by Helen Castor
In public, the dauphin acknowledged no conspiracy against the duke. Instead, he explained, the first sword drawn on the bridge had been that of John of Burgundy himself, or perhaps – he later remembered – the duke’s attendant Archambaud de Foix, lord of Navailles. (The princely finger was pointed at de Foix only after he had died of head wounds sustained during the mêlée, and was therefore conveniently unable to contest the accusation.) It was this unprovoked Burgundian aggression that had caused the sudden outburst of violence, to the dauphin’s utter consternation, and it was only thanks to the quick thinking of his loyal servants that – God be praised – he had not been taken hostage. But no amount of wide-eyed protestation – nor the suggestion to his ‘dear and well-beloved brother’, the duke’s son and heir Philip, that he should remain calm in the face of these unfortunate events – could disguise the fact that John of Burgundy had died under the dauphin’s safe-conduct, at the hands of the dauphin’s men.
And that, for the Burgundians, changed everything. Two hundred miles away in the Flemish town of Ghent, twenty-three-year-old Philip, the new duke, was overwhelmed with ‘extreme grief and distress’ at his father’s death, his counsellors reported. For Duke John’s widow, Margaret of Bavaria, her husband was a Christ-like figure, entering the palisade on the bridge to be betrayed by Tanguy du Châtel’s Judas. Not everyone would be prepared to endorse that particular image, perhaps; but in Burgundian eyes there could be no doubt that the dauphin – the heir to the throne of the most Christian king – was guilty of perjury and murder. As a result, Philip of Burgundy was confronted with a decision more fateful, more extreme, than any his father had faced. The hapless king, with Queen Isabeau at his side, remained under Burgundian protection at Troyes, ninety miles south-east of Paris, ‘where they are with their poor retinue like fugitives’, said the journal-writer bleakly. But Charles the Mad and Well-Beloved was already past his fiftieth birthday – and after him, what then? There were two claimants to his crown: an Armagnac dauphin, or an English king. And for Philip of Burgundy, after Montereau, that was no choice at all.
Still it took time to accept that the next monarch of France might be an English invader. As autumn faded into the beginnings of a bitter winter, Duke Philip remained in the north, in Flanders and Artois, deliberating with his counsellors and arranging a magnificent service for his father’s soul in the abbey church of Saint-Vaast in Arras. From Dijon, his indefatigable mother marshalled the resources of the two Burgundies to gather all possible evidence of the crime perpetrated against her husband, and to lobby the great powers of Europe to support her quest for justice. Meanwhile, as the marauding English devastated the countryside to the north of Paris, the dauphin did what he could to exert pressure of his own on the Burgundian-held capital, declaring his commitment to peace even while his troops plundered and burned the lands to the south.
It was not enough. By the spring of 1420, both the Parisian journal-writer and the monk of the abbey of Saint-Denis, four miles north of the city walls, were convinced that the English were the lesser of the two evils that menaced the kingdom. Duke Philip of Burgundy agreed. Negotiations – conducted in a series of taut, delicate exchanges between the duke at Arras, the queen at Troyes, the parlement of Paris and the English in Rouen – had taken months, but finally, on 21 May, the sovereign powers of England and France came together in the incense-clouded cathedral of Troyes for the sealing of a treaty.
That sacred space bore witness to the terrible force of the divine will: half a century earlier the spire that reached towards heaven from the crossing of the nave had been smashed into rubble by a tornado, and two decades after that a bolt of lightning had made an inferno of the wooden roof. But still the cathedral endured, an architectural testament to the possibility that, with the blessing of the Almighty, restoration might follow destruction. Not, perhaps, for King Charles of France himself, whose unsound mind had evaded all attempts to make it whole; but it seemed at last that his war-torn kingdom might find a new future. At the high altar, amid the press of lords and prelates, retainers and servants, stood France’s enemy-turned-saviour: Henry of England, scarred and self-possessed, with his eldest brother Thomas, duke of Clarence, by his side. Before him was the majesty of the French crown, as embodied by the queen, Isabeau, and the young duke of Burgundy, a loyal counsellor ready to speak for his faltering king. Both sides knew the terms of the peace which had brought them together, but this was the solemn moment at which those provisions became inescapably binding.
Charles, by the grace of God king of France, recognised Henry of England as the rightful heir to his throne. Because of his own unfortunate indisposition – gracefully acknowledged in the ventriloquised text of the treaty – Henry would take control of the kingdom’s government with immediate effect: he was now France’s regent as well as its heir. He would marry the king’s daughter Catherine, their union a physical incarnation of this perpetual peace, and their descendants would wear a double crown as monarchs of the twin realms of England and France, which would thus be joined forever in concord and tranquillity.
And so, not quite five years after the horror of Azincourt, the English king was clasped in the political embrace of the sovereign lord of the French as notre très-cher fils, ‘our dearest son’. The adolescent who until this moment would have claimed that title went almost unmentioned: the ‘horrible and enormous crimes’ of the ‘so-called dauphin’ were such, the treaty declared, that King Charles and his dear sons Henry of England and Philip of Burgundy (the latter being already the husband of another of the royal daughters of France) now swore to have no more dealings with him. Instead, Henry – acting in the name of the most Christian king as heir and regent of France – would do everything in his power to restore to their rightful allegiance those rebellious parts of the kingdom that still held for the party ‘commonly called that of the dauphin, or Armagnac’. Royal seals were pressed into soft wax; and, as preparations began for the wedding to come, heralds set out to inform the French people of the identity of their next monarch, and to demand oaths of their loyalty.
Truly, it seemed, God had spoken.
2
Like another Messiah
This was not how it was supposed to be. Charles of Valois, the seventeen-year-old dauphin de Vienne, knew that he was the heir to France. He had been the last born of his father’s sons, but by the will of God he now stood as the next successor to an unbroken line of illustrious kings reaching back to the glories of Charlemagne, and before him to the saintly Clovis, the first of France’s Christian monarchs.
It was to Clovis, almost a thousand years before, that God had sent the Holy Ampulla, a miraculous vial containing the sacred oil with which every roi très-chrétien was anointed during his coronation – a sacramental rite held by long tradition at Reims, where the Ampulla itself was guarded with the utmost reverence. It was Clovis, too, the dauphin knew – or had it been Charlemagne? – who first rode into battle bearing the oriflamme, a banner of vermilion silk hung from a golden lance which rallied the people of France to fight to the death whenever the kingdom was in mortal danger.
And the protective powers of the oriflamme were more than simply military, since this hallowed flag had been a gift from St Denis, the holy man who had converted pagan Gaul to Christianity. Exactly who Denis had been, and when he had brought the gospel to France, were questions of some complexity and much learned debate, but the answers mattered less than the evident fact of his support for the kingdom and his special relationship with its king. The oriflamme itself was kept in the saint’s own abbey, just north of Paris, ready for when the king should have need of it, along with the priceless regalia that were transported to Reims whenever a coronation took place: Charlemagne’s imperial crown and his great sword, called Joyeuse, as well as the crown of the dauphin’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Louis IX, the crusading king who had been recognised as a saint within three decades of his death. His circlet – fittingly, for this blessed monarch �
� contained a fragment of Christ’s crown of thorns and a lock of the Saviour’s hair.
St Louis himself, like all the kings of France of the last two hundred years, was buried in the abbey that belonged to St Denis. From there, these two patron saints of the French crown watched over Louis’s royal descendants in nearby Paris, the capital founded long ago by noble Trojans fleeing the sack of their own city, that had since become – in wisdom, might and holiness – a new Athens, Rome and Jerusalem. And from Paris, in turn, the French king watched over the chosen people of a holy land, a kingdom full of clerics, scholars, relics and saints.
All of this was the dauphin’s birthright. Yet now, it seemed, his inheritance was being ripped from his fingers. The fire-red blazon of the oriflamme had been trampled into the mud at Azincourt, where the sacrifice of French lives had brought only defeat and humiliation, not God-given victory. Paris, the pillar of faith and the seat of the French crown, had fallen into the grasping hands of Burgundian traitors. The consecrated precincts of the abbey of Saint-Denis had welcomed Henry of England – an upstart and a ruthless predator whose device of a fox’s brush, elegantly embroidered, could not disguise the fact that his teeth and claws were sticky with French blood – on his journey to Troyes; and in the cathedral there he had been greeted by the dauphin’s royal parents as their newly adopted son.
Meanwhile, the dauphin himself stood accused of murder most foul. Henry of England and Philip of Burgundy had agreed, in a bilateral treaty five months before Troyes, that they would work together to ensure that Charles and his accomplices were appropriately punished for their evident crimes. Even his own father – or those who now spoke on the distracted king’s behalf – had issued letters patent proclaiming the fact of the prince’s guilt and declaring that, as a result, he no longer had the right to use the title of dauphin. Instead, he was simply ‘Charles the ill-advised, who calls himself “of France”’.
The dauphin himself, of course, did not acknowledge that he bore any form of responsibility for the death of John of Burgundy. But even if he had, he would not have accepted that disinheritance was its necessary consequence. Monseigneur le dauphin, declared an Armagnac pamphlet written in 1420 in response to the treaty of Troyes, was the only true heir of the king and the kingdom. The treaty was therefore no peace, but instead a fount of discord, war, murder, plunder, bloodshed and horrible sedition – an act of tyrannical usurpation that was ‘most damnable, most unjust and abominable, and contrary to the honour of God and faith and religion …’
Still, in order to stop that usurpation in its tracks, some improvisation might be required. If the guiding light of the oriflamme had dimmed, then the dauphin’s army would fight instead under a banner depicting the golden fleurs-de-lis of France on a background of celestial blue, a venerable flag laden with meaning – the lily standing for the purity of the Virgin, its three petals for the Trinity, and the whole for the greatness of the French crown – which had also, handily, been presented to Clovis by an emissary from heaven. Some people said that it was St Denis who had brought the fleurs-de-lis to the holy king, but now that Denis had faltered in his role as guardian of the kingdom, it seemed more likely that the gift had come from the hands of the archangel Michael, God’s own standard-bearer, whose abbey at Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy was even now holding out against the English invaders. And so the dauphin ordered two new standards to be prepared for his army, each showing the heavenly knight St Michael with his sword unsheathed to kill the devil that writhed before him in the form of a serpent.
The naked blade of a sword, clasped in an armed hand, was also the dauphin’s personal device, painted delicately onto the silken banner of white, gold and blue that hung from his lance. But in practice, despite the money that he lavished on suits of golden armour, the prince could not lead his soldiers himself. It was not just that he was ‘not a warlike man’, as the Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain later remarked, noting his puny frame and unsteady gait. It was also that he was irreplaceable. Though the newly married Henry of England had, as yet, no son to succeed him, he could rally his troops on the battlefield in the knowledge that he had three royal brothers – the dukes of Clarence, Bedford and Gloucester – fighting at his side, ready to take his place if he fell. But the brothers of the dauphin Charles were all dead; the runt of the Valois litter was now the last hope of the Armagnac cause. As a result, when the next confrontation came, the Armagnac army would have to look elsewhere for its captain.
While the English and the Burgundians had been occupied with the making of their diabolical compact to deprive him of his inheritance, the dauphin and his troops had moved together through the south of the kingdom to secure the obedience of these Armagnac lands with a show of strength. But the ceremonies at Troyes – the sealing of the Anglo-Burgundian treaty, and the wedding of Henry of England and Catherine of France a little less than two weeks later – did not keep the English king from the field for long. On the day after the triumph of his marriage, the knights of England and Burgundy proposed a tournament in celebration; instead, the king ordered that they should leave immediately for Sens, forty miles west of Troyes, where, he said, ‘we may all tilt and joust and prove our daring and courage’ – not in the lists, but by besieging the Armagnacs.
A week later, Sens had fallen. A fortnight after that, Henry’s army stormed into Montereau-Fault-Yonne. There, the mutilated body of John the Fearless was exhumed from its shallow grave in the parish church, and reverently laid with salt and spices in a lead coffin for its journey back to the dead duke’s capital at Dijon. Then the English and Burgundian troops marched north-west to the fortified walls of Melun, a key staging-post in the campaign to sweep the Armagnacs out of the region immediately to the south of Burgundian Paris. But the soldiers of the Armagnac garrison dug in their heels, and by the middle of July it was clear that Melun would not so easily be taken. Now, if ever, the Armagnac cause needed an inspirational military leader to come to the town’s rescue and put a stop to the English king’s inexorable advance – and the seventeen-year-old dauphin knew just what to do. He ordered himself two new suits of gilded armour, mustered an army of fifteen thousand men and put his cousin, the count of Vertus, at the head of it.
At twenty-four, Philippe of Vertus carried the weight of his world on his young shoulders. His elder brother, the duke of Orléans, was still under lock and key in England, so it was to Philippe that the responsibility of safeguarding the family’s future had fallen. And now his prince, the dauphin, required him to lead the army that would rid France of English invaders and Burgundian traitors alike. The count had made his base at Jargeau, ten miles east of Orléans, and the dauphin joined him there in early August, ten thousand newly stitched pennons fluttering in the breeze above the heads of their massed troops. But by the end of the month, they had made no move to advance. The count, it emerged, was unwell. On 1 September, he succumbed to his illness – and all prospect of stemming the Anglo-Burgundian tide died with him. The dauphin immediately turned tail, retreating southward to his luxurious palace of Mehun-sur-Yèvre near Bourges, and six weeks later the town of Melun – with no hope, now, of rescue – was starved into surrender.
The stage was set for the triumphant English king to take possession of his new French capital. On 1 December 1420, Henry of England, Philip of Burgundy and the pitiful figure of Charles of France – ‘our French lords’, as the journal-writer approvingly called them – rode into Paris. It was a hard winter, and food was so scarce that beggar children were dying in the streets, but still the city’s hungry inhabitants turned out in their thousands to welcome the royal procession, many dressed in red, the colour of the cross of Henry’s heavenly patron, St George. The next day it was the turn of the queens to make their magnificent entrance, Henry’s wife Catherine riding through the Porte Saint-Antoine between her mother, Queen Isabeau, and her newly acquired sister-in-law, the duchess of Clarence, while cheering Parisians toasted the coming of peace in the wine that flowed da
y and night from the city’s conduits.
Nineteen-year-old Catherine had been at her husband’s side at the siege of Melun, where – in the only nod to romance this battle-hardened bridegroom was prepared to make – he had ordered musicians to play for her every evening as the sun went down. She was with him in Paris when, two days before Christmas, he and her father sat on the same judicial bench to hear a Burgundian demand for justice against her brother, ‘the so-called dauphin’, and his accomplices in the murder of John the Fearless. The dauphin was summoned to answer the charges before 6 January; to no one’s surprise, he failed to appear, and was sentenced in his absence to exile from the realm and disinheritance from the crown. And by then, Catherine and Henry were on their way to England to show the new queen to her people, and to raise more money and men for the final defeat of the Armagnac rebels.
The dauphin, however, had other ideas. He had lost his cousin of Vertus, but his protector St Michael – to whose shrine at Mont-Saint-Michel, still holding out against English siege, he had just sent a pilgrim’s offering – would provide him with new champions. The Burgundian traitors might have the help of the English, France’s ancient enemy, in their attempt to dismember the kingdom, but the dauphin could call on France’s ancient ally, the Scots, who had recognised in him the true line of French sovereignty. For more than a century, Scotland had taken every opportunity to support France in its conflicts with England: whenever English armies moved south across the Channel to ravage French lands, Scots soldiers had launched raids across England’s northern border, hoping to inflict debilitating wounds while English backs were turned. Now, with France convulsed on itself, the Scots saw their chance to fight the English at a safer distance from their own frontier, side by side with the Armagnac French.