Joan of Arc

by Castor, Helen

  The cause of Parisian despair could scarcely have been more obvious in a summit at Auxerre convened that same month by Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, a legate sent from Rome, according to his master the pope, as an ‘angel of peace’. The English were looking for no more than a truce, since they could not contemplate any permanent settlement which their boy-king might one day see as a betrayal of his God-given rights. But an Anglo-Armagnac truce was unworkable and unenforceable, the Armagnacs declared, and besides, they could decide nothing without the participation of the princes of the blood – the duke of Orléans chief among them – who were still captives in England. The duke of Burgundy had already concluded a truce with the Armagnacs that, in theory at least, took him out of the war; his interest, therefore, lay in securing his own possession of the county of Champagne, to which King Charles (the Armagnac ambassadors said) would never agree. In the end, all Cardinal Albergati could achieve was an appointment to meet again in the spring, ‘and they had done nothing,’ said the journal-writer wearily, ‘but spend a great deal of money and waste their time’.

  And when the spring came, the potential significance of the cardinal’s reconvened conference was comprehensively trumped by a wedding. On 20 April 1433 in the cathedral at Thérouanne, halfway between Calais and Arras, the widowed duke of Bedford took seventeen-year-old Jacquetta de Luxembourg as his second wife. The bride was not only ‘vivacious, beautiful and graceful’, the chronicler Monstrelet reported, but very well connected: her father, the count of Saint-Pol, was the brother of Louis de Luxembourg, bishop of Thérouanne and chancellor of English France, and of Jean de Luxembourg, the Burgundian lord who had captured Joan the Maid outside Compiègne. For Bedford, the match seemed to promise both political and military advantage, as well as the hope of an heir – something which his childless marriage to Anne of Burgundy, devoted though it was, had failed to provide. But he had reckoned without the insult that Philip of Burgundy perceived in his remarriage only five months after their beloved Anne’s death. There was injury too: the count of Saint-Pol was Duke Philip’s vassal, and the see of Thérouanne formed an enclave within the Burgundian county of Artois, yet neither count nor bishop had seen fit to seek the duke’s permission for the wedding to take place.

  Cardinal Beaufort saw the dangers of this rift, and sought to bring Bedford and Burgundy together at Saint-Omer, just north of Thérouanne, at the end of May. Both dukes duly arrived in the town with much pomp and circumstance. Only then did it transpire that neither would cede precedence by agreeing to visit the other. The cardinal – a man with years of diplomatic experience at the greatest courts in Europe – shuttled between the two households, but neither would give in. The loss of the duchess had never been more acutely felt. And when both dukes left the town in magnificent style without having met, it was apparent that the personal relationship between these twin pillars of English France had been damaged beyond repair.

  Within Armagnac France, meanwhile, bridges were being built rather than burned. The king’s mother-in-law Yolande of Aragon, queen of Sicily, had retreated from the political front line while the mission of Joan the Maid, which she had helped to unleash, had directed the course of the war. Now that the stark imperatives of those dramatic months had faded, the subtleties of politics and diplomacy were once again to the fore, and, thanks to Yolande, a queen’s gambit was already in play. The first move, in 1431, was a treaty between Yolande herself and the duke of Brittany, and that in turn prepared the way for a settlement sealed at Rennes in March 1432 by which the Breton duke’s brother Arthur of Richemont, the estranged constable of Armagnac France, was restored to royal favour. Not only had Yolande persuaded the king to set aside his deep antipathy to the constable in order to harness Richemont’s support against the enemy, but she had frustrated the duke of Bedford’s hopes of securing a lasting alliance with Brittany and the service of Richemont for English France. Now, only the endgame remained: to remove from the board the troublesome figure of the king’s favourite, the adversary who had precipitated the constable’s rift with his sovereign, Georges de La Trémoille.

  June 1433 was the moment chosen for the palace coup. At Chinon, armed men loyal to Yolande and Richemont seized La Trémoille in the middle of the night. The favourite tried to resist, but he was quickly overwhelmed; in the scuffle, he was stabbed with a dagger, but his vast belly absorbed the blow and saved him from mortal injury. King Charles heard the disturbance and started up in fear, but, on being reassured that all was well – that he was in no danger, and La Trémoille was simply being arrested for the good of his realm – he went back to bed. La Trémoille disappeared, unmourned, into internal exile, and, with scarcely a ripple in the glassy surface of the court, his place at the king’s side was taken by a charming eighteen-year-old, Yolande’s youngest son, Charles of Anjou.

  The volatile Armagnac regime had been smoothly reconfigured by the queen of Sicily’s expert hand, while in English France tensions between Bedford, his belligerent brother Gloucester on the other side of the Channel, and their uncle, the cardinal, threatened to undermine the cash-strapped government. Fighting continued in Normandy and Maine, around Paris, and – despite the Armagnac–Burgundian truce – in Champagne, Artois and on the borders of the duchy of Burgundy, as a result of which the duke of Burgundy himself decided to take the field once more in the summer of 1433. Nothing was certain, nothing was clear; but that in itself – compared to the dark days before the Maid’s coming, when it had looked as though the English might take Orléans and swarm over the Loire into the heart of the kingdom of Bourges – was a source of strength to Armagnac France. King Charles would never inspire his troops on the battlefield. That thought had long since been dismissed. But now he was an anointed sovereign, and his captains – the Bastard of Orléans, the duke of Alençon, La Hire, Ambroise de Loré – had shared the Maid’s victories; they knew, at least, what it was to win. And that was a sensation that seemed lost to the people of Anglo-Burgundian Paris. ‘The war grew worse and worse,’ reported the journal-writer in 1434; ‘those who called themselves Frenchmen came every day, pillaging and killing, right up to the gates …’ Though the city waited, neither Bedford nor Burgundy came to the rescue; ‘they might as well have been dead’, the Parisian said bitterly.

  It would not have consoled him to know that the duke of Bedford felt equally thwarted. Among the reasons for the duke’s absence from Paris was a year-long visit to London forced upon him by the need to seek more money and troops, and to counter pernicious accusations, stage-managed by his disruptively self-seeking brother Gloucester, that he had mishandled the war. In a passionately argued document submitted to the young king’s council just before his return to France in the summer of 1434, Bedford spoke of the sufferings for which the journal-writer in Paris blamed him and all the noble lords who had failed to relieve the city. Because of the war, Bedford explained, the king’s good townspeople of Paris and his other loyal subjects of France could not cultivate their lands or their vines or keep their livestock, and, as a result, they were driven ‘to an extreme poverty such as they may not long abide’. More help was needed, and Bedford had no doubt at what point the great enterprise of English France had fallen into uncertainty: ‘… all things there prospered for you,’ he told the king, ‘till the time of the siege of Orléans, taken in hand God knows by what advice. At the which time, after the adventure fallen to the person of my cousin of Salisbury, whose soul God pardon, there fell by the hand of God, as it seems, a great stroke upon your people that was assembled there in great number, caused in great part, as I think, of lack of steadfast belief, and of erroneous doubt that they had of a disciple and follower of the fiend called the Maid, that used false enchantment and sorcery, the which stroke and discomfiture not only lessened in great part the number of your people there, but as well withdrew the courage of the remnant in marvellous wise, and encouraged your adverse party and enemies to assemble them forthwith in great number …’

  Bedford had never
before spoken in public about the Maid. This was not the carefully calibrated exercise of the months after her death, setting rhetoric to work to advertise heaven’s verdict on her sin. Instead, he was giving voice to deeply felt frustration. The duke knew that his brother, the great King Henry, had been God’s own soldier, and that his royal nephew’s claim to the crown of France was just. Yet the wiles of the devil – finding a foothold in the world in the person of this misguided girl – had dealt an extraordinary blow to the righteous cause to which he had devoted his life. Bedford was forty-five, and, though his commitment to English France was as determined as ever, even the company of his lively young wife could not alleviate the weariness that now dogged his every step.

  He was hardly helped, when he finally returned to Paris that December, by the fact that the winter was the coldest anyone could remember. It snowed for forty days without stopping, noted the journal-writer in the city; if he was exaggerating, it was not by much. Back in London the Thames froze over, and in the duke of Burgundy’s town of Arras, a hundred miles north of the French capital, the inhabitants decorated the streets with elaborate sculptures carved out of snow. Their subjects were chosen from myth and legend; among these frozen tableaux, laced with the excitement of the supernatural, the only one taken from life was the figure of la grande Pucelle, the great Maid, at the head of her soldiers.

  The people of Arras had seen Joan in person four years before, when she was brought to their town as a captive on her unhappy journey to Rouen and the stake. Now, this icy representation of the Maid was altogether too inscrutable to reassure the duke of Bedford and his fellow custodians of English France about the loyalties of King Henry’s Burgundian subjects. And within weeks it became clear that Arras would soon play host to a meeting that promised them still less in the way of succour.

  In January 1435, all wrapped in furs against the perishing cold, an illustrious gathering assembled two hundred miles south of Arras at Nevers, between Armagnac Bourges and Burgundian Dijon. The duke of Burgundy had come to meet the Armagnac count of Clermont – newly elevated to the dukedom of Bourbon after the death of his father, who had never regained his freedom after Azincourt. The two men had spent much of 1434 in a battle for control of the border lands between their territories in eastern France; now, however, they had agreed a truce. The fact that the new duke of Bourbon was Burgundy’s brother-in-law, thanks to his marriage years earlier to the duke’s sister Agnes, had done nothing to stop the fighting, but now that diplomatic relations had been restored, Bourbon brought with him to the conference at Nevers another brother-in-law, Constable Richemont, the husband of Burgundy’s sister Margaret. Along with these two Armagnac princes of the blood, King Charles had sent his chancellor, the subtle and experienced archbishop of Reims. It was a happy reunion: so joyous, one chronicler said, that it appeared as though these lords had always been at peace. (How foolish, a Burgundian knight exclaimed bitterly, were all those lesser men who had risked death to fight a war so easily forgotten by the great.) Out of these personal negotiations came proposals by which it seemed a general peace might at last be secured, and it was agreed that all three parties – Burgundians and Armagnacs, and also, of course, the English, who were not present at Nevers – should meet at Arras on the first day of July in the hope of achieving such a settlement.

  Philip of Burgundy had been playing a complex and relentlessly demanding game in the fifteen years since his father’s murder. Now, finally, his pieces were aligned. The English duke of Bedford was no longer his brother-in-law. There could be no question of simply jettisoning his commitment, sworn by sacred oath, to his English allies; instead, it was up to his English allies to show themselves willing to make peace on the entirely reasonable terms to be offered at Arras by his Armagnac brothers-in-law on behalf of their king, who would also, naturally, offer restitution for the lamentable death of the duke’s father. Peace in France would not only serve the interests of the kingdom’s beleaguered people, and find favour in the eyes of the Church, but it would allow the duke to attend to the needs of his rich territories in the Low Countries, and to defend himself against the Holy Roman Emperor, whose long-standing alarm at the expansion of Burgundian power in the north had been transmuted only weeks earlier into a declaration of war.

  For Philip, therefore, with his multiple perspectives and multiple priorities, Arras promised much. For the English, it was a prospect that chilled the blood. There could be no compromise between the claims of King Charles and King Henry: only one head could, with God’s blessing, wear the French crown. If Burgundy were now to put forward as ‘reasonable’ a raft of proposals that required the abandonment of the English title to the throne of France, then the English would have no choice but to refuse. And if the duke of Burgundy were determined to see such a refusal as ‘unreasonable’, then he was already intent on a constructive dismantling of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance.

  And so it proved when the first plenary session of the new conference opened on 5 August – a month late, thanks to the time it had taken to assemble all the various attendees – in a hall hung with cloth of gold in the abbey of Saint-Vaast. Arras was swamped with people; every inn, every lodging-house was full. Quite apart from the large delegations from England, Burgundy and the Armagnac court, there were observers sent by the great lords of France and all the towns and territories that owed their loyalty to the Burgundian duke, and ambassadors from far-flung lands including Spain, Navarre, Norway, Italy and Poland. The Armagnacs were once again led by the duke of Bourbon and Constable Richemont, with the diplomatic support of the archbishop of Reims, while the duke of Burgundy, as host to these noble visitors, kept magnificent state; and the warmth and bonhomie with which he entertained his Armagnac brothers-in-law did not escape the despairing gaze of the English.

  King Henry was represented by lords spiritual and temporal from his councils in London and Rouen, including the archbishop of York, the earl of Suffolk (now freed from his brief captivity after the Maid’s victory at Jargeau, albeit at the cost of a crippling ransom), and the devotedly loyal Bishop Cauchon. But the driving force behind their last-ditch attempts to hold the duke of Burgundy to the alliance he had made almost sixteen years earlier was Cardinal Beaufort. He used all his powers of persuasion, every ounce of the personal credit he had built up with the duke and duchess, to plead his case with such intensity that, during one lengthy private conversation, observers noticed great gouts of sweat standing out on his forehead. A truce – a twenty-year truce, even, bolstered perhaps by an Anglo-Armagnac royal marriage alliance – would relieve the sufferings of the French people, and sidestep the thorny issue of sovereignty without disturbing the friendship between England and Burgundy. But the cardinal was wasting his breath. The conference had been designed from its very inception to present proposals for peace to which the English could not possibly agree. Nothing remained for them to do but leave, and as they rode away on the morning of 6 September in bucketing rain, each man in the cardinal’s lavish retinue wore the word ‘honour’ embroidered proudly – uselessly – on the sleeve of his red livery.

  In Arras, the negotiations proceeded without them. Since England had turned its face against a godly peace, the duke of Burgundy could not in law or conscience – as Cardinal Albergati was quick to confirm on behalf of his master the pope – be held to a treaty which now promised only war. Still the duke hesitated. On 10 September a requiem mass was sung in the echoing space of the abbey church, sixteen years to the day after the murder of his father on the bridge at Montereau – a killing which, of course, King Charles had been much too young to prevent, although he would now do everything in his power to pursue those responsible. The one man who had never let Duke Philip forget the horror of that Armagnac crime had not come to Arras: the duke of Bedford lay a hundred miles away at Rouen, sick in body and heart. And then, on 16 September, came the sudden news that he had died. The regent of English France – that sober, cultured and dedicated man to whom the duke of Burgundy h
ad once been so closely bound by ties of marriage and respect and affection – was gone.

  It was a mercy, perhaps, that Bedford was spared knowledge of the solemn ceremony that took place in the church of Saint-Vaast on 21 September, exactly a week after he had succumbed to his illness. The treaty of Arras was complete – territorial concessions agreed, and restitution for the devastating loss of the duke’s father promised. Now, with his hands touching the consecrated host and a golden cross, Duke Philip swore that he would henceforth live at peace with his sovereign lord, King Charles. Prompted by the love of God, he forgave his king, once and for all time, for his father’s death. And then Cardinal Albergati laid his hands on the duke’s head and absolved him from the oath he had given to serve the English king of France – a lifetime ago, it seemed – in another church, at Troyes.

  This was not peace. Many French men and women, after all, were still ruled by the English, who proclaimed King Henry’s right to the crown of France as stoutly as ever. Nor, despite the smiles and embraces at Arras, were the conflicts between Burgundians and Armagnacs that festered across the most Christian kingdom suddenly and miraculously resolved. But it was a movement of tectonic plates that utterly transformed the landscape of the war. The necessity that Yolande of Aragon had always seen, and that Joan the Maid had so forcefully demanded – that all French princes of the blood should recognise the God-given right of King Charles, and reject the false claims of the English invaders – had finally come to pass. At Bourges, Yolande celebrated the news with her pregnant daughter, Queen Marie, and her son-in-law the king; and when her next royal grandson was born at Tours in February 1436, he was named Philip, after his loving godfather Philip of Burgundy.