The Maid and the Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Ordinarily, Yolande would have been very happy with these negotiations. After all, she had been trying to separate the duke of Brittany from his English and Burgundian allies and bring him into an alliance with Charles VII for years. There was, however, a slight problem with this new arrangement: Isabelle of Brittany had been very publicly affianced for years to Yolande’s eldest son, Louis III, currently away in Italy and so conveniently unavailable to defend his marital rights. To sever the relationship was an act of treachery (not to mention highly reminiscent of what Yolande herself had done when she had so abruptly and dismissively returned Louis III’s first fiancée, the duke of Burgundy’s daughter, those many years ago). Georges de la Trémoïlle was well aware of the offending nature of this arrangement and suggested that the king send Arthur of Richemont himself to Saumur to break the news to the queen of Sicily, hoping to cause a rupture between the constable and his most powerful supporter.

  He very nearly succeeded. Yolande was above all committed to the welfare and advancement of her children, and, as the lord of Trémoïlle had expected, she reacted to the breaking of the marriage alliance between her eldest son and the daughter of the duke of Brittany as a profound insult. The woman who had taken with equanimity the murder of John the Fearless, the disinheritance of her son-in-law the dauphin, and the trials of a decades-long war with England, who had counseled forbearance and diplomacy in the face of nearly every emergency, lost all of her sangfroid and self-discipline when this news was delivered to her by her hapless protégé. “When the constable came, in the name of his brother, to see Yolande, accompanied by the count of Etampes and the Breton ambassadors, to obtain her agreement [to the marriage of Isabelle to the count of Laval] she became violently angry and it almost came to an open declaration of war,” reported G. du Fresne de Beaucourt, Charles VII’s definitive biographer. Although the constable managed to salvage his relationship with his patron, the queen of Sicily was reconciled to this betrayal only when Charles VII later appeased her by agreeing to a face-saving replacement marriage between her second daughter, Yolande of Anjou, and the duke of Brittany’s eldest son. She must have directed some choice words, too, at her youngest son for allowing himself to be outwitted, because Charles of Anjou later took his revenge in a way that implied he had strong feelings about the matter. But the principal outcome of this episode was that Yolande of Aragon was jolted out of retirement, and in this La Trémoïlle seriously miscalculated, for, once roused, the queen of Sicily made for a dangerous enemy.

  She did not recover her former influence at once; La Trémoïlle’s power over Charles VII was still too strong. Through a combination of excessive solicitude for his well-being and an adroit manipulation of his many weaknesses, the councillor had made himself seemingly indispensable to the king. (One of the many services the lord of Trémoïlle provided to his sovereign was to openly encourage and enable Charles’s frequent infidelities. As might be expected, this did not endear him to the queen.) The planned marriage between Isabelle of Brittany and the count of Laval went through despite Yolande’s vociferous objections. Although the expense of underwriting the elaborate coronation at Reims had severely depleted the royal treasury’s resources, Georges de la Trémoïlle continued to reap substantial rewards, both in terms of tax revenues and outright gifts of gold and property, from the king in exchange for “the great, notable, profitable and agreeable” tasks that he performed for Charles’s benefit.*

  René at home in his castle at work on a book of chivalry.

  How long it might have taken to dislodge this favorite using the customary methods of politics is anyone’s guess. But in the summer of 1431 another Angevin family crisis arose, this one involving René, that, even more than the severed marriage contract, forced Yolande of Aragon to intervene once again in the management of her son-in-law’s kingdom, and by so doing win the war.

  THAT RENé, who had been Joan’s earliest (if clandestine) supporter, should be the means, however backhanded, of the accomplishment of her goals is somehow fitting. After the disaster at Paris, René had remained loyal to his brother-in-law the king and had pursued the struggle against Charles VII’s enemies from his home duchy of Bar and Lorraine, an enterprise that coincided nicely with self-interest, as he got to keep everything he conquered. As a further encouragement to this helpful relative, Charles sent him troops and an experienced captain, the lord of Barbazan, so that René might launch an offensive into the neighboring county of Champagne. In 1430 this strategy resulted in a major victory against the Burgundians, when René seized the town of Chappes, a feat for which he was approvingly described by a chronicler as “a brave knight of great heart who showed himself to be proud and courageous.”

  Then, at the beginning of the succeeding year, on January 15, 1431, just as Joan’s trial for heresy was beginning in Rouen, René’s father-in-law, the old, gouty, philandering duke of Lorraine, finally succumbed to his various illnesses and René at last came into his inheritance. He was now officially titled duke of Bar and Lorraine (his uncle, the cardinal, had died the previous June), with all of the advantages that the distinction implied: overlordship of a large swath of land supplemented by the wealth of its rents and a highly prestigious position in the world.

  Unfortunately, the dispensation of lucrative legacies such as the old duke had agreed to bestow on his son-in-law were frequently challenged by other family members who considered themselves cheated by these arrangements, and the duke of Lorraine’s estate was no exception to this rule. René’s father-in-law had had a younger brother, and this younger brother had had a son, Antoine, and Antoine thought that no matter what had been agreed to in the past, he was far more entitled to his uncle’s estates than was René. To buttress his position, Antoine appealed to Philip the Good, who was already none too pleased that René had brazenly invaded Champagne and taken the town of Chappes away from him. Consequently, the duke of Burgundy was only too happy to provide Antoine with an army of approximately four thousand warriors. On July 2, 1431, Antoine’s forces met René’s near Bulgnéville, about ten miles southeast of Neufchâteau.

  Although René, still accompanied by the lord of Barbazan, commanded the larger force—some seventy-five hundred men in all—Antoine had the benefit of position. The Burgundians were entrenched behind a stream and had taken the precaution of digging trenches and erecting the customary line of stakes behind which stood a crack troop of four hundred archers lent by Philip. Antoine had also thought to bring along some heavy artillery. René had no bowmen to speak of and was without guns altogether, serious drawbacks that the more experienced Barbazan took pains to point out. But René, with one victory under his belt, was overeager for a second and was the superior in rank. He overruled Barbazan and ordered his men to cross the stream and attack. René would later defend this decision by observing that he felt that “he had so many men that it seemed that he could fight all the world for a day.”

  This sentiment proved optimistic. René’s forces charged directly into a thumping bombardment of cannonballs and a storm of lethal arrows. It was one of the shortest battles in French history. The poor lord of Barbazan died alongside his men in the first wave of the assault. René himself was struck in the face and went down soon thereafter. Seeing their commander incapacitated, the remainder of René’s forces deserted, allowing Antoine to claim victory in a record fifteen minutes (although it took a further two hours for the Burgundians to chase down and slay the fleeing opposition). In the resulting chaos, the wounded duke of Bar and Lorraine was initially claimed by an ignominious squire intent on making a profit from his noble captive, but Antoine soon discovered the identity of the prisoner and took possession of René himself. But even Antoine was to be denied so great a prize, and René was almost immediately consigned to the duke of Burgundy, who had him carted off to Dijon and sequestered in a high tower cell at one of his castles, there to await his fate.

  The defeat and capture of René of Anjou had infinitely more impact upon the court of
Charles VII than had the burning of Joan of Arc six weeks earlier. “Intelligence of this defeat was spread throughout the countries of Bar and Lorraine, and that their lord had been made prisoner, which caused the severest grief to all attached to him,” wrote the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet. Not that anyone close to him feared for his life. The difference in René’s experience of captivity and Joan’s is striking. The duke of Bar and Lorraine was a man of high birth and position. The laws of chivalry had been expressly developed to safeguard such a lord as he, and he received the full benefit of their protection, even though he had somewhat broken the rules and surrendered to a mere squire and not a member of the nobility as was the proper etiquette. René was never shackled in irons nor threatened by his jailers. Nor was it conceivable that he would ever be sold to the En glish no matter what the sum offered; the very idea was ridiculous; the duke of Burgundy would never have lived down the dishonor. And although René was of course made melancholy by his confinement, he was certainly never reduced by terror to such despair that he felt the need to throw himself out the window. On the contrary, he was allowed visitors and furloughs. He seems to have whiled away most of his time in prison painting pictures on the walls of his room and preparing sketches of stained glass windows.

  But to have the queen’s younger brother a prisoner of “our adversary of Burgundy” was a bitter pill to Charles VII. Philip the Good was fully cognizant of the boost that had been given to his bargaining position and would not in the beginning even consider setting a ransom for his hostage. To convince him otherwise, Charles was moved to real action. The military offensive against Burgundian territory, in both the north and east, was stepped up significantly in the wake of René’s capture. By a letter of July 22, the lord of Albret was named to replace the deceased Barbazan and sent to Champagne to continue to try to reclaim the area for Charles. On July 20, the duke of Austria was finally induced to declare war on Philip and began a series of border strikes that, while not seriously endangering his duchy, nonetheless forced the duke of Burgundy to divert resources to this area. Charles even sent ambassadors to the Holy Roman Emperor, who had his own territorial disputes with Philip, to arrange an alliance against Burgundy.

  But above all else, René’s capture served to convince his mother that the time had finally come to separate Philip the Good from his English allegiance. She had always believed in and worked toward this goal, but now it acquired a new urgency. A truce alone was no longer acceptable; there had been truces in the past and these had been implemented merely as a means of stalling for advantage; they were easily made and just as easily broken. What was required now was a firm peace treaty between the king of France and the duke of Burgundy, for only in this way could her son be assured of his freedom. Keeping military pressure on Philip might encourage the duke to come to terms, but it could be only one component of the overall strategy. Of equal importance would be the opening of a confidential diplomatic channel between the two courts, aimed at assessing the duke of Burgundy’s state of mind and exploiting any potential friction between Philip and the regency government in France. The question was only how best to do this, and the prisoner himself soon provided the answer.

  AS IT HAPPENED, by the summer of 1431, just at that critical juncture in the war when he had so fortuitously captured René, Philip the Good was in fact experiencing some deep reservations about his dealings with England. This was entirely based on the sudden realization by the English exchequer that the war in France was costing a great deal of money. In the Middle Ages, foreign conquests were undertaken as much for the expectation of profit as for glory; the whole point was to ravage the enemy and bring home whatever spoils could be conveniently appropriated. But in France, the En glish baronage was beginning to suspect, the reverse was true. It was the French who were making all the money! French priests and officials were on the English payroll; there was a seemingly endless demand for more soldiers, more supplies, more arms; after Charles’s coronation at Reims, the English treasury had been required to pay for a competing enthronement ceremony for ten-year-old Henry VI in Paris. The French, it seemed, could do nothing for themselves: the government had even to foot the bill for the purchase and prosecution of that Armagnac witch who had caused so much trouble in Orléans. For most of the 1420s, while the English were winning and Charles’s resistance was feeble, the war had more or less paid for itself. But in 1429, with the arrival of Joan of Arc, English outlays suddenly exceeded receipts by a distressing 10,000 pounds. And since that time, the trend had continued, and for precious little return, at least as perceived by the native English baronage. Henry VI’s forces held less territory in France in 1431 than they had in 1428 and there was apparently need of significant funds just to ensure against further losses. Although she never realized it, Joan’s most meaningful blow against her enemies was in making the war expensive.

  And when it came to allies who expected to be paid for their assistance, no one’s hand reached deeper into the pocket of the English treasury, the regency government noted, than Philip the Good’s. The duke of Burgundy had already been much enriched—outlandishly so, it was believed by some in England—in terms of both authority and territory as well as by currency. And yet in November 1430, he had had the temerity to write a letter to Henry VI complaining that Compiègne had been lost because he hadn’t received his money quickly enough and that if his expenses weren’t met soon Burgundy would refuse to participate in the war altogether! “It is… true, most redoubted lord,” the duke of Burgundy had written disagreeably to the boy king, “that, according to the agreement drawn up on your part with my people, you ought to have paid me the sum of 19,500 francs of royal money each month for the expenses of my troops before Compiègne, as well as the cost of the artillery…. It was under the impression that this would be done on your part, and especially that the said payment would be made without fail, as agreed, that I had my men stationed before Compiègne all the time. But, most redoubted lord, these payments have not been kept up by you, for they are in arrears to the tune of two months…. My most redoubted lord, I cannot continue without adequate provision in future from you… and without payment of what is due me.”

  The English response to this irksome dunning came addressed to Philip in a long letter issued by the regency council from Rouen on May 28, 1431, just two days before Joan’s execution. It was a masterpiece of evasion. “And firstly, with regard to… the great damages, outlays, and expenses which my said lord of Burgundy and his lands… have sustained by occasion of the wars; the king [Henry VI] is as much annoyed therewith as if they had been in his own country,” the letter began diplomatically, before going on to address, at some length, “the great diligence” with which the English king was prosecuting the war, and how much he was doing and had already done on Philip’s behalf. The issue of the outstanding debt owed to the duke was referred to only at the end of this extensive missive. “To the tenth article, which makes mention of what is demanded by my said lord of Burgundy in consequence of his troops who have been before Compiègne, and the artillery which has been there employed, the king will cause to be inspected the indentures and arrangements which have been made and taken in these matters… and if it shall be agreeable to my said lord of Burgundy to send him some of his people, he will cause such an arrangement to be made as ought reasonably to be satisfactory,” the English council concluded. Apparently what was satisfactory to the king of England did not involve actually paying Philip his money, because the duke had to remind Henry VI quite forcefully again six months later by a letter of December 12, 1431, that he still was not in receipt of his funds. “Notwithstanding all letters, statements, requests, and supplications, I have been unable to obtain from you, not even the payment of what you clearly owe me by the account made with your people, which amounts to a large sum…. In consequence of which I have been compelled to disband the said armies… and have been constrained to consent that certain truces and abstinences of war should be made in my sai
d countries, and especially in my countries of Burgundy, with your said enemies and mine,” Philip finished ominously. To further communicate his displeasure at this unwarranted disruption to his cash flow, the duke of Burgundy pointedly did not attend the coronation of Henry VI that was held in Paris later that month, but instead made good on his threat to collaborate with the enemy by signing a truce (which he had no intention of keeping, of course) with Charles’s representatives at Lille in order to prevent further incursions into his territory while he regrouped and waited for reinforcements.

  In the past, this behavior had always resulted in England’s capitulating to his demands, with perhaps some additional monies, territories, or honors thrown in as an extra incentive to remain true to the alliance. The duke of Burgundy no doubt waited confidently for this to happen; it must have come as quite a shock when it didn’t. And just as Philip came to the recognition that, inexplicably, a bribe would not be forthcoming, his chancellor, a man named Nicolas Rolin, who was the duke of Burgundy’s most trusted adviser (“it is he who does and decides everything, and through whose hands everything passes,” an eyewitness reported), found a convenient loophole in the treaty between Burgundy and England. According to Nicolas’s understanding of international law, Philip wasn’t obligated to maintain his allegiance to the English king, on the grounds that Henry V had died prior to the demise of the mad king Charles VI. Nicolas (who had tallied the devastation to the duke’s property caused by the war and had decided that peace would be far more profitable for all concerned, including himself) argued that although Henry V had been named Charles VI’s chosen successor, he had never actually assumed the French crown, being already dead when the reigning French monarch had died and passed it on. Therefore, as Henry V had never worn the crown of France, his son could not have inherited it from him, a legal nicety that had somehow been overlooked for the past decade while the English were winning and still paying.