Joan of Arc

by Helen Castor

  By then, the subjects of English France found themselves under fiercely intensifying pressure. Once the diplomats had left Arras, Armagnac forces had launched a whirlwind campaign in upper Normandy, seizing ports along the coast from Dieppe to Harfleur before pushing inland in January towards the embattled English stronghold of Rouen. The English lords Talbot and Scales – who, like Suffolk, had had to be expensively retrieved from French custody after their defeat by the Maid – managed to rebuff this assault on the city; but in the meantime Constable Richemont and the Bastard of Orléans were tightening a noose around Paris.

  For the people of the capital, all was confusion. Unlike English Rouen, Paris had been a Burgundian city ever since the bloody expulsion of the Armagnacs by men loyal to John the Fearless back in 1418. Now, the dead duke’s son had made peace with the traitors and murderers. The Burgundian governors of the city, who were too deeply implicated in the English regime to reconsider their allegiance – principally King Henry’s chancellor Louis de Luxembourg, bishop of Thérouanne, the doughty loyalist Bishop Cauchon and the bishop of Paris – made efforts to rally the people to a cause from which the heart had been ripped by the duke’s defection. By March, however, even they were forced to concede that anyone who wished could abandon his possessions and leave. Those who chose to stay, they declared, must take an oath of loyalty to King Henry and wear the badge of St George’s red cross.

  But, for the journal-writer there, the bishops’ defiance was a sort of frenzy that served only to prolong still further ‘this evil and diabolical war’. He and his fellow citizens were so desperate for relief from fear and starvation, and so disoriented by the abrupt shifting of the political world on its axis, that the war itself now became the enemy, rather than the Armagnacs whom they had hated for so long. On Friday 13 April, when Richemont, the Bastard of Orléans and the Burgundian lord de l’Isle-Adam appeared with their troops outside the gates, bringing with them a promise of protection from the duke of Burgundy and letters of amnesty from King Charles, there was only a brief flurry of resistance, easily swatted aside, before the city opened to let them in: ‘… the constable and the other lords made their way through Paris as peacefully as if they had never been out of Paris in their lives’, the journal-writer noted. And this ‘very great miracle’ – along with Richemont’s declaration of the king’s love and forgiveness for the inhabitants of his capital – did its work in reminding the people of what it now meant, once again, to be French: ‘the Parisians loved them for this, and before the day was out every man in Paris would have risked his life and goods to destroy the English’. The pages of the writer’s journal themselves bore the traces of this seismic change: quietly, without comment or fanfare, the name of ‘the king’ was now Charles, rather than Henry.

  The euphoria could not last. It became clear all too rapidly that fear and hunger were not, after all, at an end, and by the autumn the journal-writer was back to his familiar disenchantment with all men of power and rank, of whatever stamp. ‘There was no news at all of the king at this time, no more than if he had been at Rome or Jerusalem. None of the French captains did any good worth mentioning ever since the entry into Paris, nothing but looting and robbery day and night. The English were making war in Flanders, in Normandy and before Paris; no one opposed them …’ That last was not strictly true; and when, in November 1437, King Charles finally made his royal entry into the city, for the first time since he had fled in 1418 as a fifteen-year-old boy in his nightshirt, enough relief remained, and enough pleasure at the unfamiliar prospect of the French capital greeting its French king, for the people of Paris to give him a hero’s welcome.

  It was an unaccustomed sight in more than one respect: the king, as ungainly a figure as ever at the age of thirty-four, riding into Paris clad in the shining armour he had so rarely worn to lead his soldiers. This, at last, was a triumph, not a battle, but still there were reminders of battles past. With Charles and his fourteen-year-old son, the dauphin Louis, were princes of the blood and captains who had fought in his wars, among them Constable Richemont, Yolande’s son Charles of Anjou, the Bastard of Orléans and La Hire. Just in front of the king rode Poton de Xaintrailles (who had freed himself from English custody more successfully than the poor drowned Shepherd), carrying the royal helmet on a silver staff braced against his thigh; around the helm was a golden crown, with a golden fleur-de-lis catching the low sunlight in its centre. And holding the bridle of Xaintrailles’s horse, between cheering crowds so densely packed that it was scarcely possible to move through the streets, walked Jean d’Aulon, once the Maid’s squire, now a gentleman of the king’s household.

  The officers of the city held a canopy of blue velvet powdered with gold fleurs-de-lis above the king’s head, suppressing as they did so any memory of the same service performed for a small English boy six years earlier. As the cavalcade moved into the heart of the city, the king encountered singing angels and gatherings of saints, from France’s patron St Denis to St Margaret, springing unharmed from the belly of an artfully painted dragon, while St Michael, the young warrior of heaven, weighed the souls of the sinful in his golden scales. That night there were bonfires in the streets, with music, dancing and drinking in the flickering light of the flames. A few days later the remains of the count of Armagnac, who had died so violently at the hands of the Burgundian mob in 1418, were reverently exhumed and transported to a fitting resting-place in his patrimony in the south. With his bones was buried the name of Armagnac as a badge of division within the most Christian kingdom of France.

  The future was not simple, but it had at least begun. No one spoke any longer of the kingdom of Bourges, even if, out of long habit, the court could still most often be found in one of the royal castles south of the Loire. Charles, like his father before him, was an anointed king of France, and now both the idea and the reality of English France were starting to fade. Other English lords stepped forward into the void left by the loss of the regent Bedford, among them the ferocious veteran Talbot, as well as King Henry’s new lieutenant-general, the twenty-six-year-old duke of York, and the cardinal’s nephew Edmund Beaufort. But, despite some moments of military hope – including the recovery of Harfleur in 1440 – the combined effect of the loss of Paris and continuing pressure on English Normandy meant that the resources and the will needed to defend King Henry’s French realm were dwindling.

  King Charles, too, had his problems. The divisive figure of La Trémoille had been banished from his court, but division remained: the duke of Bourbon, in particular, resented his own lack of influence compared to the young Charles of Anjou, and he found a partner in dissatisfaction in the impoverished duke of Alençon, who could not yet enjoy the fruits of the reunified French kingdom because his lands in Normandy still lay in English hands. In seeking to assert themselves, Bourbon and Alençon could look to the support of those mercenary captains who had for two decades enjoyed the free rein conferred by a constant state of military emergency. The most infamous mercenary bands were known as écorcheurs, ‘flayers’, a name that aptly conveyed their double threat of violence and extortion. Since the treaty of Arras, their activities had become more obviously freelance, and, while the king might turn a loftily blind eye wherever their depredations ravaged territories belonging to his newly minted ally of Burgundy, he could hardly do so in the heartlands of his own kingdom. Royal efforts to check their worst excesses would therefore have made the écorcheurs natural allies of a malcontent nobleman such as Bourbon, even had two of the most notorious mercenary captains not been Bourbon’s bastard half-brothers and a third, a Castilian named Roderigo de Villandrando, the husband of his illegitimate sister.

  Already, in 1437, Bourbon and Alençon had attempted a show of strength to demonstrate their unhappiness with the regime, but a decisive military response from King Charles drove de Villandrando and his men out of the kingdom and the two dukes into retreat – a disgrace that explained their absence from the triumphal royal entry into Paris that Nove
mber. In February 1440, however, hostilities broke out again. At the end of 1439, Charles had set in train a programme of reform designed to centralise all powers to raise troops in the hands of the king – a move intended to bring order to his kingdom, but which offered further provocation to resentful princes and mercenaries alike. This time, Bourbon and Alençon were joined in their disaffection by sixteen-year-old Louis, the king’s eldest son and heir. The origin of the breach between son and father – the reason why the dauphin was so easily suborned by the rebel lords – was not made public, but it evidently ran deep, and, by lending the proximate authority of the king’s heir to the dukes’ self-assertion, it magnified the threat of the revolt many times over.

  For five months, King Charles found himself at war within the frontiers of his own kingdom. But once again, with the able support of Constable Richemont and his deputies, Raoul de Gaucourt and Poton de Xaintrailles, incisive military action forced the rebels to submit. Bourbon, Alençon and the king’s prodigal son were pardoned, in return for the ‘humility and obedience’ with which they had approached their sovereign, and peace was restored. All the same, the next decade was marked by continuing tensions among the lords and the increasing alienation of the dauphin from his royal father – conflict that was not ameliorated by the death of the grande dame of French politics, Yolande of Aragon, in 1442, or by the rapid rise to power from 1444 of the king’s influential new mistress, Agnès Sorel.

  Still, no rivalrous intrigue at the court of France could compare with the bewildering nightmare that was unfolding on the other side of the Channel. The lords of England had sought to shoulder the weighty legacy of Henry V – the government of their own realm and the war to secure English France – until his son, Henry VI, should be old enough to lead them himself. By 1440, the younger King Henry was eighteen years old, well past the age at which previous kings had sloughed off the tutelage of minority councils – or indeed the age at which the Armagnac whore had defeated his captains at Orléans. But he showed no sign of leading anyone anywhere. He was mild and vague, and generous too, in the sense that he said yes to any request that reached him, but in his gentle artlessness it began to seem – alarmingly – that he might resemble his maternal grandfather, the fragile King Charles the Well-Beloved, rather more than his warrior father. As a result, his lords found that they had no choice but to continue to manage his kingdoms, and his war, on Henry’s behalf.

  By the early 1440s, the unhappy reality with which they were confronted was that, in the face of the French resurgence and the absence of a king who could rally his faltering troops, it was peace rather than war that presented the best chance of keeping Normandy, at least, in English hands. In 1444 the earl of Suffolk, who had emerged as the leading figure in this hobbled and improvised regime, was sent to France to negotiate a truce and bring home a royal bride. But the English position was now so weak that Suffolk could secure a suspension of war for only twenty-two months, and a bride who was not one of the king’s daughters – Charles could not, after all, allow any child of his to marry a rival who still denied his right to his own throne – but a more marginal figure, the queen’s fourteen-year-old niece Margaret, daughter of Yolande’s son René of Anjou. It was a start, but what remained of English France needed more time for retrenchment, and more would have to be offered to get it. And so, in 1445, a secret deal was done by which the county of Maine, which lay precariously between English Normandy and French Anjou, would be handed over to King Charles in return for a truce of twenty years.

  If the opportunity had been taken to renew Normandy’s battered defences – if the listing English regime had had the galvanising leadership of its king, or the money it needed to seize the moment – then perhaps the plan could have worked. Instead, chaos reigned. Crisis in England consumed the energies of the lords who might have taken command in Normandy, while the captains who had fought for so long to keep Maine for King Henry simply refused to hand over their hard-won territory to King Charles. The English, it became painfully apparent, could neither deliver what they promised nor defend what they held. In February 1448, after repeated demands for its surrender, Charles sent troops into Maine to take by force what was his. Now, it was only a matter of time. An army under the command of the Bastard of Orléans made its move into Normandy in July 1449. A year later, all that remained of Henry V’s glorious conquests was the fortress of Cherbourg, perched on a rocky outcrop in a stormy sea. And by 12 August 1450, the French tide had swept the demoralised English utterly away.

  Nine years earlier, King Henry’s council in Rouen had written to their king to plead for his help. ‘Our sovereign lord’, they said, ‘… we write to you once more in extreme necessity, signifying that our malady is akin to death or exile, and, as regards your sovereign power, very close upon total ruin … we do not know how for the future it is best for you to keep your people nor to manage your affairs in this your lordship, which we perceive to be abandoned like the ship tossed about on the sea by many winds, without captain, without steersman, without rudder, without anchor, without sail, floating, staggering and wandering in the midst of the tempestuous waves, filled with the storms of sharp fortune and all adversity, far from the haven of safety and human help.’ Of the most loyal of those counsellors, many had now been overtaken by time: Bishop Cauchon was more than seventy when he died suddenly in 1442, and Louis de Luxembourg had followed him to the grave in 1443. But their despairing verdict stood. England found itself without a captain, and English France was lost.

  On 10 November 1449, the captain of the most Christian kingdom of France – who had learned, from unpromising beginnings, how to believe in his God-given sovereignty, how to take the fight to his enemies and how to unite his people around him – had ridden into Rouen. The city had surrendered to his forces only weeks earlier, and now King Charles was taking possession of what had been, for more than thirty years, the citadel of the English invaders. First came his guard of archers, dressed in their liveries of red, white and green, then trumpeters in red with gold on their sleeves, the sound of their silver trumpets filling the pale sky. Just before Charles himself came Poton de Xaintrailles on a great charger carrying the mighty sword of state, Charlemagne’s Joyeuse; then at last the king, in plate armour, his horse draped in trailing blue velvet spangled with golden fleurs-de-lis. The standard of St Michael flew over the procession as it passed through the city gate, where the king was joined by Raoul de Gaucourt, who had spent so many of his seventy-four years fighting to defend the realm, and by the Bastard of Orléans, now raised to the ranks of the peerage in his own right as count of Dunois, in recognition of his brave and loyal service to the crown.

  Charles of France stopped at the great cathedral of Notre-Dame to give thanks for the victory God had granted him. He was not far from the river, into which the ashes of a nineteen-year-old girl had been thrown almost twenty years before. He prayed; and the quiet waters of the Seine flowed on.

  12

  She was all innocence

  Joan had not been forgotten. In the dazzling city of Constantinople, almost two years after her death, a servant of the Byzantine emperor asked a Burgundian visitor whether it was true that the Maid had been captured. ‘It seemed to the Greeks an impossible thing,’ the Burgundian reported, and when he told them what had become of her, they were ‘filled with wonder’.

  Closer to home, her memory had been kept alive by the people of Orléans, whose gratitude for their liberation had not dimmed. Every year celebrations were held in the town to commemorate the miraculous events of 8 May 1429, when the Maid had forced the English into ignominious retreat. In 1435, thanks to Gilles de Rais, the Breton nobleman who had been one of Joan’s brothers-in-arms that glorious day, the anniversary was marked with a performance of breathtaking scale and ambition: a play entitled The Mystery of the Siege of Orléans. Since ‘mystery’ was a word that usually signified the depiction of stories from the Bible or the lives of saints, the burden of the drama was clear even befo
re the cast of hundreds made their appearance on stage, speaking twenty thousand lines of verse in which, amid ingeniously constructed scenery, the Maid relived her divinely inspired triumph. In her honour, no expense was spared – and some at least of the extravagant outlay was deliberately incurred, since de Rais had specifically ordered that the actors should be costumed only in the finest fabrics, and that the crowds should eat and drink their fill while they watched. It was an epic spectacle, but its grandeur was fleeting. De Rais’s frenzied spending proved part of a vertiginous plunge into financial ruin. Then, five years later, he was tried and hanged for the sexual assault and murder of more than a hundred children. His play was not seen on stage again.

  By the time de Rais died, his name indelibly stained with the horror of his crimes, hopes had been raised that Joan herself might return to the world. In May 1436 – a little more than a month after Paris had fallen to King Charles’s forces, just as the Maid had always said it would – a dark-haired woman had appeared at Metz, a town fifty miles from Domrémy, outside the north-eastern borders of the kingdom. She looked so like Joan – either that, or the desire to believe that Joan had somehow escaped the fire was so great – that many people claimed they recognised her, including two of the Maid’s own brothers. She wore men’s clothes and rode a horse with ease and skill, and her brief moment of celebrity brought her a wealthy husband, a knight of Metz named Robert des Armoises. This counterfeit Maid had given birth to two sons, it was said, by the time she moved west to Orléans in the summer of 1439. There, she was wined and dined and given purses of gold ‘for the good that she did the town during the siege’. But when she appeared in Paris in 1440, she was publicly denounced as a fraud by the parlement and university, and after that, with little prospect of further profit from her imposture, the woman slipped away from public view.