Isabelle Romée: Kneeling with the Pope's Letter for Her Daughter

Isabelle knelt before the judges with the pope’s letter in her hands. Her daughter had been burned twenty-four years earlier. The mother who had taught her to pray had come to challenge the verdict of heresy.

On the morning of 7 November 1455, Isabelle Romée, by then a widow, appeared at Notre-Dame in Paris with her son Pierre. Her daughter was Joan of Arc. Before them were the archbishop of Reims, the bishop of Paris and Jean Bréhal, an inquisitor charged with investigating offences against the faith. Isabelle offered the document again and again, to the judges together and to each of them in turn, asking them to act without further delay. Pope Callixtus III had authorised an examination of the proceedings against Joan. His letter gave them the power to reopen the case. It had not yet cleared her name.

Isabelle had raised Joan at Domrémy, where her husband Jacques d’Arc farmed land. Their daughter’s religious education had begun with her mother. When Joan was questioned at her trial in 1431, she said that Isabelle had taught her the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria and the Credo, the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary and the declaration of Christian belief. She had learned her belief, she said, from no one else. Before the bishops and theologians had begun examining her beliefs, Isabelle had taught her how to express them.

Now that upbringing formed part of the family’s appeal. Isabelle’s daughter had been baptised and confirmed. She had been brought up in the observances of the Church, attending worship, confessing and receiving communion. These were the things her mother put forward against the judgment that Joan had departed from the faith. The condemnation had reached back into the home in which she had been raised.

Joan had left that home and entered a war. In 1429 she helped lift the English siege of Orléans and accompanied Charles VII to Reims for his coronation. The following year she was captured by Burgundian forces and subsequently handed over to the English. At Rouen, a Church court headed by Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, tried her for heresy. On 30 May 1431 she was burned in the city’s market square. She was about nineteen.

Isabelle survived her.

By 1440 she was living in Orléans, where the city helped provide for her. The city whose siege Joan had helped break was paying towards her mother’s upkeep. Joan’s name could command gratitude there while her condemnation still stood in the records of the Church. Isabelle’s petition described the disgrace and injury that judgment had brought upon the surviving family. Her daughter was dead, but the sentence continued to say what sort of daughter she had been.

The war eventually made an investigation possible. French forces recovered Rouen in 1449, and Charles VII ordered an inquiry into the trial. Witnesses were questioned in 1450, and further investigations followed. The men working to reopen the case included Bréhal, the inquisitor before whom Isabelle now appeared. Her petition gave its own account of the long gap: the family had held their grief inside until Rouen and Normandy were back in French hands. She came to Notre-Dame with honourable men beside her, clerics and laymen, many women of good standing and the authority of a new pope.

She wept at the judges’ feet. Others spoke on her behalf, describing the conduct of the earlier trial: questions designed to entrap Joan, threats against the trial’s advisers and falsified articles. Isabelle repeated her appeals. As more people gathered, the judges withdrew with her and those assisting her into the sacristy, leaving the crowd outside.

There they questioned her about herself and her daughter. They offered consolation and agreed to proceed, but they also gave her a warning. A case like this was easy to begin, they told her, and difficult and perilous to finish. Reversing a judgment required proof, and the inquiry might uphold the condemnation she wanted overturned. Her affection for her child could not, by itself, settle the case. She was advised to take good counsel before returning for the formal hearing on 17 November.

There would have to be evidence as well as tears.

The proceedings continued through the following months. Early in 1456 villagers at Domrémy were questioned about the girl they had known, along with others who had encountered her during the campaigns and the trial. Documents were examined and compared. The court had to consider how the accusation had been assembled, how her answers had been represented and how the sentences had been reached.

On 7 July 1456, at the archiepiscopal palace in Rouen, the judges pronounced the original proceedings and sentences null and without effect. They identified fraud, false accusation, contradiction and errors of fact and law. The articles that had misrepresented Joan’s statements were ordered to be torn up. The judgment also declared that Joan and the relatives who had brought the case bore no stain of infamy from the condemnation.

Isabelle lived until 1458, long enough to outlast the case she had carried into Notre-Dame with the pope’s letter. The judgment named the people who had brought it: Pierre and Jean, the brothers, and before them the honest widow Isabelle, the mother. The daughter who had learned her prayers from that widow no longer stood condemned as a heretic.