History David Horspool
Canonisation was tricky for a teenage peasant girl who heard voices
It took a long time for Joan of Arc to become a saint.
In fact, it was only a century ago – on 16th May 1920 – that the Catholic Church, with Pope Pius XI at its head, announced her canonisation.
George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan three years after the canonisation. That was almost five centuries after her death in Rouen, where in 1431 she was burned as a heretic by English soldiers after a trial led by a French bishop.
The journey that brought her to that desperate end was the most extraordinary of the Middle Ages.
Joan was a peasant girl from Domrémy in the Duchy of Bar, a small pocket of territory that retained its allegiance to the French royal house in a part of the country otherwise under the power of the alliance of Burgundy and England, which controlled about half of France between them.
Joan began to hear voices when she was around 13 and, almost from the start, those voices gave her a unique mission. She was to go to the rightful King of France, Charles VII, and tell him that she would lead an army who would expel the English and their perfidious Burgundian allies from his Christian kingdom.
The English had been in France and claiming their rights to its throne for almost a century. Henry VI’S father, Henry V, had proved an even more formidable enemy than his Plantagenet ancestors, and at Agincourt in 1415 had completed a stupendous victory. Even after his death in 1422, the English had not stopped, winning another great battle at Verneuil two years later.
Even so, France had resisted English invasions before. The death of Henry V and the fact that his successor was a babe in arms would in normal circumstances have rallied the French to the cause.
But the English had also managed to insert themselves in a long-running civil war between the French royal party, known as the Armagnacs, and the Burgundians. This conflict had become a blood feud, opening with the murder of Louis of Orléans, the King’s brother, and receiving a new injection of poison from the revenge killing of the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, hacked to death in supposed peace negotiations.
When Joan appeared at the French court at Chinon, having somehow persuaded a series of ever more influential men that she must be heard, the English were closing their grip on Orléans, 100 miles away.
Joan’s message for the King – whom she had picked out from the courtiers surrounding him after they tried to fool her by concealing his identity from her – was simple. Give me an army and I will not only lift the siege of Orléans; I will clear the way for you to be crowned as all true French kings are crowned, at the cathedral in Reims, another 150 miles further into foreign-held territory.
Perhaps more remarkably still, Charles believed her. The fact was that Orléans seemed doomed to fall unless something was done, and perhaps Joan could provide the inspiration that was needed.
If she failed, she’d have been proved to be a false prophet, and France would be in no more dire a state than before.
At first, it seemed as if all Joan’s prayers, and Charles’s, had been answered. She really did ride, in armour but unarmed, at the head of an army who, inspired by her complete certainty, broke the siege at Orléans and liberated the city. Then she persuaded Charles that this victory had to be followed up and, sure enough, town after town was overawed into opening their gates until, at last, Reims itself allowed the army in.
In July 1429, less than five months after a teenaged girl dressed as a man had first been brought into his presence, Charles VII was crowned at the cathedral and anointed with the holy oil of Clovis.
Although a grateful French crown ennobled Joan’s family, and she was showered with gifts, she still had a mission, and nothing would prevent her from trying to complete it. But at the walls of Paris, her luck, or her divine helping hand, vanished. Her assault failed, she was badly wounded and the army retreated. Worse was to come. In a fairly peripheral operation to liberate another town, Compiègne, she was captured and passed to the English.
Held prisoner for months, she was tried by a group of French theologians as a heretic. Although she recanted, she changed her mind again and, unrepentant, went to the flames in Rouen.
Why did her canonisation take so long? For all her simplicity, Joan had always presented difficulties: as a peasant among lords, as someone who heard voices, and most of all, as a woman in man’s clothing. It was only in the 19th century that France could accept all that and look to her inspirational example again.
Only after the agony of the First World War could she find her place not just as a saint, but as the patron saint of the country she helped to liberate.