Joan of Arc

by Helen Castor

  By the end of the month, it seemed possible that Joan’s time was coming. At last, she rode with a detachment of troops eighty miles north to join the garrison at Lagny-sur-Marne, just east of Paris. With her little band, she ranged around the capital, from Melun, twenty-five miles south, to Senlis twenty-five miles north, skirmishing with the English wherever she could. The Armagnacs, wrote the alarmed Parisian journal-writer, were raiding right up to the city gates: ‘The duke of Burgundy was expected daily, but all through January, February, March and April, he never stirred.’ In fact, by April Duke Philip was in the field, but not within sight of the beleaguered Parisians. Instead, he was heading towards Compiègne, a town that had submitted to King Charles in the weeks after his coronation, but which – according to the detailed terms of the Armagnac–Burgundian truces – should now have been surrendered again to the duke of Burgundy. The people of Compiègne, however, were not willing to be handed over, and they began to reinforce their defences and build up their stores of food and weapons. If Duke Philip wanted their town, he would have to come and get it.

  It would not be an easy task. Compiègne stood on the southern bank of the Oise, with a single stone bridge spanning the river to the north. There were great walls surrounded by a water-filled moat, and turreted gatehouses topped, now, with guns. And, as nerves began to jangle more and more with every April day that passed, all eyes turned to this town that stood at a strategic crossroads between English Rouen to the west and Armagnac Reims to the east, between Anglo-Burgundian Paris to the south and the duke of Burgundy’s own town of Arras to the north.

  Further north even than that, meanwhile, at Calais, the boy-king Henry VI of England made landfall in his French kingdom at ten in the morning on 23 April, the feast day of his patron St George. With him were his great-uncle, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, and twenty-two English peers, including the dukes of York and Norfolk and the earls of Warwick, Huntingdon, Arundel, Stafford and Devon, along with a lavish household of servants and retainers and more troops to join the advance guard that had already landed earlier in the year. There to welcome him was Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais, a stalwart Burgundian partisan who had helped to negotiate the treaty of Troyes ten years earlier and had been a devoted counsellor of the English crown in France ever since. Cauchon had served Henry V; now, it was a moment of personal triumph to accompany that great sovereign’s son on his progress to his French coronation.

  But for the time being Bishop Cauchon and his eight-year-old king found their journey rudely interrupted. However inexactly they had been observed, the truces that formally required the English, Burgundians and Armagnacs to abstain from war had expired a week earlier, on Easter Sunday, and all parties were pointing accusatory fingers at each other to explain why it was that they were not assembling, as previously agreed, to negotiate a permanent peace. And, if peace could not be guaranteed in the country across which the royal cavalcade had to travel, then the precious and irreplaceable person of King Henry could not be put at risk. He would wait in safety behind the massive walls of Calais until his French kingdom was ready to receive him.

  While the young king settled into his new accommodation, guarded by the fortresses of the Calais pale, the duke of Burgundy was moving towards the front line. For weeks already he had been mustering his troops at Péronne, twenty-five miles south of Arras. Once Easter was safely past, he marched them south to Montdidier, and then on, zigzagging across country with his captain Jean de Luxembourg, another of his knights of the Golden Fleece, to compel the submission of castles and towns along his way. This military advance was enough, at last, to convince King Charles and his counsellors that their policy of Armagnac–Burgundian détente had failed. On 6 May, a royal letter was drafted to warn the king’s loyal subjects about the treachery of the Burgundian enemy. Charles, it explained, had sought reconciliation with all his heart, in the hope that he might relieve his people of their suffering. Duke Philip, by contrast, had done nothing but demonstrate his bad faith, trifling with truces when he had no intention of making a lasting peace. Burgundy, it was now clear, still stood with England; the result would be war.

  And war was what Joan had been waiting for. If the duke of Burgundy had Compiègne in his sights, she stood ready to defend it. She had seen action in the previous weeks – one skirmish had resulted in the capture of a troublesome Burgundian captain named Franquet d’Arras, who was tried and beheaded at Lagny – but now the task ahead had a comforting familiarity. She would relieve a town that found itself under siege, just as she had at Orléans. Just as at Orléans, her intervention would stop the enemy from securing a vital river crossing. Her opponents this time were the Burgundians, the false French, not the English, and the river was the Oise rather than the Loire, but, just as at Orléans, she had the loyal captain Poton de Xaintrailles riding at her side. The omens were good, even as the Burgundian commanders drew menacingly close: Duke Philip had set up his headquarters at Coudun, three miles north of Compiègne, and Jean de Luxembourg at Clairoix, just across the river to the north-east.

  By the third week in May, she had a plan. As at Orléans, it was still possible for the defenders of Compiègne to move in and out of the town on one side, and Joan set out with other captains and a detachment of troops for Soissons, a little more than twenty miles to the east along the river Aisne. Their idea was to use the river crossing there in order to ride north and take the enemy by surprise with an attack from behind their position. In principle the strategy was sound; in practice, the difficulty of fighting the Burgundians across territory that had embraced Armagnac authority less than a year earlier became rapidly and alarmingly clear. Soissons had surrendered to King Charles in the wake of his coronation the previous July, but now the Armagnac king was long gone. Instead, the duke of Burgundy and his army were close at hand, and the prospect of accommodating Armagnac troops within the town walls seemed, to the people of Soissons, to be dangerous foolishness. They gave the Maid a bed for the night, and shut her soldiers out in the fields.

  The plan would have to be changed. If she could not cross the river, Joan at least had the chance to seek reinforcements before she headed back to Compiègne, and so she made for Crépy-en-Valois, twelve miles south of the besieged town. When she returned with fresh troops, under cover of darkness on the night of 22 May, she found that the siege had tightened. The moment had come. After a few hours’ rest, she called for her banner and gathered her men for an assault on the enemy. With Xaintrailles beside her, she rode across the bridge, out through the fortified boulevard on the north bank of the Oise, and on, charging into the heart of the Burgundian position. The onslaught drove the enemy back and back, the shouts of the attackers and the cries of the fallen mingling with the noise of steel striking steel. Joan spurred her horse onward, urging her soldiers forward again and again until, suddenly, something shifted in the din of the battle. A glance over her shoulder told her what it was.

  Not all of the enemy stood ahead of her. Another division of Burgundian and English troops had held back from the fighting, out of sight. Now, they had moved into position behind her, cutting her off from the bridge, and safety. Still she cried out to her men till her throat was raw that God was with them. But the pressure was relentless. More and more of the Armagnac soldiers were forced into retreat across the river, until the enemy pushed so close to the boulevard that the captain of Compiègne had no choice: on his command, the great gate into the town swung shut. The sunlight was fading as the Burgundians pressed around her, blades and hands closing in, until at last she was pulled roughly from her saddle. Amid the confusion of faces, she offered the nearest Burgundian captain her formal submission, as a noble knight should, in acknowledgement of her new, unlooked-for and unwelcome status. The Maid was a prisoner.

  Word spread quickly, with excited shouts and ribald laughter, in the Burgundian and English camps. Duke Philip himself lost no time in riding from the comfort of his lodgings at Coudun to take a closer look at this extraordin
ary prize. The chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet, who was among the Burgundian duke’s entourage when he came face to face with the Armagnac whore, claimed not to remember the words that passed between them, but there was no mistaking the duke’s delight. He wrote that same night to the faithful towns in France and the Low Countries that were subject to his authority: ‘… by the will of our Blessed Creator, matters have so befallen and He has shown us such grace that the woman known as the Maid has been captured … Her capture, we are certain, will everywhere be great news, and it will demonstrate the error and foolish credulity of all those who have let themselves be convinced by the deeds of this woman; and we are writing to give you this news, hoping that you will find therein joy, comfort and consolation, and that you will give all due thanks and praise to our said Creator who sees and knows all things …’

  The man to whom the captive belonged, according to the laws of war, was Jean de Luxembourg, the commander of the soldiers who had fought the Armagnacs that day. She was taken under guard to his castle at Beaulieu-les-Fontaines, seventeen miles north of Compiègne, to await the next move in a game in which she had suddenly been transmuted from a knight to a pawn. Joan saw herself as a soldier, that much was clear from the manner in which she had surrendered to de Luxembourg’s captain, and, as such, she would expect to be ransomed – perhaps by her king, given that she had no income of her own with which to buy her freedom – or exchanged for another prisoner.

  But others saw her very differently. She was an eighteen-year-old girl whose military command derived purely from her mission. For the English and Burgundians – as Duke Philip pointed out with such satisfaction – her capture provided incontrovertible proof that her claim to act on heaven’s behalf had always been false. Clearly, the Armagnac king could not accept that misguided interpretation, but neither could he agree with the late Jean Gerson that, if the Maid faltered, the blame might lie with the inadequacies of those around her. Instead, the only possible conclusion was that she had overreached herself. That night, while Duke Philip’s missives were dispatched to the Burgundian towns, urgent letters from the archbishop of Reims, King Charles’s chancellor, conveyed the news – and its explanation – to Armagnac France. Joan the Maid had been captured, he said, because she was too wilful, too unwilling to listen to wise advice. As it happened, the king had already been approached by another messenger from heaven, this time a young shepherd from the mountains in the south-east of the kingdom. There was no doubt that the English and Burgundian enemy would be defeated, this boy had confirmed; nevertheless God had allowed the Maid to be taken because, consumed by pride and luxury, she had done what she wanted rather than following His commands.

  It had been difficult to know what to do with Joan once her miracles had begun to fade. If God had now withdrawn His favour from her completely – which was surely the message of her capture – then that, at least, provided helpful certainty. It was a matter of regret, but it could not be permitted to cast a shadow over the mandate from heaven that had been confirmed so powerfully by the king’s consecration at Reims. For the archbishop and his fellow Armagnacs, therefore – politicians, theologians, and those who, like the archbishop himself, were both – there was every reason to leave the Maid to whatever fate God had designed for her, which would surely be a judgement on her own conduct, not on the kingdom she had served.

  But that was a conclusion which the spiritual guardians of English France – the parts of the French Church that had taken the Burgundian side from the start of the civil war – could not allow to stand. The failure of the Maid was the failure of her mission. The error into which she had led the so-called dauphin, and the demonic inspiration that had prompted her to contest the God-given rights of King Henry, required investigation and condemnation; so, three days after her capture, the theologians of the university of Paris and the vicar-general of the inquisitor of the faith in English France wrote to the duke of Burgundy, humbly requesting him to surrender the woman known by the enemies of the kingdom as ‘the Maid’ to ecclesiastical justice. She was vehemently suspected, they explained, of heresy, and – as all good Christians knew – it was under the Church’s authority that she should be tried for crimes that had insulted God and risked the souls of the simple folk who had followed her. Six weeks later, having received no response, they wrote again, urging the duke to do his duty to God and Holy Church by handing Joan over to the inquisitor or, if he preferred, to the bishop of Beauvais, within whose diocese she had first been taken prisoner.

  The case, they believed, was clear. Joan had been defeated on the battlefield, and now their chance had come to shine the light of the true faith on the manifest scandal of her claims. But their arguments fell on deaf ears. Faithful son of the Church though he was, Jean de Luxembourg still expected to trade such a renowned prisoner for a substantial ransom. And, after the coup of Joan’s capture, the duke of Burgundy was beginning to regret his renewed commitment to fight for the English. Bogged down in the mud outside Compiègne, and finding his territories elsewhere under attack, he required room for political manoeuvre much more pressingly than a theological demonstration of the fact that God was not an Armagnac.

  The solution, it emerged, lay with the bishop of Beauvais. Pierre Cauchon was a scholar who, back in 1416, had defended the duke of Burgundy’s father over the long-ago murder of Louis of Orléans against the Armagnac Jean Gerson at the Council of Constance. Now, he found himself a bishop without a see, since the town of Beauvais had given itself up to the Maid and her king in the wake of the coronation at Reims the previous summer. He was determined to see Joan tried for her crimes, and – as a politician with years of experience among the royal counsellors of English France – he was well placed to bring about such a hearing. If the English, advised by Bishop Cauchon, would ransom the girl from Jean de Luxembourg, then King Henry could hand her to the Church, in the person of Bishop Cauchon, for judgement.

  The English military position in Normandy had improved sufficiently that at last, in the second half of July, King Henry himself had travelled the hundred miles south from Calais to join his uncle Bedford at Rouen, where he was met by a deputation of burgesses in red hats, and by crowds who cried ‘Noël!’ so loudly that the boy asked if the noise could be made to stop. Henry’s presence in his French kingdom, young though he was, meant that Bedford was temporarily relieved of his role as regent, and it was therefore the king’s council – under the leadership of Cardinal Beaufort, and counting Bishop Cauchon among its members – that agreed, on the king’s behalf, to buy Joan the Maid from the Burgundians. With plans being prepared for Henry’s French coronation, there could be no doubt of the virtue of exposing to public view the sorcery and idolatry of the whore who had put a crown on the head of the Armagnac pretender.

  Bishop Cauchon opened financial negotiations with the duke of Burgundy and Jean de Luxembourg, while the council set about raising the necessary money from the king’s loyal subjects of his duchy of Normandy. It was time-consuming work, but its urgency was evident. At the beginning of September, a follower of Brother Richard, a Breton woman named Pieronne, was put on trial in Paris; she claimed not only that God conversed with her in human form, wearing a white robe and a red tunic – evident proof of her blasphemy, the Parisian journal-writer said – but also that ‘the woman Joan who fought alongside the Armagnacs was good, and that what she did was well done and was God’s will’. Pieronne was condemned, and a sermon preached outside Notre-Dame to explain her error; then, because she would not abjure her heresy, she was burned alive. But the longer the delay in putting the Maid on trial, the greater the risk that such expressions of support for her might grow – or that the prisoner herself might in some way pre-empt the exposition of her crimes. She had already made one attempt at escape from Beaulieu-les-Fontaines, as a result of which she had been moved in July to the greater security of another of de Luxembourg’s castles, the fortress of Beaurevoir, thirty miles further to the north-east; there she had contrived t
o jump from the window of the tower within which she was locked, and although she survived the fall, it took some time for her injuries to heal.

  Finally, in November, the deal was done: the Burgundians had their money, and the English their prisoner. The theologians of the university of Paris sent a letter in icy Latin to Bishop Cauchon expressing their astonishment that it was taking so long for the woman to be surrendered to the jurisdiction of the Church, and another, in more politic French, to King Henry himself to ask that she should be brought to Paris forthwith, where so many learned men stood ready to assist with the investigation into her wrongdoing. But King Henry’s council had other ideas. They had only just secured possession of their captive, and they were not about to send her to a city that was too near the reach of the Armagnacs and too uncertainly under English control. The bishop of Beauvais could not hear the case in his own diocese, which lay in enemy hands; it would therefore be moved instead to Rouen, the capital of English Normandy, where the nine-year-old king himself could keep watch over the proceedings, with his council and his army reassuringly close at hand.

  And so, on 3 January 1431, an edict in the name of Henry, by the grace of God king of France and England, was issued to his loyal subjects. ‘It is sufficiently notorious and well known,’ the royal letter declared, ‘how for some time, a woman who calls herself Joan the Maid has put off the habit and dress of the female sex, which is contrary to divine law, abominable to God, condemned and prohibited by every law; she has dressed and armed herself in the habit and role of a man, has committed and carried out cruel murders and, it is said, has led the simple people to believe, through seduction and deceit, that she was sent from God, and that she had knowledge of His divine secrets, together with several other very dangerous dogmas, most prejudicial and scandalous to our holy catholic faith.’ Because these crimes required that she be examined ‘according to God, reason, divine law and the holy canons’, the king – as ‘a true and humble son of the Holy Church’ – ordered his officers to deliver the prisoner to the bishop of Beauvais. What that meant, it transpired, was that Joan would be judged by the Church, but she would be brought to court each day from a cell in a royal castle, and returned there each night. There could be no risk that the prisoner might escape. And ‘if it should come to pass that she is not convicted or found guilty of the said crimes’, the king’s letter went on, ‘it is our intention to retake and regain possession of this Joan’. In the unlikely event that her heresy was unproven, she would still, after all, be a prisoner of war.