by Helen Castor
When the learned doctors presented their conclusions, it was with palpable relief at having found a way forward. ‘The king’, they said, ‘… should not prevent her from going to Orléans with his soldiers, but should have her escorted there honourably, placing his faith in God.’ One last check on Joan’s continued virginity, the physical embodiment of her spiritual purity, was supervised by Yolande of Aragon herself. The approval of the queen of Sicily confirmed, once again, that Joan was a true maid, and that word now began to define the public persona of a girl from a background so humble that she did not use a family name to identify herself. She was not simply a maid, but the Maid – or so the theologians at Poitiers called her in reporting their findings. And when she was given her first chance to declare her mission to a wider audience than the counsellors and theologians who had so far heard her speak, it was a title she claimed for herself with astounding assurance.
Her opportunity came shortly before the court moved back from Poitiers to Chinon to make preparations for the test she now faced. On 22 March, the Tuesday before Easter, Joan dictated a letter to be sent to the English enemy. While she was growing up in Domrémy, more than 250 miles to the east, the hostile forces she had seen close at hand were the Burgundians. But she had come to rid France of the invading English, and the challenge she now issued showed how much she had learned about the war, and about the reality of the mission she had come to fulfil, in the month since she had first arrived at Chinon. At the head of the letter, she instructed the clerk to write two words in the Latin she heard in church: Jhesus Maria, ‘Jesus’ and ‘Mary’, bounded on either side by the sign of the cross. And then she began.
‘King of England, and you, duke of Bedford, who call yourself regent of the kingdom of France; you, William de la Pole, count of Suffolk; John, lord of Talbot; and you, Thomas, lord of Scales, who call yourselves lieutenants of the said duke of Bedford: submit yourselves to the king of heaven. Restore to the Maid, who is sent here by God, the king of heaven, the keys of all the fine towns that you have taken and violated in France.’ She herself stood entirely ready to make peace, she declared, just as soon as the armies of England left Orléans, and all of France, and returned to their own country, and paid for what they had taken; but if they did not, they would shortly find that the Maid would do them great harm. ‘King of England, if you do not do this, I am the military leader, and wherever I find your men in France, I will make them leave, whether they want to or not, and if they will not obey, I will have them all killed. I am sent here by God, the king of heaven, to face you head to head and drive you out of the whole of France. And if they will obey, I will show them mercy. And do not believe otherwise, for you will never hold the kingdom of France from God, the king of heaven, holy Mary’s son; but King Charles will hold it, the true heir, because God, the king of heaven, wishes it, and this is revealed to him by the Maid …’ There was more. The king, she said, would soon be back in Paris. If the English refused to listen, the Maid would raise a war-cry greater than France had heard for a thousand years. Blows would determine who had the greater right, though it was obvious that God would give victory to the Maid – and it was not too late for Bedford to join her. As prose, it was rambling and repetitive, looping in circles, veering from third person to first and back again. As a statement of intent, it was electrifying.
Singularity of purpose had brought this girl more than halfway across the country, and singularity of purpose had won her the chance to turn fighting words into action. Of course, men of experience knew that the war was not so simple, and opinion was still divided about the merits of her claims. But the disputations between the doctors of theology were not made public, nor the wranglings within the king’s council; only the careful conclusion that she should be sent to Orléans. And once that decision had been taken, however short-term its focus and however provisional its rationale, Joan’s utter conviction in her cause began to lend a new clarity to the actions of the kingdom of Bourges.
Once the court was back at Chinon in the last week of March, she was at last presented publicly to the king, in a piece of political theatre designed to set the scene for the launch of her mission. The story reached La Rochelle (where the town clerk noted in his register all the information that reached him) that Joan was first directed to the count of Clermont, who had recently returned from the siege, and then to one of the royal esquires, under the pretence that each was the king, only for her to declare that she knew it was not, and to recognise Charles as soon as she saw him. If this was pantomime, it nevertheless served as a dramatic demonstration of the Maid’s claim to more than human insight. And after pantomime came propaganda. Not only were the conclusions of the theologians at Poitiers copied many times over and distributed as far as Armagnac diplomacy could reach, but the king’s secretaries searched long and hard among the archives to find prophecies that might prefigure Joan’s coming. An otherwise incomprehensible chronogram – a verse in which letters became a date when read as Roman numerals, this one attributed to Bede – made mention of a maid bearing banners: surely a foreshadowing of Joan, and all the more significant from the pen of this venerable English writer? Most pertinently, the twelfth-century text of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain contained a telling prophecy by the great sage Merlin: ‘A virgin ascends the backs of the archers, and hides the flower of her virginity.’ What had once been obscurely allusive now clearly referred to the Maid, and a new Latin poem was hurriedly composed and disseminated, expanding on the theme of Merlin’s original in the attempt to explain the king’s decision to put a girl in armour at the head of his troops, and encourage loyal Frenchmen to join her.
Joan, too, played her part in elaborating the symbols of what the poet called the ‘maidenly war’ that she was about to undertake. She asked the king to send to the town of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, where she had stayed on her way from Vaucouleurs, to fetch a sword that, she said, lay hidden in the church there. Sure enough, and to general amazement, the weapon was discovered – according to the clerk at La Rochelle, inside a coffer at the high altar that had not been opened for twenty years. Christian warriors, contemporaries knew, carried holy swords, from King Arthur’s Excalibur to Charlemagne’s Joyeuse, and wise heads nodded at the thought that Joan’s should come to her from St Catherine, the patron of young virgins, who was so often depicted carrying the sword through which she had met her martyrdom.
At Orléans, though, Joan would need more than a symbol to defend herself. A full suit of fine armour, handmade for her slender shape, was ordered from the king’s master armourer, and a painter, a Scotsman in Tours, was commissioned to make the banners mentioned in Bede’s chronogram. On the Maid’s standard the golden fleurs-de-lis of France were sown across a white field, with the words Jhesus Maria and a painted Christ sitting in judgement over the world with an angel on either side; on her white pennon was an image of the Annunciation. During the first week in April Joan herself left Chinon for Tours, twenty-five miles further to the northeast, towards Orléans. The presence among the city’s inhabitants of a Scots painter was a reminder that Tours had seen the coming of saviours before; if it was a relief that this one was French, however extraordinary she might be in other ways, no one was prepared to say. She was, at least, accumulating the attributes of a military commander: she now had a squire, Jean d’Aulon, and two pages, Louis and Raymond, who at fourteen or fifteen were only a year or two her junior, as well as a chaplain, Jean Pasquerel, who travelled with her to sing mass and hear her confession. And, impatient though she was to pursue her mission, these weeks at Chinon and Tours gave her much-needed time to learn about managing the weight of plate armour on foot and on horseback, about balance in the saddle with a lance or banner in hand, and about the war she had come to fight and the siege that lay ahead of her.
There was time, too, for the men around her to get the measure of their new companion-in-arms. The twenty-two-year-old duke of Alençon had secured his freedom from five y
ears of captivity after the defeat at Verneuil only to find Orléans under siege and the court in turmoil. It was perhaps a measure of his disillusionment that, in the early spring of 1429, he had turned his energies to the hunting of quail, but news of Joan’s arrival drew him back to Chinon. When he heard her speak and saw her ride with a lance, he was so impressed that he made her a gift of a horse for the campaign to come; then he set himself to help Yolande, with the assistance of the captains Ambroise de Loré, La Hire, Raoul de Gaucourt and the Breton knight Gilles de Rais, to prepare the supply train and the troops that Joan would lead to the besieged town.
There were influential interventions of other kinds. In Lyon, the great Gerson at last took up his pen to consider this most urgent case of discretio spiritum, the discernment of spirits. His strength was failing but, careful as ever, he compiled six propositions in favour of Joan’s claims, and six against. His purpose, he said, was to ‘invite the finest minds to reason more deeply’, but his introductory remarks began with a reference to Amos, the biblical shepherd called to prophesy to the people of Israel, and went on to describe at some length the chastity, piety and conviction of this young shepherdess who said she had come to restore France to its obedience to God. It was not difficult to detect the hopes of the Armagnac partisan beneath the scholarly rigour.
And the tantalising possibility of hope had also reached the scarred and hungry town of Orléans. After the disaster at Rouvray, the prospects of repelling the English at the point of a sword had appeared vanishingly remote; so much so that the future seemed to depend on an appeal to the ‘false French’ – the Burgundians who fought with the English – to remember their true loyalties. Shortly after the battle, a delegation led by the captain Poton de Xaintrailles made its way past the English blockade and rode to the court of Philip of Burgundy, to offer him a deal. They would surrender the town into his hands, they said, on condition that he should hold it in the name of his cousin, the captive duke of Orléans. The English could come and go freely, and half of the town’s revenues would be paid to the king of England, but the other half must be reserved for the duke’s ransom. Duke Philip was pleased to agree, but when he arrived in Paris in early April, he found that the regent Bedford refused to countenance the possibility that territory belonging to the crown of France should be given over into the hands of anyone but its rightful king. Towards the end of the month, after heated words had been exchanged, the duke of Burgundy left for Flanders, and news reached Orléans that the treaty could not be concluded. But the embassy had not been in vain. In Xaintrailles’s company on his return to the town was a herald from Duke Philip, bringing orders that the Burgundian forces present at the siege should withdraw. And, as the people of Orléans watched a part at least of the enemy at their gates melt away, rumours raced through the battered streets of a miraculous maid who was coming to save them.
From Chinon, Charles and his counsellors had been observing events at Orléans closely. On 21 April, four days after the Burgundian contingent abandoned the siege, Joan left Tours for Blois, another thirty-five miles along the Loire towards Orléans, and the place where her soldiers and supplies were gathering. From there, the letter in which she issued her roaring challenge to Bedford, Suffolk, Talbot, Scales and all the English in France was at last dispatched to the enemy. Carts were loaded, weapons polished, and the Maid’s discipline imposed on her men; even Jean Gerson, far away in Lyon, had heard that ‘she prohibits murder, rape and pillage, and any other violence’ towards those who were willing to submit to the justice of her cause. On the night of 25 April she slept in her armour. And the next morning, without looking back, the Maid rode to war.
5
Like an angel from God
It was an odd sort of an army, the English soldiers thought. They had had a hard winter, stretched as they were to keep a grip on the town. There had been too few of them from the start, and many of the men who had been there at the beginning were now gone, home to England when their contract of service was up, or called away by their master, the duke of Burgundy. They were the besiegers not the besieged, but still they found themselves hungry, especially when – as had happened in the first week of April 1429 – a sortie from within the walls robbed them of a mouthwatering consignment of wine, pork and venison. Now they watched from their posts in the bastilles on the north bank of the river and the Tourelles tower at the southern end of the broken bridge, as more provisions, grain, cattle, sheep and pigs, approached the town from the south. For once, though, the food was not the focus of attention. Instead, English eyes were fixed on the military escort, which looked for all the world like a religious procession. From out of the forest on the southern side of the Loire walked priests, carrying a banner of the Crucifixion and singing the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, ‘Come, Holy Spirit’. Only then came the men-at-arms, with the carts behind; and riding among them, her fine armour gleaming in the April sun, was the girl.
They had heard about her, this blasphemous whore, even before the herald had arrived with her letter. A challenge to the enemy to surrender was nothing new; great King Harry had done the same outside the walls of Harfleur. But he had been an anointed king, God’s own warrior, not a lowborn scrap of a peasant girl. She was threatening to kill them all, which made her touched in the head, or a witch, or both. And she called herself ‘the Maid’. Was she daring to compare herself to the blessed Virgin, the holy mother of God, while she ran around with soldiers, her hair cut short and her legs on show like a shameless little tart? It had been clear before that the Armagnacs and their so-called dauphin were desperate, but this was ludicrous. And so they looked on, howls of derision and insults of epic profanity hanging in the spring air, while the girl and her men moved to cross the river at Chécy, upstream to the east of the town.
On that side, English defences were so thin as to be almost negligible, even before the Orléanais launched a raid on the bastille of Saint-Loup, the lone English fortification to the east of the gates, to buy time for the convoy of supplies to make its way past. By the time the losses were counted – several dead, injured and captured on either side, and an English standard now in Armagnac hands – the girl, as well as the provisions, had slipped through the English blockade. Her escort of priests, and most of the troops she had brought with her, had remained on the south side of the river; little point in bringing food, after all, if it came with more mouths to fill. While they turned back towards Blois, and darkness fell, the English soldiers could hear the sound of cheering carried on the wind from within the town – but any fleeting moment of unease in the English camp was soon dispelled with some well-chosen anatomical vocabulary and more mocking laughter.
Inside Orléans, meanwhile, there was delirium. Men, women and children crowded the streets, their voices raised with the exhilaration of hope after six fear-filled months of suffering, as the Maid rode among them on her white horse, her armour shining in the torchlight, her banners carried before her. Accompanied by her squire and her pages, with the town’s commander, the Bastard of Orléans, and the captains La Hire and de Gaucourt beside her, she made her way slowly through the press of people – hands reaching out towards her all along the way, as though a touch would bring a blessing – to the comfortable house that had been prepared for her lodging. And, once she was safely inside, it became clear that Joan was incandescent with fury.
She had come at God’s command to fight the English, with soldiers who had not simply rallied to her cause but joined her mission, making confession of their sins and forswearing pillage and prostitutes, as she required, while they marched under her standard. Raising the siege of Orléans was her task and her sign. She knew what she had to do; yet, now that she was here, she had been prevented from going immediately to confront Talbot and Scales and the rest of the English to start her work. Not only that, but her troops had been sent back to Blois against her will. The Bastard and La Hire, de Gaucourt and the others talked of tactics and strategy, of food supplies and calculation of ri
sk, but why need she think in those terms when she had the will of God to guide her? And if God was her guide, on what grounds could these men contradict her?
It was becoming uncomfortably clear that the operational realities of the Maid’s mission had not occurred to the theologians debating her case. ‘The king’, they had said, ‘… should not prevent her from going to Orléans with his soldiers, but should have her escorted there honourably, placing his faith in God.’ That he had done; but he had failed to consider in any practical detail what might happen when she got there. As a result, Joan – the ‘military leader’ of France, as she had called herself in her letter to the English – now found that her first battle was with the commanders she had come to rescue.
The next day, 30 April, La Hire led a raid against the bastille of Saint-Pouair to the north of the city, but Joan was not interested in a skirmish; she wanted a war. The herald who had taken her letter to the enemy had been held prisoner by the English, so she wrote again to their captain, Lord Talbot, to demand the man’s release, and to repeat the terms of the challenge he had carried: the English must raise the siege and return to their own country, or face defeat at the hands of the Maid. The herald was freed, but the answer with which he returned came dripping with contempt: she was a trollop, Talbot said, and should go back to herding cattle. For their part, the English would burn her. Joan was so outraged by their insolence that she climbed the fortifications overlooking the ruined bridge and shouted to the English in the Tourelles tower that they should surrender to God. She succeeded only in provoking more abuse. Did she really think, they jeered, that they should give themselves up to a woman and her pimps?