And so the duke of Orléans, at the age of forty-five, was finally liberated and immediately married Philip’s niece at a lavish wedding paid for by the duke of Burgundy, well attended by both great nobles from France and ambassadors from England. But instead of being a force for unity, the reintroduction of the duke of Orléans into the fragile balance of power surrounding France became a source of division. “For… the king [Charles VII] had been informed of the whole conduct the duke had held since his return from England—of his oaths and alliance with the duke of Burgundy—of having received his order—how grandly he was accompanied—of his having admitted into his household numbers of Burgundians, who had formerly waged war against him and his crown,” explained Enguerrand de Monstrelet. “The king was also told that these connections had been formed in opposition to him and his ministers—and that many great lords, such as the dukes of Brittany and Alençon, had joined the two dukes, with the view of forming a new administration…. The king, who was ever inclined to suspicion, and to listen to such information, from the many plots that had been formed against him during his reign, readily believed what was now told him.”
Nor were these idle rumors. The duke of Burgundy had indeed joined in a new triple alliance with the dukes of Orléans and Brittany, which left open the possibility of a rebellion against Charles that could potentially be exploited by England. Also at this time the count of Armagnac, old ally of the duke of Orléans, offered one of his daughters to Henry VI in marriage without bothering to consult the king of France. Such an alliance could strengthen England’s position on the continent and put the southern portion of the kingdom at risk.
It had been more than ten years since Charles VII had vacillated, irresolute and conflicted in the face of the English threat, unable to act until Joan had appeared. He was now a different man, a man inured to threats to his rule, a king convinced of the legitimacy of his cause, and with the experience to lead. Consequently, he did not wait for the conspirators to make a move but at the first hint of collusion acted with energy to protect his government. “King Charles of France now assembled a very large body of men from different provinces of his realm, and ordered those captains… to join him instantly with their troops,” reported Enguerrand de Monstrelet. “When all were collected on the banks of the Loire, the king departed from Bourges in Berry, attended by the dauphin, the constable of France, the lord Charles of Anjou, and lords without number.” In 1441, the king himself took command of this army and invaded Champagne, reaching to the outskirts of Burgundy, and achieved the submission of the major forts and the town of Troyes, an act that reestablished and confirmed the population’s obedience to the crown. From Champagne, Charles continued to accompany the royal militia north of Paris, where he attacked and won the city of Pontoise, despite its being defended by an English garrison under the highly experienced command of Captain Talbot, one of the original members of the besieging force at Orléans and the commander who later fought against Joan and La Hire at the battle of Patay. Encouraged by these successes, the king continued his offensive the next year, moving against the English occupation in Guyenne, in the heart of the Aquitaine.
In England, the political faction committed to the war roused itself and succeeded in convincing Henry VI to raise a new army to repel the French attack and take back the kingdom. During the winter of 1442, an imposing force of some seven thousand men-at-arms was recruited for a spring offensive. And this was where matters stood in France when René lost Naples.
RENé’S SOJOURN in his southern Italian kingdom had been plagued by his customary perverse luck. Although initially the forces he commanded were of equal strength to those of his opponent, the king of Aragon, and he had some early successes, his fortunes fell when he lost one of his best commanders, a man named Jacopo Caldora, who was killed leading an assault in 1439. Jacopo was succeeded by his son, Antonio, who had neither his father’s strategic skills nor his sense of loyalty. Antonio was more of an entrepreneur—he regarded war as a moneymaking activity and was happy to switch sides at a moment’s notice depending upon whose offer was the most lucrative. This did not make him the most reliable soldier, particularly as René’s funds were already running low. The king of Sicily had to write home to his mother for more silver.
Matters came to a head in 1440 when René’s troops encountered the king of Aragon’s at the interior city of Benevento and lost due in large part to the nonparticipation of Antonio, who was too busy being bought off by the enemy to bother to fight. The fickle commander and his men eventually defected to the Aragonese side altogether. It was at this point that René sent Isabelle and his two sons back to Provence, an act that did not exactly instill confidence in his abilities among his Neapolitan subjects.
By the spring of 1442, the king of Aragon’s forces had surrounded the capital, and his fleet had cut off food supplies to the city. The population began to suffer from hunger, and what support René and Isabelle had managed to garner in the past eroded. On June 1, a company of Aragonese soldiers quietly infiltrated Naples through an underground well by bribing the local guard; a second squadron followed the first; and by the next morning enough enemy soldiers were inside the city to open two of the gates. The king of Aragon’s army poured into the streets of the capital. There was very little resistance from the starving population; on the contrary, most people welcomed the intruders, and a group of nuns even went so far as to toss ropes to the enemy soldiers in order to help them scale the high walls of the city.
René rushed out of his castle with a small band of loyalists. Fighting in the streets, he made an attempt to repel the invaders, but soon saw that it was hopeless and escaped to a waiting galley. “Were I certain of death I should not care, but I fear being taken prisoner,” he gasped as his final poignant farewell to his men. In the confusion of the assault his ship managed to elude the enemy fleet, enabling the last in the long line of Angevin pretenders to the throne of Naples to watch from beyond the shore as the army of the king of Aragon took control of the capital—and with it, the kingdom.
By the end of the year, René was back in Provence and reunited with Isabelle and his sons. He arrived in Marseille depressed, defeated, and insolvent, just in time to hear that his mother had passed away.
YOLANDE OF ARAGON was sixty-one years old in 1442, the year she died. She was such an extraordinary presence that it must have seemed to her vassals that she was indestructible. The year before her death, the bishopric of Angers fell vacant, and she nominated her secretary to the position as a reward for his long years of loyal service. Charles VII made the mistake of trying to overrule her, and put his own candidate into the office. The queen of Sicily, in a fury, let it be known that if the king’s appointee made an appearance in Angers she would have his head cut off. The king backed down. Yolande’s candidate got the position. Clever little Margaret, still living with her grandmother, took it all in.
Yolande must have been very close to her granddaughter by this time, because her last public act was an attempt to elevate Margaret’s nuptial prospects. It happened that the Holy Roman Emperor himself was looking for a wife, and had heard of the exceptional beauty of King René’s younger daughter. Ambassadors were sent to Saumur to inspect the girl and make an offer. They arrived in September 1442. The queen of Sicily was noticeably failing in health, but she roused herself to one last great effort. Yolande’s own dressmakers were called in, and Margaret was outfitted in a sumptuous robe made of cloth of gold and trimmed in white fur. In the account book of the period it was specifically noted that the queen of Sicily had ordered that no expense be spared as she wanted her granddaughter to look “dazzling.” The imperial representatives were presented, Margaret was observed in all of her finery, and afterward everyone was treated to a series of extravagant feasts and entertainments. Although nothing definite could be concluded in her father’s absence, the ambassadors were clearly impressed and no doubt made an extremely positive report of the young lady’s charms upon their return t
o Germany.
By the time the envoys left Saumur at the beginning of October, the energy it had taken to entertain on such a lavish scale had begun to take its toll. Aware that she was terminally ill, Yolande sought refuge in religion and affiliated herself with a monastic house as a layperson or oblate. Practical to the end, on November 12, 1442, while staying at the chateau of the lord of Tucé, the queen of Sicily signed her last will and testament. In it, she divided the rights to her lands between her two surviving sons, René and Charles of Anjou. As remembrances, she gave René some important tapestries, and to her daughter Marie, some jewelry. Again, there is evidence of her deep affection for Margaret, as she alone among Yolande’s grandchildren was also willed a special ornament. But there was no great pile of coins or saved hidden fortune with which to surprise her heirs, as had been the case with her own mother-in-law, Marie of Blois. In fact, there was no money at all—the queen of Sicily had held nothing back but had unstintingly, over the course of twenty-five years, given her entire fortune to the prosecution of two wars. Conscious of the meagerness of her legacy, she made a point of explicitly explaining the lack of gold and the absence of silver plate and precious stones in her will. “The most beautiful and the best of these were used for the purposes of the kingdom of Italy and given to King Louis,” Yolande of Aragon wrote simply.
Stained glass window of Yolande of Aragon at the cathedral in Le Mans.
Two days later, the queen of Sicily died. She was buried in the cathedral Saint-Maurice of Angers, next to her husband, and with her death the last and the greatest of the Armagnac leaders of her generation passed away.
THE LOSS OF HIS MOTHER, who had ever been a source of strength and aid, deprived René of his most powerful supporter. Impoverished by his abortive campaign in Italy, already in arrears on the final two payments of his ransom due to the duke of Burgundy, and desperate to stay free of that prison cell in Dijon, René turned to his brother-in-law, Charles VII. In March 1443, he reunited with the king when the royal court convened at Toulouse. Charles had already raised a large body of soldiers and was intending to march them into Normandy in anticipation of the enemy counterattack. But when the formidable new English army, numbering some seven thousand men, landed at Cherbourg in April, its commander, the earl of Somerset, a man of excellent political connections but very little military experience, inexplicably shunned a decisive battle with his French counterpart. Instead, he stayed timorously within the occupied lands of the duchy of Maine, wreaking havoc and marching his men haphazardly through its own territory before ending up for no apparent purpose in Brittany, which was not in contention. (The earl of Somerset, challenged by his own staff on this questionable course of action, refused to explain his strategy, declaring somewhat enigmatically, “I will reveal my secret to no one. If my shirt knew my secret I would burn it.”) Whatever his secret was, it clearly did not involve an offensive strike against the French, as the earl of Somerset stayed in Brittany for only a few weeks, just long enough to extort some money from the duchy, before turning tail and sailing back to England.
This was the end of the war party’s influence in London. A substantial English army, once so feared by the French that the threat of fighting alone had brought the kingdom to submission, had retreated without even giving battle! At the beginning of 1444, the English sent a new embassy to Charles VII, this one led by the earl of Suffolk, the leader of the faction that argued in favor of a general peace in combination with a royal marriage. Henry VI was by this time referring to Charles VII as “our dear uncle of France.”
In April, Suffolk and his emissaries met with their counterparts in the French court at Tours and an agreement was hammered out. The issue of sovereignty was left unresolved but a two-year moratorium on all hostilities was successfully negotiated. “The meetings for peace were, during this time, continued with much activity at Tours, whither came many of the high nobility of France and England,” Enguerrand de Monstrelet wrote. “A general truce on the part of the king, our sovereign lord, and his kingdom, as well by sea as by land, his vassals and subjects, including those most powerful princes the kings of Castille and Leon, of the Romans, of Sicily, of Scotland; the dukedoms of Anjou, Bar, and Lorraine; the dauphin of Vienne; the dukes of Orléans, Burgundy, Brittany, Bourbon, Alençon; the count of Maine; and generally the whole of the princes of the blood-royal of France… including, likewise, all their vassals, subjects, and adherents… promising, on oath, to preserve the truce inviolate.” The agreement was signed on May 20, 1444, and was known as the Truce of Tours.
That left only the issue of the royal marriage, a far thornier solution, at least on the French side, than would first appear. To give one of Charles VII’s daughters to Henry VI was out of the question; it would only prejudice the dauphin’s chances of inheriting the throne peacefully after his father’s death, since any male offspring of such a marriage would inevitably claim rights to the kingdom through his mother. Charles wasn’t about to conclude a marriage that might start the whole Hundred Years War over again in the next generation. In fact, for this very reason, no daughter of a king of France was wed to an English sovereign for the next two centuries, an astute policy that had the added undeniable benefit of saving the head of at least one French princess during the reign of Henry VIII.
But neither could the king of France simply walk away from the possibility of a marriage alliance and allow Henry VI to choose his own bride—there was too much risk that one of Charles VII’s many enemies might use this device to try to amass power in order to challenge his rule. What was needed was the daughter of a nobleman upon whose loyalty the king of France could unquestionably rely; someone of very high rank who was nonetheless not a threat; someone who could perhaps be bullied into taking this on, as nobody really wanted to marry his child to Henry VI and send the girl over to live with the hated English. There was only one candidate who fit all of these requirements: René of Anjou’s daughter Margaret. “The marriage of Margaret was concluded… in the interest of Charles VII and at his demand,” René’s biographer stated flatly. Without his mother to support him, René was in no position to deny the king this or, for that matter, any request. A short time after the signing of the Truce of Tours, Margaret’s engagement to the son of the count of Saint-Pol was officially broken, the Holy Roman Emperor’s advances were courteously but firmly denied, and Yolande of Aragon’s favorite granddaughter was affianced to the king of England.
And so fifteen-year-old Margaret of Anjou, descended from the line of remarkable Frenchwomen that included Marie of Blois and Isabelle of Lorraine, and a girl who had just spent three years in the home and under the watchful tutelage of perhaps the most astute and powerful politician in the kingdom, was launched at the unsuspecting English aristocracy and married to Henry VI, a monarch so unsuited to his position that he made Charles VII look like a tower of energy and strength by comparison. The lessons acquired at her grandmother’s side bore fruit almost immediately. Margaret was crowned queen on May 30, 1445, at Westminster, promised in a letter of December 17 of the same year to do all she could to retrieve Maine for France, and by December 22 Henry VI had officially renounced his rights to the entire duchy, including the capital city of Le Mans, in favor of his father-in-law, René.* Even more provocatively, Margaret would later be credited by many with starting the infamous Wars of the Roses, a bitter civil conflict that would consume England for thirty years. Not quite retribution for Agincourt, of course—but close.
By the summer of 1444, when he was forced to accede to his daughter’s marriage, René’s position was especially vulnerable. The citizens of Metz, just north of Nancy in Lorraine, encouraged by the duke of Burgundy, had revolted against René’s authority, and some of its inhabitants had even had the temerity to steal his wife’s luggage when she had visited as part of a pilgrimage. Impecunious René had not the resources to strike back on his own, and needed to convince the king of France to lend him his army to help him subdue the town quickly lest the d
uke of Burgundy gain a foothold in the duchy. Also, he was hoping to induce the king to intervene on his behalf with Philip the Good to settle the outstanding debt associated with the payment of his ransom. Accordingly, René invited Charles VII and all of his court to Nancy, where he feasted the king and introduced him to one of his wife Isabelle’s ladies-in-waiting, a notorious beauty by the name of Agnes Sorel, who would very quickly become the king’s mistress.
It was customary to present the visiting monarch with a memento on these occasions out of gratitude for the distinction conferred by the royal presence. René must have known that it would be helpful if he could give Charles something that would discreetly remind the king of everything that René and his family had done for him and the kingdom over the long course of the war. Being of an artistic nature, the duke of Lorraine ceremonially bestowed upon Charles VII a beautifully bound volume specially produced to commemorate the event. It cannot be by mere chance that, out of all the works of literature, history, and theology that were available, René elected to present Charles VII with a copy of The Romance of Melusine.
The following year, Charles took his army to Metz and helped René bring the city back to obedience. Afterward, the king hosted a conference attended by the duchess of Burgundy, who was empowered to act for her husband, at which the payments owed on the final installments of René’s ransom were forgiven.
The Maid and the Queen Page 28