7
It was clear to the duke of Bedford that, if Paris were to be defended, he would have to do it himself. In public – and with the air of one who hoped to make it so, if he said it often enough – the duke insisted that the Anglo-Burgundian alliance was holding strong; Philip of Burgundy, Bedford told the council back in England, was showing himself in this hour of need to be a ‘true kinsman, friend and loyal vassal’ of the young King Henry.
But the practical fact of the matter was that Duke Philip was not in Paris. Instead, by the first week in August 1429 he was in his palace at Arras in Artois, a hundred miles north, where – as Bedford happened to know – a high-level delegation of Armagnac envoys had just arrived, led by the chancellor Regnault de Chartres, archbishop of Reims, and the veteran soldier Raoul de Gaucourt. Duke Philip did not admit them to his presence straight away, and Bedford had the best of all possible spies, his sharp-eyed wife Anne, to keep him informed of what her brother was up to. Still, the situation was hardly reassuring – and, quite apart from his anxiety about the reliability of his Burgundian partner, Bedford was also distinctly short of English lieutenants, given that Suffolk, Talbot and Scales now languished in enemy hands.
There was little option but to set to work. Already the thirty-foot walls of the city had been strengthened and artillery positions ranged around them, and on 25 July the duke had ridden through the gates in the company of his uncle, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, along with 250 men-at-arms and 2500 archers – fresh troops raised by the cardinal in England for a crusade against Hussite heretics in Bohemia but, thanks to the pressure of events in France, hurriedly diverted instead to Paris. Within days, Bedford and this new force were in the field, moving through the countryside outside the city in the attempt to ward off any closer approach by the Armagnac army. But when the news arrived that Armagnac ambassadors were in Arras to treat for peace with Burgundy, the regent decided that the moment had come for a more dramatic move of his own.
By 7 August he was in Montereau, the fateful place where the blood of John the Fearless had been spilled almost ten years earlier. From there, Bedford issued a ringing challenge to ‘you, Charles of Valois, who are accustomed to name yourself dauphin de Vienne, and now without just cause call yourself king’. Charles should meet him face to face, he declared, either to make peace or to give battle; but the terms in which this defiance was couched made it clear that his words were intended as much for the ears of his Burgundian ally as they were directed at his Armagnac enemy. ‘We are, and we will always be, intent and determined on all good ways of peace that are not feigned, corrupt, dissembling, broken or perjured,’ he said – and all those listening could guess what was coming next – ‘… such as that at Montereau-Fault-Yonne, from which ensued, through your guilt and connivance, the most horrible, detestable and cruel murder, committed against law and knightly honour, of our dearest and most beloved late father’ – John the Fearless being Bedford’s father, according to church law, through his marriage to the duke’s daughter Anne. After their oaths sworn in Paris, and now this evocation of the killing on the very spot where it had taken place, it was Bedford’s hope that his brother-in-law Philip could not publicly overlook the crimes of the past, however much water had flowed under Montereau’s bloodstained bridge since then.
Bedford also had a message for the people of Paris. The so-called dauphin was abusing the trust of the simple and the ignorant, he explained, with the help of two ‘superstitious and reprobate characters’, both of them ‘abominable in the sight of God’: one ‘a sluttish woman of ill repute, dressed as a man and dissolute in her conduct’, the other ‘an apostate and seditious friar’. Brother Richard, it seemed, had been won over by his encounter with Joan at Troyes to such an extent that he was now riding with her and the Armagnac army. This news was so unwelcome in Paris, where his thundering sermons had converted many to a new austerity of life, that the citizens went back to playing backgammon, bowls and dice in ostentatious defiance of his teaching, and swapped the tin medallions that he had persuaded them to wear, each one inscribed with the name of Jesus, for Burgundian saltires. Yoking the friar and the Maid together therefore served a useful purpose for Bedford within the city he was trying to defend: Joan’s claims to divine inspiration could only be tarnished, in the eyes of the Parisians, if she were the partner in crime of a spiritual leader who had utterly betrayed their trust.
Bedford’s letter was long, but its conclusion was clear. God, ‘who is the only judge’, he said, would recognise the true right of King Henry, whether through peace or war. However much these words were intended for others as well as the newly crowned Armagnac king, Charles could hardly ignore such a challenge to his title and his conduct. By 14 August his army had approached within sight of Bedford’s forces north of Paris at Montepilloy, just outside Senlis. Both sides dug in overnight, working quickly to fortify their positions. The English – along with a few hundred Burgundian soldiers mustered at English expense for the defence of Paris – flew the banners of France and England, King Henry’s two realms, and the standard of their patron, St George. The Armagnacs were drawn up under their many commanders: the duke of Alençon, René of Anjou, Gilles de Rais and, at the front, the Bastard of Orléans, La Hire and the Maid, her white banner held high. King Charles, escorted by the count of Clermont and the ever-present La Trémoille, rode at a careful distance behind the lines. And so, through the heat of a scorching August day, they all – English, Burgundians and Armagnacs – waited for battle.
There were skirmishes, feints and parries, as each side sought to tempt the other into a full-blown assault. Every movement kicked up so much dust from the parched earth that, close as they were, it was hard to keep the enemy in plain sight. But as the hours dragged on, it began to dawn on the Armagnac captains that the English had no intention of leaving the ground they had staked out. At Rouvray, English forces had broken the Armagnacs with a battery of arrows from behind a barricade of herring-filled wagons, but at Patay, with their defences incomplete, they had met bloody disaster. They had no intention of making the same mistake again. And, of all the Armagnac captains, it was Joan who could not contain her frustration. She took her banner in her hand and rode right up to the enemy lines, daring them to attack; when her presence failed to provoke them, she sent a message that King Charles’s troops would give them time and space to deploy themselves for battle as they wished. There was no response. Night fell; and the next morning news reached the French camp that the English were marching back to Senlis, and from there to Paris.
Bedford had made his point, but he was not about to risk everything on a single encounter in the open. Let his enemies move against Paris if they dared; meanwhile Normandy urgently required his attention. There, Mont-Saint-Michel still held out, a lone Armagnac outpost off the coast of English France, but across the duchy, as reports spread of the rescue of Orléans and King Charles’s coronation campaign, resistance to English rule was growing. So much so, in fact, that the town of Évreux, thirty miles south of Rouen, had been surrounded by Armagnac troops and forced to agree to surrender if help did not come by 27 August. Bedford, who could not afford to see his Norman power base disintegrate, moved at speed to the rescue, and then took up position at Vernon, poised watchfully between his two threatened capitals, Paris and Rouen.
In the duke’s absence, King Charles continued his stately and apparently inexorable takeover of the towns around Paris. Compiègne, forty miles north-east of the city, opened its gates, and Beauvais, another thirty miles west from there, sent a delegation to offer its submission. This was a menacing royal progress, not only pushing towards Paris itself, but moving within striking distance of English Normandy to the west and Burgundian Artois to the north. The Armagnac strategy, however, had two faces. The king’s army remained in the field, but on 16 August – the day after the inconclusive face-off with Bedford’s forces at Montepilloy – his envoys were finally admitted to the presence of the duke of Burgundy at Arras. They hoped to hammer out terms for peace between the king and his Burgundian cousin, and there was serious intent, it seemed, on both sides: after intensive discussion at Arras, Burgundian ambassadors returned with the archbishop and de Gaucourt to Compiègne, to present the results of their labours at the Armagnac court. By 27 August, the king had agreed in principle to make spiritual reparation for the murder at Montereau (which he had of course, regrettably, been too young to prevent), and to offer financial compensation for the jewels and belongings the duke had had with him when he died. Philip would be confirmed in lands he had been granted by the English, and would be personally exempt from any requirement to do homage to Charles, while Charles himself would grant a general pardon and a general truce.
But it was not enough. Bedford’s public summoning of the spectre of Burgundy’s dead father had done its work; the duke could not bring himself to make a permanent peace with his murderer. Instead, on 28 August, a temporary truce was agreed, by which the abstinence from war that already protected the southern frontiers between Burgundian and Armagnac territory would now be extended to all lands north of the Seine with the exception of the city of Paris, which the duke of Burgundy could defend if it were to come under Armagnac attack. This, in other words, was a gesture of goodwill that would allow the moment to play itself out. The duke of Burgundy had not abandoned his English alliance, but his door was still open to the Armagnacs, who would, in the meantime, have the chance to find out whether Paris was theirs for the taking.
That was music to the ears of Joan, who had been left in uncomfortable limbo while these diplomatic wheels turned. She had a mission that depended on divine, not human, agency – except for the inconvenient fact that she needed the faith of politicians and the presence of soldiers to put it into effect. And now that the initial momentum of her campaign had dissipated in the aftermath of the coronation at Reims, questions about the nature and limits of the authority she might claim were becoming a little more difficult to answer. Some time earlier, for example, Count Jean of Armagnac – son of the nobleman who had given his name to the anti-Burgundian cause – had written from his lands in the far south-west of the kingdom to seek her advice on the papal schism. Almost all of Europe now regarded the conflict as settled in favour of Martin V, who had been elected to the Holy See at the Council of Constance, but Count Jean was one of the few who persisted in the belief that one of two others might still have a claim. ‘I beseech you’, he asked her, ‘to beg Our Lord Jesus Christ that, in His infinite mercy, He might wish to declare to us, through you, which of the three men is the true pope.’ At Compiègne, during the military lull after Montepilloy, Joan gave her answer. ‘Jhesus Maria. Count of Armagnac, my very dear and good friend, Joan the Maid lets you know that your messenger has reached me … I cannot reliably tell you the truth of the matter now, until I am in Paris or elsewhere, as required, because I am now too much caught up in the business of war; but when you know that I am in Paris, send a messenger to me and I will then tell you clearly which one you should put your faith in, and what I have learned from my rightful and sovereign lord, the king of all the world …’
Joan was prepared to envisage, it seemed, that her instructions from heaven would one day encompass more matters than she had so far spoken of. For the time being, though, she was consumed – and troubled – by the interruption to her military mission. On 23 August, the day after her reply to the count of Armagnac, she was at last given leave to ride out of Compiègne with her soldiers and her fellow captain, the duke of Alençon. Three days later, they had reached Saint-Denis, the town outside the walls of Paris that housed the holy abbey of France’s ancient patron and the blessed bones of its most Christian kings. The English had not thought it worthwhile to install a garrison in a place that had few fortifications, and many of the townspeople had retreated into Paris at news of the Armagnacs’ approach. Joan and her men therefore encountered no resistance as they reclaimed the protection of St Denis for a kingdom and an army that had marched for so long under the banner of the heavenly warrior St Michael, before the Maid had come to lead them.
Now the walls of Paris were just four miles away, but still Joan could not launch the attack she wanted. Instead, the king moved slowly south from Compiègne to Senlis while his counsellors continued their painstaking summits with the duke of Burgundy’s envoys. Finally, the partial truce was signed that left open the possibility of a fight for the capital, and by the end of the first week in September Charles arrived at Saint-Denis, while Joan and the army pushed on another two miles to the village of La Chapelle. She and Alençon now had the champions of Armagnac France around them – the counts of Clermont and Laval, de Rais, La Hire, de Gaucourt, Xaintrailles and more – and they had spent the days since their own arrival at Saint-Denis engaged in sorties and reconnaissance, gauging the task that lay ahead.
There was no doubt that the defences of Paris were monumental, on a scale far beyond anything that Joan had experienced before. Massive walls were pierced by arrow slits and topped with fortified towers and gun placements, and new-built boulevardsprotected each of the six gates, all of which lay behind an immense ditch that circled the whole city. Not only that, but the duke of Bedford had issued an impassioned summons to his captains in Normandy to come to him at Vernon by 8 or 9 September, with all the men they could spare, to march to the capital’s rescue (‘… and fail not hereof, as you love the conservation of this land, and as you will answer to my lords and us therefore in time coming’). But the threat of Bedford’s arrival was all the more reason to do what Joan had always believed she should: to strike, in God’s name, without delay.
And so, on Thursday 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, the Maid took her banner in her hand and rode with her troops to the Porte Saint-Honoré, the gate that led to the palace of the Louvre on the western edge of the city. For the Armagnac soldiers, as they set about God’s work under the command of the leader He had sent to save France, the holiness of the day could only sanctify their labours. For the Burgundians of Paris, on the other hand, it was sacrilege: ‘… these men were so unfortunate, so full of foolish trust,’ railed the journal-writer within the city, ‘that they relied upon the word of a creature in the form of a woman, whom they called the Maid – what it was, God only knows – and with one accord conspired to attack Paris on the very day of the Holy Nativity of Our Lady.’ This time, clearly, there would be no faction among the besieged pressing to open the gates. This time, the city would be taken by assault, or not at all.
Even for Joan, there was a familiarity, by now, to the workings of the military machine. The noise was deafening. The roar of the Armagnac cannon was answered by artillery blasts from the walls above; whenever a Parisian gunner struck his target, the screams of mutilated horses and men added a nerve-shredding counterpoint to the shouts of the soldiers who toiled in the moat, hurling bundles of wood into the standing water at the bottom in an attempt to build a makeshift pathway to the foot of the walls. As always, Joan led the way into the ditch, brandishing her banner and urging on her men, while arrows and stones fell from above in a piercing, bludgeoning storm. Long hours passed, until muscles were cramped in agony and eyes stung with blood, sweat and dirt, and still the walls loomed high above them, impenetrable and impassable.
As the sun dipped below the horizon, Joan called urgently to the unseen enemy in the fortifications above. ‘Surrender to us quickly, in the name of Jesus! For if you do not surrender before nightfall, we will come in there by force, whether you like it or not, and you will all be put to death without mercy!’ ‘Shall we, you bloody tart?’ came the reply, and a crossbow bolt ripped through her thigh. As she staggered, another arrow pinned the foot of her standard-bearer to the ground beside her. When he lifted his visor so that he could see to free himself, a third shot split his skull between his eyes. He died where he fell. Darkness was coming. Joan was losing blood, but still she shouted till she was hoarse: her exhausted soldiers should move forward, onward, to the attack. At Orléans and at Jargeau she had been hurt only to rise again, her resilience a sign to her troops that God would give them victory. Paris was next, of that there could be no doubt. And then, over the cannon blasts, she heard the sounding of the retreat. She did not stop insisting that the city could be won as she was dragged from the ditch and carried to safety. Only when the tail of the Armagnac army disappeared into the night did the Parisian guns stutter, at last, into silence.
It had been worth a try, the king and his counsellors knew. To take Paris by assault – to overwhelm the defences of the strongest city west of Constantinople without help from inside the walls – would have been a miracle; but the Maid, after all, had worked miracles before. Then again, to ask for more might test the patience of heaven. God’s help might come when all human remedies had failed, but now, thanks to Joan’s intervention at Orléans and Reims, the newly crowned King Charles could hope to help himself. The Maid had had her chance, but Paris had not fallen, and the imminent arrival in the capital of the duke of Bedford’s troops made it all the more certain that it was time to take stock, to pursue the peace with Burgundy that would unite France against the Englishinvaders. A truce had been agreed with the Burgundians, to last until Christmas, and in a time of truce – as Charles explained in a letter to the people of Reims a few days later – the king could not keep an undeployed army in the field without risking the ‘total destruction’ of the countryside across which they ranged. Privately, too, he knew that his cash-strapped regime did not yet have the money to pursue a full-scale campaign against the English in Normandy. He would therefore return to the Loire, leaving the count of Clermont to hold the lands north of the Seine, and prepare himself and his forces for the new year to come.
Joan was distraught. Wounded though she was, she had woken in the camp at La Chapelle on 9 September determined to renew her assault on Paris. She asked the duke of Alençon to sound the trumpets and ready the troops; only then did she learn that Charles had given the order for wholesale retreat. While envoys returned to the city walls under safe-conduct to collect the Armagnac dead, she travelled the two miles to Saint-Denis in pain and despair to rejoin the king who had betrayed her. How was she – how was anyone – to understand such a reverse for Joan the Maid and her mission from God? The great theologian Gerson had foreseen this very problem. The ‘party having justice on its side’, he had concluded after her triumph at Orléans, must take care not to render the help of heaven useless through disbelief or ingratitude; ‘for God changes His sentence as a result of a change in merit,’ he wrote, ‘even if He does not change His counsel.’
One possibility, then, was that she had failed at the walls of Paris because her king had not shared her conviction that, with God’s help, victory was certain. But there was another interpretation, and the Burgundian scholars of the university of Paris were quick to find it. Perhaps – ran the argument of a theological treatise written a few days after her retreat from the capital – she had failed because her inspiration came not from heaven, but from hell. ‘It is not enough’, wrote the author of On the Good and the Evil Spirit, ‘that someone claims purely and simply to be sent from God, since this is the claim of all heretics; but it is necessary that this invisible mission should be confirmed by a miraculous work or by a particular testimony drawn from holy scripture.’ For the supporters of English rather than Armagnac France, the relief of Orléans was no miracle – and therefore, in the absence of theologically sufficient proof, anyone who accepted Joan’s assertions was rejecting the judgement and the authority of the Church itself.
Not only that, but her claims were demonstrably false. If she had truly been sent by God, she would not wear men’s clothes in contravention of God’s law and the Church’s teaching. The nature of her supposed mission was no excuse for this abomination, since no ‘greater’ good could ever justify sin – and in any case women were forbidden to fight, just as they were forbidden to preach, to teach, to administer the sacraments, and all other duties that belonged to men. That she did the devil’s work was clear from the fact that she incited war, rather than bringing peace; she had even dared to insult God by fighting on the feast day of the Nativity of His most glorious mother. She had allowed children to kneel before her with burning candles, from which she dropped wax onto their heads as an enchantment for good luck: idolatry, sorcery and heresy, all in one. And some poor souls worshipped images of her as though she were a saint, an error of such magnitude that it threatened the true faith – and the Church should do all in its power to excise the danger this Maid represented.
The Maid herself was hardly likely to agree. All the same, she was limping, spiritually as well as physically, as she prepared for the long ride south to the Loire. At the sacred abbey of Saint-Denis, she left a suit of armour as an offering before the image of the Virgin; not a gift of thanks for victory, but a more inscrutable acknowledgement of a task unfinished. And then, because she had no other choice, she followed the king as he retraced his steps around Paris to the east, from Lagny-sur-Marne to Provins, and then southward to Montargis, Gien and Bourges. ‘And thus’, wrote a servant of the duke of Alençon, ‘was the will of the Maid and of the king’s army broken.’
A couple of days later Bedford stormed into the capital, and rounded in fury on the remaining inhabitants of Saint-Denis for having accommodated the Armagnac enemy without resistance or protest. For the lodgings they had provided, they had been promised payment from the Armagnac plunder of a conquered city; instead, they found themselves heavily fined for their miscalculation. But Bedford knew that this was a moment in which his principal weapons were diplomatic, not financial or military. On 18 September, ten days after the failed Armagnac assault, King Charles’s council belatedly agreed that Paris should now be incorporated into the truce he had already sealed with the duke of Burgundy. The task Bedford faced was to ensure that these negotiations between Armagnacs and Burgundians went no further without him, and instead to wind the coils of English France more tightly around his brother-in-law.
On the last day of September Duke Philip himself arrived in the city, gorgeously arrayed, and accompanied, as always in recent months, by his sister, Bedford’s loyal wife Anne. A week later, the two dukes were joined by Bedford’s uncle, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, for talks which ended in agreement that the duke of Burgundy should become the new governor of Paris. Not only that, but envoys from England and Burgundy met Armagnac ambassadors at Saint-Denis, and concluded that a truce should be observed between all parties to the war until comprehensive peace negotiations could begin the following April (or, as Bedford suggested to Burgundy in private, a renewed assault on the Armagnacs could be launched). Meanwhile, Bedford’s plan to draw the sting from Charles’s consecration at Reims by anointing and crowning his nephew, King Henry, was finally coming to fruition. On 6 November, in the soaring splendour of Westminster Abbey, the newly returned Cardinal Beaufort placed the heavy crown of England on the eight-year-old boy’s head; and preparations were well under way for the young king’s progress across the Channel to his second realm, for a second coronation in France.
Events were leaving Joan behind. The time of miracles had passed, and now even the war she had come to fight had been temporarily suspended. Skirmishes continued, and garrisons needed captains; once her leg was whole again, some occupation could certainly be found for her. And yet the qualities that had made her the saviour of Armagnac France now threatened to undermine her future. She had learned much, but if the course of the war were now to be determined by military strategy, not divine inspiration, there were other commanders with infinitely more experience and skill. Above all, perhaps, if the hand of heaven had once more withdrawn from direct intervention in the world, then a woman on a battlefield became an alarming liability, rather than a unique embodiment of God’s will.
Some of the men who had fought beside her did not falter in their belief. Despite the truce, the young duke of Alençon was assembling forces of his own to move in the direction of his ancestral lands in Normandy, of which he had been dispossessed for so long. He wanted Joan with him, but the king’s counsellors – among them the archbishop of Reims, La Trémoille and the grizzled Raoul de Gaucourt, all of whom had taken part in the recent rounds of diplomacy – knew that the impulsive aggression of the Maid and Alençon in the field together might undo all their careful work. Instead, after several weeks of convalescence in the home of one of the queen’s ladies at Bourges, Joan was sent with Charles d’Albret, La Trémoille’s half-brother, to deal with a mercenary captain named Perrinet Gressart who was making a nuisance of himself on the frontier along the eastern reaches of the Loire.
In theory, Gressart served the English and the Burgundians. In practice, his own interests came first. Two years earlier, he had dared to kidnap La Trémoille himself on the road between Armagnac and Burgundian territory, releasing him only on the payment of an exorbitant ransom. Now, Gressart ran his own unofficial fiefdom from the fortified town of La Charité-sur-Loire, thirty miles east of Bourges, and his brutal grip extended as far south as Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, a further thirty miles upstream. La Trémoille was determined to break him, and thus it was that Joan and d’Albret arrived outside the walls of Saint-Pierre in late October. The siege was set, but it was not long before the Maid turned to the tactics she knew best. She led the way into the ditch outside the walls, and called the soldiers to cast bundles of firewood into the water to make a pathway across to the town. She urged them forward, towards walls that stood only a fraction as high as the great defences of the capital before which she and the might of the Armagnac army had foundered. Once again, one of the men who served her was pierced through the foot by an arrow; but Saint-Pierre was not Paris. At the Maid’s words, her troops surged to the attack, and the defenders faltered. On 4 November, the town was taken.
It was a small victory, but it was something. Still, La Charité lay ahead, and that, as the winter began to draw in, was a less comfortable prospect. Joan was in grim mood on 9 November when she wrote to the people of Riom, sixty miles south of Saint-Pierre, to seek their help in supplying her little force. She had begun to learn to hold a pen as well as a lance, and when the message was done she wrote her name in large, uncertain letters at the end, but for once she did not begin with the name of Jesus. ‘Dear and good friends’, she said, ‘you know well how the town of Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier was taken by assault, and with the help of God I intend to clear out the other places which oppose the king. But because there has been such a great outlay of gunpowder, arrows and other military equipment in facing that town, and because I and the lords who are now in that town have minimal stocks left to lay siege to La Charité, where we are on the point of going, I entreat you, in as much as you have at heart the welfare and honour of the king and also of all our other men here, to assist with the siege by immediately sending gunpowder, saltpetre, sulphur, arrows, good strong crossbows and other military equipment. And thereby ensure that the matter should not be long drawn out through lack of the said gunpowder and other military equipment, and that you cannot be said to be negligent or unwilling. Dear and good friends, may Our Lord protect you.’
It was focused, practical, and markedly lacking in the glorious certainty that had infused every word of her earlier missives. Who knew, now, what the future might hold? That, at least, was the message sent across Europe from Bruges to his father in Venice by the merchant Pancrazio Giustiniani on 20 November. The Maid was surely still alive, he said, and had even recently taken a strong castle by assault. If what people were saying was true, she was still capable of astonishing the world. The university of Paris had sent to Rome to accuse her of heresy, he reported, but then again the university’s former chancellor, Jean Gerson, had written an excellent work in her defence. Some believed in her, and some did not. Meanwhile the king of England had been crowned in London, and would soon arrive in France at the head of a formidable army. ‘It seems to me certain’, he wrote, ‘that great things will happen in the spring.’
Joan could only hope that he was right.