Joan of Arc

by Helen Castor

  For Joan and the duke of Alençon, however, the constable’s imminent arrival was profoundly alarming, given that the king had barred him from his presence and proscribed him from his service. At the same time, the fact was that Fastolf was the clear and present danger, and Richemont brought with him more than a thousand fresh troops. After fraught discussion within the Armagnac camp, Joan, Alençon and the Bastard rode to meet him. Richemont’s admiring biographer later put a carelessly heroic speech into his mouth, made while Joan – supposedly – knelt at his feet: ‘They tell me that you want to fight me,’ the constable reportedly declared. ‘I don’t know if you are from God or not; if you are from God, I fear you not at all, because God knows well my good intentions. If you are from the devil, I fear you even less.’ Much more plausible were reports that Joan and the other commanders made him swear a solemn oath that he would serve the king faithfully before they would agree to fight at his side. However it was achieved, Richemont’s forces joined the siege. And when Fastolf arrived at Beaugency, with Talbot and Scales now in his company, the Armagnac position appeared too strong to attack. The English reinforcements withdrew upriver to the castle outside the walls of Meung, and that night the besieged garrison of Beaugency, despairing now of rescue, negotiated their surrender.

  The following day, 18 June, the soldiers from Beaugency left for Paris, with their lives, their horses and little else. When this devastating news reached Meung that morning, Fastolf, Talbot, Scales and their men followed them onto the road north; the fortress there was not worth holding if the river was lost. But behind them, spurred on by the Maid’s determination that the English should now be driven out of the valley of the Loire at swordpoint, was the full force of the Armagnac army, moving at speed with La Hire and Xaintrailles in the vanguard, and Richemont, Alençon, the Bastard, de Rais, de Gaucourt and Joan herself at the head of their troops. The English had not quite reached the village of Patay – not far from the scene of Fastolf’s triumph at the Battle of the Herrings just four months earlier – when their scouts brought alarming reports of this furious pursuit.

  As before, Fastolf took up a defensive formation, with Talbot and several hundred archers holding a forward position, a narrow pass between two woods, to protect the main body of the army behind them. The familiar but formidable plan was that a storm of English arrows would take the Armagnacs by surprise. The troops were almost in place when suddenly a stag erupted out of the woods and plunged into the English ranks, precipitating a great shout of confusion and fear just at the moment when advance riders from the French forces were approaching within earshot. The animal had given away the English position before Talbot’s archers had finished planting their sharpened stakes in the ground and making ready their bows; the trap that the English were attempting to lay would be sprung on them, it turned out, by their Armagnac enemy. With a roar, the Maid’s soldiers charged into Talbot’s position, sharpened steel meeting flesh and bone. As the English collapsed into confusion and panic, Talbot and Scales were captured, and, despairing amid the slaughter, Fastolf turned his horse and fled.

  Already before the battle, according to a Burgundian knight named Jean Waurin who fought under Fastolf’s command, ‘by the renown of Joan the Maid the hearts of the English were greatly changed and weakened, and they saw, as it seemed to them, that Fortune was turning her wheel harshly against them’. Now, the bloodshed at Patay had not only secured the frontier of the kingdom of Bourges, but pushed it back across the Loire into English France. All this had been achieved in just seven weeks since the Maid’s arrival at Orléans. ‘And by these operations’, Waurin wrote, ‘she acquired so great praise and renown that it really seemed to all men that the enemies of King Charles would have no power of resistance in any place where she was present, and that by her means the said king would shortly be restored to his kingdom in spite of all those who wished to gainsay it.’

  That was what Joan had said all along. And next, she would lead the king to his coronation.

  6

  A heart greater than any man’s

  There was one person, at least, in London who received the news from France with pleasure. By now, the duke of Orléans had been a prisoner in England for fourteen of his thirty-five years. He was an honoured captive, allowed to live in the luxury his royal blood demanded and to receive carefully monitored visits from his French servants, but he was powerless to help his town of Orléans during its long months of suffering under English siege. Now it was free, thanks to the marvellous intervention of this extraordinary girl. In tribute, the duke sent her a gift: a fine robe and short jacket in crimson and darkest green, the livery colours of the house of Orléans, to be made up for her by a draper and tailor in the town.

  Jean Gerson had believed, when he wrote his first treatise to consider the Maid’s case, that she changed back into women’s clothes when she was not riding with soldiers; whenever she dismounted from her horse, he said, this peasant girl was as inexperienced in worldly matters as an innocent lamb. Gerson might once have been right on both counts, but no longer. When she took off her armour, she dressed as a man, in silken hose and satin doublets like the one sent by the captive duke. She had servants to wait on her. She could summon wine when she was thirsty, as she did when she drank with the bedazzled Guy de Laval, and she could send Laval’s aristocratic grandmother a gold ring, apologising as she did so that it was only a tiny trinket. Now, she was not just a peasant girl but a player on the political stage of the Armagnac court – a position that, day by day, brought with it new experience of a complex and frustrating kind.

  After their triumph at Patay, Joan and the duke of Alençon had rejoined the king at Sully-sur-Loire, a moated fortress belonging to his favourite, Georges de La Trémoille, that lay twenty-five miles eastward along the river from Orléans. Charles greeted them with delight, thanking God for giving the Maid such courage in her mission, and extending an elegant welcome to her noble English prisoners. But when Joan knelt to petition the king that Richemont, who had brought so many soldiers to her cause and fought bravely at her side, should be pardoned his previous offences, the reply was much less fulsome. Richemont was forgiven, Charles said, but he should not come to court, nor join the king on his progress to his coronation at Reims. To Joan, this was baffling. God had sent her to reunite France in the service of its true sovereign. Why, then, would the king not embrace a prodigal son returning to the fold? The answer, it was clear, lay with La Trémoille, whose enthusiasm for Joan’s victories was diluted by concern that they might reintroduce undesirable influences into the politics of a kingdom in which he currently held such sway. The unhappy lesson Joan was beginning to learn was that even a mission from heaven could not easily repair the rifts in this fractured court.

  Still, at least the king had agreed to leave the renewed safety of the Loire to make the journey to Reims for the coronation that the Maid had promised. This would be his first foray into enemy territory since the aftermath of the Armagnac victory at Baugé eight years earlier, when his father and the warrior-king Henry of England had still been alive – and, for a king who had never led his people from the military front line, it was not a reassuring prospect. Reims itself, where the sacred oil of Clovis was kept in the Holy Ampulla, lay under Burgundian control, and much of the hundred miles and more of territory between there and the Loire was in English or Burgundian hands. Other voices at court argued that Reims was a distraction, and pressed instead for a strike into the English heartlands in Normandy, but Joan was adamant that the king must be anointed and crowned. Once God had sanctioned his kingship, she knew, the power of his enemies would wither away. She had been right at Orléans, a verdict confirmed by glorious victory at Patay. Men were flocking to join the king’s army for the first time in years, and towns such as Janville, twenty miles north of Orléans – where Fastolf had attempted to take refuge after the fighting at Patay, only to find the gates closed against him – were spontaneously reverting to Armagnac loyalties. Her missio
n, in other words, was unanswerable. And so, on 29 June, the royal party set out.

  The king rode at the head of thousands, the largest army he could muster; he had summoned all of his subjects who were fit to bear arms to come to his aid, and now he sent letters ahead to warn the Anglo-Burgundian towns that lay in his path of his imminent approach. If they would render the obedience that was rightfully his, the past would be forgotten, with no further thought of royal vengeance for their disloyalty. The scarcely veiled threat did its work at Auxerre, where the Burgundian town governors showed no appetite for armed confrontation, and by the morning of 5 July the Armagnac army had moved on to Troyes, the place where the outrageous sentence of disinheritance had been formally pronounced against France’s true heir almost a decade earlier.

  But the people of Troyes, it turned out, would not so easily be persuaded to open their gates. They had sworn allegiance to the duke of Burgundy and to King Henry, the lawful successor to King Charles the Well-Beloved by the terms of the treaty that had been sealed in their cathedral, and their garrison of English and Burgundian soldiers stood ready to defend them against the pretensions of the so-called dauphin and his army of traitors. Nor were they cowed by the presence of the girl who called herself the Maid. Within their walls was a man well qualified to judge her claims of divine inspiration: a friar named Brother Richard, who had first come to public attention in Paris three months earlier. For ten days in April he had preached warnings of the coming of the Antichrist to crowds of thousands, summoning up the pains of hellfire with such terrifying immediacy that men burned great heaps of chess-boards, dice, cards ‘and every kind of covetous game that can give rise to anger and swearing’, said the journal-writer in the city, while women tossed elaborate headdresses and other such feminine vanities into the flames. Now he had brought his apocalyptic message to Troyes, and so the townspeople sent him out to discover whether Joan had come to them from heaven or hell.

  When he returned, however, it was not with the answer for which they were hoping. They had thought he might declare her a heretic or a witch, to be condemned like the mandrake roots – kept by the foolish in the superstitious belief that they would bring earthly riches – which he had tossed onto the bonfires in Paris. Instead, Brother Richard had been so impressed by the Maid that he brought back a letter she had dictated the day before her arrival outside the walls of Troyes, addressed to the town’s inhabitants. They had received a missive already from Charles, the rightful king of France; now Joan brought them word from the almighty king of heaven. She did not forget that the people of Troyes were Frenchmen, to be welcomed back to the path of righteousness, not Englishmen to be threatened with God’s wrath, but her instructions – after her customary invocation of the holy names Jhesus Maria – were no less direct.

  ‘Very dear and good friends,’ she began, ‘if that is what you are: my lords, townsmen and people of the town of Troyes, Joan the Maid brings you a message from the king of heaven, her rightful sovereign lord, in whose royal service she spends each day, that you should submit yourselves in true recognition to the noble king of France, who will very soon be in Reims and in Paris, whosoever may oppose him, and in his fine towns of this holy kingdom, with the aid of King Jesus. Loyal Frenchmen, come before King Charles, and do not fail; and have no fear for your lives or your possessions if you do so.’ Her arms were open to receive them, but still there was steel behind her words. ‘If you do not do this, I promise and swear to you, on your lives, that we will enter with God’s help into all the towns which rightfully belong to this holy kingdom, and we will impose a good and lasting peace, whosoever opposes us. I commit you to God; may God preserve you, if that be His will. Reply at once.’

  But the authorities in Troyes felt little inclined to obey this peremptory demand. Brother Richard was not the honourable man they had thought, it was clear, but a sorcerer, and this girl was a madwoman inspired by the devil; not Joan the Maid, but Joan the Braggart. They read her letter and mocked it – it had no rhyme or reason, they declared – and then burned it without responding. As they watched the Armagnac army range itself outside their walls, they wrote urgently instead to the citizens of Reims, asking them to petition the regent Bedford and the duke of Burgundy to come to their aid. In the meantime, they prepared themselves to defend their town to the death.

  It was not long, though, before an early sortie by some of their soldiers demonstrated that the army of traitors was unnervingly larger than they had imagined. As the impasse dragged on from one day into two, and from two into three, their hopes of rescue began to fade, along with the certainties of their position. Was it possible that Brother Richard might be right after all that this girl had some kind of authority from God? They could not know, as heralds moved fruitlessly between the two sides, that anxiety was building outside as well as inside the town walls. There were many hungry mouths in the Armagnac army, and little with which to feed them. The besiegers were short of money and artillery, and the town was strongly defended. Perhaps, as the king’s chancellor Regnault de Chartres, archbishop of Reims, suggested to a receptive audience of royal counsellors and captains, they should leave Troyes to its intransigence, and move back to the safety and plenty of the Loire. But the veteran Robert le Maçon insisted that one more opinion should be sought: that of the Maid, who rode at the head of the king’s troops, but who was not a regular presence among the wise heads of the king’s council. She, le Maçon said, was the reason they were there; she should therefore be given the chance to speak.

  Joan was duly summoned, and the difficulties of their position explained. Not for the first time, she was mystified. These details were irrelevant. What reason was there, now or ever, to deviate from a course set by God Himself? The answer was simple. Within two or three days she would lead the king through the gates of Troyes, of that there could be no doubt. The counsellors knew they had a choice: either follow her faith, or set it aside in favour of reason. But, if they opted for the latter course, why had they left the Loire for the dangerous journey to Reims in the first place? Put that way, their decision was already made.

  And so, with the reluctant blessing of the royal council, Joan rode out on her warhorse in full view of the watching townspeople, directing her soldiers to make ready what guns they had and to fill the ditches around the walls with brushwood. After four days of fear and deepening uncertainty, the sight of these preparations for an assault led by the miraculous Maid finally shattered the town’s resistance. The gates opened, a deputation emerged to offer terms for surrender, and the next morning the king rode into Troyes in imposing procession, with Joan and her banner at his side. The following day, 11 July, the governors of the town hastily wrote again to Reims. This time, there was no mention of the regent Bedford and the duke of Burgundy, of their oath to serve King Henry, or of fighting to the death; this time, they explained that King Charles was prepared to forget the past, and that he would bring peace to his realm, just as his ancestor St Louis had done. The people of Reims would surely share the joy that Troyes now knew, once they had submitted to a prince of such discretion, understanding and valour.

  It was not long before the people of Reims received another letter offering a rather different version of events. As bad luck would have it, the captain of their own garrison was not with them in the town, but his brother wrote urgently from nearby Châtillon-sur-Marne to tell them that many loyal knights at Troyes had not wanted to capitulate. Despite this firm opposition, and the evident weaknesses in the enemy position, the wiles of Brother Richard – or so the captain’s brother had heard – had persuaded the bishop and many of the common people to open the gates to the Armagnacs. The squire who had brought him this news from Troyes had seen Joan the Maid with his own eyes, and heard her speak, and swore that she was so simple as to be almost half-witted; she made no more sense, the man reported, than the greatest fool he had ever seen.

  Not everyone, it seemed, was convinced by the peasant girl dressed in armour, talking abou
t God and playing at soldiers. But whatever view the people of Reims now took of her, the fact was – as their returning captain was unwillingly forced to admit – that any prospect of rescue by the dukes of Bedford and Burgundy was weeks away, while the enemy was almost within sight. On 16 July, the inhabitants of Châlons, twenty-five miles south-east of Reims, wrote to inform their neighbours that they too had decided to receive the gracious and merciful King Charles as their sovereign, and to advise that Reims should do the same without delay. In the end, the choice was quickly made. When the king and his army arrived at Sept-Saulx, just twelve miles from the town, they were met by a group of dignitaries from Reims who knelt to offer Charles their obedience as their rightful monarch.

  That evening, the king rode through the gates of Reims while crowds cried ‘Noël!’ in welcome. The cheers were politic, but their meaning was inscrutable; after so many years of conflict it was impossible to distinguish between expressions of relief and fear, between enthusiasm and exhaustion. Charles was greeted by the town’s archbishop, his own chancellor Regnault de Chartres, who had left his side only a few hours earlier to take possession at last of the archiepiscopal seat from which he had been exiled during its years in Burgundian hands. And that night, while the king rested in the sumptuous surroundings of the archbishop’s palace, his officers, counsellors and servants worked through the hours of darkness to prepare for the makeshift coronation that would take place in the great cathedral the very next day.