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. A Dominican friar at Rouen named Isambart de la Pierre swore thathe was threatened by Cauchon with death if he said anything goodabout Joan.The judges and assessors, according to la Pierre, were vari-ously motivated by partisanship, outright hatred of Joan, love of themoney with which they were bribed, or fear of punishment. Every-thing was done according to the wishes of the King of England [that is,according to the mandate of his regent, the Duke of Bedford], the Car-dinal of Winchester, the Earl of Warwick, and other Englishmen whoassumed the trial s expenses. * As for Joan, a Benedictine monk namedThomas Marie summarized the fama or word of mouth in Rouen at thetime: If the English had a woman like Joan on their side, they wouldhave rewarded her with high honors and not treated her so dreadfully. That was also the judgment of Jean de la Fontaine, who was chargedwith making the summary of charges against Joan in February.He sawthat the enormous evidence favorable to her was being deliberatelyexcised from the record, and he promptly withdrew from the case;afraid for his life, he made a hasty exit from Rouen.Jean Lohier, a Nor-man priest, loudly proclaimed his opinion that the trial was invalid* Many other testimonies support these; see, for example, the recollections of MartinLadvenu, Jean Toutmouillé, Jean Le Fèvre, Jean Le Maire, Thomas Marie, Guillaumede la Chambre, and Jean de Mailly (the bishop of Noyon), all preserved in Duparc,Procès en nullité, vol.1. 130 J OANbecause no one was there to represent the cause of either Joan orCharles VII. We shall ignore him and go on our way, mutteredCauchon.Lohier quit the trial and took refuge in Rome.Cauchon s autocratic, tyrannical and malicious conduct with priests,bishops and assessors was entirely consistent with his attitude towardJoan, the trial he was preparing against her and his plan for her destruc-tion.The critical issue at stake was clear to him: would Joan the Maidsubmit to the judgment of the institutional Church that is, to him asits representative? Would she judge her own life as they would judgeher? If so, she could readily be proclaimed guilty on their summaryjudgment; if she would not submit, she could nevertheless forthwith becondemned, since to deny the authority of the Church in matters spiri-tual was defined as the worst sort of heresy.Cauchon s reasoning was a finely tuned example of medieval ecclesi-astical thinking in service to churchmen rather than the laity; it was, inother words, an example of how a system could easily sacrifice peopleto syllogisms.However one assesses his sense of the Church, hisnotion of the nature of faith and the meaning of conscience, Cauchoncan only be regarded as a complete failure; indeed, he gave no indica-tion that these mattered to him at all.Entirely controlled by greed andan almost maniacal drive for political power, he became an implacableegomaniac who orchestrated not only Joan of Arc s condemnation as aheretic but also her death.He cannot simply be excused as a product ofthe fifteenth century, for people of that time as seen in the reactionsof many assessors placed a high value on fidelity to canon and civillaw, which he blithely ignored.Utterly lacking any sense of justice, Cauchon insisted on stackingJoan s trial with biased minds.Then, to prove that he was fiercely loyalto the king of England and the English cause, he worked to destroyboth the French throne and the woman who had brought its sovereignfrom the realm of the possible to the world of the real.His crime wasamong the most heinous, for he not only wished to demonstrate his Cunning and Clothes 131intense loyalty to those who could raise him high, he also sought todestroy the perceived enemies of those he served.And if Joan the Maidwas indeed an authentic visionary sent by God, he would have to con-sider himself doomed for supporting the wrong side in the HundredYears War.She had to be discredited, she had to be executed: his entirelife, his success, his rank, reputation and position hung in the balance.That Pierre Cauchon was a bishop with a keen mind intensified theawfulness of the situation.He revealed to the court nothing of Christianfaith, much less of the spirit of the gospel or of the bishop s vocationhis mandate and, presumably, his sacred honor and supreme happi-ness namely, the service of God s people.Of the man s earlier spiritualconvictions, and of his conscience then and later, we know nothing.THE FI R S T PU B L I C session of the trial s preliminary investigationwas held on Monday, February 19, when Cauchon in the presence ofeleven assessors ordered Joan to make her first appearance two dayslater in council chambers
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