Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England from the Norman conquest to the fall of the Stuarts |
The Maid of Orleans:
1429. |
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 | Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England |  |
The Maid of Orleans:
1429.
It is not within the compass of argument to maintain that
the progress of society, the advance of civilization, and the
growth of science, have not, in some degree, affected and even
altered the standards, by which men judge of thoughts, principles,
and actions, as praiseworthy or culpable—nay, in the
abstract, as virtuous and vicious. So, if we are in error, it is
perfectly possible and consistent that, in two different periods of
the world—two different constitutions of society, the very same
line of conduct in man or woman should call forth the highest
admiration, and acquire deathless fame, or awaken criticism
only, and be judged dubious at the least, if not disgraceful.
We might instance the recorded hardihood of Spartan
mothers, inaccessible to the slightest touch of womanly or
motherly feeling, a hardihood which it is still the fashion to
laud in Fourth of July orations as the beau-ideal of patriotism,
heroism, and a genuine love of freedom, whereas it was in truth
no more than the cold and stupid insensibility of minds unrefined
by civilization, unswayed by sentiment, and unsoftened by any
of those redeeming graces, which, it is said, even among the
most barbarous and savage hordes, are observed to relieve the
primitive ruggedness of nature in the softer sex—a hardihood
of our race, would consign her to endless scorn and loathing,
as a woman deprived of the best attributes of womanhood,
and differing only from the lost and lowest of her sex as inferior
to them in the want of that “one touch of nature,” which, in
the words of the great English dramatist, “makes the whole
world kin.”
In like manner, we might adduce the practice—for, among
the ancients, before the Christian era, it was a practice, and a
time-honored practice, too, among the wisest and the best of
men—of deliberate and long premeditated suicide. For in
those days, not to die by his own hand, for one guiltlessly sentenced
to the hand of the executioner, or fallen into the power
of unrelenting enemies, was certainly regarded as an act of
cowardice and dishonor; while self-murder, in a similar state
of circumstances, was held an added title to the immortal honor
of the sage, the patriot, or the unsuccessful hero.
At a much later period, to decline the arbitration of the sword
in quarrels of a private and social nature, and, whether in the
case of receiving a wrong at the hands of another, or inflicting
it at his own, to deny the appeal to single combat, was sufficient—nay,
in some countries, to this very hour, is sufficient—to
deprive the highest member of society of all claim to social
position, to stigmatize him as a poltroon, and banish him,
deprived of caste for ever, from the companionship of men of
honor; whereas, it is now the cry of that popular voice, which
some infatuated Roman once defined as being the voice of God,
that to endure obloquy, calumny, insult, nay blows, without
resenting them, is the best proof of manhood, of gentlemanly
bearing, and of a clear and correct sense of honor.
Without entertaining the slightest idea of entering into the
discussion of any one of these vexed and disputed questions,
alteration of popular sentiment on these several points, the
rather that in the very person of the Heroine, whom we have
selected as the subject of the present article, we have an
instance directly in point—an instance of conduct on the part
of a young woman, which occurring as it did, in the early
part of the fifteenth century, we cannot hesitate to pronounce
the offspring of genuine patriotism, of genuine heroism, and
absolved, in consequence of the mode of thinking and acting
in those days, from any censure of indecorum or want of those
feminine attributes, to which everything else is now, and most
justly, held subservient.
We are the more especially called upon to note this discrepancy,
as we might otherwise ourselves fall under the charge
of inconsistency, since in a preceding paper on the character of
Philippa of Hainault, the admirable and womanly wife of the
third Edward of England, we took occasion to express our
abhorrence and loathing of those women, who in an age of
gentleness, civilization, refinement, and a thorough apportionment
of their appropriate rights, duties, and tasks to the two
sexes, have chosen, in defiance of the laws of nature, the modesty
of nature, and the wholesome prescriptions of society, and
in obedience to a morbid love of excitement, or masculine lust
for power or fame, to undertake the parts, unsolicited and
uncalled for by anything of duty or of station, of propagandists,
conspirators, patriots, and statesmen; and have actually so
far forgotten themselves as to don—not figuratively, but actually
—the breeches, to become colonels of dragoons, and to fight
hand to hand among the shock of martial gladiators. Of a truth,
little as we can sympathize with the executioners—the scourgers,
as it is alleged, of women, quite as little can we feel for the
scourged; who, according to our judgment, having made their
adopted the duties of manhood, had no right to complain of
finding that they had thereby incurred the responsibilities of
manhood also.
It is to her gentleness, to her weakness, and to her alleged
incapacity to contend with man, in braving the shocks of the
world, the inclemency of seasons, the severity of toils, and more
especially the brunt of battle, that woman is entitled to the protection,
the reverence and—even when perverse and reprobate—
to the pitiful clemency and considerate tolerance of man. The
moment she assumes an equality of mental hardness, of physical
robustness, or of active hardihood and daring, she forfeits
the indulgences willingly conceded to the implied weakness of
her feminine organization, and having deliberately unsexed
herself, may properly and most righteously be judged as one
of those among whom she has chosen to enrol herself, not as
one of those whom she has deserted, in defiance of every principle
of decorum, decency, or nature.
An effeminate, and effete, and unsexed man, the Hercules
degraded into a willing Omphale, has at all times been regarded
with scorn, abhorrence, and that disgust which is felt for reptiles
beyond and below the attributes of nature. Men shrink
from him with plainly discovered loathing, and true women
shake the contamination of his vile presence from the very
skirts of their raiment.
Why is it then? why should it be? How can it be?—for
it is, alas!—it is even among ourselves, that the loud-tongued
viragoes, the sword-drawing termagants, who, ashamed of their
highest attributes, the delicate sensibilities, the finer organization,
the more perfect perceptions, purer motives, holier aspirations,
and more admirable powers of their own sex, who, in
love with the brute force, the fierce ambition, the fiery excitement
of brass and feet of clay,”—who forgetful of all modesty, propriety,
decorum, nature, unsex themselves even to the putting
on not the garb only, but the feelings of the gladiator, looking
on death with wolfish eyes, nay! dealing death with gory
hands. How can it be that these, and such as these, can meet
with sympathy, nay! but with raptures of applause, triumphs
of adulation, not from the men alone—though that were bad
enough—but from the women—the sensitive, the delicate, the
feminine, would that we could add, the true-hearted women of
America?
Even in men, and with a good cause to boot, heroism of the
battle-field—is it not a bloody and a beastly business? and if the
state of society may not dispense with it, nor the constitution of
the human heart deny its thrill of admiring sympathy to the
brave man, the strength and daring of whose spirit conquers
the weakness of his flesh, and in whom the love of country or
of glory is greater than the fear of death—in Heaven's high
name let us at least limit the license of the sword to the male
hero, and doom the woman who betakes herself to so bloody
work to a sentence as disgraceful as that which in the male
attaches to the coward. It were a just doom, sanctioned by
nature and analogy, for each is alike guilty of unfitness to
rational duties, of rebellion against the veriest law of nature—
and here the woman is the worst sinner, as offences of commission
must needs be heavier than those of omission, and as wilfulness
is at all times less the subject of pity than weakness
which cannot always be controlled.
But, as I have before remarked, there have been ages of the
world, in which the generally received opinions concerning
duties, obligations, and the appropriate functions and fitnesses
of the sexes have been so different from these which now exist,
actions and principles, the characters and conduct of the great
and good, as well as of the base and bad, in accordance with
the lights which they possessed and the views which then
obtained, not as if they had occurred under the clearer blaze
of recent knowledge, or under the better ordered standards of a
wiser and more generous society. So that many deeds may
have been done, nay have been done, in the troublous times
of the middle ages, which we must admire, must elaborate, must
hold aloft, as examples of splendid heroism; though they would
nowadays be stigmatized with propriety as indecorous, and as
indicative of feelings and impulses which must be regarded as
anything rather than honorable. And again, many deeds which
would now be recorded with execrations on the heads of the
perpetrators, as prodigies of cruelty and horror, must be narrated
as lamentable instances of the ignorance and semi-barbarism of
general society at that period, but by no means as examples of
unusual or peculiar ferocity, or insensibility, or ignorance of the
individual. Of the former class are many of the most highly
lauded warlike exploits of the middle ages, many of which are
tinctured with a degree of hardness, ruthlessness, insensibility,
and love of battle, if not of bloodshed, which would be pronounced
in the nineteenth century as purely detestable. High-bred
and gentle women looked upon strife and slaughter, not
with dismay and loathing, but with applause and admiration,
and rewarded the most bloodstained homicide with renown and
love. The dearest ties of affection were broken on trivial points
of honor. Insensibility to the death of children, parents, wives,
nay, the sacrifice of near kinsmen to small points of chivalry,
were held claims for honorable note and fame of patriotic heroism.
Quarter was rarely given on the field of battle, until the
victors were weary and worn out with slaying, unless for the
character, and condition, were suffered to languish miserable
years in closer durance than the worst felons of our days, if once
they were so hapless as to fall into the hands of an enemy as
prisoners of war.
Of the second class are the judicial combats, the fearful punishments
inflicted on innocent persons for witchcraft, magic,
devil-worship, and the like, all which absurdities were then
more generally believed to be positive truths, and atrocities of
hourly occurrence, by the nations at large, from the highest
and best to the lowest intellects, than are the truths of Holy
Writ accepted as truths by the masses of even the most Christian
communities. It is much to be doubted whether down to
the fourteenth century there were even ten men living in Europe,
from the Danube to the Bay of Biscay, who disbelieved the
actual and present agency of the Supreme Being in judicial
battles, or of the Evil Being in necromancies, magical murders,
false prophecies, and all the fanciful wickedness comprised under
the vulgar name of witchcraft.
In reviewing, therefore, the first class, we must not be deterred
by the ruggedness, the hardness, the impossibility, nor
even by the fierce and sanguinary habits of the times, from attributing
the praise of true heroism to many who were in their
days, and according to their acceptance of the nature of heroism,
true heroes, whatever might be the title which should be
justly given to their deeds done nowadays.
In like manner, recording the events of the second order, we
must beware of attributing individual cruelty and savageness
to rulers and magistrates who ordered the infliction of penalties
which make our blood run cold, for offences which we
know to have no existence, but in the reality of which they
implicitly believed; for they were in reality in no wise more
a sentence, or finding a verdict of death, this year,
for an offence, which the milder law of another year pronounces
worthy only of a milder penalty.
In both these classes of events and actions, so long as the
actors have acted up to the standards which their own ages
considered best, highest, purest, noblest, they must be acquitted
of all blame, and entitled to all honor. It is only where they
have fallen below the spirit of their time in morality, or clemency,
or virtue, or where they have grossly exceeded it in
superstition, intolerance, bigotry, or severity, or, once more,
where being themselves endued with clearer lights, purer perceptions,
and higher talents, they have used and perverted the
less elevated spirit of the times to their own selfish, views that
they deserve our sternest denunciations.
The heroine to whom I have assigned this paper, presents a
remarkable case in point, under both the views in question—
under the first, as regards her character, and the light in which
we are to regard her—under the second, as relates to her
lamentable and unmerited end.
The first question, as regards written history, has always been
decided in her favor, though it is quite certain that, according
to existing ideas, a woman playing such a part to-day would
receive no higher credit from the judicious or the right-minded
than a Marie Ambræ, an Augustina of Saragossa, an Apollonia
Jagello, or any other high-spirited vivandière, whom we puff
in newspaper columns and praise in after dinner speeches, yet
never dream of introducing to our wives, or holding up as
objects of imitation to our daughters. The second question
has as generally been mistreated by historians, and attributed
nationally as a peculiar disgrace to England, and, individually,
as an act of unusual atrocity, to the regent Bedford, though it
her captors had been Frenchmen, and her judges Charles or
Dunois, for as the winning side really believed her mission,
inspiration, and powers to be divine, the losers as readily supposed
them to be fiendish: and in truth, the whole of her
career is so strange, unaccountable, and marvellous, even apart
from the supernatural wonders added to it by the one party,
and implicitly received by both, that it would be scarce surprising
if, in much milder and more recent times, and among
more enlightened actors, such a course of success were considered
by the vulgar minds, of which by the way there are many
in every place, as the result of superhuman powers. Nay! I
believe that, could such a thing have occurred, as the checking
of the career of the French arms, after Lodi, Marengo, Austerlitz,
and Jena, the total and repeated overthrow of Napoleon,
and the rolling back the refluent tide of battle from the Po and
Danube to the Seine and Loire, by an Austrian or Italian peasant
maiden, half the consular or imperial armies would have
cried sorcery, and the other treason; and if taken, she would
unquestionably have shared the fate, if not of Joan of Arc, at
least of Hofer, and a hundred Spanish partisans, shot in cold
blood as brigands. Nor do I think the case would have been
much altered if Wellington had been driven from the conquered
Pyrenees to the Tagus by a French paysanne, or the victor of
Buena Vista into the Rio Grande by a black-browed Mexicana
—at least I am sure that such events would go further to justify
the belief of supernatural agency, than any part of the performance
of the Misses Fox of Rochester with their assistant knockers,
which are believed by many, of what some are pleased to
call “the best minds in the country,” to be, not only superhuman
and divine, but the best, if not sole convincing proofs
of the immortality of the soul. Oh! Plato, Plato, if thy
most ill understandings.
But to come more directly to the personality of my heroine,
it cannot, I think, be doubted, whatever hypothesis we may take
of her career, that she was a very extraordinary, unusual, and in
some sort superior person. That she was an impostor is incredible;
and if, as I doubt not to have been the case, she was a
visionary or enthusiast, and perhaps something approaching to
what we call a somnambulic or mesmeric personage, she must
have had very rare faith in her own mission as a reality, and,
what is more, very rare powers of making others also believe in
its truth and divinity, to have effected what she did, with the
means which she had at her command. For the minds with
which, and against which, she acted, were all minds of greatly
above average capacity; and yet it appears to me to be very
certain that the leaders of both hosts did believe in her real
possession of superhuman powers—indeed, I scarcely see how
at that day and in the then state of the human mind, they
could have believed otherwise—though the French would of
course regard the supernaturalism as a divine, the English as a
diabolical agency; for such is the natural constitution of the
human mind, the partisans of any cause, which they have once
fairly adopted, under whatever views, coming in the end to
regard it as the true and heaven-favored cause.
But in order to get a little more nearly at this let us see
what was the state of France at her appearance; what the circumstances
of her success, and what the real extent of her services
to her king and country.
About fourteen years before, the tremendous battle of Agincourt,
won by the fifth Henry of England, had more than
decimated the aristocracy, and completely subdued the feudal
military power of France; all the leading princes of the blood
been slain on the fatal field, or still languished in English dungeons.
From that day forth every species of calamity had
befallen the unhappy France; the Queen-mother hostile to her
own son, a minor, the dauphin Charles; the furious factions of
the Armagroes and Burgundians literally deluging the streets
of Paris with French blood; province against province; prince
against prince; and ever and anon the English profiting by the
dissensions and disasters of the enemy to break in and overrun,
and desolate and take possession, until it really did seem
as though the boastful pretensions of the English king were
true; and as though his utmost ambition was about to be
realized, when he replied to the Cardinal des Ursias, who would
have persuaded him to peace—“Do you not see that God has
led me hither as by the hand? France has no sovereign; I
have just pretensions to the kingdom; everything here is in
the utmost confusion—no one thinks of resisting me. Can I
have a more sensible proof that the Being who disposes of empires
has determined to put the crown of France upon my head?”
And shortly afterward, though the battle of Baugé, wherein
the Duke of Clarence fell by the spear of the Scottish champion,
Allan Swinton, and Dorset, Somerset, and Huntingdon
were made prisoners, threw a solitary gleam of lustre over the
dark affairs of France, it availed not to retard the progress of
Henry, who had, in fact, conquered all the northern provinces,
and held, them in quiet possession; who was master of the
capital, Paris, wherein his son, afterwards Henry VI., of most
hapless memory, was born amid general acclamations, and
almost unanimously hailed as heir to both crowns; and who
had chased the Dauphin beyond the Loire, whither he was
pursued, almost in despair, by the victorious and united arms
of Burgundy and England.
Had Henry's life been prolonged, it is difficult to conjecture
what would have been the end, for he was no less politic as a
prince, and shrewd as a man, than daring, skilful, and successful
as a leader. But the Disposer of empires, whose fiat he had so
recently anticipated, had already disposed of his tenure of his
own, much more of his half-conquered and rashly-expected
crown, and he was summoned from the captured capital of
France before that throne where kings and clowns are judged
equally, in the thirty-fourth year of his age, and the tenth of
his reign—a great king, a great conqueror, a brave, honorable,
and, in the main, a just and good man. Few men have performed
more splendidly ambitious acts from less personally selfish
motives; few kings have attained such glorious greatness
through their own personal action, with less alloy of evil or
detraction.
His son, whom he left not nine months old, and “whose
misfortunes in the course of his life,” to quote the language of
Hume, “surpassed all the glories and successes of his father,”
succeeded to the crown of his father, and to his claims on that
of France; nor, although minorities are proverbially weak, and
the times were turbulent and stormy, did his tenure of the one,
or his accession to the other, appear at first doubtful.
This appears to me to be in no degree tenable. In the first
place, no person can be half-real enthusiast, half-impostor—the
one or other phase of character must prevail. The impostor who
knows his own jugglery, cannot believe in his own supernatural
power; the enthusiast who does believe, has no need to have
recourse to imposture. Secondly, so general a religious imposture,
to which jurists, doctors of divinity, and ignorant, superstitious
warriors must have lent themselves, is wholly inconsistent
with the spirit of the age and the character of the popular
mind. Thirdly, Dunois, and the other French leaders, had been
or the force which they subsequently displayed. Fourthly, it is
little likely that on the faith of so shallow and childish an imposture
as dressing up a simple village girl, not only sane but
shrewd and wise men, who had not previously ventured to undertake
the most trivial sally, now boldly should set armies in
the field, carry out enterprises of great pith and moment, and
utterly paralyse foes so able as Suffolk, Talbot, Scales, and
Falstoffe, by a series of well directed blows, stunningly delivered
and rapidly followed up. Fifthly, it is incredible, that,
if the French had been such fools as to try so silly a trick, if a
mere trick, the English could be so miserably gulled. And
lastly, the empty and useless pageant of the procession to
Rheims, the whole distance through the heart of an enemy's
country, and in the midst of his hostile and undismayed garrisons,
cannot be accounted for by political, military, or rational
grounds, or by any supposition, unless this, that every person of
the French army, and of the English army also, was thoroughly
convinced of her supernatural powers and irresistible
prowess.
This supposition accounts for the attempt, and accounts also
for its success. And such a conviction only could be wrought
upon such minds as those of Charles VII. and Dunois, of Suffolk
and Sir John Talbot, by a person who did really possess extraordinary
talents, extraordinary enthusiasm, and did really perform
extraordinary things. No one now believes that Oliver
Cromwell really heard a voice, at the dead of night, telling him
in his obscure boyhood that he should be “not king, but the
first man in England,” nor is it probable that John Hampden
then believed the vision—but he did believe the enthusiasm,
and did believe the fact, as he told Sir Philip Warwick, that
“you slave would be the greatest man in England.” The belief
made the belief of the followers, and the enthusiasm and belief
excited made the imagined vision to come to pass in a palpable
fact.
The facts are, that she relieved Orleans, in the first giving up
her own opinion to the advice of Dunois, hers being the more
daring council—that she then threw herself into the city,
marching, according to her own plan, directly through the
English lines, the hitherto victorious Britons, before a dozen of
whom hundreds of French had been daily flying in panic terror,
not daring to attack her—that she stormed the lines of Suffolk,
and utterly defeated his whole army with prodigious loss—that
then, following up her successes, she stormed Jergean, whither the
Regent had retired, carried the town by assault, Suffolk himself
being obliged to surrender himself—and that a few days after,
she again attacked the rear of the late victorious army with such
headlong valor, that the redoubted Falstoffe fled like a poltroon
before her, and was deprived of his garter for cowardice, while
Talbot and Scales were made prisoners, and the whole army
and cause of the English utterly disorganized and lost.
These are not the acts of an impostor, nor of men palming an
enthusiast, in whom they did not believe, on inferior minds.
Where did Charles and Dunois gain the audacity, the skill, and
the fortune to recover all that they had lost in fourteen years,
in as many days—where, indeed, if not in the conviction that
Joan's enthusiasm, visionary possession, and energetic will, were
indeed of heaven, and themselves consequently destined to be
victorious?
The rest of her career is explained yet more easily on the
same hypothesis. She next declared that her future mission
was to conduct Charles in triumph, at the head of a small force,
to Rheims, across one half the breadth of France, and there to
and this, too, she accomplished without a banner raised, a
trumpet blown, or a spear couched against her. The attempt
justified the success, for the very rashness of the undertaking
and inadequacy of the object increased the panic of the English.
But in what possible light must we regard the statesmen and
warriors whom Hume believes to have been the moving actors
of this wonderful drama, if we believe them, when it was their
business to have hunted the invaders from post to post, while
their panic was fresh upon them, until they left the land they
had so long held as their own; if we believe them, I say, at
such a time to have risked all they had won, and their army
and king to boot, for the sake of a mere empty pageant, which
might well have followed, but absurdly preceded the invasion
of the enemy?
This done, Joan declared her mission ended, her powers revoked,
and made public her desire to resume the dress of her
sex and her former condition. She was overruled, and a few
days afterward taken in a sally from Compiegne, by John of
Luxembourg, and transferred to the Duke of Bedford, by whom
she was delivered over to the ecclesiastical power, tried by a
court of bishops at Rouen, in which only one Englishman sate,
and sentenced to be burned to death as a witch. Assailed on
all sides by doctors and divines, by promises and threats, and
naturally and consistently doubting, from her fall, the origin of
her former successes, she declared her visions to be illusions
and her powers impostures, and had her sentence thereupon
commuted. Having, however, resumed male habits, said to
have been purposely thrown in her way, and again returned to
her former belief in her supernatural inspiration, probably from
the idea that the male habiliments were supernaturally sent to
her, she was adjudged a relapsed heretic and magician, and
ideas of the age, burnt to ashes in the market-place at Rouen.
I see no cause to agree in the belief that any peculiar cruelty
prompted, or that any political tactics actuated either Bedford
or her judges, nor that it was any “pretence,” as Hume terms
it, “of heresy and magic,” by which she was consigned to the
flames, but as full a belief on the part of her slayers that she
was a foul and fiendish wizard, as her own conviction, and that
of her followers, was full and certain that she was a messenger
of heaven.
Heroine and enthusiast as she was, spotless of life, dauntless
of courage, hapless of death, but most fortunate of glory—
certainly an agent and minister of providence, not by divine
mission, but by the working of natural causes—for she redeemed
the throne of France to its native owners, never again
to be seriously disputed by an English claimant— few heroines
have a fairer title to the name, and none a fame more spotless.
Soon after the death of Henry, his rival, Charles VI., died
also. He had for many years possessed mere nominal authority
in France, and his life had been as unhappy to himself
as disastrous to his country. To his son he left only a disputed
crown and a divided country, and that he ever owned the
one unquestioned and the other entire, he owned in part to his
own high qualities, and in part to the character and achievements
of Joan, the maid of Are and Orleans. He was crowned
at Poictiers Charles VI.; his Paris, and Rheims—the sacred coronation
city—being both in the hands of the English. This event
occurred in the year 1422, and, although Henry was an infant,
and when even he arrived at manhood little better than imbecile,
so splendid was the administration of the protector, the
Duke of Bedford, and so great the talents of the renowned
generals who commanded under him, Somerset, Warwick,
they not only held Guienne, the capital, and all the northern
provinces, but pressed the war with vigor in the south and west,
so that the position of Charles VI. had become almost desperate,
when the disastrous battle of Verneuil, second only in the
slaughter of nobility to the fields of Cressy, Poictiers, and Agincourt,
reduced him to the last extremity, and to such a state of
hopeless poverty and depression that not only was he compelled
to abandon every effort at sustaining the parade of a court, but
was scarcely enabled to procure daily subsistence for himself and
a few faithful followers.
Just at this moment some dissensions occurred in the English
ministry, and the Duke of Bedford was recalled home, his
place being ably filled by Suffolk; and, although the Duke of
Brittany was beginning to look distastefully on the English alliance,
and Montargis was relieved by the bastard of Orleans,
better known in after days as the Count of Dunois, so little
effect did the change of hands appear to have produced on the
conduct of the war, that Orleans, the most important city of
France in the possession of Charles, was closely invested and
on the point of yielding, while the king himself was dissuaded
from retreating into the remote provinces of Dauphiny and
Languedoc by the entreaties of the fair but frail Agnes Sorel.
At this time an incident occurred so strange, and with consequences
so extraordinary, that one can scarce wonder at the
credulity of a French historian, who, describing the first appearance
of Joan on the scene of history, commences thus: “But at
this crisis the Lord, not desiring that France should be entirely
undone, sent a woman,” &c., &c., evidently esteeming her mission
as positive and direct as that of St. John or any of the
Holy Apostles—nor, I conceive, is it at all to be doubted that she
confident of her divine inspiration and superhuman power.
She was a poor girl, of the small village of Domremi, near
Vaucouleurs, in Lorraine, of the very lowest class of society.
She is variously stated to have been a hostler-wench at an inn,
and shepherdess; but of irreproachable conduct, and undoubted
virtue. It is said that she had manifested no singularity nor
given any tokens of possessing superior genius, until she was
seized by a sudden idea that she saw visions and heard voices
commissioning her to re-establish the throne of France and
expel the foreign invaders. She first made her way to the
presence of Baudricourt, the governor of Vaucouleurs, to whom
she declared her mission, and, although he at first treated her
with neglect, she at length so far convinced him that he sent
her on with an escort to the French court, at the little town of
Chinon. Here, it is asserted, that she at once recognised the
king, though purposely disguised and surrounded by his courtiers,
and that she claimed and described, even to its minutest
ornaments, and the place where it had long lain concealed, a
curious antique sword, which was found in the church of St.
Catharine de Fierbois. Hume, who is ever sceptical, leans to the
view that all this was jugglery, not exactly on Joan's part, but
on that of the French king and Dunois, who were determined
to use her as an instrument; and to the talents and skill of the
leaders, whose tactics he supposed were followed, Joan being
merely led as a puppet through the host, he ascribes all that
follows.
| Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England | |