May 30

May 30, 1431: 19-year-old Joan of Arc, also known as “the Maid of Orléans,” is burned at the stake by the direction of John of Lancaster, First Duke of Bedford, in Rouen, France.

Jeanne d’Arc was born January 6, 1412. In 1429, when she was 17, she claimed to have had visions from God that told her to recover her homeland from English domination. These claims coincided with vague prophecies concerning an armed maid who would rescue France.

After meeting the uncrowned King Charles VII and the Dauphin, Joan of Arc was sent to Orléans as part of an effort to lift the siege there. Prior to departing Blois, she sent a letter to the Earl of Salisbury, calling upon the English forces to quit the siege, surrender all cities and territories in France, and to return to England. If they refused, she promised that she would raise a "War cry against them that would last forever....I shall not write any further.” Her audacity in this regard was only to be matched by her accomplishments. Nine days later the siege was lifted after a Joan of Arc led a series of successful attacks against English positions around Orléans. The victory was Joan of Arc’s first major military accomplishment, the first major French success since the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, and marked a turning point in The Hundred Years War. Several more swift victories along the Loire River led to Charles VII's coronation at Reims.

On May 23, 1830, Joan was captured by the English and Burgundians as part of a rear-guard action after a minor skirmish. Eight months later, she was tried by an ecclesiastical court led by Bishop Pierre Cachon, an English partisan at the instance of the First Duke of Bedford. Transcripts from her trial continue in existence today, and George Bernard Shaw found much of this dialogue so compelling that sections of his play Saint Joan are literal translations of the trial record. The most famous exchange is “Asked if she knew she was in God's grace, [Joan of Arc] answered ‘If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.’” The question is a scholarly trap. Church doctrine of the age held that no one could be certain of being in God’s grace. If Joan of Arc had answered yes, then she would have convicted herself of heresy. However, if she had answered no, then she would have confessed her own guilt. Notary Boisguillaume would later testify that at the moment the court heard this reply, “Those who were interrogating her were stupefied.”

The court convicted Joan of Arc of heresy and she was burned at the stake by the English on May 30, 1431 at nineteen years old. After she had died, the English raked back the coals to expose her charred body so that no one could claim she had escaped alive, then burned the body twice more to reduce it to ashes and cast her remains into the Seine. The executioner, Geoffroy Therage, later stated that he “…greatly feared to be damned” for his part in the execution.

A posthumous retrial, under the authorization of Pope Callixtus III, opened 24 years later to investigate whether the trial and its verdict had been handled justly and according to canon law. The final summary, put down in June, 1456, styles Joan as a martyr and implicates the late Pierre Cauchon with heresy for having convicted an innocent woman in pursuit of a secular end. The court declared her innocence on July 7, 1456. She was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920.

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