Joan of Arc

by Helen Castor

  Thwarted though Philip of Burgundy might have been in his desire to win chivalric glory – or, at least, having comprehensively called Gloucester’s bluff – the duke knew that the Low Countries were within his grasp. By the summer of 1425 he had secured custody of the abandoned Duchess Jacqueline and, with her, the chance to consolidate his hold on Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland. But that September, one morning before dawn, Jacqueline escaped from house arrest in Ghent, disguised as a man for her headlong ride to Holland and freedom. As she mustered support to resist Burgundian rule, Philip gathered his armies for the fight ahead. And for the duke of Bedford, relief at the retreat from this battleground of his foolhardy brother Gloucester was tempered by the knowledge that his greatest ally’s interest in France was now subsumed in the overriding demands of war elsewhere.

  From Rouen, Bedford did everything he could to keep his partnership with the absent duke of Burgundy alive, and he had his beloved wife, Philip’s sister Anne, to help him in his task. But the treaty at Amiens that had brought Bedford and his duchess together had been a double marriage alliance, and now the duke discovered that the other union made there – that of Anne’s sister Margaret and Arthur, count of Richemont, brother of the duke of Brittany – would no longer share the burden of sustaining the political bond between England and Burgundy.

  Richemont’s relationship with England was a complex one. His title was English in origin, but this earl of Richmond, as he was known on the northern side of the Channel, held no lands there. Instead, it was a name associated since the eleventh century with the independent duchy of Brittany, whose dukes now used it as of right within their own family, whatever the current state of their dealings with the English crown. His widowed mother had married King Henry IV of England in 1403, but Richemont had grown up in France, and it was for France that he had fought at Azincourt. Wounded on the field, he was found after the battle, covered in blood, under a pile of corpses. For five years he remained Henry V’s prisoner until, at twenty-seven, he won his freedom on parole – that is, on his word that he would do nothing against the interests of the king of England or the duke of Burgundy.

  That stipulation was a mark of the changed world into which Richemont emerged from his captivity. He had close ties from his earliest years in Paris with the houses of both Burgundy and Orléans, but when the civil war first erupted he had fought for the Orléanist Armagnacs. By 1420, however, the Armagnac dauphin was the killer of John the Fearless, and Richemont’s childhood friend Philip of Burgundy was the ally of the English king. Richemont committed himself to the Anglo-Burgundian cause, and helped to persuade his elder brother of Brittany, who had previously tacked between the two sides, to do the same. His decision was reflected and underpinned in 1423 by his marriage to Burgundy’s sister, and he was rewarded by the regent Bedford with a grant of the royal duchy of Touraine, the province that – lying as it did across the great fault-line of the Loire – would also be granted, from the other side of the divide, by King Charles VII to the earl of Douglas.

  But despite these years of service to English France in the north, in October 1424 Richemont rode to Angers to kneel before the young king in the south. There Charles proposed that the count should take the place of the dead earl of Buchan as the constable of his kingdom, the military leader of Armagnac France. In March 1425, at Chinon, Richemont swore an oath of homage to his new king and received the constable’s sword from his hands. For Charles and the Armagnacs, the reasons to rejoice at this defection were as numerous as the causes for English disquiet: not only was Richemont an experienced and proficient soldier, but his service was offered as one part of a wider realignment of Breton loyalties that, by the autumn of 1425, included a treaty between the kingdom of Bourges and Richemont’s brother, the Breton duke. Most alarmingly of all, Richemont had insisted that he could not accept his new command without consulting his brother-in-law, Philip of Burgundy. The fact that Duke Philip did not prevent him from taking up arms for the Armagnac king represented no simple reordering of Burgundian diplomacy, not least because by now there was nothing simple in the Burgundian position; but that conclusion in itself offered little comfort to the English.

  More significant even than the presence of Richemont at Charles’s side, meanwhile, was the means by which he had been drawn back into the Armagnac fold. The first meeting between the king and his new constable had taken place at Angers, the great capital of the duchy of Anjou, because it had been brokered by Anjou’s dowager duchess, Charles’s mother-in-law, Yolande of Aragon. The kingdom of Bourges owed its very existence to Yolande’s support: in the dark days of 1418, after Charles’s escape from Burgundian Paris, she had established his court in the south and surrounded him with loyal supporters. In the years since then, however, this formidable politician had occupied herself with other battles.

  The dukes of Anjou held an impressive array of titles scattered across hundreds of miles of territory. Their duchy of Anjou and county of Maine, just south of Normandy, lay on the bitterly fought front line of the war with the English, but their county of Provence, four hundred miles further south-east, was lit by the stronger sun of the Mediterranean, and its trading revenues from the port of Marseille helped to fill Angevin coffers with gold. More impressive still, though infinitely less substantial, was their hereditary claim to the crowns of Sicily and Jerusalem. The latter kingdom was long gone and the former split in two, but one of these paper titles – the mainland kingdom of Sicily, consisting of the lands in southern Italy that were ruled from Naples – remained tantalisingly close to Angevin hands. Yolande’s husband had tried and failed to retrieve this Italian realm, but the wife who had governed his French territories during his absence on campaign was still known to her contemporaries as ‘the queen of Sicily’.

  Nor, after her husband’s death in 1417, had Yolande herself given up on this Angevin dream. In 1419, once she had established her royal son-in-law Charles in safety at Bourges, she had travelled south to Provence to prepare a new military expedition through which her sixteen-year-old son, Duke Louis, might secure his Italian birthright. She also had plans for her second son, René. From her mother, Yolande had inherited a claim to the duchy of Bar in eastern France, which was currently ruled by her uncle, the cardinal-bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne – but as a priest, he could father no children of his own. Yolande persuaded him to adopt René as his heir; and René would also, she hoped, rule the neighbouring duchy of Lorraine through the marriage she negotiated for him with its young heiress, Isabelle.

  These were complex and ambitious schemes, but by 1423 they were bearing fruit. René was now married to Isabelle and living in Bar as the cherished heir of Yolande’s uncle, and in June Louis took ship for his kingdom of Sicily at the head of the army his mother had raised. It was time to return her attention to the kingdom of France. On 26 June 1423, just a few days after Louis’s departure from Marseille, Yolande left Provence for the first time in four years to ride north to Bourges, where her daughter, Charles’s queen Marie, was about to give birth to France’s heir. And there, after a brief moment of domestic communion with her new grandchild, she addressed herself to the next political task at hand.

  Her goals were clear. Her commitment to the future of her son-in-law, Charles, as king of France was matched by her determination that Anjou and Provence should flourish while her son Louis secured his Italian throne, and that Bar and Lorraine should pass peacefully into the hands of her younger son, René. All three objectives required that the English should be expelled from French soil, and the kingdom reunited under Charles’s rule. It was no use to Yolande if France were to remain torn in two, its back broken along the valley of the Loire: that would maroon Anjou and Maine on the ravaged frontier of war with the English, and leave Bar and Lorraine struggling in a Burgundian vice, lying as they did between the duchy of Burgundy to the south and the Burgundian territories in the Low Countries to the north. The way forward, then, could not be achieved through military force alone. No matte
r what had happened in the past, Yolande knew that the princes of the blood – including Philip of Burgundy – must come together under the rule of their king, Charles VII, in the joint interests of the kingdom of France and her Angevin dynasty.

  She had already begun a private correspondence with Duke Philip by the time of her return to Bourges in June 1423, but the diplomatic offensive she launched within weeks of her arrival had, as its first target, the duke of Brittany. That autumn she spent a month visiting him at his castle at Nantes, only fifty miles from Angers, and the following spring she returned there with a deputation from her son-in-law’s court at Bourges. The result of this elegant intervention was the political détente between Bourges and Brittany that led to the defection of the duke’s brother Arthur of Richemont from the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, and his appointment in 1425 as constable of Armagnac France.

  Richemont arrived in Bourges, as Yolande had planned, still armed with his Burgundian connections, and as part of the deal by which he took up his sword in the Armagnac cause, some of the men most hated by Duke Philip – those who were directly implicated in the murder of John the Fearless – were removed from Charles’s court. Tanguy du Châtel, whose axe had struck the first blow, and Jean Louvet, who had stood beside him to watch the duke die, were exiled from the king’s side in the summer of 1425 to positions in faraway Provence. Their destination alone would have revealed the guiding hand of Yolande, even had Charles himself not made her role explicitly clear: his decision had been taken, he said, by ‘the good advice and counsel of our dearest and most beloved mother, the queen of Jerusalem and Sicily’.

  This reconfiguration of the Armagnac court demonstrated her pragmatism as a politician, but Yolande also knew that divine providence would shape her country’s future. She had direct experience, after all, of its role in healing a rupture in the fabric of creation even more cataclysmic than the current division within the kingdom of France. In 1400, when she had first arrived as a young bride in her husband’s county of Provence, two rival popes simultaneously claimed dominion over Christendom, one in Rome and the other in the city of Avignon, just twelve miles from her new home at the castle of Tarascon. This great schism in the Church was finally ended, after four decades of bitter wrangling, by the Council of Constance in 1418. During that time, holy voices had been raised across Europe to demand an end to the Church’s agony – and Yolande had learned at first hand that these spiritual leaders might be female as well as male.

  In the 1390s, for example, her mother-in-law, Marie of Brittany – another strikingly formidable dowager duchess of Anjou – had known a peasant woman named Marie Robine, who had begun to receive messages from God. Originally from the Hautes-Pyrénées, in 1388 Marie Robine had travelled more than two hundred miles to Avignon in the grip of an intractable illness, seeking help at the shrine of a young cardinal who had died a year earlier at the age of just eighteen, and whose grave in Avignon’s cemetery of St Michael was developing a reputation for miraculous cures. There, in the presence of Avignon’s pope, God’s grace had restored her to health, and from then on she remained as a holy recluse within the cemetery.

  It was ten years later, on 22 February 1398, that Marie Robine first heard a voice from heaven, telling her that she must direct the king to reform the Church and end the schism. By April, Duchess Marie was taking so close an interest in this divine instruction that she was present in St Michael’s cemetery when Marie Robine had another vision, this time of a burning wheel bearing thousands of swords and innumerable arrows, poised to descend from heaven to earth to destroy the wicked. At her voices’ urging – and perhaps with the help of the duchess – she left her cell to travel to Paris, but failed to secure a hearing before the ailing king’s council. By 1399, back in Avignon, her voices became more outspoken in rejecting the corrupted authority of the earthly Church and more apocalyptic in the face of the king’s failure to heed her words, until in November, fifteen days after her last revelation, Marie Robine died.

  Memories of her were still fresh when Yolande arrived in Provence in the following year, and when the young duchess travelled north to the valley of the Loire, she herself encountered another female visionary. Jeanne-Marie de Maillé was a woman of noble birth who, after her husband’s death in 1362, had embraced a life of poverty and prayer as a recluse under the protection of a convent in Tours. On occasion, her visions enabled her to make prophecies – one, at least, concerned with the profound trauma of the schism – and her words could command the ear of the powerful. Her connections with the Angevin dynasty were so close that she stood godmother to one of Duchess Marie’s sons, Yolande’s brother-in-law, and she was twice granted an audience with the king, first when Charles VI visited Tours in 1395, and again when she travelled to Paris in 1398. These were private conversations, their content unrecorded, but Jeanne-Marie spent time too with Queen Isabeau, whom she reprimanded for living in luxury while the people suffered and starved. When Yolande met her, she was already in her seventies, but the two women spent enough time together that when Jeanne-Marie died in 1414, Yolande was a witness at the canonisation hearing held to consider evidence that she might be recognised as a saint.

  It seemed, then, in 1425 that Yolande had what Armagnac France needed: vision of a different kind – not the revelations granted to Marie Robine and Jeanne-Marie de Maillé, but the insight to perceive God’s plan that France should be reunited under Charles’s kingship, and to comprehend how it might be brought about. She was at her son-in-law’s side when he called his subjects to arms once again at the beginning of 1426, and established herself at the head of his council in an attempt to bring royal finances under strict control. Constable Richemont stood ready for the double task of fighting the English and facilitating peace with Burgundy, and meanwhile efforts were made to retain old friends as well as welcoming new ones. John Stewart of Darnley, for example, received a grant in November 1425 to help him pay the ransom demanded after his capture by the Burgundians at Cravant, so that he could resume his role as ‘constable of the Scots army’ (or, at least, what little remained of it after the massacre at Verneuil).

  And yet as the months went by, despite all Yolande’s efforts, concrete progress in pushing back the frontier of English France or persuading Burgundy into the embrace of the kingdom of Bourges seemed as remote a prospect as ever. At the end of 1425 the duke of Bedford was called back to England to deal with his brother of Gloucester, whose talent for causing trouble had been unleashed at home after his ignominious retreat from the Low Countries. As his lieutenants, Bedford left the earls of Salisbury, Suffolk and Warwick to launch a campaign in 1426 against the duchy of Brittany – in English eyes an ally that had turned traitor with the diplomatic realignment of the previous year – as well as pursuing operations in Maine and Champagne. But Armagnac forces, with Richemont at their head, proved unable to take advantage of the regent’s absence. Instead, the court of Bourges was otherwise occupied in turning on itself.

  Yolande had hoped that the arrival of Richemont and the banishment of Louvet and du Châtel would enable Charles’s regime to settle into a new order focused on rapprochement with Burgundy. In practice, however, the removal of the controversial figure of Jean Louvet from the king’s side in 1425 had only been achieved after an astonishing moment of violence, when Louvet himself, in a last desperate ploy to save his position, took the young king to Poitiers with as many soldiers as he could muster, and prepared to hold the city against Richemont, who advanced against him with an army of his own. Civil war among the Armagnacs had eventually been avoided, thanks in large part to Yolande’s intervention, but much too narrowly for comfort, and it remained unclear whether Charles was vulnerable to manipulation by the ambitious and grasping men around him, or whether he played some deliberate part in setting them against one another. Either way, the relationship between the king and his new constable had got off to a poisonous start – and the result was escalating conflict within the Armagnac establishment.


  By the summer of 1426 the man who had replaced Louvet at the eye of the developing storm was Pierre de Giac, a former Burgundian loyalist who had defected to the Armagnac court and risen high in Charles’s affections. That August, Giac launched an extraordinary assault on Robert le Maçon, who had served the king ever since Yolande had first established the court at Bourges. Now in his sixties, le Maçon was taken prisoner on Giac’s orders, and kept in confinement for two months until he paid handsomely for his freedom. But Giac’s confidence that the favour in which he stood with the king made him untouchable proved entirely misplaced. Richemont had not been recruited to serve at the king’s right hand simply to tolerate the antics of men as rapacious as Giac; and in February 1427 Giac was arrested, sentenced to death and killed by Richemont’s men. Such summary justice had been necessary, the constable explained in a public letter to the people of Lyon, because the king was ‘badly advised, and unaware of the great disloyalty and treason of the said Giac’, so that he, Richemont, had been forced to remove him, on the king’s behalf and in the interests of good government.