by Helen Castor
If God’s purpose no longer seemed clear even to the winners, the losers stood little chance of making sense of their defeat. While the Bastard of Orléans, who had only narrowly escaped the field with an arrow wound in his foot, limped back to the besieged and hungry town with La Hire, Xaintrailles, Clermont and the rest of the battle’s survivors, their king, ninety miles away at Chinon, struggled to retain any vestige of hope that his right to his father’s throne might one day be vindicated beyond doubt or hesitation. His constable was making war on his courtiers; those among the great lords of his realm who were not still prisoners in England had all but left him to his fate; and the military fortunes of his kingdom were turning, it seemed, from bad to worse. After the deaths of Douglas, Buchan and now Darnley, the promise of salvation from Scotland appeared to have been no more than a vain imagination. Rumours began to fly that, if Orléans were to fall, Scotland itself, or perhaps Castile, might at least offer some kind of safe haven for the fugitive king.
Whatever the whispers, though, it was clear to Charles and his council that it was too soon to think of abandoning the realm. Retreat, on the other hand – perhaps to the Dauphiné in the far south-east, from where he could seek to defend the Lyonnais, Auvergne and Languedoc – might have much to recommend it. There, some suggested, he would be able to wait in greater safety for God to show His grace; but others warned that this was a counsel of despair, and that to give ground, however great the threat, would only incur heaven’s wrath and give heart to the enemy. The discussions, and the siege, went on. And every day the king heard his masses, calling constantly to mind (one chronicler suggested) ‘that the persecutions of war, death and famine are the rods with which God punishes the crimes of people or princes’.
And then, on 23 February, just eleven days after the massacre at Rouvray, a little band of six armed men arrived, dusty from the road, at the great castle of Chinon. With them rode a girl, dressed as a boy, her dark hair cut short. Her name was Joan, and she had come with a message from God.
PART TWO
Joan
4
The Maid
At Chinon, they were expecting her. She had sent ahead when she and her companions had reached the town of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, twenty miles to the east, to tell the king she was coming – a letter she had to dictate, since she could not write for herself. But, as Marie Robine and Jeanne-Marie de Maillé had discovered before her, divine instruction by itself was not enough to secure access to the royal presence. For that, she needed friends in high places on earth as well as in heaven – and, like Jeanne-Marie de Maillé before her, she would find one in the dowager duchess of Anjou.
Yolande had had warning of the girl’s existence weeks earlier. During the previous year Joan had appeared at Vaucouleurs, a walled town held by an Armagnac garrison in the far east of the kingdom, and asked the captain there, a man named Robert de Baudricourt, to take her to the king, for whom, she said, God had given her a message. De Baudricourt sent her away with a flea in her ear, but at the end of the year she came back, and this time the nature of the message she brought attracted more influential attention. Vaucouleurs – like the girl’s home village of Domrémy, a little more than ten miles further south – lay on the frontier between the duchy of Bar and the duchy of Lorraine, and at the beginning of 1429 the duke of Lorraine himself decided that he should hear what she had to say.
Avignon and the valley of the Loire had had no monopoly on visionaries during the duke’s lifetime. Thirty years earlier, in Champagne, the neighbouring county to the duchy of Bar, a poor widow named Ermine had been visited by both angels and demons in a case that had raised such troubling questions about how to tell one from the other – a process known as the ‘discernment of spirits’ – that they had been referred to the great theologian Jean Gerson. Now, as word of Joan’s insistent claims began to spread, the duke summoned her to his court for a private conversation. And when she returned to Vaucouleurs after this audience, she discovered that, whether as cause or consequence of the duke’s interest, Robert de Baudricourt had changed his mind: he was prepared to send her to Chinon.
By now, some of the inhabitants of Vaucouleurs, an Armagnac town in a region surrounded by Burgundian territory, had developed such hopes of Joan’s mission to their king that they offered help for this perilous journey. She was given a horse to ride and an outfit of men’s clothes – tunic, doublet, hose and breeches, all in black and grey – as a practical replacement for her rough red dress. When she left, with a black woollen hat pulled down over her cropped hair, her small escort included a royal messenger named Colet de Vienne, whose presence indicated that someone – perhaps the duke of Lorraine himself, or his son-in-law René of Anjou, twenty-year-old heir to the duchy of Bar – had already sent to Chinon to prepare her way. And there could be no doubt that any communication between the duchy of Bar and the royal court in the Loire, especially concerning a matter as weighty as a message from heaven, would come to the attention of René’s mother, Yolande.
Colet and his companions did their job well. Despite the dangers of the route – more than 270 miles across country, through Burgundian lands, with the constant risk that someone might take too close an interest in their strange little fellowship – Joan reached Chinon safely. Amid the luxury and ceremony of the court, she was an utterly incongruous sight: a village girl, not yet out of her teens, dressed in clothes that no reputable woman should ever have worn. But the guiding hand of Yolande – unseen but unmistakable in the very fact of her arrival – brought her to the presence of the king, and, though their meeting was witnessed only by his chief counsellors, the clarity of her message and the conviction with which it was delivered meant that news of her mission soon raced from the castle through the town and beyond. It was as startling as the girl herself. Joan, it seemed, had been sent by God not simply to instruct the king, but to help him in the recovery of his kingdom. If Charles – whom she sometimes addressed as ‘Dauphin’, because he was not yet God’s anointed – would give her an army, she would drive the English out of France, and lead him to Reims for his coronation.
The proposition was utterly extraordinary. Robert de Baudricourt, back in Vaucouleurs, had begun by treating this peasant girl as a fantasist whose family, he said, should give her a few slaps to snap her out of her delusions. But Baudricourt had eventually been persuaded to do as she asked, and now that she had reached the king, her words could not be dismissed so lightly. Still, the utmost caution was essential in responding to anyone who claimed prophetic insight or a special revelation of God’s will, since it was not easy to tell the difference between true revelations from heaven and trickery unleashed from hell. The devil, after all, could speak with a fair face as well as foul. In this case, it was also necessary to remember that Satan’s deceptions were practised more easily on women, whose moral and intellectual frailties made them more susceptible than men to demonic influence. Their fervour, Jean Gerson had written, was ‘excessive, overeager, changeable, unbridled, and therefore not to be trusted’ – and Joan, who was young, inexperienced and uneducated, was an especially fragile vessel.
There were other reasons, too, to be wary of her claims. Even before she opened her mouth, the girl’s virtue and modesty were called into question by the extraordinary outfit she wore. Her hose and breeches, both tightly knotted with many cords onto her doublet, undoubtedly served a useful purpose in allowing her to ride quickly through dangerous country, and in offering a measure of protection against sexual assault when she found herself alone among men, as she had been on her journey from Vaucouleurs. But it could not be denied that, according to the prescriptions of the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, a woman in men’s clothing was ‘an abomination unto the Lord’. And Joan not only dressed like a man, but dared to say that she had been sent to make war on the English. This was no humble recognition of a woman’s place, no acknowledgement of the proper order of God’s creation, but a rash boldness in which it was all too easy to g
uess that the devil might have taken a hand.
And yet. For Charles and his counsellors – encouraged, as always, by the wise advice of his mother-in-law Yolande – the possibility that God might at last, in his mercy, have been moved by the plight in which the holy land of France now found itself could only be intoxicating. At the same time, the profound risks that the girl embodied were clear, and terrifying. France had already been brought to the brink of destruction by God’s punishment for its sins. If the most Christian king now ordered his people to follow a false prophet, an instrument of the lord of hell, he would deliver them to certain disaster. But the outcome would be equally catastrophic if he were to reject the counsel of a true prophet inspired by the king of heaven. It was well known that God would not send a miracle until all human remedies were exhausted. Fourteen long years after the wretched day of Azincourt, might He have decided that the kingdom had suffered enough, and sent help?
The only possible way forward lay in seeking expert assessment of the girl’s claims. France’s great repository of theological knowledge was the university of Paris, a community of scholars of international influence that was already two centuries old. But the university, like the kingdom, had been torn apart by the war between Armagnacs and Burgundians. The academic battle to demonstrate the theological truths that underpinned each side’s position had already raged more than a decade earlier at the Council of Constance, where Jean Gerson, the university’s chancellor, had clashed publicly and bitterly with the Burgundian Pierre Cauchon over John the Fearless’s killing of the duke of Orléans. Now, however, the university was divided physically as well as intellectually: the theologians who remained in Paris were loyal to the Anglo-Burgundian regime, while those who offered their allegiance to the Armagnac heir had fled south to his kingdom of Bourges.
Gerson himself was not among the clerics around the king at Chinon. For a year after the Burgundian seizure of the capital in 1418 he had wandered in political exile in Germany. Then, when news came of the death of John the Fearless at Montereau, he returned to France to settle at Lyon. Ten years later, now in his mid-sixties, he was still there, and still writing with his characteristic speed and intensity while living the contemplative life of a hermit. But, even in his absence, the theologians at the Armagnac court could look to his three great treatises on the discernment of spirits, the most celebrated of which – On the Proving of Spirits, written in 1415 – provided a checklist of the principles on which theological investigation of mystical revelations should proceed. Amid his learned discourse, Gerson summed them up in a Latin jingle: ‘Ask who, what, why; to whom, what kind, whence.’ In other words, he proposed an interrogation of both vision and visionary: what could the nature of the revelation itself show about its origin, and what could the nature of its recipient show about its authenticity?
The first step was to test Joan’s integrity, her wholeness, in the literal sense of her physical being. Despite her alarming immodesty in wearing male clothes, she was a young unmarried woman who claimed to live a pious and God-fearing life – and if that were true she should by definition be a virgin, an unsullied state which would make it less likely that she had been suborned by the devil. A private examination by two ladies of the court, one the wife of Chinon’s military captain, Raoul de Gaucourt, the other the wife of the king’s counsellor Robert le Maçon, confirmed that she was indeed what she claimed to be: a maid, pucelle in French, from the Latin puella, meaning ‘girl’, a word that had come to signify the transitional state of chaste adolescence before a woman became a wife and mother. And pucelle was the word used to describe her when the clerics at court wrote to the archbishop of Embrun, the eminent theologian Jacques Gélu, to seek his advice about the next stage of investigation: testing Joan’s spiritual integrity.
She was, they said, a maid from the region of Vaucouleurs, about sixteen years old, who had been brought up among the sheep, but who had come to the king with predictions and prophecies of great advantage to the kingdom – if, of course, they were true. In the attempt to find out, they had questioned her on her faith and her habits, and found her in all things devout, sober and virtuous. Might she, perhaps, be an instrument of God’s will comparable to the biblical precedents of the prophetess Deborah, or Judith who had saved Israel from Assyrian invaders, or the sibyls who had foreseen the coming of Christ?
Archbishop Gélu’s response was equivocal. A staunch Armagnac, he had no doubt that God might well decide to send help to the king, given that the English invasion – as he pointed out with some passion – was contrary to every kind of law, divine, natural, canon, civil, human or moral. But that undeniable fact did not mean that credence should be given quickly or lightly to the words of a peasant girl whose youth and simplicity made her so vulnerable to the power of illusions, and who came from a frontier region so near to the influence of the Burgundian enemy. The king must be cautious, Gélu said, and should redouble his prayers, keeping Joan at a distance while she was questioned at length by learned men of the Church. If there was evil in her, it could not stay hidden forever. But however unlikely it seemed that divine assistance should come in female form, given that it was not the part of a woman to fight or preach or dispense justice, it was also essential to retain an open mind, since God might bring victory through any instrument He chose.
Further inquiries were clearly necessary before any firmer judgement could be reached and decisions made about what exactly should be done. The clerics around the king knew that greater theological expertise was available at Poitiers, the administrative centre of the kingdom of Bourges, which the Armagnac scholars who had fled the university of Paris in 1418 had adopted as their new home. And so the girl Joan, who had so far been lodged with care in the great keep of the Tour du Coudray at Chinon, was dispatched forty miles southward to Poitiers for more detailed questioning by the greatest gathering of theologians that Armagnac France could muster, under the leadership of the king’s chancellor, Regnault de Chartres, archbishop of Reims. For three weeks from the beginning of March, as they later explained, they observed and tested the girl ‘in two ways: that is, by using human wisdom to inquire about her life, her behaviour and her aims . . ; and by devout prayer, seeking a sign of some actual or hoped-for divine deed through which it could be judged that she has come by the will of God’.
These were Gerson’s principles put into action by the most skilled practitioners of the discernment of spirits in the kingdom of Bourges. And still, as the weeks passed and the conversations continued, no definitive verdict could be returned. The difficulty was that so much hung on an investigation for which there were no easy precedents. Female visionaries in the Church’s recent history had experienced their revelations when they were already under the care of a spiritual adviser, a confessor perhaps, who could testify to their morals and the nature of their claims. Joan, by contrast, had appeared alone, apart from her escort of armed men. And, rather than simply conveying a message from heaven, she – a teenage girl – wanted to lead the king’s troops into battle. Even when considered against a dossier of past cases that were by definition extraordinary, this one was exceptional.
But as the spring days gradually started to lengthen, some conclusions at last began to take shape. Under pressure though she was, in a place far from home and family, the girl’s conduct could not be faulted. ‘She has conversed with everyone publicly and privately,’ the doctors and prelates reported, ‘but no evil is found in her, only goodness, humility, virginity, piety, integrity and simplicity …’ It was just as clear that her belief in her mission could not be shaken. She continued to speak with the astonishing resolve that had brought her, against all the odds, from a distant village to the royal court, and, out of her unwavering insistence that she had been sent to repel the English and lead the king to be crowned at Reims, there emerged a plan to tackle the second of the theologians’ concerns. They were looking for a sign to confirm that her assertions might truly be sent from God. It was far from obvious wha
t form such a sign might take, but when it was pointed out to Joan that her mission to lead the king from Chinon or Poitiers to Reims would be very difficult to achieve, given that the besieged town of Orléans lay directly in the way, her reply was immediate. She would raise the siege herself.
This was promising. An attempt to relieve Orléans would be a finite task, requiring only a minimum of resources to be committed by the king, that could stand as a practical test of the girl’s mission. Success, if it came, would be a miraculous vindication of her claims; failure would provide an incontrovertible judgement against her. Either way, God would have spoken – and, even if the verdict were negative, there was relatively little to lose by trying. Orléans would still be under siege, just as it was now, and there would be no shame for the beleaguered kingdom of Bourges in having sought to prove Joan in the furnace of war. Archbishop Gélu had worried about exposing the king to ridicule if she were welcomed with too much credulity; the French, he said nervously, already had enough of a reputation for being easily duped. But, especially given the desperate state in which the kingdom now stood, there could be no dishonour in sending her to Orléans to discover whether her inspiration truly came from heaven. ‘For to doubt or discard her, without there being any appearance of evil in her,’ the theologians at Poitiers argued, ‘would be to reject the Holy Spirit and render oneself unworthy of God’s help.’