Joan of Arc

by Castor, Helen

  Bedford’s letter was long, but its conclusion was clear. God, ‘who is the only judge’, he said, would recognise the true right of King Henry, whether through peace or war. However much these words were intended for others as well as the newly crowned Armagnac king, Charles could hardly ignore such a challenge to his title and his conduct. By 14 August his army had approached within sight of Bedford’s forces north of Paris at Montepilloy, just outside Senlis. Both sides dug in overnight, working quickly to fortify their positions. The English – along with a few hundred Burgundian soldiers mustered at English expense for the defence of Paris – flew the banners of France and England, King Henry’s two realms, and the standard of their patron, St George. The Armagnacs were drawn up under their many commanders: the duke of Alençon, René of Anjou, Gilles de Rais and, at the front, the Bastard of Orléans, La Hire and the Maid, her white banner held high. King Charles, escorted by the count of Clermont and the ever-present La Trémoille, rode at a careful distance behind the lines. And so, through the heat of a scorching August day, they all – English, Burgundians and Armagnacs – waited for battle.

  There were skirmishes, feints and parries, as each side sought to tempt the other into a full-blown assault. Every movement kicked up so much dust from the parched earth that, close as they were, it was hard to keep the enemy in plain sight. But as the hours dragged on, it began to dawn on the Armagnac captains that the English had no intention of leaving the ground they had staked out. At Rouvray, English forces had broken the Armagnacs with a battery of arrows from behind a barricade of herring-filled wagons, but at Patay, with their defences incomplete, they had met bloody disaster. They had no intention of making the same mistake again. And, of all the Armagnac captains, it was Joan who could not contain her frustration. She took her banner in her hand and rode right up to the enemy lines, daring them to attack; when her presence failed to provoke them, she sent a message that King Charles’s troops would give them time and space to deploy themselves for battle as they wished. There was no response. Night fell; and the next morning news reached the French camp that the English were marching back to Senlis, and from there to Paris.

  Bedford had made his point, but he was not about to risk everything on a single encounter in the open. Let his enemies move against Paris if they dared; meanwhile Normandy urgently required his attention. There, Mont-Saint-Michel still held out, a lone Armagnac outpost off the coast of English France, but across the duchy, as reports spread of the rescue of Orléans and King Charles’s coronation campaign, resistance to English rule was growing. So much so, in fact, that the town of Évreux, thirty miles south of Rouen, had been surrounded by Armagnac troops and forced to agree to surrender if help did not come by 27 August. Bedford, who could not afford to see his Norman power base disintegrate, moved at speed to the rescue, and then took up position at Vernon, poised watchfully between his two threatened capitals, Paris and Rouen.

  In the duke’s absence, King Charles continued his stately and apparently inexorable takeover of the towns around Paris. Compiègne, forty miles north-east of the city, opened its gates, and Beauvais, another thirty miles west from there, sent a delegation to offer its submission. This was a menacing royal progress, not only pushing towards Paris itself, but moving within striking distance of English Normandy to the west and Burgundian Artois to the north. The Armagnac strategy, however, had two faces. The king’s army remained in the field, but on 16 August – the day after the inconclusive face-off with Bedford’s forces at Montepilloy – his envoys were finally admitted to the presence of the duke of Burgundy at Arras. They hoped to hammer out terms for peace between the king and his Burgundian cousin, and there was serious intent, it seemed, on both sides: after intensive discussion at Arras, Burgundian ambassadors returned with the archbishop and de Gaucourt to Compiègne, to present the results of their labours at the Armagnac court. By 27 August, the king had agreed in principle to make spiritual reparation for the murder at Montereau (which he had of course, regrettably, been too young to prevent), and to offer financial compensation for the jewels and belongings the duke had had with him when he died. Philip would be confirmed in lands he had been granted by the English, and would be personally exempt from any requirement to do homage to Charles, while Charles himself would grant a general pardon and a general truce.

  But it was not enough. Bedford’s public summoning of the spectre of Burgundy’s dead father had done its work; the duke could not bring himself to make a permanent peace with his murderer. Instead, on 28 August, a temporary truce was agreed, by which the abstinence from war that already protected the southern frontiers between Burgundian and Armagnac territory would now be extended to all lands north of the Seine with the exception of the city of Paris, which the duke of Burgundy could defend if it were to come under Armagnac attack. This, in other words, was a gesture of goodwill that would allow the moment to play itself out. The duke of Burgundy had not abandoned his English alliance, but his door was still open to the Armagnacs, who would, in the meantime, have the chance to find out whether Paris was theirs for the taking.

  That was music to the ears of Joan, who had been left in uncomfortable limbo while these diplomatic wheels turned. She had a mission that depended on divine, not human, agency – except for the inconvenient fact that she needed the faith of politicians and the presence of soldiers to put it into effect. And now that the initial momentum of her campaign had dissipated in the aftermath of the coronation at Reims, questions about the nature and limits of the authority she might claim were becoming a little more difficult to answer. Some time earlier, for example, Count Jean of Armagnac – son of the nobleman who had given his name to the anti-Burgundian cause – had written from his lands in the far south-west of the kingdom to seek her advice on the papal schism. Almost all of Europe now regarded the conflict as settled in favour of Martin V, who had been elected to the Holy See at the Council of Constance, but Count Jean was one of the few who persisted in the belief that one of two others might still have a claim. ‘I beseech you’, he asked her, ‘to beg Our Lord Jesus Christ that, in His infinite mercy, He might wish to declare to us, through you, which of the three men is the true pope.’ At Compiègne, during the military lull after Montepilloy, Joan gave her answer. ‘Jhesus Maria. Count of Armagnac, my very dear and good friend, Joan the Maid lets you know that your messenger has reached me … I cannot reliably tell you the truth of the matter now, until I am in Paris or elsewhere, as required, because I am now too much caught up in the business of war; but when you know that I am in Paris, send a messenger to me and I will then tell you clearly which one you should put your faith in, and what I have learned from my rightful and sovereign lord, the king of all the world …’

  Joan was prepared to envisage, it seemed, that her instructions from heaven would one day encompass more matters than she had so far spoken of. For the time being, though, she was consumed – and troubled – by the interruption to her military mission. On 23 August, the day after her reply to the count of Armagnac, she was at last given leave to ride out of Compiègne with her soldiers and her fellow captain, the duke of Alençon. Three days later, they had reached Saint-Denis, the town outside the walls of Paris that housed the holy abbey of France’s ancient patron and the blessed bones of its most Christian kings. The English had not thought it worthwhile to install a garrison in a place that had few fortifications, and many of the townspeople had retreated into Paris at news of the Armagnacs’ approach. Joan and her men therefore encountered no resistance as they reclaimed the protection of St Denis for a kingdom and an army that had marched for so long under the banner of the heavenly warrior St Michael, before the Maid had come to lead them.

  Now the walls of Paris were just four miles away, but still Joan could not launch the attack she wanted. Instead, the king moved slowly south from Compiègne to Senlis while his counsellors continued their painstaking summits with the duke of Burgundy’s envoys. Finally, the partial truce was signed that left open the possi
bility of a fight for the capital, and by the end of the first week in September Charles arrived at Saint-Denis, while Joan and the army pushed on another two miles to the village of La Chapelle. She and Alençon now had the champions of Armagnac France around them – the counts of Clermont and Laval, de Rais, La Hire, de Gaucourt, Xaintrailles and more – and they had spent the days since their own arrival at Saint-Denis engaged in sorties and reconnaissance, gauging the task that lay ahead.

  There was no doubt that the defences of Paris were monumental, on a scale far beyond anything that Joan had experienced before. Massive walls were pierced by arrow slits and topped with fortified towers and gun placements, and new-built boulevards protected each of the six gates, all of which lay behind an immense ditch that circled the whole city. Not only that, but the duke of Bedford had issued an impassioned summons to his captains in Normandy to come to him at Vernon by 8 or 9 September, with all the men they could spare, to march to the capital’s rescue (‘… and fail not hereof, as you love the conservation of this land, and as you will answer to my lords and us therefore in time coming’). But the threat of Bedford’s arrival was all the more reason to do what Joan had always believed she should: to strike, in God’s name, without delay.

  And so, on Thursday 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, the Maid took her banner in her hand and rode with her troops to the Porte Saint-Honoré, the gate that led to the palace of the Louvre on the western edge of the city. For the Armagnac soldiers, as they set about God’s work under the command of the leader He had sent to save France, the holiness of the day could only sanctify their labours. For the Burgundians of Paris, on the other hand, it was sacrilege: ‘… these men were so unfortunate, so full of foolish trust,’ railed the journal-writer within the city, ‘that they relied upon the word of a creature in the form of a woman, whom they called the Maid – what it was, God only knows – and with one accord conspired to attack Paris on the very day of the Holy Nativity of Our Lady.’ This time, clearly, there would be no faction among the besieged pressing to open the gates. This time, the city would be taken by assault, or not at all.

  Even for Joan, there was a familiarity, by now, to the workings of the military machine. The noise was deafening. The roar of the Armagnac cannon was answered by artillery blasts from the walls above; whenever a Parisian gunner struck his target, the screams of mutilated horses and men added a nerve-shredding counterpoint to the shouts of the soldiers who toiled in the moat, hurling bundles of wood into the standing water at the bottom in an attempt to build a makeshift pathway to the foot of the walls. As always, Joan led the way into the ditch, brandishing her banner and urging on her men, while arrows and stones fell from above in a piercing, bludgeoning storm. Long hours passed, until muscles were cramped in agony and eyes stung with blood, sweat and dirt, and still the walls loomed high above them, impenetrable and impassable.

  As the sun dipped below the horizon, Joan called urgently to the unseen enemy in the fortifications above. ‘Surrender to us quickly, in the name of Jesus! For if you do not surrender before nightfall, we will come in there by force, whether you like it or not, and you will all be put to death without mercy!’ ‘Shall we, you bloody tart?’ came the reply, and a crossbow bolt ripped through her thigh. As she staggered, another arrow pinned the foot of her standard-bearer to the ground beside her. When he lifted his visor so that he could see to free himself, a third shot split his skull between his eyes. He died where he fell. Darkness was coming. Joan was losing blood, but still she shouted till she was hoarse: her exhausted soldiers should move forward, onward, to the attack. At Orléans and at Jargeau she had been hurt only to rise again, her resilience a sign to her troops that God would give them victory. Paris was next, of that there could be no doubt. And then, over the cannon blasts, she heard the sounding of the retreat. She did not stop insisting that the city could be won as she was dragged from the ditch and carried to safety. Only when the tail of the Armagnac army disappeared into the night did the Parisian guns stutter, at last, into silence.

  It had been worth a try, the king and his counsellors knew. To take Paris by assault – to overwhelm the defences of the strongest city west of Constantinople without help from inside the walls – would have been a miracle; but the Maid, after all, had worked miracles before. Then again, to ask for more might test the patience of heaven. God’s help might come when all human remedies had failed, but now, thanks to Joan’s intervention at Orléans and Reims, the newly crowned King Charles could hope to help himself. The Maid had had her chance, but Paris had not fallen, and the imminent arrival in the capital of the duke of Bedford’s troops made it all the more certain that it was time to take stock, to pursue the peace with Burgundy that would unite France against the English invaders. A truce had been agreed with the Burgundians, to last until Christmas, and in a time of truce – as Charles explained in a letter to the people of Reims a few days later – the king could not keep an undeployed army in the field without risking the ‘total destruction’ of the countryside across which they ranged. Privately, too, he knew that his cash-strapped regime did not yet have the money to pursue a full-scale campaign against the English in Normandy. He would therefore return to the Loire, leaving the count of Clermont to hold the lands north of the Seine, and prepare himself and his forces for the new year to come.

  Joan was distraught. Wounded though she was, she had woken in the camp at La Chapelle on 9 September determined to renew her assault on Paris. She asked the duke of Alençon to sound the trumpets and ready the troops; only then did she learn that Charles had given the order for wholesale retreat. While envoys returned to the city walls under safe-conduct to collect the Armagnac dead, she travelled the two miles to Saint-Denis in pain and despair to rejoin the king who had betrayed her. How was she – how was anyone – to understand such a reverse for Joan the Maid and her mission from God? The great theologian Gerson had foreseen this very problem. The ‘party having justice on its side’, he had concluded after her triumph at Orléans, must take care not to render the help of heaven useless through disbelief or ingratitude; ‘for God changes His sentence as a result of a change in merit,’ he wrote, ‘even if He does not change His counsel.’

  One possibility, then, was that she had failed at the walls of Paris because her king had not shared her conviction that, with God’s help, victory was certain. But there was another interpretation, and the Burgundian scholars of the university of Paris were quick to find it. Perhaps – ran the argument of a theological treatise written a few days after her retreat from the capital – she had failed because her inspiration came not from heaven, but from hell. ‘It is not enough’, wrote the author of On the Good and the Evil Spirit, ‘that someone claims purely and simply to be sent from God, since this is the claim of all heretics; but it is necessary that this invisible mission should be confirmed by a miraculous work or by a particular testimony drawn from holy scripture.’ For the supporters of English rather than Armagnac France, the relief of Orléans was no miracle – and therefore, in the absence of theologically sufficient proof, anyone who accepted Joan’s assertions was rejecting the judgement and the authority of the Church itself.

  Not only that, but her claims were demonstrably false. If she had truly been sent by God, she would not wear men’s clothes in contravention of God’s law and the Church’s teaching. The nature of her supposed mission was no excuse for this abomination, since no ‘greater’ good could ever justify sin – and in any case women were forbidden to fight, just as they were forbidden to preach, to teach, to administer the sacraments, and all other duties that belonged to men. That she did the devil’s work was clear from the fact that she incited war, rather than bringing peace; she had even dared to insult God by fighting on the feast day of the Nativity of His most glorious mother. She had allowed children to kneel before her with burning candles, from which she dropped wax onto their heads as an enchantment for good luck: idolatry, sorcery and heresy, all in one. And some poor souls
worshipped images of her as though she were a saint, an error of such magnitude that it threatened the true faith – and the Church should do all in its power to excise the danger this Maid represented.

  The Maid herself was hardly likely to agree. All the same, she was limping, spiritually as well as physically, as she prepared for the long ride south to the Loire. At the sacred abbey of Saint-Denis, she left a suit of armour as an offering before the image of the Virgin; not a gift of thanks for victory, but a more inscrutable acknowledgement of a task unfinished. And then, because she had no other choice, she followed the king as he retraced his steps around Paris to the east, from Lagny-sur-Marne to Provins, and then southward to Montargis, Gien and Bourges. ‘And thus’, wrote a servant of the duke of Alençon, ‘was the will of the Maid and of the king’s army broken.’

  A couple of days later Bedford stormed into the capital, and rounded in fury on the remaining inhabitants of Saint-Denis for having accommodated the Armagnac enemy without resistance or protest. For the lodgings they had provided, they had been promised payment from the Armagnac plunder of a conquered city; instead, they found themselves heavily fined for their miscalculation. But Bedford knew that this was a moment in which his principal weapons were diplomatic, not financial or military. On 18 September, ten days after the failed Armagnac assault, King Charles’s council belatedly agreed that Paris should now be incorporated into the truce he had already sealed with the duke of Burgundy. The task Bedford faced was to ensure that these negotiations between Armagnacs and Burgundians went no further without him, and instead to wind the coils of English France more tightly around his brother-in-law.