PART THREE
11
The duke of Bedford had not been in Rouen to watch the Maid die. His wife had overseen the formal examination of the girl’s virginity when the trial began in January, but a few days later the duke and duchess had ridden out of the city, leaving his uncle, the cardinal, to supervise the progress of Bishop Cauchon’s conscientious work. At the end of the month Bedford had arrived in Paris to a hero’s welcome: he brought with him a convoy of around seventy boats and barges packed with supplies, all of which he had shepherded up the Seine from Rouen through lashing winds and torrential rain, dodging Armagnac ambushes along the way. By the beginning of June, in more clement weather, he was back in the field outside the capital when news finally arrived that the Armagnac whore had paid for her crimes with her life.
That breathless messenger was followed, over the next weeks and months, by a stream of documents. There was a letter in Latin addressed, in the name of nine-year-old King Henry, to the Holy Roman Emperor and all other kings, dukes and Christian princes of Europe, and another, in French, to the lords spiritual and temporal of France and to the cities of this most Christian kingdom. Both missives recounted the outrageous heresies of the ‘woman whom the common people called the Maid’, and sketched the events of the trial that had been conducted by Holy Mother Church ‘with great solemnity and honourable dignity, to the honour of God and the wholesome edification of the people’. It was the need for such edification, in fact, which had moved the king (or, at least, his voice as ventriloquised by his noble council) to proclaim the news so widely. Since tales of the woman’s exploits had spread ‘almost to the entire world’, it was necessary that her just punishment be published in the same way, to warn the faithful of the dangers of false prophets.
The prelates, nobles and cities of English France were required by this royal letter to arrange that sermons should be preached so that the common people should know the truth – and in Paris on 4 July the inquisitor of France himself, Jean Graverent, addressed a great crowd at the abbey of Saint-Martin-des-Champs about the trial over which he had been unable to preside in person. He spoke so authoritatively that the journal-writer in the city noted down his dramatic account of the three demons who had appeared to the woman Joan in the forms of St Michael, St Catherine and St Margaret, only to abandon her utterly at the last. But the tale Graverent told was already familiar to the inhabitants of Paris, complete with grim details of the Maid’s fate that had raced along the road to the capital from Rouen. After she had taken her last breath, the journal-writer reported, and her clothes were all burned away, the executioner had raked back the fire to expose her charred and naked body, still bound as it was to the stake, so that the people could see beyond any doubt that she was truly a woman. Then, when they had stared enough, he had stoked the flames higher and higher, until her flesh and bones were nothing but ashes. His masters, he knew, would not thank him for leaving fragments of the corpse to be retrieved as holy relics by deluded fools.
In the battle to eradicate such spiritual contagion, there was more work to be done. As soon as the trial was over, Bishop Cauchon had entrusted one vital task to the notary Guillaume Manchon and to Thomas de Courcelles, a theologian who had attended many of the sessions. The notaries had recorded the interrogations, day by day, in the French in which they were conducted. Now, Manchon and de Courcelles were to produce a Latin translation of these minutes as an official transcript of the proceedings. With this text, they were to gather all the correspondence, from the bishop, the university of Paris and the king, by means of which the trial process had been established, and they were to append witness statements from the clerics who had spoken to the prisoner on the morning of her death – a pastoral visit after the end of the formal trial, which had therefore gone undocumented by the notaries – as well as the public letters in which the king announced her execution. Then they were to transcribe this composite narrative into a register and make five official copies, to be signed by the notaries and bearing the judges’ seals. And then this detailed record of the trial, written in the Latin that was the lingua franca of Church and state throughout Europe, would stand as an open testament to the diligence of the judges and the enormity of the girl’s heresy.
Manchon and de Courcelles worked as quickly as they could, but there was no doubting the urgency of their assignment. It was essential that the rumours sweeping the continent should be corrected at the earliest possible opportunity. Reports reaching Venice from Bruges in the first half of July, for example, alleged that St Catherine had appeared to the Maid just before her death. ‘Daughter of God,’ the saint had said, ‘be secure in your faith, for you will be numbered among the virgins in the glory of Paradise!’ Meanwhile, the Armagnac king, the Venetians were assured, was stricken with grief, and had sworn to wreak terrible vengeance on the English.
But this was gossip running wild on the subject of the court at Chinon as well as the court of heaven. From the lips of King Charles, there came no comment on events in Rouen. His enemies had not dignified Joan with a public response while she was winning battles against them; it was not until her capture and execution had confirmed the self-evident truth that God was not an Armagnac that a torrent of their words told the world what she truly was. And, between the lines of each sermon, letter and transcript, the weight of one further conclusion could be felt: that the taint of the Maid’s heresy hung heavy on the false king for whom she had fought. Of course, King Charles himself knew that idea to be a ludicrous misapprehension. The archbishop of Reims had already made clear the position of the Armagnac court: Joan’s regrettable pride and wilfulness had caused her fall, but her faults could not detract from God’s blessing upon her king, as embodied in the holy oil that had touched his brow during the sacred ceremony of his coronation. Nothing more need be said; and, from Chinon, the rest was an echoing silence.
In any case, as the archbishop had told the king’s faithful subjects, another envoy from God was presently riding with the Armagnac forces. William the Shepherd, they called him, this boy who could hardly have been less like the Maid: full of wondering innocence, he rode side-saddle on his horse, his holiness made manifest by the bloody stigmata on his hands, feet and side. That August, the Shepherd was with the captain Poton de Xaintrailles when they chased after some English outriders who had dared to approach the walls of Beauvais. Too late, they realised it was an ambush laid by the earls of Arundel and Warwick. And, as the soldier and the boy disappeared into English custody, the silence from Chinon deepened.
The summer was not going well. The autumn, it transpired, was worse. In October 1431, the town of Louviers – a vital staging-post on the Seine between Rouen and Paris, which had been captured by La Hire while Joan was struggling in the mud outside La Charité – fell to an English siege. The mighty Château Gaillard was already back in English hands, and, as a result of these two Armagnac losses, the route along the river from the seat of English government in Rouen to the kingdom’s capital now lay open once again. For the duke of Bedford and his uncle the cardinal, there was no time to lose: at long last, eighteen months after his arrival in France, the young King Henry could safely grace Paris with his presence.
On Advent Sunday, 2 December, the boy rode into the city to a rapturous welcome. The guilds took it in turns to hold over his head an azure-blue canopy starred with golden fleurs-de-lis – first the drapers, then the grocers, the money-changers, the goldsmiths,the mercers, the furriers and the butchers – while cries of ‘Noël!’ warmed the freezing air. Ingenious pageants were presented at every turn: the beheading of the glorious martyr St Denis, the hunting of a stag in a small wood, and then, at the Châtelet, a doppelgänger of the king himself decked out in scarlet and fur, surrounded by the lords of England and France, with the two crowns of his twin kingdoms glittering above. At the window of the Hôtel Saint-Pol the dowager Queen Isabeau, with tears in her eyes, bowed to the royal grandson she had never met. And at the back of this stately parade, wretched and bound with rope like a common thief, came the holy fool William the Shepherd, now abandoned, it seemed, by his God. The simpleton was not seen again; rumour had it that he was dumped in the Seine and left to drown once the celebrations were over.
Two weeks later, another great procession assembled on the Île de la Cité to accompany the king on the short walk from his royal palace to the cathedral of Notre-Dame. In the vast splendour of the church, a flight of steps broad enough for ten men to stand abreast rose to a newly built platform that led into the choir. There, as heavenly music soared to the vaults above, King Henry VI of England was anointed and crowned King Henry II of France. Notre-Dame was not Reims, and the balm on the boy’s royal head was not the holy oil of Clovis – but that could not be helped, since both were in the hands of the usurping Armagnacs. Still, the ancient regalia of the most Christian kingdom had been brought from Saint-Denis, and now the young king received them solemnly from his great-uncle, Cardinal Beaufort, who pronounced God’s blessing on his sovereign. After the ceremony the company returned to the palace for a feast, its courses punctuated by elaborately sculpted sugar ‘subtleties’, one an image of the Virgin with the child-king of heaven, another a golden fleur-de-lis carried by two angels and topped with a shining crown. And there, among the lords of Church and state who drank the health of their newly consecrated monarch, was the gratified figure of Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais.
And yet, among the smiles and the celebrations, there were signs that all was not quite as it should be in the kingdom of English France. The bishop of Paris did not appreciate being elbowed aside by the English cardinal for a coronation in his own cathedral, and there was a spat between the officers of the king’s household and the canons of Notre-Dame over who should keep the silver-gilt cup in which the wine had been offered at mass. The Parisian journal-writer, meanwhile, was scathing about the incompetence with which the English had organised the feast, and how dreadful the food had been. ‘Truly,’ he wrote, ‘no one could find a good word to say about it’; and the half-hearted tournament held the day after the ceremony was similarly underwhelming. ‘Really, many a time a citizen of Paris marrying off his child has done more for tradespeople, for goldsmiths, goldbeaters, all the luxury trades, than the king’s consecration now did, or his tournament or all his Englishmen. But probably it is because we don’t understand what they say and they don’t understand us …’
This mutual incomprehension was hardly improved when the royal party hurried away from Paris only ten days after the coronation, back through flurries of snow and freezing rain to Rouen, then Calais and England. And with the king’s departure from France, all eyes turned to the greatest of his French subjects. Philip of Burgundy had been present in Paris in the proxy form of an actor, bending his knee to his sovereign in the tableau at the Châtelet, but at the coronation the duke himself was nowhere to be seen. It was true that he had been much occupied during the previous eighteen months with the practical challenges of war. Despite the triumph of the Maid’s capture, Compiègne had not fallen to the Burgundians in 1430, a failure which the duke angrily blamed on inadequate funding by the English. By that autumn, however, it was clear that Burgundian interests in the Low Countries – where he had just added the duchy of Brabant to his control of Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland – were reclaiming the duke’s attention, and observers could not help noticing that his absence from the French capital in December 1431 meant that he was called upon to swear no personal oath of fealty to the young king. Not only that but, more than a hundred miles north in his Flemish town of Lille, he was occupied instead in negotiating a new six-year truce with the Armagnac enemy.
The meteoric moment of the Maid’s career – her blazing rise and her dying fall – had briefly hardened the divisions between the two rival kingdoms of France, strengthening the Armagnac position while driving the duke of Burgundy into a closer embrace with the English. Thanks to Joan and the momentum of her mission, both kings had been anointed and crowned; but, now that she was gone, old fault-lines in the political landscape were beginning to open up once again. With every month that passed, the duke of Burgundy’s gaze was more obviously fixed on the horizon to the north and east, where his new Burgundian state was emerging into independent being. And the dawning realisation that his policy would be shaped by whatever best served the interests of that autonomous power-bloc left the loyal French subjects of King Henry increasingly uneasy about what the future might hold.
The brittleness of English France was made disquietingly apparent in a series of conspiracies in 1432 that shook the English hold on Rouen, Argentan and Pontoise, and succeeded – through an improvised Trojan horse of soldiers hidden in barrels by turncoat merchants – in delivering Chartres to the Armagnacs. That summer, the duke of Bedford’s satisfaction at retrieving the reins of power from the departed Cardinal Beaufort was cut short by his failure to take Lagny-sur-Marne, to the east of the capital, where the Maid had fought before her fateful move to defend Compiègne. Bedford’s siege – conducted in a punishing heatwave that had followed the biting winter – had to be lifted in August after the Bastard of Orléans, Raoul de Gaucourt and Gilles de Rais led their troops in a slick manoeuvre to rescue the hard-pressed garrison and thereby maintain the military pressure on Paris. And the autumn, when it came, brought Bedford a body-blow that combined personal tragedy with political disaster.
Plague had been raging in Paris for weeks, and the spectacular luxury of the duke’s home in the capital proved no defence against its ravages. In the early hours of the morning on Friday 14 November, his wife Anne succumbed to the epidemic, at the age of just twenty-eight. She was ‘the most delightful of all the ladies then in France’, lamented the journal-writer, and ‘much loved by the people of Paris’. Bedford had loved her too, and so had her brother of Burgundy; and, once she was gone, the remaining bonds of loyalty that tethered the Burgundian duke within the fold of English France began to fray and loosen. She was buried in the church of the Celestines in the east of the city, English singers weaving melodies in haunting counterpoint as her body was lowered into the grave, ‘… and with her died most of the hope that Paris had’, the journal-writer said, ‘though it had to be endured’.
The cause of Parisian despair could scarcely have been more obvious in a summit at Auxerre convened that same month by Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, a legate sent from Rome, according to his master the pope, as an ‘angel of peace’. The English were looking for no more than a truce, since they could not contemplate any permanent settlement which their boy-king might one day see as a betrayal of his God-given rights. But an Anglo-Armagnac truce was unworkable and unenforceable, the Armagnacs declared, and besides, they could decide nothing without the participation of the princes of the blood – the duke of Orléans chief among them – who were still captives in England. The duke of Burgundy had already concluded a truce with the Armagnacs that, in theory at least, took him out of the war; his interest, therefore, lay in securing his own possession of the county of Champagne, to which King Charles (the Armagnac ambassadors said) would never agree. In the end, all Cardinal Albergati could achieve was an appointment to meet again in the spring, ‘and they had done nothing,’ said the journal-writer wearily, ‘but spend a great deal of money and waste their time’.
And when the spring came, the potential significance of the cardinal’s reconvened conference was comprehensively trumped by a wedding. On 20 April 1433 in the cathedral at Thérouanne, halfway between Calais and Arras, the widowed duke of Bedford took seventeen-year-old Jacquetta de Luxembourg as his second wife. The bride was not only ‘vivacious, beautiful and graceful’, the chronicler Monstrelet reported, but very well connected: her father, the count of Saint-Pol, was the brother of Louis de Luxembourg, bishop of Thérouanne and chancellor of English France, and of Jean de Luxembourg, the Burgundian lord who had captured Joan the Maid outside Compiègne. For Bedford, the match seemed to promise both political and military advantage, as well as the hope of an heir – something which his childless marriage to Anne of Burgundy, devoted though it was, had failed to provide. But he had reckoned without the insult that Philip of Burgundy perceived in his remarriage only five months after their beloved Anne’s death. There was injury too: the count of Saint-Pol was Duke Philip’s vassal, and the see of Thérouanne formed an enclave within the Burgundian county of Artois, yet neither count nor bishop had seen fit to seek the duke’s permission for the wedding to take place.
Cardinal Beaufort saw the dangers of this rift, and sought to bring Bedford and Burgundy together at Saint-Omer, just north of Thérouanne, at the end of May. Both dukes duly arrived in the town with much pomp and circumstance. Only then did it transpire that neither would cede precedence by agreeing to visit the other. The cardinal – a man with years of diplomatic experience at the greatest courts in Europe – shuttled between the two households, but neither would give in. The loss of the duchess had never been more acutely felt. And when both dukes left the town in magnificent style without having met, it was apparent that the personal relationship between these twin pillars of English France had been damaged beyond repair.
Within Armagnac France, meanwhile, bridges were being built rather than burned. The king’s mother-in-law Yolande of Aragon, queen of Sicily, had retreated from the political front line while the mission of Joan the Maid, which she had helped to unleash, had directed the course of the war. Now that the stark imperatives of those dramatic months had faded, the subtleties of politics and diplomacy were once again to the fore, and, thanks to Yolande, a queen’s gambit was already in play. The first move, in 1431, was a treaty between Yolande herself and the duke of Brittany, and that in turn prepared the way for a settlement sealed at Rennes in March 1432 by which the Breton duke’s brother Arthur of Richemont, the estranged constable of Armagnac France, was restored to royal favour. Not only had Yolande persuaded the king to set aside his deep antipathy to the constable in order to harness Richemont’s support against the enemy, but she had frustrated the duke of Bedford’s hopes of securing a lasting alliance with Brittany and the service of Richemont for English France. Now, only the endgame remained: to remove from the board the troublesome figure of the king’s favourite, the adversary who had precipitated the constable’s rift with his sovereign, Georges de La Trémoille.
June 1433 was the moment chosen for the palace coup. At Chinon, armed men loyal to Yolande and Richemont seized La Trémoille in the middle of the night. The favourite tried to resist, but he was quickly overwhelmed; in the scuffle, he was stabbed with a dagger, but his vast belly absorbed the blow and saved him from mortal injury. King Charles heard the disturbance and started up in fear, but, on being reassured that all was well – that he was in no danger, and La Trémoille was simply being arrested for the good of his realm – he went back to bed. La Trémoille disappeared, unmourned, into internal exile, and, with scarcely a ripple in the glassy surface of the court, his place at the king’s side was taken by a charming eighteen-year-old, Yolande’s youngest son, Charles of Anjou.
The volatile Armagnac regime had been smoothly reconfigured by the queen of Sicily’s expert hand, while in English France tensions between Bedford, his belligerent brother Gloucester on the other side of the Channel, and their uncle, the cardinal, threatened to undermine the cash-strapped government. Fighting continued in Normandy and Maine, around Paris, and – despite the Armagnac–Burgundian truce – in Champagne, Artois and on the borders of the duchy of Burgundy, as a result of which the duke of Burgundy himself decided to take the field once more in the summer of 1433. Nothing was certain, nothing was clear; but that in itself – compared to the dark days before the Maid’s coming, when it had looked as though the English might take Orléans and swarm over the Loire into the heart of the kingdom of Bourges – was a source of strength to Armagnac France. King Charles would never inspire his troops on the battlefield. That thought had long since been dismissed. But now he was an anointed sovereign, and his captains – the Bastard of Orléans, the duke of Alençon, La Hire, Ambroise de Loré – had shared the Maid’s victories; they knew, at least, what it was to win. And that was a sensation that seemed lost to the people of Anglo-Burgundian Paris. ‘The war grew worse and worse,’ reported the journal-writer in 1434; ‘those who called themselves Frenchmen came every day, pillaging and killing, right up to the gates …’ Though the city waited, neither Bedford nor Burgundy came to the rescue; ‘they might as well have been dead’, the Parisian said bitterly.
It would not have consoled him to know that the duke of Bedford felt equally thwarted. Among the reasons for the duke’s absence from Paris was a year-long visit to London forced upon him by the need to seek more money and troops, and to counter pernicious accusations, stage-managed by his disruptively self-seeking brother Gloucester, that he had mishandled the war. In a passionately argued document submitted to the young king’s council just before his return to France in the summer of 1434, Bedford spoke of the sufferings for which the journal-writer in Paris blamed him and all the noble lords who had failed to relieve the city. Because of the war, Bedford explained, the king’s good townspeople of Paris and his other loyal subjects of France could not cultivate their lands or their vines or keep their livestock, and, as a result, they were driven ‘to an extreme poverty such as they may not long abide’. More help was needed, and Bedford had no doubt at what point the great enterprise of English France had fallen into uncertainty: ‘… all things there prospered for you,’ he told the king, ‘till the time of the siege of Orléans, taken in hand God knows by what advice. At the which time, after the adventure fallen to the person of my cousin of Salisbury, whose soul God pardon, there fell by the hand of God, as it seems, a great stroke upon your people that was assembled there in great number, caused in great part, as I think, of lack of steadfast belief, and of erroneous doubt that they had of a disciple and follower of the fiend called the Maid, that used false enchantment and sorcery, the which stroke and discomfiture not only lessened in great part the number of your people there, but as well withdrew the courage of the remnant in marvellous wise, and encouraged your adverse party and enemies to assemble them forthwith in great number …’
Bedford had never before spoken in public about the Maid. This was not the carefully calibrated exercise of the months after her death, setting rhetoric to work to advertise heaven’s verdict on her sin. Instead, he was giving voice to deeply felt frustration. The duke knew that his brother, the great King Henry, had been God’s own soldier, and that his royal nephew’s claim to the crown of France was just. Yet the wiles of the devil – finding a foothold in the world in the person of this misguided girl – had dealt an extraordinary blow to the righteous cause to which he had devoted his life. Bedford was forty-five, and, though his commitment to English France was as determined as ever, even the company of his lively young wife could not alleviate the weariness that now dogged his every step.
He was hardly helped, when he finally returned to Paris that December, by the fact that the winter was the coldest anyone could remember. It snowed for forty days without stopping, noted the journal-writer in the city; if he was exaggerating, it was not by much. Back in London the Thames froze over, and in the duke of Burgundy’s town of Arras, a hundred miles north of the French capital, the inhabitants decorated the streets with elaborate sculptures carved out of snow. Their subjects were chosen from myth and legend; among these frozen tableaux, laced with the excitement of the supernatural, the only one taken from life was the figure of la grande Pucelle, the great Maid, at the head of her soldiers.
The people of Arras had seen Joan in person four years before, when she was brought to their town as a captive on her unhappy journey to Rouen and the stake. Now, this icy representation of the Maid was altogether too inscrutable to reassure the duke of Bedford and his fellow custodians of English France about the loyalties of King Henry’s Burgundian subjects. And within weeks it became clear that Arras would soon play host to a meeting that promised them still less in the way of succour.
In January 1435, all wrapped in furs against the perishing cold, an illustrious gathering assembled two hundred miles south of Arras at Nevers, between Armagnac Bourges and Burgundian Dijon. The duke of Burgundy had come to meet the Armagnac count of Clermont – newly elevated to the dukedom of Bourbon after the death of his father, who had never regained his freedom after Azincourt. The two men had spent much of 1434 in a battle for control of the border lands between their territories in eastern France; now, however, they had agreed a truce. The fact that the new duke of Bourbon was Burgundy’s brother-in-law, thanks to his marriage years earlier to the duke’s sister Agnes, had done nothing to stop the fighting, but now that diplomatic relations had been restored, Bourbon brought with him to the conference at Nevers another brother-in-law, Constable Richemont, the husband of Burgundy’s sister Margaret. Along with these two Armagnac princes of the blood, King Charles had sent his chancellor, the subtle and experienced archbishop of Reims. It was a happy reunion: so joyous, one chronicler said, that it appeared as though these lords had always been at peace. (How foolish, a Burgundian knight exclaimed bitterly, were all those lesser men who had risked death to fight a war so easily forgotten by the great.) Out of these personal negotiations came proposals by which it seemed a general peace might at last be secured, and it was agreed that all three parties – Burgundians and Armagnacs, and also, of course, the English, who were not present at Nevers – should meet at Arras on the first day of July in the hope of achieving such a settlement.
Philip of Burgundy had been playing a complex and relentlessly demanding game in the fifteen years since his father’s murder. Now, finally, his pieces were aligned. The English duke of Bedford was no longer his brother-in-law. There could be no question of simply jettisoning his commitment, sworn by sacred oath, to his English allies; instead, it was up to his English allies to show themselves willing to make peace on the entirely reasonable terms to be offered at Arras by his Armagnac brothers-in-law on behalf of their king, who would also, naturally, offer restitution for the lamentable death of the duke’s father. Peace in France would not only serve the interests of the kingdom’s beleaguered people, and find favour in the eyes of the Church, but it would allow the duke to attend to the needs of his rich territories in the Low Countries, and to defend himself against the Holy Roman Emperor, whose long-standing alarm at the expansion of Burgundian power in the north had been transmuted only weeks earlier into a declaration of war.
For Philip, therefore, with his multiple perspectives and multiple priorities, Arras promised much. For the English, it was a prospect that chilled the blood. There could be no compromise between the claims of King Charles and King Henry: only one head could, with God’s blessing, wear the French crown. If Burgundy were now to put forward as ‘reasonable’ a raft of proposals that required the abandonment of the English title to the throne of France, then the English would have no choice but to refuse. And if the duke of Burgundy were determined to see such a refusal as ‘unreasonable’, then he was already intent on a constructive dismantling of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance.
And so it proved when the first plenary session of the new conference opened on 5 August – a month late, thanks to the time it had taken to assemble all the various attendees – in a hall hung with cloth of gold in the abbey of Saint-Vaast. Arras was swamped with people; every inn, every lodging-house was full. Quite apart from the large delegations from England, Burgundy and the Armagnac court, there were observers sent by the great lords of France and all the towns and territories that owed their loyalty to the Burgundian duke, and ambassadors from far-flung lands including Spain, Navarre, Norway, Italy and Poland. The Armagnacs were once again led by the duke of Bourbon and Constable Richemont, with the diplomatic support of the archbishop of Reims, while the duke of Burgundy, as host to these noble visitors, kept magnificent state; and the warmth and bonhomie with which he entertained his Armagnac brothers-in-law did not escape the despairing gaze of the English.
King Henry was represented by lords spiritual and temporal from his councils in London and Rouen, including the archbishop of York, the earl of Suffolk (now freed from his brief captivity after the Maid’s victory at Jargeau, albeit at the cost of a crippling ransom), and the devotedly loyal Bishop Cauchon. But the driving force behind their last-ditch attempts to hold the duke of Burgundy to the alliance he had made almost sixteen years earlier was Cardinal Beaufort. He used all his powers of persuasion, every ounceof the personal credit he had built up with the duke and duchess, to plead his case with such intensity that, during one lengthy private conversation, observers noticed great gouts of sweat standing out on his forehead. A truce – a twenty-year truce, even, bolstered perhaps by an Anglo-Armagnac royal marriage alliance – would relieve the sufferings of the French people, and sidestep the thorny issue of sovereignty without disturbing the friendship between England and Burgundy. But the cardinal was wasting his breath. The conference had been designed from its very inception to present proposals for peace to which the English could not possibly agree. Nothing remained for them to do but leave, and as they rode away on the morning of 6 September in bucketing rain, each man in the cardinal’s lavish retinue wore the word ‘honour’ embroidered proudly – uselessly – on the sleeve of his red livery.
In Arras, the negotiations proceeded without them. Since England had turned its face against a godly peace, the duke of Burgundy could not in law or conscience – as Cardinal Albergati was quick to confirm on behalf of his master the pope – be held to a treaty which now promised only war. Still the duke hesitated. On 10 September a requiem mass was sung in the echoing space of the abbey church, sixteen years to the day after the murder of his father on the bridge at Montereau – a killing which, of course, King Charles had been much too young to prevent, although he would now do everything in his power to pursue those responsible. The one man who had never let Duke Philip forget the horror of that Armagnac crime had not come to Arras: the duke of Bedford lay a hundred miles away at Rouen, sick in body and heart. And then, on 16 September, came the sudden news that he had died. The regent of English France – that sober, cultured and dedicated man to whom the duke of Burgundy had once been so closely bound by ties of marriage and respect and affection – was gone.
It was a mercy, perhaps, that Bedford was spared knowledge of the solemn ceremony that took place in the church of Saint-Vaast on 21 September, exactly a week after he had succumbed to his illness. The treaty of Arras was complete – territorial concessions agreed, and restitution for the devastating loss of the duke’s father promised. Now, with his hands touching the consecrated host and a golden cross, Duke Philip swore that he would henceforth live at peace with his sovereign lord, King Charles. Prompted by the love of God, he forgave his king, once and for all time, for his father’s death. And then Cardinal Albergati laid his hands on the duke’s head and absolved him from the oath he had given to serve the English king of France – a lifetime ago, it seemed – in another church, at Troyes.
This was not peace. Many French men and women, after all, were still ruled by the English, who proclaimed King Henry’s right to the crown of France as stoutly as ever. Nor, despite the smiles and embraces at Arras, were the conflicts between Burgundians and Armagnacs that festered across the most Christian kingdom suddenly and miraculously resolved. But it was a movement of tectonic plates that utterly transformed the landscape of the war. The necessity that Yolande of Aragon had always seen, and that Joan the Maid had so forcefully demanded – that all French princes of the blood should recognise the God-given right of King Charles, and reject the false claims of the English invaders – had finally come to pass. At Bourges, Yolande celebrated the news with her pregnant daughter, Queen Marie, and her son-in-law the king; and when her next royal grandson was born at Tours in February 1436, he was named Philip, after his loving godfather Philip of Burgundy.
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 November. 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 raisetroops 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.