by Helen Castor
At nine in the morning of Sunday 17 July, forty-nine years after his father’s coronation and seven after his father’s death, Charles VII of France entered the cathedral of Reims for his own consecration. The octagonal labyrinth inlaid in black and white marble in the floor of the nave might have seemed to represent the tortuous path which God in His wisdom had required the king to tread, had it not been for the fact that, since the Maid’s arrival, heaven had opened the way before him with a new and startling directness. Four months earlier, he had contemplated retreat to the far south of his kingdom in the face of a usurpation that had begun to seem inexorable and irreversible. Now, after the miracle at Orléans and victory at Patay, he had advanced deep into territory held by his enemies, without a blow being struck to resist him. The ancient regalia of Charlemagne still, for the moment, lay out of his reach at Saint-Denis, but a substitute crown and sword had been made ready, and at six o’clock that morning four of his knights, including Gilles de Rais, had gone to the nearby abbey of Saint-Rémi to collect the sacred oil of Clovis with which his kingship would, at last, be given sacramental force.
Now the knights rode fully armed on their great chargers through the west door of the cathedral to present the Holy Ampulla to the archbishop at the entrance to the choir. And so the ceremony began. Lacking though it might have been in prepared magnificence, its sanctity was palpable. With prayers and psalms, the king was presented to God, and the holy oil with which he was touched at the head, breast, shoulders and arms consecrated him to the service of heaven as the anointed sovereign of his people. At that sacred moment, and again when the archbishop placed the crown on his brow, cries of ‘Noël!’ echoed to the vaulted ceiling that soared high above, and trumpets sounded so loudly, one observer declared, that it seemed the vaults themselves might shatter. And throughout it all, Joan the Maid stood at Charles’s side, dressed in her shining armour and holding her white banner in her hand.
Now, at last, the true king of France was truly a king. After the ceremony, Joan knelt at his feet. ‘Noble king, God’s will is done,’ she said, and began to weep, overcome with the magnitude of what heaven had helped her accomplish. As she had promised, she had brought the man she had once called the dauphin to Reims and seen him crowned, with the nobility of the most Christian kingdom gathered around him. The duke of Alençon, the count of Clermont and the Bastard of Orléans were there. The devoted Guy de Laval, who had fought at Joan’s side ever since meeting her at Selles, was made a count that day, along with the king’s most beloved counsellor Georges de La Trémoille. Gilles de Rais was appointed a marshal of France, under the approving gaze of the captains with whom he and Joan had ridden to war at Orléans and Patay. They had been joined in time for the ceremony by the king’s brother-in-law, Yolande’s son René of Anjou, heir to the duchies of Bar and Lorraine. And also newly arrived from Bar, along with the young duke-to-be, was a small group of wondering faces that were dearly familiar to Joan: her father, her brothers, her cousin’s husband and her godfather, who were given lodgings at an inn at the expense of the townspeople.
But, despite the tears and the jubilation, there were figures missing from this loyal gathering whose absence was a pointed reminder of what still remained to be done. Regardless of Joan’s pleas, the constable, Arthur of Richemont, who should have carried the sword of state in procession before the king, had been refused permission to attend, his place taken instead by the half-brother of his enemy La Trémoille. The duke of Orléans, the king’s first cousin, was unavoidably detained by the bars of his gilded English prison. And the most significant absentee of all was the duke of Burgundy, the prince of the blood royal whose feud with the newly crowned king lay at the heart of France’s self-mutilation. If the kingdom were to be made whole again, and the English driven away for good, then Philip of Burgundy would need to stand at King Charles’s side. All parties within the Armagnac court knew that to be true, however wide the rifts between them yawned. La Trémoille, who had been a Burgundian before he was an Armagnac and whose brother Jean remained in Burgundian service, had been involved in diplomatic exchanges with Duke Philip’s envoys since the end of June, and at that point Joan too had taken it upon herself to write to the duke to remind him of his duty to come to Reims for the coronation of his rightful king.
Now, on the triumphal day of the ceremony itself, she summoned her clerk once again. ‘Jhesus Maria’, she began. ‘High and mighty prince, duke of Burgundy, Joan the Maid calls upon you by the king of heaven, my rightful and sovereign lord, that you and the king of France should make a good and lasting peace. Forgive one another entirely, in good faith, as loyal Christians should do; and if you wish to make war, do so against the Saracens.’ She was respectful – ‘prince of Burgundy, I pray, beseech and call upon you as humbly as I can that you should make no more war in the holy kingdom of France’ – but she did not hesitate to make clear how much was at stake, and what the consequences would be if the duke took no account of her words. ‘I bring you word from the king of heaven, my rightful and sovereign lord, for your good, for your honour and upon your life, that you will win no battle against loyal Frenchmen, and that all who wage war against the holy kingdom of France wage war against King Jesus, the king of heaven and of the whole world, my rightful and sovereign lord. And, with my hands clasped, I pray and call upon you that you fight no battle and wage no war against us, neither you, nor your men or subjects; and know surely that, however many men you bring against us, they will win nothing at all, and great sorrow will be the result of the great battle and the blood that will be shed there by those who come against us.’
The evident truth of her words was demonstrated by the fates of those to whom she had written before: the English at Orléans, defeated, and the Frenchmen of Troyes, surrendered. And yet Philip of Burgundy had made no reply to her first letter, nor did he respond to this, her second. If any flicker of hesitation had crossed the duke’s mind, any moment of questioning whether the gift of prophecy this girl claimed might truly come from heaven, it had been extinguished – in public, at least – exactly a week earlier, when he was welcomed with great magnificence into the city of Paris by his brother-in-law, the duke of Bedford.
These were ceremonies in which Bedford’s elegant words of greeting were uttered through gritted teeth. The regent could have been forgiven for wondering how he came to find himself facing such parlous news that summer. He had not wanted to besiege Orléans in the first place; that had been the earl of Salisbury’s plan, until a cannonball had torn his face away. Even then, the so-called dauphin and his Armagnac rebels had been almost on the run, until the arrival of this girl, this witch, who was now leading the false king to Reims for a spurious coronation. Back in April, even before Joan had arrived at Orléans, Bedford had written to the council in England to request reinforcements, and to propose that the child-king Henry should himself be crowned as soon as possible. He knew how important it was to demonstrate that God was with this boy who ruled two kingdoms, just as He had been with his glorious father at Agincourt. But the council in England had done nothing. And now, after the extraordinary reverses that had befallen the English in the intervening months, it was left to Bedford to remind his Burgundian brother-in-law of his divinely sanctioned duty to fight the Armagnacs.
The public ritual that marked Duke Philip’s five-day visit to Paris included a grand procession and a sermon preached at Notre-Dame, but at the heart of this political performance was a spectacle that took place on 14 July in the presence of the two dukes at the royal palace on the Île de la Cité. There, reported the journal-writer, it was publicly rehearsed how ‘in former times’ the so-called dauphin and his perfidious Armagnacs had made peace with the duke of Burgundy’s noble father, and had sworn solemn oaths and taken together the sacrament of the Eucharist, ‘the precious body of Our Lord’, and how then the duke’s father – ‘desiring and longing that the kingdom should be at peace, and wishing to keep the promise he had made’ – had knelt before
the dauphin on the bridge at Montereau, only to be treacherously murdered. At this reminder of the crimes committed by the man the Armagnacs dared to call their king, there was uproar in the Parisian crowd, until the regent Bedford called for silence to allow the duke of Burgundy to speak of his sorrow at the broken peace and his father’s untimely death. Then the two dukes together swore to defend the city, and called on its inhabitants to swear in their turn that they would be loyal and true.
In the emotion of the moment, it was easy to forget how rare it was these days for the two dukes to be in Paris at all, let alone at the same time. As his interests in the Low Countries grew and his differences with the English multiplied, Philip of Burgundy seemed increasingly to be a sleeping partner in the Anglo-Burgundian alliance. And that was dangerous, if it gave the impression that the war had become a conflict between the English and the French, rather than between the true French loyal to King Henry and the false French of the pretender Charles. To speak simply of the French fighting the English, after all, was to use the language of the girl who had been sent by the devil to break the siege at Orléans. But Bedford’s Parisian coup de théâtre – reinforced behind the scenes by the help of his devoted wife, Burgundy’s much-loved sister Anne – now meant that Duke Philip had no choice but to reassert his commitment to his alliance with England against the Armagnac traitors.
All the same, the continuing fragility of the Anglo-Burgundian coalition was everywhere apparent. Despite their public gestures of solidarity, Bedford was forced to agree that the duke of Burgundy should continue to be paid in full for the military support he provided to English France. And well might the regent have wondered whether an ally who required payment was an ally at all: on the very day that Duke Philip left Paris after his meeting with Bedford, envoys from his court arrived at Reims in time to witness the coronation of King Charles. While they set about negotiating a temporary truce between Burgundians and Armagnacs, the Armagnac king and his army moved on, edging closer to Paris as more Burgundian towns opened their gates and submitted to his authority.
But his heaven-sent champion, Joan the Maid, was not happy with this piecemeal approach. Her renown was growing; though the great Armagnac theologian Jean Gerson had died on 12 July, five days too soon to witness the apotheosis of his king at Reims, other writers of a different stamp took up their pens to record Joan’s achievement. One of the king’s secretaries, an accomplished poet named Alain Chartier, composed a Latin letter describing the miraculous deeds of this ‘she-warrior’ who was ‘the glory not only of the French, but of all Christians’. And his praise was echoed by the extraordinary figure of Christine de Pizan, the daughter of a Venetian physician at the French royal court who, despite the odds stacked against her by her sex, had become one of the most distinguished writers of her day. In 1418, when the Burgundians seized Paris, Christine had retreated in horror to the abbey of Poissy outside the city walls; now, in her late sixties, she emerged from more than a decade of literary silence to celebrate the renaissance of the Armagnac cause, rejoicing in effervescent verse at the restoration of the rightful king through this blessed Maid. Joan, she declared, was sent by God, ‘who has given her a heart greater than any man’s’.
Now, however, the Maid’s heart was troubled. On 5 August, she sent a letter to her ‘dear and good friends’, the people of Reims. They should not have a moment’s doubt of her commitment to them, she said, or of the cause for which she was fighting, but it was true that the king had made a truce with the duke of Burgundy, by the terms of which the duke must hand over the city of Paris at the end of fifteen days. Joan was not convinced. ‘Do not be surprised,’ she told them, ‘if I do not enter there so quickly. Although this truce has been made, I am not at all content, and I do not know if I will keep it. But if I do, it will only be to preserve the honour of the king, and also as long as they do not further demean the blood royal in any way, because I will be holding and keeping together the king’s army in order to stand ready at the end of the said fifteen days if they do not make peace.’ The responsibility God had given her had always been singular, but now – after the euphoria of the coronation, and finding herself suddenly caught amid unpredictably swirling political currents – she sounded newly conscious of how alone she was with her duty. ‘My dearest and most perfect friends,’ she added, ‘I pray you that you should not feel uneasy as long as I live; but I ask that you keep a good watch and protect the good city of the king, and let me know if there are any traitors who wish to harm you, and as soon as I can I will drive them away; and let me know your news.’
Christine de Pizan, finishing her hymn of praise to the Maid six days earlier, had been certain that Joan would soon lead the king into Paris, and to Joan herself the recapture of the kingdom’s great capital seemed the obvious next step. Obvious perhaps, but not God-given. She had known she would take the king to Reims from the moment she arrived at Chinon, and at Poitiers, shortly after, she had learned that her sign would be to free Orléans. What now remained was the rest of her mission: to drive the English from French soil. That much God had made clear – but the question was how it should be achieved. Peace with the duke of Burgundy would heal France’s wounds, but that, for Joan, required the duke’s submission to his king, not the subtle and insubstantial words of diplomats. She also knew that if she attacked the enemy – and to take Paris from English hands would be a great and necessary prize – then God would give her victory. But in this large army that had escorted the king to Reims, she was one among many captains, and a place was not habitually made for her in the arguments about policy and strategy that consumed the attention of the king’s counsellors.
She had been an exceptional leader in an exceptional moment – a miraculous anomaly who, by the will of heaven, had transformed the landscape in which she stood. She knew that God was with her, and how much work still lay ahead. But what if those around her believed the moment of miracles had passed?
7
A creature in the form of a woman
It was clear to the duke of Bedford that, if Paris were to be defended, he would have to do it himself. In public – and with the air of one who hoped to make it so, if he said it often enough – the duke insisted that the Anglo-Burgundian alliance was holding strong; Philip of Burgundy, Bedford told the council back in England, was showing himself in this hour of need to be a ‘true kinsman, friend and loyal vassal’ of the young King Henry.
But the practical fact of the matter was that Duke Philip was not in Paris. Instead, by the first week in August 1429 he was in his palace at Arras in Artois, a hundred miles north, where – as Bedford happened to know – a high-level delegation of Armagnac envoys had just arrived, led by the chancellor Regnault de Chartres, archbishop of Reims, and the veteran soldier Raoul de Gaucourt. Duke Philip did not admit them to his presence straight away, and Bedford had the best of all possible spies, his sharp-eyed wife Anne, to keep him informed of what her brother was up to. Still, the situation was hardly reassuring – and, quite apart from his anxiety about the reliability of his Burgundian partner, Bedford was also distinctly short of English lieutenants, given that Suffolk, Talbot and Scales now languished in enemy hands.
There was little option but to set to work. Already the thirty-foot walls of the city had been strengthened and artillery positions ranged around them, and on 25 July the duke had ridden through the gates in the company of his uncle, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, along with 250 men-at-arms and 2500 archers – fresh troops raised by the cardinal in England for a crusade against Hussite heretics in Bohemia but, thanks to the pressure of events in France, hurriedly diverted instead to Paris. Within days, Bedford and this new force were in the field, moving through the countryside outside the city in the attempt to ward off any closer approach by the Armagnac army. But when the news arrived that Armagnac ambassadors were in Arras to treat for peace with Burgundy, the regent decided that the moment had come for a more dramatic move of his own.
By 7 August he was in Monte
reau, the fateful place where the blood of John the Fearless had been spilled almost ten years earlier. From there, Bedford issued a ringing challenge to ‘you, Charles of Valois, who are accustomed to name yourself dauphin de Vienne, and now without just cause call yourself king’. Charles should meet him face to face, he declared, either to make peace or to give battle; but the terms in which this defiance was couched made it clear that his words were intended as much for the ears of his Burgundian ally as they were directed at his Armagnac enemy. ‘We are, and we will always be, intent and determined on all good ways of peace that are not feigned, corrupt, dissembling, broken or perjured,’ he said – and all those listening could guess what was coming next – ‘… such as that at Montereau-Fault-Yonne, from which ensued, through your guilt and connivance, the most horrible, detestable and cruel murder, committed against law and knightly honour, of our dearest and most beloved late father’ – John the Fearless being Bedford’s father, according to church law, through his marriage to the duke’s daughter Anne. After their oaths sworn in Paris, and now this evocation of the killing on the very spot where it had taken place, it was Bedford’s hope that his brother-in-law Philip could not publicly overlook the crimes of the past, however much water had flowed under Montereau’s bloodstained bridge since then.
Bedford also had a message for the people of Paris. The so-called dauphin was abusing the trust of the simple and the ignorant, he explained, with the help of two ‘superstitious and reprobate characters’, both of them ‘abominable in the sight of God’: one ‘a sluttish woman of ill repute, dressed as a man and dissolute in her conduct’, the other ‘an apostate and seditious friar’. Brother Richard, it seemed, had been won over by his encounter with Joan at Troyes to such an extent that he was now riding with her and the Armagnac army. This news was so unwelcome in Paris, where his thundering sermons had converted many to a new austerity of life, that the citizens went back to playing backgammon, bowls and dice in ostentatious defiance of his teaching, and swapped the tin medallions that he had persuaded them to wear, each one inscribed with the name of Jesus, for Burgundian saltires. Yoking the friar and the Maid together therefore served a useful purpose for Bedford within the city he was trying to defend: Joan’s claims to divine inspiration could only be tarnished, in the eyes of the Parisians, if she were the partner in crime of a spiritual leader who had utterly betrayed their trust.