A Likely Story #7

One of the most spectacular set pieces in the allegations against Gilles de Rais is the ferrying of forty decaying cadavers downriver, from Champtocé to Machecoul, for cremation. Bossard paints a delightful picture of this episode, with the barge waiting under the willows; Prouteau sardonically calls it a barque dantesque. In the prosaic words of the trial record, we merely have Henriet remarking that the remains were transported "by water". 

The reasons for this Gothic journey need not detain us long. Gilles was about to hand the castle of Champtocé over to the Duke of Brittany; for complex political reasons, this could only be done by pretending to take it by force from his brother, who was currently occupying it. The token army of about twenty men was accompanied by the Chancellor of Brittany, Jean de Malestroit, presumably to oversee the handover. So everything that took place happened with Gilles' future judge on the premises, an embarrassing fact that is often glossed over. 

None of this is disputed, although the date is unclear. Most commentators have it as June 1438. So in all probability, the Dantean barge processed down the Loire with its cargo of dead children at the height of summer, when nights are short and days long. Note too that Machecoul was supposedly taken by René de la Suze in November 1437; there is no record of how or when Gilles reclaimed it. 

Now, René de la Suze had been living at Champtocé since October of the preceding year, so obviously the bodies were hidden in a reasonably safe place. For some reason, however, Gilles feared that they would be uncovered by Jean V, so it became necessary to exhume and dispose of them. They could hardly be burned on the spot - remember, the Bishop of Nantes was there and might have noticed. Hence the lengthy process of exhumation and the long journey to Machecoul, which could not be reached by river, so the final part had to be overland. Given the time of year, not all of this process could have been accomplished under cover of darkness.

The bodies were packed in one or two chests (accounts vary) and were burned at Machecoul. Apparently nobody in the castle or the village noticed the stinking smoke that must have resulted. Note that much is made, during the trial, of how the bodies were burned immediately. How a backlog of forty was allowed to build up under a tower at Champtocé, dating back to around 1432 presumably, and nobody ever noticed are questions which are not addressed. 

Gilles de Rais himself was supposed to have accompanied the remains on their final journey, since he was not a man to miss out on inhaling the stench of burning bodies. We are not told how his guest, Jean de Malestroit, felt about being left to entertain himself while his host was mysteriously absent for a period of many hours. Hospitality was important and Gilles' behaviour would have been seen as unspeakably rude. 

The events at Champtocé have an exact parallel at Machecoul in October of the preceding year. When he heard that René had taken Champtocé, Gilles panicked and had (again) around forty bodies exhumed and cremated. None of this is plausible, as Gilles never before or after displayed any fear of the brother who was by far his military inferior, but at least on this occasion there was no need for an excursion by river. The two episodes are so similar that many biographers confuse or deliberately conflate them. 

Gilbert Prouteau boggled at the sheer unlikelihood of the mass transportation of so many decomposed corpses by river and land over a distance of 111.4 kilometres (nearly 70 miles). Nous passons encore une fois les frontières de la vraisemblance [Once more we go beyond the bounds of credibility], he remarked, and it is hard to argue with him. 

A Likely Story #6

One of the set pieces of the trial is the case of Jean Hubert, aged fourteen, son of Jean and Nicole Hubert, who went missing in 1438. Georges Bataille asserts that, of all Gilles' victims, we know his fate the most precisely; in fact, the converse seems to be the case. At first, the lad's parents gave their testimony together. Their son was employed briefly by Princé, Pierre Jacquet, who was Gilles' herald at arms, but the arrangement did not work out, apparently because Jean was afraid of Princé's horse. He was then passed on to Henriet, who introduced him to a mysterious gentleman known as Spadin, or Spadine. It has been plausibly conjectured that this is a misspelling of the Scottish name Spalding. Henriet spoke of training the boy up as a valet to replace Poitou, improbably said to be leaving Gilles' service. We hear no more of this surprising career move on the part of Gilles' most devoted servant. 

The three internal witnesses – Gilles himself, Henriet and Poitou – are unanimous that Jean lodged at the Hôtel de la Suze in Nantes for eight days before being killed. However, Gilles was absent for four or five of those days. On his return, he was kind to the boy, had him clean his room, and gave him wine to drink and a loaf of bread to take to his parents. Jean did this, and then returned to La Suze. Shortly after, Spadine/Spalding called for M Hubert to ask where the child had gone, and there was an unseemly dispute over who had lost him. The parents made several complaints to Gilles' men and were told that “a Scotsman” had taken their son away. Now, young Jean had already told his parents that he did not want to go back to school because Spadine was going to take him “north” or “upriver”. He stayed with his parents for only one night between employers and seems to have been an adolescent who yearned to escape from his dull home life.

There was a run-in with one Mme Briand, wife of a kitchen employee called Jean Briand; she accused Mme Hubert of saying that Gilles killed her son, which the latter woman prudently denied. Mme Briand made an earlier appearance in the evidence, in relation to the disappearance of a boy named Delit. It is interesting that the conversation with Mme Hubert follows almost exactly the same course as the one with Mme Delit, concluding with Mme Briand's threat or warning that “she and the others would regret it”.

To complicate matters further, Nicole Hubert reappeared alone later in the trial, and contradicted the evidence she gave with her husband. This time, she did not mention her son meeting Gilles at all. The loaf of bread was a present from Spadine; in the earlier testimony, there were two loaves, one from Gilles and one from a servant called Simonnet, though the second loaf was intended for an unnamed woman in town. Princé has been edited out of the story altogether – in Mme Hubert's solo account, her son worked for a man called Mainguy, who died.

This case is unique in that it was affirmed by Gilles, his servants, and the parents of the missing child, among others. The only comparable case is that of Bernard le Camus, although he was reported missing by the man he lodged with rather than a relative.

Reading the accounts given at the trial, it is not easy to work out exactly what happened. Gilles' biographers get round this little difficulty in their usual fashion, by deciding on the narrative and editing out the contradictions. 

Making a Mediaeval Murderer

Three years ago, the website Dirty, Sexy History published this article by Jessica Cale - Making a Medieval Murderer: The Exoneration of Gilles de Rais. It remains one of the best accounts of the alternative narrative and features a substantial interview with your trusty blogger Margot K Juby.

Old image of  the blogger as a young woman

A Lilliputian Quarrel

In the world of Raisian studies (impossibly pseudish expression stolen from Michel Meurger) everything moves with glacial slowness. Think how long it took for word of the 1992 retrial to seep out into the English speaking world. Lately, however, a near controversy has blown up. Consider this -

We all know Gilles de Rais' dates, don't we? All the fours, as in the Britannica entry. Wikipedia, however, has recently taken an independent tack and is insisting on "unknown, not earlier than 1405". Now, this is not just a minor quibble - Wiki is saying that everybody else for nearly 600 years has got it wrong. The only citation given is Romanian historian Matei Cazacu's relatively recent biography. 

A small furore took place on the Talk page of the relevant Wikipedia entry. Personally, I have never attempted to edit Wikipedia because I am not King Canute and have no illusions that I could make a permanent difference. But I have friends who do, and one of them tried to change the date back to 1404. After a couple of attempts, he was banned from editing.

So the editor who is so determined that Gilles de Rais was born in 1405 (or even later!) is playing hardball. There will be no discussion: Cazacu is right and everybody else is wrong. It seems a strange hill to die on, but goodness knows we all have our little idées fixes and I am nobody to judge. Far be it from me to insist that Heers or Benedetti or (heaven forfend!) Bossard were right about any given point.  Something about this stinks, however.

Cazacu's dating depends entirely upon the interpretation of documents and it does clash with other information that we have. Gilles de Rais came into his inheritance - and reached his majority - in 1424, when he was twenty. His brother René inherited in January 1434, which is one reason I consider it certain that he was born in 1414 rather than the often-given 1407. We do not know exactly what Gilles' role was in the rescue of Jean V in 1420, but we do know that both he and his grandfather were lavishly rewarded, which would seem unlikely if he had been only a page or a squire. He was made Marshal of France in 1429, at a phenomenally young age even if we consider that he was in his twenty-fifth year. If he had been twenty-three or even twenty-two, that would have been quite remarkable.

This may seem an esoteric point, and in a way it is. If the Wiki entry had been amended in a less arrogant way - "traditionally 1404, although some historians argue for 1405 or later" - there would be no problem. Nobody really knows either the month or the year of Gilles de Rais' birth and probably nobody ever will. This, however, is an aggressive attempt to make the claim that Matei Cazacu is the only reliable biographer, and this cannot be allowed to stand. 

One good thing has come out of this grubby little squabble. If you see Gilles de Rais' date of birth given using the rubric "unknown, not earlier than 1405", you will know that the article has been directly or indirectly sourced from Wikipedia and should be consigned to the dustbin. 

Gilles de Rais Day 2021

 

Saints & Sinners: or, why I do what I do

Nobody will be surprised to hear that I have a little Gilles de Rais shrine; it would be more surprising if I didn't.

A few days ago I decided that I would add to it by ordering a candle and a canvas from a company that produces icons of saints with the faces of politicians and also does custom orders. I won't give them undeserved publicity, but will make sure that anyone putting their company name into the search engine will find this post. 

Within 24 hours I had a PayPal refund. Quickly followed by this -

I’m afraid we’ve got a bit of a problem with your custom request. Our candles are fun, irreverent and warmly meant - the subjects usually trigger warm and/or happy feelings – if they make us laugh we’re very gung-ho about making them and putting them out, but the immediate association here is one of pure evil.

We sometimes receive requests that we decline and while we hate not to please our customers, we also have to trust our gut. We don’t always get it right, but I’m afraid on this occasion, our call is not to do it. As a result of this decision, I have refunded your order.

Now, I'm not easily offended by ignorance - I'd have died of outrage several Bluebeardery & Copypasta seasons ago if I were. But this sticks in my craw because of a toxic combination of the judgemental and the hypocritical.

Because you can have a Margaret Thatcher icon - crowned, no less. Boris Johnson, also crowned, waving the butcher's apron. You can even have Priti "sink the immigrant boats!" Patel on a cushion. They're proud of that one.

All controversial politicians. You wouldn't look far to find someone insisting that each one has blood on their hands. All acceptable, apparently.

You can't, however, have Gilles de Rais, because somebody did an image search and clicked on the first site they found, probably Wikipedia. They chose to ignore all the recent developments since 1992 (and, in fact, before). They are blissfully and ironically unaware of the 1925 attempt to have Gilles beatified. Well, you may say, they make candles: why should they be following this somewhat arcane controversy? Indeed. I would argue, though, that they should at least make sure they know what they're talking about before they rudely turn down a £70 order.

I get that they thought I was attempting dark humour. But policing your customers' sense of humour isn't really on, either, is it? In fact, when a bespoke service tries to exercise its freedom of speech to censor its customers, for any reason, it never goes well.

I don't take offence on my own behalf. I'll get over feeling hugely disrespected. I don't think it's a great way to run a business, but it's their business, after all. If they want to turn away trade in a fit of misplaced virtue signalling, that's up to them.

(Although how you can jump on a moral high horse when you're making sizeable profits off the backs of all the photographers whose copyright you are merrily violating is beyond me. Every one of their non-custom items is based on an uncredited photograph).

But I am Gilles de Rais' representative on earth, so I have to make some kind of stand. I have spent a decade or more putting out the truth, with some effect, and what is the first impression someone gets when they search his name? "The immediate association here is one of pure evil". This is why I do what I do. This is why I carry on.

Update: It seems I was right; a business that turns away trade for dubious moral reasons isn't going to last long. This company, which I can now name as My Sainted Aunt, went into voluntary liquidation on February 21st 2022, some four months after my run-in with them. If I believed in karma, I'd be impressed with the rapidity. 

When I looked into the matter, it turned out that there is another company that offers a suspiciously similar product and that has been in business since 2016. So My Sainted Aunt - founded in June 2020 - presumably "borrowed" the idea from them. Delightful people. 

Gilles de Rais: A Case for the Defence (Part 2)

My previous essay on the case for the defence deliberately did not address the grounds to suppose that there was some kind of plot against him. That is a whole other topic which needs to be examined in some detail. The motives of his enemies were not wholly financial, as simplified accounts of the life of Gilles de Rais often imply; politics also featured heavily.

However, the initial impetus behind the machination was property, as Bourdeaut grasped when he titled his book Chantocé, Gilles de Rais et les ducs de Bretagne. Gilles came into the world as a result of politicking over the border castles of Champtocé and Ingrandes and died for the same reason. Jeanne La Sage needed an heir urgently because she was a lone woman and therefore prey to any predatory noble.  And Jean IV, the father of Gilles' nemesis, had long coveted the Rais estates, and those two castles in particular. They were of huge strategic importance, controlling ingress to Brittany by river, but they were also highly lucrative. Their lord could tax the river traffic; Jean de Craon's battles with the Loire boatmen lived on long after him in the form of various lawsuits. Gilles hung on to Champtocé almost until the end, not (as is sometimes suggested) out of sentimentality about his birthplace, but because the revenue it accrued was a welcome source of cold cash.

Brittany was, at this point, effectively bankrupt. At one point the Duke misappropriated the money his late wife had left to have masses said for her soul, because he was lacking in both money and morals. The Rais estates must have looked tempting. In fact, they were so alluring that they were confiscated a good fortnight before Gilles was even arrested: as Reinach remarks, when you give away the bearskin before the hunt starts, it means you have firmly resolved to kill the bear, by fair means or foul. (Quand on cède ainsi la peau de l'ours, c'est qu'on est bien décidé, per fas et nefas, a tuer l'ours.) 

Most biographers argue that, since Jean V had obtained the two castles he particularly craved in early 1438, he had no reason to plot against Gilles to seize the rest of his estates. There is a muddled belief that Gilles was virtually bankrupt and no longer had anything worth stealing. Nothing could be further from the case. In order to acquire the estates he wanted, the Duke had had to exchange them for the entirety of the barony of Rais, which Gilles had sold previously. That was how valuable those particular estates were to Brittany. Once acquired, however, it was by no means certain that Jean V could hold on to them. According to Breton law, the Duke was not allowed to enter into property transactions with his vassals. For this reason he used proxies such as "Jean Pain" and, notoriously, Geoffroy Le Ferron. Champtocé was ostensibly bought for one of his sons. In fact, the lawsuits about the misappropriation of Gilles' properties continued for a century after his death and all of them were eventually restored to the Rais family. 

Jean V had another reason to be doubtful that he could hang on to his ill-gotten gains. The contract for the sale of Champtocé was fiendishly complex and went through several drafts. The final agreement included the clause that Gilles could buy the castle back at any point within the next six years, at the price he had sold it for. Most commentators dismiss this as a motive: the money simply was not there. However, we know that the Duke had at least two spies in Gilles' household - Guillaume Grimaud and Guillaume Sauzaie - who were bribed to persuade their master to sell Champtocé (and, meanly, would not be paid unless they succeeded). It is certain that they would have told him that Prelati was claiming to be close to finding the Philosopher's Stone. If he could turn base metals into gold, money would cease to be a problem for Gilles. 

This, then, is the financial aspect of the plot. As we see, it was not as simple as "follow the money", though it should be stressed that not one sou of the proceeds went to the Church; it was divided between the Duke's sons.

The politics, similarly, appears simple but is deeply complex, hinging as it does on the absurdity of a French war hero on trial in the quasi-independent duchy of Brittany. Charles VII owed his throne to two commanders, Gilles and Jehanne. He had singled them out from the rest by awarding them the highly unusual honour of a border of fleurs de lys around their coats of arms. If both had been executed for heresy, then it might be argued that he had won the crown with the help of the Devil. To smear Gilles was to smear Jehanne and, by extension, the French King. 

Jean V's links with England were strong. Few writers explain exactly how strong they were. After his father died, his mother, Jeanne de Navarre, married the English king, Henry IV; her son, the future Jean V, became a ward of the Duke of Burgundy, one of the staunchest allies of the English. As Duke of Brittany, he operated a politique de bascule which was highly successful: between 1420 and 1427 he switched sides no fewer than five times. During Gilles' trial, he actually signed an important treaty with the English, so it is clear which way the pendulum was swinging at that time, and it was not in a direction favourable to the pre-eminent  French commander standing before a Breton court

Besides, Jean V loathed the Lavals. A 17th century historian, François-Eudes de Mézeray, remarked that the Duke was “very glad to avenge his own offence in avenging that of God”. Michelet adds that he was all the more delighted to strike at the Lavals because the King had elevated the barony of Rais to a county and therefore Gilles from a baron to a count. The Duke had a paranoid fear that the Lavals were plotting against him; in December 1437, while he was negotiating with Gilles for the sale of Champtocé, he dismissed his cooks for fear of poison.  Jean V would never have trusted Gilles completely; he was descended from the Lavals on his father's side and would have carried that name if it had not been for the complex deal that had eventually resulted in a passionately pro-French Laval owning a huge swathe of Brittany. All this must have rankled.

Gilles' judge Jean de Malestroit, usually described as the Bishop of Nantes, was also the Chancellor of Brittany. He was a lifelong supporter of the English, had led several embassies to London, and was strongly suspected of sabotaging the French cause - not least by Richemont, the Constable of France, who in 1426  kidnapped him and flung him into prison. Malestroit's chief aim in life was to maintain the independence of Brittany and prevent it from being subsumed into France, and he rightly supposed that an alliance with England was the best way to ensure this. Unlike the Duke, his allegiance never wavered. 

The important fact to remember is that the French King had nothing to do with the trial of Gilles de Rais. It is impossible to make sense of what happened without understanding the separation between Brittany and France. 

In the end it all came down to property and dirty politics.