Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens

by David Mitchell

If your awareness of history comes from a primarily English or British perspective, Joan of Arc is an awkward prospect. Her role in the story makes France right and England wrong. She is a rebuke to unworthy and unrealistic ambitions and only really enjoyable from a French perspective. ‘This is their bit,’ you have to say and let the French have fun. That wasn’t the view of the English at the time. The trouble with personifications of inevitable historical processes is that, unlike the processes themselves, they can be killed. So that’s what the English did to her, after their Burgundian allies had captured her and handed her over in exchange for 10,000 livres tournois, which is roughly equivalent, in today’s money, to a lot. The English didn’t reckon she was a personification of an inevitable historical process at all. They thought she was an annoying piece of shit – otherwise known as a heretic. It was heresy that she was convicted of in a very dodgy trial in front of a lot of pro-English priests. And then she was burned at the stake in 1431. Twenty-five years later, the verdict was overturned and, in 1920, she was made a saint. As a trajectory of posthumous Roman Catholic respectability, this is known as a ‘reverse-Savile’.