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This was not how it was supposed to be. Charles of Valois, the seventeen-year-old dauphin de Vienne, knew that he was the heir to France. He had been the last born of his father’s sons, but by the will of God he now stood as the next successor to an unbroken line of illustrious kings reaching back to the glories of Charlemagne, and before him to the saintly Clovis, the first of France’s Christian monarchs.
It was to Clovis, almost a thousand years before, that God had sent the Holy Ampulla, a miraculous vial containing the sacred oil with which every roi très-chrétien was anointed during his coronation – a sacramental rite held by long tradition at Reims, where the Ampulla itself was guarded with the utmost reverence. It was Clovis, too, the dauphin knew – or had it been Charlemagne? – who first rode into battle bearing the oriflamme, a banner of vermilion silk hung from a golden lance which rallied the people of France to fight to the death whenever the kingdom was in mortal danger.
And the protective powers of the oriflamme were more than simply military, since this hallowed flag had been a gift from St Denis, the holy man who had converted pagan Gaul to Christianity. Exactly who Denis had been, and when he had brought the gospel to France, were questions of some complexity and much learned debate, but the answers mattered less than the evident fact of his support for the kingdom and his special relationship with its king. The oriflamme itself was kept in the saint’s own abbey, just north of Paris, ready for when the king should have need of it, along with the priceless regalia that were transported to Reims whenever a coronation took place: Charlemagne’s imperial crown and his great sword, called Joyeuse, as well as the crown of the dauphin’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Louis IX, the crusading king who had been recognised as a saint within three decades of his death. His circlet – fittingly, for this blessed monarch – contained a fragment of Christ’s crown of thorns and a lock of the Saviour’s hair.
St Louis himself, like all the kings of France of the last two hundred years, was buried in the abbey that belonged to St Denis. From there, these two patron saints of the French crown watched over Louis’s royal descendants in nearby Paris, the capital founded long ago by noble Trojans fleeing the sack of their own city, that had since become – in wisdom, might and holiness – a new Athens, Rome and Jerusalem. And from Paris, in turn, the French king watched over the chosen people of a holy land, a kingdom full of clerics, scholars, relics and saints.
All of this was the dauphin’s birthright. Yet now, it seemed, his inheritance was being ripped from his fingers. The fire-red blazon of the oriflamme had been trampled into the mud at Azincourt, where the sacrifice of French lives had brought only defeat and humiliation, not God-given victory. Paris, the pillar of faith and the seat of the French crown, had fallen into the grasping hands of Burgundian traitors. The consecrated precincts of the abbey of Saint-Denis had welcomed Henry of England – an upstart and a ruthless predator whose device of a fox’s brush, elegantly embroidered, could not disguise the fact that his teeth and claws were sticky with French blood – on his journey to Troyes; and in the cathedral there he had been greeted by the dauphin’s royal parents as their newly adopted son.
Meanwhile, the dauphin himself stood accused of murder most foul. Henry of England and Philip of Burgundy had agreed, in a bilateral treaty five months before Troyes, that they would work together to ensure that Charles and his accomplices were appropriately punished for their evident crimes. Even his own father – or those who now spoke on the distracted king’s behalf – had issued letters patent proclaiming the fact of the prince’s guilt and declaring that, as a result, he no longer had the right to use the title of dauphin. Instead, he was simply ‘Charles the ill-advised, who calls himself “of France”’.
The dauphin himself, of course, did not acknowledge that he bore any form of responsibility for the death of John of Burgundy. But even if he had, he would not have accepted that disinheritance was its necessary consequence. Monseigneur le dauphin, declared an Armagnac pamphlet written in 1420 in response to the treaty of Troyes, was the only true heir of the king and the kingdom. The treaty was therefore no peace, but instead a fount of discord, war, murder, plunder, bloodshed and horrible sedition – an act of tyrannical usurpation that was ‘most damnable, most unjust and abominable, and contrary to the honour of God and faith and religion …’
Still, in order to stop that usurpation in its tracks, some improvisation might be required. If the guiding light of the oriflamme had dimmed, then the dauphin’s army would fight instead under a banner depicting the golden fleurs-de-lis of France on a background of celestial blue, a venerable flag laden with meaning – the lily standing for the purity of the Virgin, its three petals for the Trinity, and the whole for the greatness of the French crown – which had also, handily, been presented to Clovis by an emissary from heaven. Some people said that it was St Denis who had brought the fleurs-de-lis to the holy king, but now that Denis had faltered in his role as guardian of the kingdom, it seemed more likely that the gift had come from the hands of the archangel Michael, God’s own standard-bearer, whose abbey at Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy was even now holding out against the English invaders. And so the dauphin ordered two new standards to be prepared for his army, each showing the heavenly knight St Michael with his sword unsheathed to kill the devil that writhed before him in the form of a serpent.
The naked blade of a sword, clasped in an armed hand, was also the dauphin’s personal device, painted delicately onto the silken banner of white, gold and blue that hung from his lance. But in practice, despite the money that he lavished on suits of golden armour, the prince could not lead his soldiers himself. It was not just that he was ‘not a warlike man’, as the Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain later remarked, noting his puny frame and unsteady gait. It was also that he was irreplaceable. Though the newly married Henry of England had, as yet, no son to succeed him, he could rally his troops on the battlefield in the knowledge that he had three royal brothers – the dukes of Clarence, Bedford and Gloucester – fighting at his side, ready to take his place if he fell. But the brothers of the dauphin Charles were all dead; the runt of the Valois litter was now the last hope of the Armagnac cause. As a result, when the next confrontation came, the Armagnac army would have to look elsewhere for its captain.
While the English and the Burgundians had been occupied with the making of their diabolical compact to deprive him of his inheritance, the dauphin and his troops had moved together through the south of the kingdom to secure the obedience of these Armagnac lands with a show of strength. But the ceremonies at Troyes – the sealing of the Anglo-Burgundian treaty, and the wedding of Henry of England and Catherine of France a little less than two weeks later – did not keep the English king from the field for long. On the day after the triumph of his marriage, the knights of England and Burgundy proposed a tournament in celebration; instead, the king ordered that they should leave immediately for Sens, forty miles west of Troyes, where, he said, ‘we may all tilt and joust and prove our daring and courage’ – not in the lists, but by besieging the Armagnacs.
A week later, Sens had fallen. A fortnight after that, Henry’s army stormed into Montereau-Fault-Yonne. There, the mutilated body of John the Fearless was exhumed from its shallow grave in the parish church, and reverently laid with salt and spices in a lead coffin for its journey back to the dead duke’s capital at Dijon. Then the English and Burgundian troops marched north-west to the fortified walls of Melun, a key staging-post in the campaign to sweep the Armagnacs out of the region immediately to the south of Burgundian Paris. But the soldiers of the Armagnac garrison dug in their heels, and by the middle of July it was clear that Melun would not so easily be taken. Now, if ever, the Armagnac cause needed an inspirational military leader to come to the town’s rescue and put a stop to the English king’s inexorable advance – and the seventeen-year-old dauphin knew just what to do. He ordered himself two new suits of gilded armour, mustered an army of fifteen thousand men and put his cousin, the count of Vertus, at the head of it.
At twenty-four, Philippe of Vertus carried the weight of his world on his young shoulders. His elder brother, the duke of Orléans, was still under lock and key in England, so it was to Philippe that the responsibility of safeguarding the family’s future had fallen. And now his prince, the dauphin, required him to lead the army that would rid France of English invaders and Burgundian traitors alike. The count had made his base at Jargeau, ten miles east of Orléans, and the dauphin joined him there in early August, ten thousand newly stitched pennons fluttering in the breeze above the heads of their massed troops. But by the end of the month, they had made no move to advance. The count, it emerged, was unwell. On 1 September, he succumbed to his illness – and all prospect of stemming the Anglo-Burgundian tide died with him. The dauphin immediately turned tail, retreating southward to his luxurious palace of Mehun-sur-Yèvre near Bourges, and six weeks later the town of Melun – with no hope, now, of rescue – was starved into surrender.
The stage was set for the triumphant English king to take possession of his new French capital. On 1 December 1420, Henry of England, Philip of Burgundy and the pitiful figure of Charles of France – ‘our French lords’, as the journal-writer approvingly called them – rode into Paris. It was a hard winter, and food was so scarce that beggar children were dying in the streets, but still the city’s hungry inhabitants turned out in their thousands to welcome the royal procession, many dressed in red, the colour of the cross of Henry’s heavenly patron, St George. The next day it was the turn of the queens to make their magnificent entrance, Henry’s wife Catherine riding through the Porte Saint-Antoine between her mother, Queen Isabeau, and her newly acquired sister-in-law, the duchess of Clarence, while cheering Parisians toasted the coming of peace in the wine that flowed day and night from the city’s conduits.
Nineteen-year-old Catherine had been at her husband’s side at the siege of Melun, where – in the only nod to romance this battle-hardened bridegroom was prepared to make – he had ordered musicians to play for her every evening as the sun went down. She was with him in Paris when, two days before Christmas, he and her father sat on the same judicial bench to hear a Burgundian demand for justice against her brother, ‘the so-called dauphin’, and his accomplices in the murder of John the Fearless. The dauphin was summoned to answer the charges before 6 January; to no one’s surprise, he failed to appear, and was sentenced in his absence to exile from the realm and disinheritance from the crown. And by then, Catherine and Henry were on their way to England to show the new queen to her people, and to raise more money and men for the final defeat of the Armagnac rebels.
The dauphin, however, had other ideas. He had lost his cousin of Vertus, but his protector St Michael – to whose shrine at Mont-Saint-Michel, still holding out against English siege, he had just sent a pilgrim’s offering – would provide him with new champions. The Burgundian traitors might have the help of the English, France’s ancient enemy, in their attempt to dismember the kingdom, but the dauphin could call on France’s ancient ally, the Scots, who had recognised in him the true line of French sovereignty. For more than a century, Scotland had taken every opportunity to support France in its conflicts with England: whenever English armies moved south across the Channel to ravage French lands, Scots soldiers had launched raids across England’s northern border, hoping to inflict debilitating wounds while English backs were turned. Now, with France convulsed on itself, the Scots saw their chance to fight the English at a safer distance from their own frontier, side by side with the Armagnac French.
The first few hundred Scots soldiers – archers, in the English style, as well as men-at-arms – had arrived in France in the spring of 1419. But by the end of that year a major force of six or seven thousand troops had made landfall at La Rochelle under the command of John Stewart, earl of Buchan, and his brother-in-law Archibald Douglas, earl of Wigtown, along with other captains including Buchan’s distant relative and namesake, Sir John Stewart of Darnley. This Scottish army had not been sent by the Scots king, James I; he had been captured by the English as a boy of eleven, fourteen years earlier, and the governor of the kingdom during the long years of his absence – Buchan’s father, the duke of Albany – had no particular enthusiasm for the prospect of curtailing his own power by securing the king’s release. The English response to the arrival of Scottish troops on French soil was to summon the captive King James to join the English army. The dauphin’s forces therefore found themselves confronting not one but three kings – Henry of England, the ailing Charles of France and the prisoner James of Scotland – in order that the Armagnacs and the Scots could be accused of treachery in bearing arms against their own sovereigns. This grandstanding from the moral high ground, always Henry’s favoured terrain, had dangerous implications for troops who could expect no mercy in defeat if they were deemed to have broken their allegiance. But the Scots remained unmoved, and by February 1421 another four thousand men had sailed from Scotland to join the contingent under Buchan’s command.
Marching against them was not Henry himself, who was by now back in England for the first time in more than three years, but the lieutenant-general he had left behind, his brother Thomas, duke of Clarence. Clarence was eager to seize this chance to emerge from his older brother’s shadow as a hero of the war, and – apparently looking for a fight in which he might cover himself in glory to rival Henry’s – he led a detachment of the Anglo-Burgundian forces south from Normandy into Anjou. But there, on 22 March, just outside the town of Baugé, he encountered the fresh troops newly arrived from Scotland, with Buchan and Wigtown at their head. Clarence charged into the attack, neither listening to his captains’ advice nor waiting for his archers to catch up – and found himself overwhelmed in a bloody rout. He died on the field with hundreds of his men; and the Scottish earls wrote in exultation to invite the dauphin to advance immediately into Normandy ‘because, with God’s help, all is yours’.
At last, divine favour had been restored to the true heir of the most Christian king. The dauphin, giddy with euphoria, hurried to give thanks in the great cathedral at Poitiers, and set out the same day to meet the victorious Scots at Tours. Until now, these interlopers from a tiny kingdom far to the north had been received with disdain by some at the dauphin’s court: ‘drunken, mutton-eating fools’ was the phrase whispered, with lips curled, behind elegant French hands. ‘What do you think now?’ the dauphin demanded after news came of the triumph at Baugé, one Scottish chronicler proudly reported; and ‘as if struck on their foreheads by a hammer, they had no answer’. Instead, the earl of Buchan ‘seemed to have arisen like another Messiah among and with them’. Within days, this saviour of France had been named constable of the kingdom – the highest military post in the gift of the crown, which gave Buchan authority second only to that of the dauphin himself. And the dauphin ordered some more armour – this time in the Scottish fashion – and another banner of St Michael, and prepared for an assault that would surely drive the English and their Burgundian allies from France for ever.
With the image of the warrior archangel borne before them, the Armagnacs and the Scots pressed northward into Normandy and then turned east, in the direction of Paris; by the beginning of July the dauphin’s army was camped outside the walls of Chartres, just fifty miles south-west of the embattled capital. They were poised, at last, for a climactic confrontation with the traitors and invaders who had so grievously usurped the birthright of France’s heir. But amid the exhilaration of their triumph at Baugé, they had forgotten, for a joyous, fleeting instant, that defeating the duke of Clarence was one thing; facing his brother, the victor of Azincourt, quite another. After almost six months’ absence, Henry had returned to France in June, with fresh soldiers at his back. He arrived in Paris on 4 July, and the very next day – citing sickness among his troops, and the difficulty of feeding an army in the field after an exceptionally long and bitter winter – the dauphin began a southward retreat to the safety of his castles in the valley of the Loire and his court at Bourges.
The hunger and disease were real, but so, unmistakably, was the loss of nerve. Military operations would continue under Buchan’s command, but the moment had been lost – and when manoeuvres resumed, the dauphin would no longer be there to witness them. Meanwhile, the serene and implacable elect of God, Henry of England, moved to besiege Meaux, a heavily fortified and strategically vital Armagnac town twenty-five miles east of Paris, whose garrison had long been a thorn in the capital’s side.
This time, there would be no musical interludes as night fell on the siege: Henry had come back without his wife, Catherine. Instead, he brought news to strike dread into her brother’s heart. She was carrying a baby with Plantagenet and Valois blood mingled in its veins. The treaty of Troyes would soon be made flesh in an heir to the twin thrones of England and Burgundian France; and though the dauphin might be safe, for now, in his refuge behind the protective waters of the Loire, the glorious promise of the victory at Baugé was fading like the sunlight as summer gave way to a sodden autumn.
With rain falling from leaden skies, the besiegers at Meaux needed all their king’s relentless determination to sustain them when illness took hold in the camp and food ran punishingly short. But Henry knew that God’s purpose was unfolding on both sides of the Channel. He sent a messenger riding sixty miles west to the abbey of Coulombs, near Chartres, to take possession of the foreskin of Christ, a sacred relic that offered special protection for women in childbirth, so that it could be dispatched to England for the approaching confinement of his young queen. Just before Christmas, word came that this holy object had done its work. On 6 December, Catherine had given birth to a healthy boy, named Henry after his royal father.
While bells rang and bonfires were lit in the streets of Paris, the journal-writer in the city contemplated the future of the divided kingdom this infant had been born to rule. His hatred of the Armagnacs, whose treachery had caused ‘these bitter troubles, this intolerable life, this accursed war’, burned as fiercely as ever, but he saw little reason to celebrate. The cause of the Burgundian duke and the English king might be just, but peace had not come, and on every side it was the poor, betrayed by their rulers, who suffered. ‘It is not one year or two,’ he wrote in despair, ‘it is fourteen or fifteen since this dismal dance began …’
That much the dauphin knew: those fourteen or fifteen years were all he could remember. But the salvation of his people – he was certain, even if they were not – lay in the vindication of the Armagnac cause. His Scots captains could not save Meaux from its fate; it fell after seven months of siege, through the grimmest of winters, in early May 1422. What he could, however, do for himself – even from the sheltering valley of the Loire – was offer a response to the dynastic threat of his nephew’s birth. He was eighteen, plenty old enough to be a husband and father, and the identity of his bride had been fixed years earlier, when they were both children: Marie, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Yolande, the dowager duchess of Anjou, who had done so much to establish Armagnac power in the south, in what some now disparagingly called the ‘kingdom of Bourges’. The dauphin had been encouraged by a visit the previous year from a holy hermit, Jean de Gand, who told him of a vision sent from heaven that he would wear the crown of France and father an heir to the throne. Now preparations were put in train, and in a magnificent ceremony in April 1422 the kingdom of Bourges acquired its dauphine. By the autumn, Marie was pregnant. But by then, everything had changed.
After the fall of Meaux, Henry had spent some time in Paris with his wife. They kept great state at the palace of the Louvre, dining in their jewelled crowns, while on the other side of the city her father and mother – who were still, hard though it might be to remember, the king and queen of France – were left to wander amid the gardens and galleried courtyards of the Hôtel Saint-Pol. But beneath the pomp of Henry’s court, a new vulnerability became suddenly, shockingly apparent. In June, the king set out southward in blistering heat to help relieve the siege of the Burgundian town of Cosne by Armagnac forces. He never arrived. He was only twenty-five miles south of Paris when it became clear that this unyielding soldier was too weak to stay in the saddle.
Hollow-faced, Henry was carried in a litter to the castle of Vincennes, south-east of the capital. There, in the cool of the donjon tower that loomed against the blue summer sky, his terrified physicians found that they could do nothing to relieve his fever. The elect of God, invincible though he was in the face of the enemy, was not immune, it appeared, to the gnawing, cramping flux that had ravaged his army in the mud outside Meaux. In the will he had written when he left England for the last time fourteen months earlier, he had commended his soul to God, Christ, the Virgin and the saints, his patron St George chief among them. Now, on 26 August – as always, facing what lay ahead with lucid control – he dictated a list of the silver and gold plate he wished to bequeath to his wife Catherine and to the baby son he had never seen. He left altar hangings to the abbey of Saint-Denis outside his French capital and to the abbey of Westminster beside his English one. And on 31 August 1422, in the darkness of the early hours, Henry died.
It seemed impossible that the ferocious energy that had bent two kingdoms to his will could be so abruptly extinguished, but the shocked observers who watched the imposing cortège that bore his body north from Vincennes had no choice but to believe it. On the large lead coffin, draped in crimson cloth of gold, lay an effigy of the king himself, fashioned out of boiled leather, delicately painted and dressed in royal robes, with a golden crown on its head and orb and sceptre in its hands – an embodiment of Henry’s majesty as an anointed sovereign, which endured even on this journey to the grave. The stately procession made its way first to Saint-Denis, the necropolis of the monarchs of France, and then, by water, to Rouen. There, three hundred mourners, men of England and Normandy, all dressed in black with torches blazing in their hands, attended the corpse as the tolling of church bells hung heavy in the city air, and everywhere voices were raised to sing the psalms and masses of the Office of the Dead, until the king reached Calais, and the sea, and England.
It was 5 November by the time Henry entered London for the last time. The coffin was drawn through the streets to rest for a night in the great cathedral of St Paul’s, before its final journey beyond the city walls to Westminster. There, on 7 November, the requiem mass was sung. A knight dressed in Henry’s exquisite armour rode through the west door of the abbey and spurred his warhorse on to the choir, where – in a startling moment of spiritual theatre – man and horse were stripped of their arms, which were offered up, symbols of the king’s earthly power, at the high altar. And then, at last, Henry’s mortal remains were laid to rest in the tomb he had chosen, nestling close to the shrine of Edward the Confessor, England’s royal saint.
Henry of England was in his grave at Westminster, and four days later another funeral rite was enacted, for another sovereign, at Saint-Denis. On 21 October, just seven weeks after Henry’s death at Vincennes, Charles of France had taken his last breath in the Hôtel Saint-Pol. For two or three days his body lay where he had died, ‘the room full of lights’, the journal-writer said, so that all those who wished could see him, and offer up their prayers. Then, on 11 November, he too was carried through crowded streets, with a crowned effigy dressed in ermine-lined robes lying on his coffin, for burial beside his ancestors in the hallowed vaults of France’s royal abbey.
Henry had been feared, and poor, perplexed Charles had been loved. Both were succeeded by an heir who was neither: ‘Henry of Lancaster, king of France and of England’, as the herald proclaimed at Saint-Denis – the nine-month-old baby, son of Henry and grandson of Charles, now in the care of his nurses at Windsor Castle. In him the provisions of the treaty so carefully enacted at Troyes had been fulfilled, but with dangerous prematurity. Despite the obvious hazards of war, no one had truly expected the English king, God’s own soldier, to be struck down so young and so abruptly, before even his fragile father-in-law. Now that both were gone in the space of two months, the lords on either side of the Channel who had committed themselves to the union of the two crowns were shaken to find themselves suddenly responsible for securing the rule of this double monarchy.
In England, the younger of the dead king’s two surviving brothers, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, established himself at the head of a council of nobles as protector of the realm and of the infant Henry VI. But in France it was his elder sibling, John, duke of Bedford – a steadier and more conscientious figure than either Gloucester or Thomas of Clarence who had died at Baugé – who was named regent on his nephew’s behalf. Charlemagne’s Joyeuse, the great sword of state of the French sovereigns, was carried upright before Bedford when he rode in procession from Saint-Denis back to Paris after the old king’s funeral, in token of his new authority – ‘at which the people murmured very much’, reported the Parisian observer, ‘but had to endure it for the time being’.
Their disquiet was prompted by the absence of Duke Philip of Burgundy, the prince of the blood whose support had made a French heir out of the English monarch. But Philip – who had been a solemn presence, in the black velvet of mourning for his murdered father, at the wedding of Henry and Catherine and their triumphal entry into the capital two years earlier – did not appear at either of the royal funerals in the autumn of 1422. His interests and ambitions, much more clearly than his father’s, now lay principally in the Low Countries, where civil war had broken out over the disputed succession of his cousin Jacqueline to the counties of Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland that bordered his own rich territories of Flanders and Artois. While he was occupied there in the north, and his redoubtable mother kept a watchful eye from her court at Dijon on the fortunes of the two Burgundies in the east, his concerns within the war-torn kingdom of France centred on the protection of his own lands, rather than the quest for control in government that had consumed his father’s life. The onerous task of leading the campaign to defeat the dauphin was therefore one he was happy to leave to Bedford. From this secondary position ‘in the service of the king of France’, as his financial officers had pointed out in 1421, he could demand that his military costs be paid by the regime in Paris; he also retained enough elbow-room to renegotiate the terms of his engagement with the Armagnac enemy should the passage of time and political circumstance require.
For now, however, the duke of Bedford was his ally – not least because Jacqueline of Hainaut had fled from her unhappy marriage to a Burgundian husband, Philip’s cousin John of Brabant, into the arms of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester in England. To keep Gloucester out of the Low Countries and his inexhaustible ambition in check, Philip of Burgundy needed the help of the duke’s elder brother, John of Bedford; and so, in the spring of 1423, a treaty was sealed at Amiens by which Bedford married Burgundy’s favourite sister, Anne. Bedford was thirty-three, an imposingly powerful man both physically and politically, while Anne of Burgundy was just eighteen, one of four girls who were all, one ungallant observer reported, ‘as plain as owls’. But she had charm, grace and an impressively quick mind, and soon, it was said, Bedford would go nowhere without her. By the same treaty, her sister Margaret married Arthur, count of Richemont, the brother of the duke of Brittany, and through these two marriages Bedford and Richemont stepped forward into the breach left in the Anglo-Burgundian front line by the sudden loss of England’s warrior-king.
Supporters of the kingdom of Bourges, meanwhile, were preoccupied not simply with the practical consequences of Henry’s death, but with its meaning. Armagnac chroniclers could not deny that there had been much to admire in a man who had been a brave soldier, a formidable leader and a prince whose justice was dispensed with unbending rigour; but for his life to be cut short in the midst of his triumphs, when he was just thirty-five, suggested something other than the divine mandate Henry had always claimed. Perhaps, they thought, he had been punished for disturbing the holy shrine at Meaux that held the relics of St Fiacre, whose feast day, tellingly, had been the last full day of his life.
The dauphin – whose daily routine included two or sometimes three masses, so unstinting was his devotion – knew that God’s will could also be revealed to the world through the movement of His heavens. Among the gifts he had bestowed on the earl of Buchanafter the victory at Baugé were the services of an astrologer named Germain de Thibouville, who (it was later reported) had immediately foretold the imminent deaths of the kings of England and France. Even for those less confident in the science of the stars than their royal master, it hardly mattered whether this was skilful prognostication or wishful thinking, now that it had come to pass. Whatever grief the dauphin felt for the father who had disowned him, France’s future depended on one overriding truth: that, in the moment when Charles VI’s soul had left his body, his son had become Charles VII, the new roi très-chrétien.
His title was proclaimed in the sumptuous surroundings of the royal chapel at Mehun-sur-Yèvre on 30 October, but his difficulty was that the crown itself remained physically out of reach. The circlets of Charlemagne and St Louis rested, as they always had, in the abbey of Saint-Denis, under the usurping power of the duke of Bedford. Although the coronation of the most Christian king could perhaps be performed in their absence, the sacred rite could only take place in the cathedral at Reims, with the holy oil of Clovis that was guarded there. And Reims – eighty miles north-east of Paris in the county of Champagne, where only a few hardy Armagnac garrisons held out in beleaguered isolation – lay beyond the current borders of the kingdom of Bourges.
In the circumstances, unction from the Holy Ampulla would have to wait. But there were, at least, other signs of God’s blessing. In the last week of September, while his father languished in his final illness at the Hôtel Saint-Pol, the dauphin had set out westward from Bourges to muster the threatened defences of La Rochelle, the only seaport on the Atlantic coast that remained in Armagnac hands. There, on 11 October, he sat in state to receive his supporters in the great hall of the bishop’s palace. Suddenly, with a heart-stopping lurch, the floor collapsed beneath their feet into the void of the chamber below. Amid the choking dust and splintered debris, many died and more were badly hurt – but, apart from a few scratches, the dauphin was miraculously unharmed. A fortnight later, when reports arrived of his father’s death, the divine purpose for which he had been saved became clear. And the new king knew where thanks were due: he made a generous donation to the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel to provide that each year, on the anniversary of the accident, there should be sung a mass of St Michael, ‘the archangel whom we venerate and to whom we entrust the greatest confidence’. St George might fight for the English, but St Michael, the standard-bearer of heaven, would protect the true king of France. From now on, Charles and his court would put aside the white sash of the Armagnacs in favour of the white cross – not just the ancient badge of the French crown, but the emblem of St Michael himself.
Even with the archangel’s help, however, it was apparent that the task of driving the English into the sea would take some time. The renewed sense of purpose within the court at Bourges was matched by the duke of Bedford’s determination to defend his brother’s legacy, and military operations continued with fresh energy, but to inconclusive effect. In the summer of 1423, an Armagnac army commanded by John Stewart of Darnley besieged the town of Cravant, which lay seventy miles north-east of Bourges, within the duchy of Burgundy itself. Bedford’s troops were occupied elsewhere, to the north and west; but, from Dijon, Philip of Burgundy’s mother sent for help from her son’s allies, and on 31 July four thousand men, English and Burgundian, appeared at Cravant like lightning from the clear sky. Their effect was as deadly: Darnley’s soldiers were slaughtered, and Darnley himself lost an eye in savage fighting before he was taken prisoner. If the Scots were the saviours of France, their intervention, clearly, would not always be as miraculous as it had been at Baugé. Charles quickly wrote to reassure his faithful subjects in Lyon that very few French noblemen had been party to the defeat – only Scots and Spaniards and other foreign soldiers, he said – ‘so the harm is not so great’.
Smoothly dismissive words might be necessary in public to maintain confidence in his cause, but that did not mean the Scots were any less vital to his plans. Darnley had been in command at Cravant only because the earls of Buchan and Wigtown had sailed for Scotland that summer to raise more troops, and by October there was good news to report: Buchan was about to return with eight thousand men, Charles told the people of Tournai cheerfully. The recovery of Normandy was in hand, and once this new Scots army stood on French soil, he intended to defeat the traitors and rebels, reclaim his kingdom and make his way to Reims for his coronation. And in the meantime, it had pleased God to provide France with an heir. On 3 July, at Bourges, his young queen had given birth to a fine son, named Louis after France’s royal saint.
Despite Cravant, then, the omens were good when Buchan made landfall at La Rochelle in the spring of 1424, bringing with him not only fresh soldiers but Wigtown’s father, Archibald, earl of Douglas, a fifty-five-year-old veteran of the wars between Scotland and England, who had already lost an eye and a testicle in earlier battles. The grand old man had decided to take his son’s place on the front line in France in part because the rewards on offer were so great. When he arrived at Bourges in April to kneel before the twenty-one-year-old king, Douglas was immediately granted the royal duchy of Touraine and named Charles’s ‘lieutenant-general in the waging of his war through all the kingdom of France’.
This was unprecedented honour and extraordinary power to bestow on a foreigner, but if it resulted in the expulsion of the English and the defeat of the Burgundians, it would be a price worth paying. Appalled though they privately were at the prospect of their uncouth Scottish duke, the citizens of Tours welcomed Douglas with stiff-necked public ceremony, and watched, grim-faced, while he set about plundering the city’s treasury as thoroughly as his troops were pillaging the countryside round about. Sooner or later, they knew, he would have to earn his extortionate keep; and on 4 August – having extracted another small fortune from the city to pay his soldiers – he led his army north towards Normandy, and the war they had come to fight.
Marching beside the Scots were French troops under the command of two lords whose own Norman lands had been overrun by the English: seventeen-year-old Jean, duke of Alençon, whose father had died at Azincourt, and Jean d’Harcourt, count of Aumâle, the experienced captain of Mont-Saint-Michel, who had struck deep into Normandy the previous autumn and had begged his king to launch this campaign. And riding to join this Franco-Scottish force was another contingent from outside the realm: heavy cavalry, two thousand strong, recruited from the duchy of Milan. These Lombard riders and their horses – men and animals all plated in steel, thanks to the superlative skill of Milanese armourers – were equipped to withstand English arrows, and the archers within the Scots army stood ready to return English fire. This, Charles and his commanders could be certain, would be no Azincourt.
The thought had almost been enough to bring the king to the battlefield. In the weeks before his troops moved north, Charles had once again ordered new coats of arms and trappings for his warhorse. Now that France had an heir – his baby son, kicking in his cradle – should he ride with his men to reclaim his kingdom? But St Michael’s protection had already been tested once at La Rochelle, and by August all were agreed that prudence was the better part of royal valour. The army of France would be led by Alençon and Aumâle, Buchan and Douglas. Their target was Ivry, a castle on the Norman frontier reclaimed a year earlier by an Armagnac garrison, but now close to breaking point under English siege. Knowing how few cards they had left to play, Ivry’s defenders had negotiated a truce according to the chivalric laws of war: fighting would stop while they appealed for help from their king, but if reinforcements did not arrive by 15 August, they would lay down their arms and surrender the castle into English hands.
While Charles’s army marched to save Ivry, therefore, the duke of Bedford mustered his troops to stop them. On 14 August the duke arrived outside the walls of the castle and picked his ground for battle. But the next day the summer sun rose and fell, and the Armagnacs did not come. Instead, there were riders, breathless and terrified, from the town of Verneuil, twenty-five miles further west, with shocking news. Alençon, Aumâle, Buchan and Douglas had realised that the Lombard knights, still behind them on the road, could not reach Ivry in time, and too much was at stake to risk meeting the English without them. It would mean grave dishonour if the army of France failed to appear at Ivry on the appointed day, but honour had not saved the princes of the blood at Azincourt. So, while Bedford waited, they had turned west to Verneuil. They had called for volunteers from within the Scots ranks – men who spoke English – and bound them backwards on their horses, spattered with blood, as if they were prisoners. Before Verneuil’s walls they paraded these bogus captives, who shouted to the townspeople that the English at Ivry had been slaughtered, and there was no hope of help. In consternation and fear, the people of Verneuil opened their gates and gave up the town without a fight. And when Bedford heard of this brazen trick, he set out in furious pursuit.
On 17 August, the English army reached the broad plain just outside Verneuil to the north-east, to find the might of France – or at least the part of it that the kingdom of Bourges could command – ready for battle. Together, the French and the Scots outnumbered the English almost two to one, and in front of their lines stood the newly arrived Lombard cavalry, a wall of muscle and bone encased in steel. This time, lowborn English archers would not preside over a field of blood; this time a noble French assault – in the ominous shape of Milanese mercenaries – would break them where they stood. At a signal, the cavalry wall began to move, faster and faster, hooves pounding into tinder-dry earth. When the shuddering impact came, the English ranks buckled and staggered. Sharpened stakes, too quickly planted, could not bring down horses in armour, and the Lombard riders carved a path of devastation, of trampled, broken bodies, through the heart of the English army. The cavalry had done its work. But, as the Lombards fell upon the spoils of the English baggage-train, they did not see the battered ranks of the enemy taking shape again behind them.
It was the French and the Scots, in shock, who saw English men-at-arms advancing out of the dust-storm kicked up by the horses’ heels. Braced though they were, the assault was brutal. In dense, chaotic fighting so ferocious that the earth was dark and slippery with blood, no one could tell who was winning – until, with a great roar, the English archers who had flung themselves out of the way of the Lombard charge regrouped to join the mêlée, daggers and axes in hand. English pressure began to bite, and, at last, the French line broke. Panic spread, and men fled for their lives, only to be trapped and butchered in the deep ditches outside the town walls. The count of Aumâle died where he fell; the young duke of Alençon was captured on the field. Of the few who escaped, almost none were Scots. As the plain of Verneuil became a killing ground, Douglas, Buchan and the army they led were hacked to pieces.
Outside Ivry two days earlier, Bedford had ridden before his troops wearing a blue velvet robe emblazoned with a red cross of St George within a white cross of St Michael. Two saints, two kingdoms, England and France; the claim could not have been clearer. Now it was vindicated in the bloody triumph of Verneuil. Bedford himself – who ‘did that day wonderful feats of arms’, said an admiring Burgundian chronicler who fought with the English army – returned to Paris, to be greeted with processions, songs and pageants by elated crowds all dressed in the red of St George. Relief at the defeat of the vile Armagnacs was so profound, the journal-writer observed, that the duke was welcomed to the great cathedral of Notre-Dame ‘as if he had been God’.
While celebrations continued in Anglo-Burgundian France – lubricated, fortuitously, by the best and most plentiful vintage anyone could remember – the kingdom of Bourges occupied itself with more sombre tasks. The city of Tours received the lifeless bodies of its duke, Archibald Douglas, and his son-in-law, John Stewart of Buchan, and buried them quietly in the choir of the cathedral. ‘Dearly loved and delightful they were in life’, said the Scottish chronicler Walter Bower, ‘and in death they were not divided.’ The people of Tours made no comment, other than to blockade the garrison of Scots soldiers that Douglas had left in the castle until they agreed to go away.
It was clear to the roi très-chrétien, contemplating the state of his kingdom, that France was going to need another saviour.