St. Joan and the Dominicans

Extract

On the 19th of February, 1431, when St. Joan had lain near three months in the dungeon of Rouen Castle and the preliminaries for her trial were already completed, Bishop Cauchon summoned the Dominican Jean Lemaitre, Vice-Inquisitor of Rouen, to become his fellow in judging the Maid.

In dismay, evidently realising the irregularity of the whole proceeding, the Vice-Inquisitor takes refuge in a technicality: the trial, though held in Rouen, is considered as taking place in Cauchon’s diocese of Beauvais, whereas his own jurisdiction comprises Rouen only.

Thereupon Cauchon has recourse to the Inquisitor, Lemaitre’s superior, then absent. ‘I pray your Venerable Paternity,’ he writes, ‘summoning and requiring ... that you should come immediately to this town ... Or if you are detained by business so important as to give a real excuse for delay, please at least delegate Brother Jean Lemaitre in your stead . . . .’

Such language argues considerable coercive power. The Inquisitor seems to jump at the plea of other business, but from the 13th of March the Vice-Inquisitor Lemaitre must take his place at Cauchon’s side— though such tardy participation should have been sufficient to invalidate the whole trial.

‘He was forced to come in,’ Nicholas de Houppeville would testify thereafter, ‘he was a prey to great fears. I saw him greatly perplexed and perturbed during the case.’ Lemaitre’s conscience must have sometimes troubled him, for it was he himself who told Houppeville that Joan had complained of the brutality of her gaolers—a brutality it was his own duty to prevent, or rather, to render impossible by removing her to an ecclesiastical prison.