The Maid and the Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Accompanied by her relative, Joan reached Vaucouleurs safely. The distinguishing feature of the town was its fortified castle, a twenty-three-stone-tower edifice on the bank of the Meuse supported by an escarpment, at which was stationed a garrison loyal to Charles. The soldiers of this unit were responsible for defending the territory surrounding Vaucouleurs against the Burgundians. Joan and her cousin went searching for Robert de Baudricourt and eventually found him. There followed a conversation that was overheard by a number of bystanders. The event was sufficiently unusual to be remembered long afterward: an unknown sixteen-year-old girl, attired in a shabby red dress or surcoat, loudly declaiming to a seasoned military commander while her adult male cousin looked on uncomfortably. This sort of thing did not occur every day in Vaucouleurs. An eyewitness reported, “Joan the Maid came to Vaucouleurs at the time of the Ascension of Our Lord [approximately May 14], as I recall it, and there I saw her speak with Robert de Baudricourt who was then captain of the town. She told him that she was come to him, Robert, sent by her Lord to bring word to the Dauphin that… the Lord wanted the Dauphin to be made King and he was to place his kingdom at her command, saying that despite his enemies the Dauphin would be made King and that she would lead him to his coronation.” The outcome of this first parley was not successful. “This Robert several times told me that I should return her to her father’s house after having cuffed her soundly,” Joan’s hapless cousin Durand Laxart reported.

  Durand took the captain’s advice and returned Joan to Domrémy, but the war intervened and she didn’t remain there long. On June 22, taking the recommendation of the military council in Paris, the duke of Bedford ordered the governor of the nearby county of Champagne, Antoine de Vergy, a Burgundian ally who was on the English payroll, to attack the fortress of Vaucouleurs. In July, Antoine invaded the Bar-Lorraine region with an army of some twenty-five hundred soldiers, frightening the inhabitants of all of the villages in the area, including Domrémy. Gathering their possessions and livestock, Joan and her family followed their neighbors and fled to Neufchâteau, the nearest walled city, which was located only about ten miles south of Vaucouleurs.

  Neufchâteau was large enough to boast an inn, owned by a woman known as La Rousse (the Redhead), and here Joan lodged, helping out in the kitchen to help pay for her stay. Both the inn and the city were crowded with people and men-at-arms similarly displaced by the war, and as might be imagined, there was much talk about the political situation and the need for Charles’s government to take action against the enemy, particularly when the Burgundians began burning everyone’s fields, an infuriating measure that could be witnessed simply by climbing onto the city’s walls. There was much fear that Vaucouleurs would surrender, but Robert de Baudricourt and his men stubbornly resisted, and by the end of July the enemy, finding the fortress more difficult to conquer than they had expected, lifted the siege and retreated to their home base in Champagne.

  FROM HER EXILE in Saumur, Yolande monitored the renewed English military offensive, and Charles’s pathetic response to it, with increasing concern. Ordinarily, as a diplomat, she would have preferred to work quietly behind the scenes in order to regain her former influence at court. But conditions were deteriorating so rapidly that she didn’t have the time. So she effectively staged a coup.

  In February 1428, she hosted a small but select conclave at her castle to discuss what could be done to redeem the political and military situation. Attending this private conference were three former members of Charles’s council—Arthur of Richemont (the constable), the duke of Clermont, and the count of Pardiac—all persons of high birth who, like Yolande herself, had left the king’s court the year before. An understanding was reached, an army was mobilized, and by summer a plan of action was in motion.

  On June 15, 1428, just after Joan’s first unsatisfactory conversation with Robert de Baudricourt, Charles received a written communication signed by the constable and the two noblemen who had been called by Yolande to Saumur. In their letter, the three called for a meeting between the “États généraux” (a representative assembly from all the territories loyal to Charles) and the king and his councillors, for the purpose of determining the direction of the war. The three “princes of blood” noted that they wished to be reconciled with the king but only if the policies drawn from these deliberations were actually put into effect (a reference to La Trémoïlle’s influence over Charles, which was generally recognized as inhibiting the king’s will to act). To see that this condition was met, they demanded that “the queen of Sicily and those whom she was pleased to designate for this task, be responsible for ensuring the execution” of whatever resolutions came out of these discussions, evidence of Yolande’s guiding influence over these events. That these three princes, with the queen of Sicily’s aid, had managed to raise a substantial army capable of taking over the government with or without Charles’s permission was well known at the royal court, and added greatly to the persuasiveness of their argument.

  Charles was in no position to refuse this ultimatum. The prospect of a new offensive by the English frightened him; if the enemy broke through to the south of France he could be captured or killed. He needed allies and troops, and he recognized that the three princes, once reconciled, could bring the forces they were now using to threaten him to his defense. Accordingly, he acceded to all of their demands, and on September 15 a meeting of the États généraux was convened at Chinon. Yolande was back in power.

  Having once again organized events to her satisfaction, the queen of Sicily returned to Charles’s court. Mindful of the lessons of her own mother-in-law, Marie of Blois, to ease the process of mediation and smooth over any lingering hurt feelings, Yolande thoughtfully remembered to pack 500,000 francs, which she immediately donated to Charles’s war effort. Even more important, she brought with her two new influential allies, the duke of Alençon and the count of Vendôme, high-ranking noblemen who, with Richemont, Clermont, and Pardiac, now formed the core of her political party.

  Reconciliation was effected, and the queen of Sicily resumed her former position of authority within the royal council. At the September meeting, the États généraux, in combination with the councillors of the court, recommended that a new battalion be raised to meet the English threat, and, as previously agreed, Yolande was put in charge of organizing and supplying this army. She now had the policy she wanted—to meet the English with force—and the authority to implement it. She worked feverishly over the next few months to assemble the best and most experienced military commanders and soldiers available from within Charles’s dominion and to gather the necessary provisions and equipment. By winter, all was in readiness, awaiting only the king’s command to attack.

  But despite all of her efforts, she was unable to convince Charles to act militarily, and only the king could order the army to advance. Subtler methods would be necessary to effect that transition.

  BY SEPTEMBER, the reinforcements under the command of the earl of Salisbury had arrived in Paris and the English once more made plans to launch an offensive. Against the orders of the duke of Bedford, who wanted to attack and hold Anjou, the earl of Salisbury instead chose the city of Orléans, about halfway between Paris and Bourges, as his primary target. Orléans, on the north bank of the Loire, was protected by a number of walls and moats but was vulnerable to a blockade. In October, the earl of Salisbury had seized a number of towns in the surrounding area, including an important fort on the south side of the river, effectively isolating the city. Although Salisbury died from wounds incurred in the attack, he was immediately replaced by the earl of Suffolk, whose plan was simply to starve the inhabitants into submission. The English forces encircled the city and dug in for the winter, and so began the siege of Orléans.

  Charles, despite having earlier agreed to implement the war policies recommended by his councillors and the general assembly, hesitated. He was terrified of losing, and this fear manifested itself in the form of an obsession with the poss
ibility that he might be illegitimate. As part of a propaganda campaign to win the allegiance of their French subjects, the English had circulated a poster depicting in verse and images Henry VI’s lineage, tracing the child’s genealogy back to the great French king Louis IX. (Louis IX had later been deified Saint Louis; everyone in France, from the lowest peasant to the most exalted aristocrat, knew and revered Saint Louis.) The poem that accompanied this exceedingly clever and persuasive pictorial representation stressed the legitimacy of Henry V’s son to the French crown. “How this Herry in the eight degree / Is to seint Lowrys sone and very heire /… For to possede by enheritaunce / Crownes two of englond and of Fraunce,” the poet charged with this task wrote. The implication, of course, was that Charles was not legitimate—that he was instead the bastard son of Louis, duke of Orléans, by Isabeau of Bavaria, an accusation that Isabeau herself strenuously denied, and that the chronicler Jean Chartier accused the En glish of spreading deliberately, after which, he wrote, the queen “never again had joy in her heart.”

  Although the taint of Charles VII’s illegitimacy would follow him throughout the centuries, the bulk of the evidence sustains the theory that he was in fact the son of the king of France. Disapproval of Isabeau’s relationship with the duke of Orléans was not even hinted at by any chronicler until 1405, and Charles was conceived in 1402, when Isabeau’s fidelity to her husband was never questioned. Moreover, based upon the date of his birth, February 22, 1403, modern science is able to pinpoint the period of Charles’s conception as occurring between May 30 and June 1, 1402. The Monk of Saint-Denis specifically stated that “at the beginning of the month of June [1402]” the duke of Burgundy was apprised of the recovery of the king from one of his psychotic episodes. However, the duke of Burgundy was at this time in his northern territories, which meant that it would have taken a messenger at least a few days, if not a week, to transmit this information to him, so Charles VI had likely recovered by the last week in May. To prove that he was healthy again, the king would have once more begun sleeping with his wife, an action that resulted in Charles VII.

  But no matter how many times Yolande assured him that he was legitimate—“you are the son of a king,” she had told him repeatedly over the years—Charles continued to be racked by the fear that he was not legally heir to the kingdom, and so was fated to have his armies lose to the English. Even worse, egged on by Georges de la Trémoïlle, who was at his most influential when the king was faltering, instead of launching a counterattack, Charles instead began to toy with the idea of fleeing the kingdom as a means of avoiding disgrace or capture. One of Charles’s chamberlains later reported that in 1428, Charles went into his private chapel and silently prayed, “saying nothing, but begging God in his heart that if he were indeed the true heir of the blood and noble house of France, and the kingdom lawfully his, God would protect and defend him; or at least grant him grace to be spared death or captivity, and escape to Spain or Scotland, whose kings had long been brothers in arms and allies of the kings of France; hence he had chosen them as his last refuge.”

  To have her son-in-law abandon the kingdom was the worst possible scenario, not simply for her daughter Marie but for Yolande herself. If the king fled, the English army would march uncontested into his territory and the queen of Sicily would lose all her lands and castles and estates in Anjou and Saumur. This was unacceptable. And she knew all about his plan. Charles might have thought that he was keeping his prayers to himself, but the sentiments he professed to express only to God would hardly have been mysterious to those around him, particularly his wife and mother-in-law. Yolande had eyes and ears all over the court; many of the domestics who waited upon the king had initially been in service with the queen of Sicily or a member of her family and remained loyal to her. Not that spies were particularly necessary in this instance; the idea of escaping to Scotland, for example, was one that had already been openly broached by Charles’s advisers. As early as April 1428, Charles had sent ambassadors to try to arrange a marriage between his young son Louis and the daughter of the Scottish king as a means of further enabling this option. So widespread were the reports of Charles’s Scottish project that Joan herself mentioned Scotland in a chance conversation with a man who was at the time a complete stranger to her. “I must be at the King’s side, though I wear my feet to the knees. For indeed there is nobody in all the world, neither king nor duke, or daughter of the King of Scotland, nor any other who can recover the kingdom of France,” she said.

  Well indeed should Charles seek an alliance with the king of Scotland and get on his knees and beg God for assistance. The assault on Orléans was a blow meant to wound emotionally as much as militarily, a symbol of the futility of his efforts. Apprehensive that the return of the popular duke of Orléans might lead to further uprisings in France, the regency government had refused to set a ransom figure on him, and so thirteen years after Agincourt, the duke was still a prisoner of the English. To have a royal prince of once-mighty France held in captivity for so long was disgraceful enough, but for his captors to take advantage of his absence to seize and perhaps occupy his birthright was, at least to the common people, unthinkable. And yet throughout the winter of 1428 and into the early months of 1429, the king remained completely immobilized. It was as though Charles was waiting, yearning—begging—for a sign from God to tell him who he was and what to do.

  The frustration Yolande of Aragon experienced at the king’s obstinacy must have been overpowering. She had struggled to raise and supply a strong army and Charles refused to use it! And the English were within months, or perhaps even weeks, of taking Orléans! Desperate to shake him from his lethargy, the queen of Sicily was forced to intervene once again.

  Around this time—the date was not specifically recorded—a royal messenger named Colet de Vienne was quietly dispatched to the court of Lorraine. Subsequent events would prove that he was not ordered away by the king, as Charles was unaware of his whereabouts or his role in the drama that would later unfold. Most likely, then, the messenger was sent under the guise of a routine family communication between Yolande (or Queen Marie, acting for her mother) and her son, as no one else of note at court would have had business in Lorraine. But Colet de Vienne’s errand was anything but ordinary.

  The king needed the confidence that God was with him in order to pursue the military policy she favored? Very well, Yolande of Aragon would arrange to have his prayers answered.

  BY THE WINTER of 1428, the crisis was so acute that the French clergy was enlisted to organize regular weekly processions in the hopes that a public display of piety would find favor with God and lead to “the prosperity of the king’s arms.” In response, Joan’s voices became even more urgent and they again told her to approach Robert de Baudricourt, this time with a new mission. “The voice told me, twice or thrice a week, that I, Joan, must go away and that I must come to France and… that I should raise the siege laid to the city of Orléans,” she later told her inquisitors. “And me, I answered it that I was a poor girl who knew not how to ride nor lead in war.” Sometime in either December 1428 or early January 1429, Joan again enlisted the aid of her cousin and went to Vaucouleurs. She did not try to approach Robert de Baudricourt immediately as she had done previously, but instead took up residence at the home of a husband and wife, Henri and Catherine Le Royer, who owned a house in the town. By this time, Joan was convinced that she was the virgin referred to in the prophecy and made no secret of her belief or the reason for her visit. “At the time when Joan sought to leave the town she had been in my house for a period of three weeks,” Catherine Le Royer later testified. “And it was then that she sent to have speech with the lord Robert de Baudricourt that he take her to that place where the Dauphin was. But the lord Robert would not. And when Joan saw that Robert would not take her, she said—I heard her—that she must go to the place where the Dauphin was: ‘Have you not heard it said that it has been prophesied that France shall be lost by a woman and restored by a virg
in from the Lorraine marshes?’ I remembered having heard that and I was stupefied… and after that I believed in her words and with me many others,” Catherine said.

  This was Robert’s second refusal to take Joan, but it was not nearly as scornful or vehement as his first rejection. During the three weeks she spent in Vaucouleurs, Joan had begun gathering support for her mission. Those she lived with were so impressed by her speech, her piety, and her passion—and so in agreement with her views that the siege of Orléans ought to be lifted and Charles crowned at Reims and restored to his hereditary position as king of France—that they offered to take her themselves. Together with Durand Laxart and another man from Vaucouleurs, Jacques Alain, Joan started out on her own to reach Charles’s court. But she soon thought better of it and returned to Vaucouleurs, telling her companions that it was “not thus that they should depart.” Still, the attempt was an indication that public opinion in the town had shifted enough in her favor to give Robert de Baudricourt pause.

  Robert might have been the reigning power in Vaucouleurs, but like any knight he was also the vassal of a great lord, with whom he kept in regular contact and from whom he received military instructions. Robert was particularly close to his seigneur, and would later become his chamberlain and valued counselor. Robert de Baudricourt’s great lord was—Yolande of Aragon’s son René, the future duke of Bar and Lorraine.

  René was now twenty years old, the father of two sons and a daughter. Both his uncle and his father-in-law were ailing—each would die within the next two years—and René was shouldering the brunt of the work associated with the administration of Bar and Lorraine. René had maintained his love of art and was still a devoted reader of romances and a loyal follower of the chivalric tradition, but he was also keenly aware of the conflict with England and the need to protect his duchies from encroachment. Robert de Baudricourt was one of his best men; he had been instrumental in holding the important fortress at Vaucouleurs. The two were in frequent communication. “The register of the Archives of La Meuse… bears trace of a regular correspondence between the Duke of Bar [René] and Baudricourt,” wrote the great French scholar Anatole France.