Joan of Arc

by Helen Castor

  On the last day of September Duke Philip himself arrived in the city, gorgeously arrayed, and accompanied, as always in recent months, by his sister, Bedford’s loyal wife Anne. A week later, the two dukes were joined by Bedford’s uncle, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, for talks which ended in agreement that the duke of Burgundy should become the new governor of Paris. Not only that, but envoys from England and Burgundy met Armagnac ambassadors at Saint-Denis, and concluded that a truce should be observed between all parties to the war until comprehensive peace negotiations could begin the following April (or, as Bedford suggested to Burgundy in private, a renewed assault on the Armagnacs could be launched). Meanwhile, Bedford’s plan to draw the sting from Charles’s consecration at Reims by anointing and crowning his nephew, King Henry, was finally coming to fruition. On 6 November, in the soaring splendour of Westminster Abbey, the newly returned Cardinal Beaufort placed the heavy crown of England on the eight-year-old boy’s head; and preparations were well under way for the young king’s progress across the Channel to his second realm, for a second coronation in France.

  Events were leaving Joan behind. The time of miracles had passed, and now even the war she had come to fight had been temporarily suspended. Skirmishes continued, and garrisons needed captains; once her leg was whole again, some occupation could certainly be found for her. And yet the qualities that had made her the saviour of Armagnac France now threatened to undermine her future. She had learned much, but if the course of the war were now to be determined by military strategy, not divine inspiration, there were other commanders with infinitely more experience and skill. Above all, perhaps, if the hand of heaven had once more withdrawn from direct intervention in the world, then a woman on a battlefield became an alarming liability, rather than a unique embodiment of God’s will.

  Some of the men who had fought beside her did not falter in their belief. Despite the truce, the young duke of Alençon was assembling forces of his own to move in the direction of his ancestral lands in Normandy, of which he had been dispossessed for so long. He wanted Joan with him, but the king’s counsellors – among them the archbishop of Reims, La Trémoille and the grizzled Raoul de Gaucourt, all of whom had taken part in the recent rounds of diplomacy – knew that the impulsive aggression of the Maid and Alençon in the field together might undo all their careful work. Instead, after several weeks of convalescence in the home of one of the queen’s ladies at Bourges, Joan was sent with Charles d’Albret, La Trémoille’s half-brother, to deal with a mercenary captain named Perrinet Gressart who was making a nuisance of himself on the frontier along the eastern reaches of the Loire.

  In theory, Gressart served the English and the Burgundians. In practice, his own interests came first. Two years earlier, he had dared to kidnap La Trémoille himself on the road between Armagnac and Burgundian territory, releasing him only on the payment of an exorbitant ransom. Now, Gressart ran his own unofficial fiefdom from the fortified town of La Charité-sur-Loire, thirty miles east of Bourges, and his brutal grip extended as far south as Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, a further thirty miles upstream. La Trémoille was determined to break him, and thus it was that Joan and d’Albret arrived outside the walls of Saint-Pierre in late October. The siege was set, but it was not long before the Maid turned to the tactics she knew best. She led the way into the ditch outside the walls, and called the soldiers to cast bundles of firewood into the water to make a pathway across to the town. She urged them forward, towards walls that stood only a fraction as high as the great defences of the capital before which she and the might of the Armagnac army had foundered. Once again, one of the men who served her was pierced through the foot by an arrow; but Saint-Pierre was not Paris. At the Maid’s words, her troops surged to the attack, and the defenders faltered. On 4 November, the town was taken.

  It was a small victory, but it was something. Still, La Charité lay ahead, and that, as the winter began to draw in, was a less comfortable prospect. Joan was in grim mood on 9 November when she wrote to the people of Riom, sixty miles south of Saint-Pierre, to seek their help in supplying her little force. She had begun to learn to hold a pen as well as a lance, and when the message was done she wrote her name in large, uncertain letters at the end, but for once she did not begin with the name of Jesus. ‘Dear and good friends’, she said, ‘you know well how the town of Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier was taken by assault, and with the help of God I intend to clear out the other places which oppose the king. But because there has been such a great outlay of gunpowder, arrows and other military equipment in facing that town, and because I and the lords who are now in that town have minimal stocks left to lay siege to La Charité, where we are on the point of going, I entreat you, in as much as you have at heart the welfare and honour of the king and also of all our other men here, to assist with the siege by immediately sending gunpowder, saltpetre, sulphur, arrows, good strong crossbows and other military equipment. And thereby ensure that the matter should not be long drawn out through lack of the said gunpowder and other military equipment, and that you cannot be said to be negligent or unwilling. Dear and good friends, may Our Lord protect you.’

  It was focused, practical, and markedly lacking in the glorious certainty that had infused every word of her earlier missives. Who knew, now, what the future might hold? That, at least, was the message sent across Europe from Bruges to his father in Venice by the merchant Pancrazio Giustiniani on 20 November. The Maid was surely still alive, he said, and had even recently taken a strong castle by assault. If what people were saying was true, she was still capable of astonishing the world. The university of Paris had sent to Rome to accuse her of heresy, he reported, but then again the university’s former chancellor, Jean Gerson, had written an excellent work in her defence. Some believed in her, and some did not. Meanwhile the king of England had been crowned in London, and would soon arrive in France at the head of a formidable army. ‘It seems to me certain’, he wrote, ‘that great things will happen in the spring.’

  Joan could only hope that he was right.

  8

  I will be with you soon

  It was cold. December was always bitter, but in the frozen mud outside La Charité the damp clawed its way through layers of leather and wool and into aching bones. Hunger did nothing to help. The king had sent regretful word from his palace of Mehun-sur-Yèvre, forty miles west and a world away, that he lacked the money to send more supplies. As a result, the soldiers fumbling to load the great iron guns were now labouring with yawning stomachs as well as numb and stiffened fingers.

  They had been here four weeks. Four days, it had taken the Maid to free Orléans from siege. A single day, the king had given her for the attempt to storm Paris. And now she stalked, her jaw set, beneath the looming fortifications of La Charité, on which a month’s bombardment had left alarmingly little trace. The commander of this huddled troop, the king’s favourite’s half-brother, did what he could to eke out their stores of food and ammunition, but when the order came to call off the siege, a couple of days before Christmas, they were so weary, and so eager to leave the place, that they abandoned artillery pieces among the debris of the camp, guns that were too damaged or too unwieldy to pull along roads deeply rutted with ice.

  If Joan felt relief, it was overlaid with something darker and more difficult. She had not wanted to fight a Burgundian mercenary at La Charité when the English still held so much of her king’s dismembered realm. But she did not want to come back with nothing to show for a month of punishing effort, and with nowhere else to go. When the soldiers dispersed, she did not ride to Mehun, to the court that no longer knew what to do with her; instead, she took the road further north to Jargeau, the scene of her triumph over the earl of Suffolk in the summer sun just six months ago. There she heard that the king, in his wisdom, had chosen to reward her for her service. Back in July, Charles had declared – at Joan’s request, he said – that her home village of Domrémy should be exempt from the payment of all taxes, in recognition of th
e extraordinary role she was playing in the recovery of his kingdom. Now, it was a personal honour he had in mind: the Maid and the family from which, by the grace of God, she had so gloriously sprung should be by royal authority ennobled. This was not the gift of a title, but an elevation of status. Not only Joan herself but her parents, Jacques and Isabelle, and her brothers, Jacquemin, Jean and Pierre, and all their descendants, male and (an unusual privilege, this) female, should henceforth rank among those with noble blood in the kingdom of France, even though their birth had not previously qualified them for such distinction.

  The royal charter spoke of the Maid’s service to come, as well as achievements past. All the same, the tone was unmistakable: this was the closing of a chapter. But Joan, at not quite eighteen, and with her mission from heaven still unfinished, was not ready to lay aside her armour for a comfortable retirement. She made no public mention of her new dignity. Her authority came from God, not the king, and the trappings of aristocracy could not soothe her anger at her enforced inactivity in this hour of France’s need. As she moved along the valley of the Loire from Jargeau to Orléans and then back, reluctantly, to join the king at La Trémoille’s castle of Sully, all that was left for her to do was respond to those who still looked to her for leadership, however small the request. The daughter of the Scots painter at Tours who had made her banner was getting married: would the city, given their regard for Joan, agree to pay for the bride’s trousseau? Even this favour, it turned out, was now beyond the Maid’s power. The councillors expressed their profound regret that they could not respond more positively to her letter, because their funds were committed to municipal repairs, but they would pray for the girl, and – for the love they bore the Maid – offer a small gift of bread and wine for the wedding meal.

  The painter’s daughter was not the only one planning a wedding that January. The duke of Burgundy was preparing to become a husband for the third time, and, for him, expense was no object. Though he was by no means short of female company – the Burgundian court housed a growing family of his illegitimate offspring – Duke Philip had been a widower for five years, ever since the death of his second wife in 1425. Now, he had chosen as his bride Isabel, daughter of the king of Portugal, a match that proclaimed his power as an independent player on the European political stage (albeit with a tactful nod to his English allies, given that she could count King Henry’s great-grandfather, John of Gaunt, among her own grandparents).

  Her arrival from Portugal had been anxiously awaited for weeks, but the harsh winter weather had blown her little fleet off course, and it was not until 8 January that she made her ceremonial entry into Bruges, accompanied by the sound of 150 silver trumpets through crowded streets festooned with crimson drapery. At the duke’s palace, temporary kitchens, ovens and larders surrounded a banqueting hall 150 feet long, decorated everywhere with his flaming flints and steels. The wedding feast combined breathtaking culinary art with slapstick entertainment: the pièce de résistance was a vast pie out of which burst a live sheep, its wool dyed blue and its horns gilded, along with a man dressed as a wild beast who ran the length of the table while the terrified animal dived beneath it. Then days of jousting culminated in the duke’s declaration that he had founded a new chivalric brotherhood, the Order of the Golden Fleece, an honour to be bestowed upon twenty-four of the finest knights in Artois, Flanders and the county and duchy of Burgundy.

  For years, Philip had politely declined the duke of Bedford’s invitation to become a knight of the English king’s Order of the Garter. The combined message of his own foundation of the Golden Fleece and his new royal marriage was therefore that Burgundy was more than ever a force to be reckoned with, an emerging state staking its claim to an independent place within the political map of Europe. But how, in practice, that force would make itself felt would depend on what happened after Easter Sunday, 16 April, the date on which the truces between England, Burgundy and Armagnac France would come to an end.

  Already, the jockeying for position was well under way. The duchess of Bedford, Anne of Burgundy, was a guest of honour at her brother’s wedding, but her husband was absent from the festivities, since he was busy shoring up the defences of English France. The rhetoric of King Henry’s two crowns was as strong as ever: in the illuminations of a liturgical book even now being produced for Bedford by sublimely skilled craftsmen in Paris, the warrior archangel St Michael held an exquisitely painted shield bearing not the white cross of the Armagnacs, but the red cross of England and St George. To appropriate a saint with a couple of delicate brushstrokes was one thing; the military reality a great deal more challenging. The truces still held, but they were increasingly unsteady, and in February the Armagnac captain La Hire seized the great Norman stronghold of Château Gaillard on the Seine, just twenty miles south-east of Rouen. A month later, Armagnac troops once again raided Saint-Denis, plundering the town and causing panic among the inhabitants of Paris. It was time, Bedford felt, that his newly married brother-in-law showed himself willing to take to the battlefield, should the projected peace not materialise as planned, and on 8 March he named Philip count of Champagne, in the expectation that this new title and the territorial rights that went with it would encourage the Burgundian duke to retrieve Reims, Troyes and the other Champenois towns from their freshly pledged Armagnac allegiance.

  Duke Philip, however, was not quite so sure of his next move. His dilemma was laid bare in the roll-call of his newly dubbed knights of the Golden Fleece: they included Jean de La Trémoille, brother of the Armagnac king’s closest counsellor, but also Hugues de Lannoy, whose commitment to the Anglo-Burgundian alliance was so unshakable that he presented the duke with a blow-by-blow military plan for the spring campaign to come. The grant of the county of Champagne, in fact, formed part of a deal by which the duke had undertaken to lead his army for two months against the Armagnacs in the service of King Henry, but at the same time as that contract had been agreed in late February, Philip was also extending his richest and most courteous welcome to a deputation of Armagnac knights, including Poton de Xaintrailles, for five days of jousting at Arras. It was clear, if nothing else, how much now hung on the imminent arrival in France of eight-year-old King Henry himself, at the head of what was planned to be the largest English army to cross the Channel since the glory days of his father’s extraordinary campaigns.

  Tension was rising, and still Joan found herself caged at the castle of Sully. There she received a series of increasingly frantic missives from the governors of Reims, who were deeply alarmed at the possibility that the duke of Burgundy might seek to reclaim their town – as well they might be, given how quickly they had surrendered to an Armagnac king who had now retreated more than a hundred miles south to the safety of the Loire. She did what she could to reassure them. ‘Very dear and good friends whom I greatly desire to see’, she wrote on 16 March, ‘Joan the Maid has received your letters saying that you fear being besieged. Please know that you will not be, if I can encounter them soon; and if it should so happen that I do not encounter them on their way to you, shut your gates, because I will be with you soon. And if they are there, I will make them put on their spurs in such haste that they will not know what they are doing, and I will relieve you there so quickly that it will seem no time at all.’ She dictated another message full of encouragement almost a fortnight later, but the truth was that she could not protect the people of Reims, or even guarantee that she would come to their help, if the king and his counsellors would not give her leave to fight and an army with which to do so.

  Her own growing desperation found a voice in a very different letter, composed in Latin on her behalf a week later by the chaplain who had been at her side since Orléans, Jean Pasquerel. The message was addressed to the Hussites, the heretics fighting for control of faraway Bohemia. For years, Pope Martin V had sought to gather a crusading force to crush them, and now – thwarted as she was within the kingdom of France – Joan unleashed her anger for the first time
beyond its borders. ‘Jhesus Maria. For some time now, reports and widespread rumours have been reaching me, Joan the Maid, that you have turned from being true Christians to become heretics, and like Saracens … Indeed I, in truth, had I not been occupied with fighting the English, would have visited you already. However, unless I hear that you have mended your ways, I may well abandon the English and march against you, so that by the sword, if I cannot do it another way, I shall destroy your empty and abominable superstition, and strip you of either your heresy or your lives. But if you return to the Catholic faith, and to your former enlightened state, send me your envoys, and I will tell them what you should do.’

  Whether this was Joan’s idea or Pasquerel’s, or simply a howl of frustration that it was six months since she had last had the chance to fight the English outside the walls of Paris, it had the effect at least of restating her claim to a unique spiritual authority on the battlefield – an idea that had begun to lose its potency with each moment that passed since the triumphs of the previous summer. Not that Joan herself had any intention of relinquishing it. Before she had set out on her ill-fated winter campaign against the mercenary Gressart, the preacher Brother Richard had asked her to give her verdict on a woman named Catherine de La Rochelle, who wanted to make peace between King Charles and the duke of Burgundy with the help of what she was claiming were heaven-sent visions. Joan was not impressed – Catherine should go back to her housework, she declared – and told the king so, to the displeasure of Brother Richard; but much of her own mission still remained to be completed, and she could not countenance the possibility that this woman’s false claims might serve to distract from the truth of the God-given message she herself brought.