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It seemed strange, to the people of Paris, that their country now appeared to have two capitals, neither of which was their own incomparable city.
Bourges, more than a hundred miles to the south, was home to the court of the disinherited dauphin, Charles the ill-advised. Loyal Parisians knew that he was surrounded by traitors and murderers – not just the killers of the good duke John of Burgundy, but all those evildoers who had inflicted years of barbarous suffering on the people of France. But, disconcertingly, the righteous lords to whom France’s greatest city had been so conspicuously faithful were not resident in Paris either. The duke of Bedford, regent of the kingdom on behalf of the infant king Henry, had moved into the Hôtel de Bourbon, just beside the palace of the Louvre on the westernmost edge of the city, and held a great feast there before Christmas 1424; but then, as was his habit, he returned to Rouen, the capital of English-held Normandy, and the centre of English government in France since before the treaty of Troyes.
Duke Philip of Burgundy, meanwhile, had been at his Parisian home, the Hôtel d’Artois, earlier in the autumn for the lavish wedding of the master of his household, Jean de La Trémoille, to one of Queen Isabeau’s ladies; then, said the journal-writer in the city, he ‘went back to his own country’. ‘His own country’ – his pays – meant his own territories, not his own kingdom; but even the most steadfast Burgundian adherent, which this observer had once been, could not help noticing that ‘Burgundian’ no longer straightforwardly meant ‘French’. The duke – a lean, long-nosed figure whose habit of dressing entirely in black emphasised the unhappy circumstances in which he had inherited his title – had replaced his dead father’s emblem of a carpenter’s plane with his own personal badge, a flint and steel producing sparks and flames. But after the conflagration that his father’s determination to rule had fuelled in the most Christian kingdom, the fires of Philip’s ambition burned elsewhere, in the new Burgundian state he was forging in the Low Countries. As a result, his visits to Paris – ‘a city which had loved him so well and which had suffered so much and still was suffering for him and for his father’, lamented the disillusioned journal-writer as early as 1422 – dwindled almost to nothing.
By 1424, then, it seemed that there were two Frances. One, in the north, was ruled from Rouen by the regent Bedford, who decreed that none of King Henry’s loyal subjects should refer to the so-called dauphin as ‘king’, or to the Armagnac traitors as ‘French’, on pain of hefty fines. Meanwhile, the other France, in the south, looked to the government of King Charles VII in Bourges, from where he promised to sweep the usurping English into the sea and to reduce those of his subjects who had rebelled against him to the obedience they owed.
These, obviously, were incompatible claims. In theory, each kingdom of France was dedicated to the annihilation of the other. In practice, they were locked in a deathly embrace, a stalemate sustained by devastation and bloodshed. ‘At that time’, the Parisian had written wearily in his journal in 1423, ‘the English would sometimes take one fortress from the Armagnacs in the morning and lose two in the evening. So this war, accursed of God, went on.’ Though the kingdom of the north had been strengthened by victory at Verneuil, and English forces were pushing southward from Normandy into Maine and Anjou, neither side had yet shown themselves capable of making a decisive move across the great natural boundary of the river Loire, which now, in effect, divided the Armagnac kingdom of the south from English France to the north and its ally, the duchy of Burgundy, to the east.
It even seemed possible that a decisive part in this bloody struggle might now be taken by a different war, fought for different reasons on different soil. In the summer of 1424, while Bedford hammered the Scots into the dust of Verneuil, his brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was mustering troops in England for a continental invasion of his own. At Gloucester’s side was his new wife, Jacqueline of Hainaut, whose previous unhappy marriage to the duke of Brabant had not yet been annulled to the satisfaction of the Church – nor, indeed, of the duke of Brabant himself, who was not prepared to relinquish Jacqueline’s counties of Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland along with his unloved bride. Gloucester, however, was not about to let matrimonial technicalities stand in his way. He and Jacqueline were married by the beginning of 1423, their union blessed, since Rome refused to sanction it, by the last remaining antipope, who had been living in Spanish obscurity ever since the rest of Europe had ended the papal schism without him. And in October 1424, the duke and his new duchess landed at Calais with an army, ready to reclaim her inheritance.
This irritating intervention was not what Philip of Burgundy’s alliance with England had been designed to achieve. Even before Gloucester’s expedition had reached the Low Countries, its potential repercussions within Anglo-Burgundian France were beginning to be felt. As news of Gloucester’s military preparations spread that summer, tentative diplomatic approaches – the first in years – took place between Burgundian Dijon and Armagnac Bourges. Wild rumours that Duke Philip had already made peace with the man who had murdered his father reached Bedford on the eve of battle at Verneuil, and as a result he decided at the eleventh hour to send away the Burgundian troops under his command, preferring to fight with a smaller number of soldiers on whose loyalty he could depend absolutely, rather than run the risk of treachery from within. There was, of course, no chance that John the Fearless’s blood could be washed so easily from the hands of the young king of Bourges, but it was clear that the reordering of Burgundian priorities might at last mean that the stain was starting to fade. That September, Duke Philip put his seal to a truce with the Armagnacs to protect the frontiers of his lands in eastern France – thereby freeing himself to tackle Gloucester’s aggression in the north – which acknowledged for the first time the claim of the ‘so-called dauphin’ to style himself a king. Instead of this disparaging Burgundian circumlocution, the text of the treaty called him simply ‘le roi’.
It took only months, however, for Gloucester’s assault on the Low Countries to reveal itself as a damp squib. The English duke discovered that he faced not only a Burgundian army but a public challenge to fight in single combat. Young knights like themselves, Duke Philip declared, should risk their own lives to settle such a quarrel, rather than spill the blood of their followers. This was an offer Gloucester could not, with honour, refuse. At his suggestion the date was set for St George’s day, 23 April 1425. In preparation, Philip retired to his castle at Hesdin, where he took lessons to refine his swordsmanship and spent the eyewatering sum of nearly £14,000 on new armour, pavilions, coats of arms, banners and horse harness in embroidered silks and velvets. Humphrey of Gloucester, meanwhile, sought a safe-conduct to return to England to make his own preparatory arrangements, leaving his wife, Jacqueline, in Hainaut. He took with him one of his duchess’s most beautiful attendants, an Englishwoman named Eleanor Cobham; and gradually it became clear that he was not coming back.
Thwarted though Philip of Burgundy might have been in his desire to win chivalric glory – or, at least, having comprehensively called Gloucester’s bluff – the duke knew that the Low Countries were within his grasp. By the summer of 1425 he had secured custody of the abandoned Duchess Jacqueline and, with her, the chance to consolidate his hold on Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland. But that September, one morning before dawn, Jacqueline escaped from house arrest in Ghent, disguised as a man for her headlong ride to Holland and freedom. As she mustered support to resist Burgundian rule, Philip gathered his armies for the fight ahead. And for the duke of Bedford, relief at the retreat from this battleground of his foolhardy brother Gloucester was tempered by the knowledge that his greatest ally’s interest in France was now subsumed in the overriding demands of war elsewhere.
From Rouen, Bedford did everything he could to keep his partnership with the absent duke of Burgundy alive, and he had his beloved wife, Philip’s sister Anne, to help him in his task. But the treaty at Amiens that had brought Bedford and his duchess together had been a double marriage alliance, and now the duke discovered that the other union made there – that of Anne’s sister Margaret and Arthur, count of Richemont, brother of the duke of Brittany – would no longer share the burden of sustaining the political bond between England and Burgundy.
Richemont’s relationship with England was a complex one. His title was English in origin, but this earl of Richmond, as he was known on the northern side of the Channel, held no lands there. Instead, it was a name associated since the eleventh century with the independent duchy of Brittany, whose dukes now used it as of right within their own family, whatever the current state of their dealings with the English crown. His widowed mother had married King Henry IV of England in 1403, but Richemont had grown up in France, and it was for France that he had fought at Azincourt. Wounded on the field, he was found after the battle, covered in blood, under a pile of corpses. For five years he remained Henry V’s prisoner until, at twenty-seven, he won his freedom on parole – that is, on his word that he would do nothing against the interests of the king of England or the duke of Burgundy.
That stipulation was a mark of the changed world into which Richemont emerged from his captivity. He had close ties from his earliest years in Paris with the houses of both Burgundy and Orléans, but when the civil war first erupted he had fought for the Orléanist Armagnacs. By 1420, however, the Armagnac dauphin was the killer of John the Fearless, and Richemont’s childhood friend Philip of Burgundy was the ally of the English king. Richemont committed himself to the Anglo-Burgundian cause, and helped to persuade his elder brother of Brittany, who had previously tacked between the two sides, to do the same. His decision was reflected and underpinned in 1423 by his marriage to Burgundy’s sister, and he was rewarded by the regent Bedford with a grant of the royal duchy of Touraine, the province that – lying as it did across the great fault-line of the Loire – would also be granted, from the other side of the divide, by King Charles VII to the earl of Douglas.
But despite these years of service to English France in the north, in October 1424 Richemont rode to Angers to kneel before the young king in the south. There Charles proposed that the count should take the place of the dead earl of Buchan as the constable of his kingdom, the military leader of Armagnac France. In March 1425, at Chinon, Richemont swore an oath of homage to his new king and received the constable’s sword from his hands. For Charles and the Armagnacs, the reasons to rejoice at this defection were as numerous as the causes for English disquiet: not only was Richemont an experienced and proficient soldier, but his service was offered as one part of a wider realignment of Breton loyalties that, by the autumn of 1425, included a treaty between the kingdom of Bourges and Richemont’s brother, the Breton duke. Most alarmingly of all, Richemont had insisted that he could not accept his new command without consulting his brother-in-law, Philip of Burgundy. The fact that Duke Philip did not prevent him from taking up arms for the Armagnac king represented no simple reordering of Burgundian diplomacy, not least because by now there was nothing simple in the Burgundian position; but that conclusion in itself offered little comfort to the English.
More significant even than the presence of Richemont at Charles’s side, meanwhile, was the means by which he had been drawn back into the Armagnac fold. The first meeting between the king and his new constable had taken place at Angers, the great capital of the duchy of Anjou, because it had been brokered by Anjou’s dowager duchess, Charles’s mother-in-law, Yolande of Aragon. The kingdom of Bourges owed its very existence to Yolande’s support: in the dark days of 1418, after Charles’s escape from Burgundian Paris, she had established his court in the south and surrounded him with loyal supporters. In the years since then, however, this formidable politician had occupied herself with other battles.
The dukes of Anjou held an impressive array of titles scattered across hundreds of miles of territory. Their duchy of Anjou and county of Maine, just south of Normandy, lay on the bitterly fought front line of the war with the English, but their county of Provence, four hundred miles further south-east, was lit by the stronger sun of the Mediterranean, and its trading revenues from the port of Marseille helped to fill Angevin coffers with gold. More impressive still, though infinitely less substantial, was their hereditary claim to the crowns of Sicily and Jerusalem. The latter kingdom was long gone and the former split in two, but one of these paper titles – the mainland kingdom of Sicily, consisting of the lands in southern Italy that were ruled from Naples – remained tantalisingly close to Angevin hands. Yolande’s husband had tried and failed to retrieve this Italian realm, but the wife who had governed his French territories during his absence on campaign was still known to her contemporaries as ‘the queen of Sicily’.
Nor, after her husband’s death in 1417, had Yolande herself given up on this Angevin dream. In 1419, once she had established her royal son-in-law Charles in safety at Bourges, she had travelled south to Provence to prepare a new military expedition through which her sixteen-year-old son, Duke Louis, might secure his Italian birthright. She also had plans for her second son, René. From her mother, Yolande had inherited a claim to the duchy of Bar in eastern France, which was currently ruled by her uncle, the cardinal-bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne – but as a priest, he could father no children of his own. Yolande persuaded him to adopt René as his heir; and René would also, she hoped, rule the neighbouring duchy of Lorraine through the marriage she negotiated for him with its young heiress, Isabelle.
These were complex and ambitious schemes, but by 1423 they were bearing fruit. René was now married to Isabelle and living in Bar as the cherished heir of Yolande’s uncle, and in June Louis took ship for his kingdom of Sicily at the head of the army his mother had raised. It was time to return her attention to the kingdom of France. On 26 June 1423, just a few days after Louis’s departure from Marseille, Yolande left Provence for the first time in four years to ride north to Bourges, where her daughter, Charles’s queen Marie, was about to give birth to France’s heir. And there, after a brief moment of domestic communion with her new grandchild, she addressed herself to the next political task at hand.
Her goals were clear. Her commitment to the future of her son-in-law, Charles, as king of France was matched by her determination that Anjou and Provence should flourish while her son Louis secured his Italian throne, and that Bar and Lorraine should pass peacefully into the hands of her younger son, René. All three objectives required that the English should be expelled from French soil, and the kingdom reunited under Charles’s rule. It was no use to Yolande if France were to remain torn in two, its back broken along the valley of the Loire: that would maroon Anjou and Maine on the ravaged frontier of war with the English, and leave Bar and Lorraine struggling in a Burgundian vice, lying as they did between the duchy of Burgundy to the south and the Burgundian territories in the Low Countries to the north. The way forward, then, could not be achieved through military force alone. No matter what had happened in the past, Yolande knew that the princes of the blood – including Philip of Burgundy – must come together under the rule of their king, Charles VII, in the joint interests of the kingdom of France and her Angevin dynasty.
She had already begun a private correspondence with Duke Philip by the time of her return to Bourges in June 1423, but the diplomatic offensive she launched within weeks of her arrival had, as its first target, the duke of Brittany. That autumn she spent a month visiting him at his castle at Nantes, only fifty miles from Angers, and the following spring she returned there with a deputation from her son-in-law’s court at Bourges. The result of this elegant intervention was the political détente between Bourges and Brittany that led to the defection of the duke’s brother Arthur of Richemont from the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, and his appointment in 1425 as constable of Armagnac France.
Richemont arrived in Bourges, as Yolande had planned, still armed with his Burgundian connections, and as part of the deal by which he took up his sword in the Armagnac cause, some of the men most hated by Duke Philip – those who were directly implicated in the murder of John the Fearless – were removed from Charles’s court. Tanguy du Châtel, whose axe had struck the first blow, and Jean Louvet, who had stood beside him to watch the duke die, were exiled from the king’s side in the summer of 1425 to positions in faraway Provence. Their destination alone would have revealed the guiding hand of Yolande, even had Charles himself not made her role explicitly clear: his decision had been taken, he said, by ‘the good advice and counsel of our dearest and most beloved mother, the queen of Jerusalem and Sicily’.
This reconfiguration of the Armagnac court demonstrated her pragmatism as a politician, but Yolande also knew that divine providence would shape her country’s future. She had direct experience, after all, of its role in healing a rupture in the fabric of creation even more cataclysmic than the current division within the kingdom of France. In 1400, when she had first arrived as a young bride in her husband’s county of Provence, two rival popes simultaneously claimed dominion over Christendom, one in Rome and the other in the city of Avignon, just twelve miles from her new home at the castle of Tarascon. This great schism in the Church was finally ended, after four decades of bitter wrangling, by the Council of Constance in 1418. During that time, holy voices had been raised across Europe to demand an end to the Church’s agony – and Yolande had learned at first hand that these spiritual leaders might be female as well as male.
In the 1390s, for example, her mother-in-law, Marie of Brittany – another strikingly formidable dowager duchess of Anjou – had known a peasant woman named Marie Robine, who had begun to receive messages from God. Originally from the Hautes-Pyrénées, in 1388 Marie Robine had travelled more than two hundred miles to Avignon in the grip of an intractable illness, seeking help at the shrine of a young cardinal who had died a year earlier at the age of just eighteen, and whose grave in Avignon’s cemetery of St Michael was developing a reputation for miraculous cures. There, in the presence of Avignon’s pope, God’s grace had restored her to health, and from then on she remained as a holy recluse within the cemetery.
It was ten years later, on 22 February 1398, that Marie Robine first heard a voice from heaven, telling her that she must direct the king to reform the Church and end the schism. By April, Duchess Marie was taking so close an interest in this divine instruction that she was present in St Michael’s cemetery when Marie Robine had another vision, this time of a burning wheel bearing thousands of swords and innumerable arrows, poised to descend from heaven to earth to destroy the wicked. At her voices’ urging – and perhaps with the help of the duchess – she left her cell to travel to Paris, but failed to secure a hearing before the ailing king’s council. By 1399, back in Avignon, her voices became more outspoken in rejecting the corrupted authority of the earthly Church and more apocalyptic in the face of the king’s failure to heed her words, until in November, fifteen days after her last revelation, Marie Robine died.
Memories of her were still fresh when Yolande arrived in Provence in the following year, and when the young duchess travelled north to the valley of the Loire, she herself encountered another female visionary. Jeanne-Marie de Maillé was a woman of noble birth who, after her husband’s death in 1362, had embraced a life of poverty and prayer as a recluse under the protection of a convent in Tours. On occasion, her visions enabled her to make prophecies – one, at least, concerned with the profound trauma of the schism – and her words could command the ear of the powerful. Her connections with the Angevin dynasty were so close that she stood godmother to one of Duchess Marie’s sons, Yolande’s brother-in-law, and she was twice granted an audience with the king, first when Charles VI visited Tours in 1395, and again when she travelled to Paris in 1398. These were private conversations, their content unrecorded, but Jeanne-Marie spent time too with Queen Isabeau, whom she reprimanded for living in luxury while the people suffered and starved. When Yolande met her, she was already in her seventies, but the two women spent enough time together that when Jeanne-Marie died in 1414, Yolande was a witness at the canonisation hearing held to consider evidence that she might be recognised as a saint.
It seemed, then, in 1425 that Yolande had what Armagnac France needed: vision of a different kind – not the revelations granted to Marie Robine and Jeanne-Marie de Maillé, but the insight to perceive God’s plan that France should be reunited under Charles’s kingship, and to comprehend how it might be brought about. She was at her son-in-law’s side when he called his subjects to arms once again at the beginning of 1426, and established herself at the head of his council in an attempt to bring royal finances under strict control. Constable Richemont stood ready for the double task of fighting the English and facilitating peace with Burgundy, and meanwhile efforts were made to retain old friends as well as welcoming new ones. John Stewart of Darnley, for example, received a grant in November 1425 to help him pay the ransom demanded after his capture by the Burgundians at Cravant, so that he could resume his role as ‘constable of the Scots army’ (or, at least, what little remained of it after the massacre at Verneuil).
And yet as the months went by, despite all Yolande’s efforts, concrete progress in pushing back the frontier of English France or persuading Burgundy into the embrace of the kingdom of Bourges seemed as remote a prospect as ever. At the end of 1425 the duke of Bedford was called back to England to deal with his brother of Gloucester, whose talent for causing trouble had been unleashed at home after his ignominious retreat from the Low Countries. As his lieutenants, Bedford left the earls of Salisbury, Suffolk and Warwick to launch a campaign in 1426 against the duchy of Brittany – in English eyes an ally that had turned traitor with the diplomatic realignment of the previous year – as well as pursuing operations in Maine and Champagne. But Armagnac forces, with Richemont at their head, proved unable to take advantage of the regent’s absence. Instead, the court of Bourges was otherwise occupied in turning on itself.
Yolande had hoped that the arrival of Richemont and the banishment of Louvet and du Châtel would enable Charles’s regime to settle into a new order focused on rapprochement with Burgundy. In practice, however, the removal of the controversial figure of Jean Louvet from the king’s side in 1425 had only been achieved after an astonishing moment of violence, when Louvet himself, in a last desperate ploy to save his position, took the young king to Poitiers with as many soldiers as he could muster, and prepared to hold the city against Richemont, who advanced against him with an army of his own. Civil war among the Armagnacs had eventually been avoided, thanks in large part to Yolande’s intervention, but much too narrowly for comfort, and it remained unclear whether Charles was vulnerable to manipulation by the ambitious and grasping men around him, or whether he played some deliberate part in setting them against one another. Either way, the relationship between the king and his new constable had got off to a poisonous start – and the result was escalating conflict within the Armagnac establishment.
By the summer of 1426 the man who had replaced Louvet at the eye of the developing storm was Pierre de Giac, a former Burgundian loyalist who had defected to the Armagnac court and risen high in Charles’s affections. That August, Giac launched an extraordinary assault on Robert le Maçon, who had served the king ever since Yolande had first established the court at Bourges. Now in his sixties, le Maçon was taken prisoner on Giac’s orders, and kept in confinement for two months until he paid handsomely for his freedom. But Giac’s confidence that the favour in which he stood with the king made him untouchable proved entirely misplaced. Richemont had not been recruited to serve at the king’s right hand simply to tolerate the antics of men as rapacious as Giac; and in February 1427 Giac was arrested, sentenced to death and killed by Richemont’s men. Such summary justice had been necessary, the constable explained in a public letter to the people of Lyon, because the king was ‘badly advised, and unaware of the great disloyalty and treason of the said Giac’, so that he, Richemont, had been forced to remove him, on the king’s behalf and in the interests of good government.
This was remarkable frankness: clearly, the twenty-four-year-old king did not enjoy full control over his own administration, and his most powerful servants were now entirely capable of taking his law into their own hands. Nor did the death of Giac bring greater calm to the court. Another favourite, Le Camus de Beaulieu, was brutally murdered in June 1427, and few doubted that the constable had ordered his dispatch. Meanwhile, Richemont himself introduced a new face into the crowd jostling for position around the king. Georges de La Trémoille – another former Burgundian, whose brother Jean remained master of the duke of Burgundy’s household – had been instrumental in Giac’s execution, and married his widow five months later. Almost immediately, La Trémoille began his own ascent in Charles’s confidence, and soon he and Richemont, in their turn, were at daggers drawn. Yolande, bruised by the self-destructive violence of this bloody heaving and shoving, retreated from court for the first time in three years. And all the while, the people of France endured the effects of a war that now seemed to have no beginning, and no end.
The people of Paris – a city that had once been the centre of the conflict, these days all but abandoned by the powerful – had to find their own moments of distraction in this grimly uncertain world. In the late summer of 1425, the journal-writer there reported, two entertainments had been devised for the diversion of the citizens. On the last Sunday in August, an enclosure was set up in the Rue Saint-Honoré in which a large pig was placed, along with four blind men, each of them wearing armour and carrying a hefty club. Whichever man could kill the pig would win its carcass as a prize, and ‘they fought this very odd battle’, the anonymous Parisian said, ‘giving each other tremendous blows with the clubs. Whenever they tried to get a good blow in at the pig, they would hit each other, so that if they had not been wearing armour they would certainly have killed each other.’ Then, the following Saturday in the Rue Saint-Denis, a long pole was set up, more than thirty feet tall and thoroughly greased, with a basket on the top containing a goose and a handful of silver coins. Whoever succeeded in reaching the basket would win its contents; but the greasy pole defeated all comers, until at last the boy who had climbed highest was given the goose, though not the money. The other news of note was that, a little earlier in the year, a painting of the Danse Macabre had been unveiled along the cloister walls of the city’s cemetery of the Holy Innocents. The grinning figure of Death led a grotesque carnival in which king, beggar, pope and peasant were swept up all together, the pomp and power of the great exposed as worthless vanity by this inexorable procession to the grave. The dance of death; the greasy pole; a battle of the blind. If the journal-writer felt any temptation to suggest that these moments in Parisian life might echo the wider state of the kingdom, it was one he heroically resisted.
By the spring of 1427, when the duke of Bedford at last returned to the city, Paris was in the grip of dreadful weather: heavy frosts, constant rain and storms of hail. The regent’s mood was little better. He had knocked heads together in England, but fifteen months of work had produced no permanent solution to Gloucester’s truculence, and in France every step forward seemed to be matched by another reverse. There was cause for English celebration that autumn, when many months of campaigning in Brittany at last persuaded its duke, always a versatile player in this endless game, to abandon his alliance with the Armagnacs and pledge his renewed loyalty to the English king. But just seventy-two hours before the treaty was finally signed on 8 September, cheers died on English lips when Armagnac forces won two substantial encounters in a single day. At Montargis, sixty miles south of Paris, a besieging English army was driven off by Armagnac troops under the command of the Bastard of Orléans (illegitimate brother of the duke who, twelve years after Azincourt, still remained a prisoner in England) and a captain named Étienne de Vignolles, known to all by his nickname as ‘La Hire’. And 150 miles further west, another Armagnac captain named Ambroise de Loré wiped out an English force almost within sight of the fortress of Sainte-Suzanne, headquarters of Sir John Fastolf, the English military governor in Maine.
For the kingdom of Bourges, meanwhile, these moments of triumph were shafts of light in a lowering sky. The loss of the Breton alliance was a grievous blow. Not only that, but the perfidy of the duke of Brittany compromised the standing of his brother, Richemont, as the military leader of Armagnac France – a circumstance that might have mattered more had Richemont not been busy doing his own extraordinary damage from inside the Armagnac regime. In more than two years since he had sworn homage to the king at Chinon, the constable had yet to lead his troops to victory in an engagement with the enemy. Now, with the English in Maine, and Brittany to the west once again a hostile power, Yolande’s duchy of Anjou stood in need of urgent reinforcement. Richemont, however, was yet again arming himself not to confront the English, but to remove an ‘evil counsellor’ from the king’s side – this time his own former protégé, La Trémoille.
And this time, Charles had had enough. La Trémoille’s determination not to be prised from his place was matched by the king’s resolve not to lose another favourite to sudden death or distant exile. Together, in the spring of 1428, king and counsellor seized the great castle at Chinon, which had been in Richemont’s hands ever since his appointment as constable. There, they set about rallying the resources of the kingdom, calling once again on the presence of Yolande to foster confidence in their efforts, while Richemont – his energies now focused entirely on internal rivals rather than the enemy without – installed himself in the fortified citadel of Parthenay in Poitou, forty miles to the south-west. But that autumn, alarming reports arrived of a new and unexpected threat. Orléans was under siege.
Technically, Orléans should never have been an English target. According to the laws of war, the lands of a prisoner – and the duke of Orléans was still a captive in London – had protected status, being reserved from combat to produce the money that would pay his ransom. But there was good reason for the English to make a strategic exception to this honourable rule. Orléans was the northernmost town on the great curve of the river Loire. If the English were ever to make a decisive push across this natural boundary, to break the stalemate that held the war in brutal and costly stasis, Orléans would have to fall. And if it fell, the doorway into Armagnac France would be wide open.
The man behind this plan was Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, at forty a gifted and vastly experienced commander with an exemplary record of service to Henry V and the regent Bedford – ‘a thorough soldier, an excellent fighter, and very astute in all his dealings’, the Parisian journal-writer noted approvingly. But his march on Orléans was not unequivocal evidence of renewed purpose on the part of the English. Salisbury himself was intent on securing the Loire crossing there, but that had not been Bedford’s strategy; the regent and the council over which he presided in Paris in the spring of 1428 had decided that the newly recruited troops the earl was bringing from England should be used to advance the English line from Maine into Anjou, consolidating the conquest slowly and carefully, piece by piece, with a push from English-held Le Mans to the gates of Yolande’s capital, Angers.
But when Salisbury and his army landed in France that July, it was to Orléans, not Angers, that they headed; persuasion, or insubordination, or some combination of the two had deflected the regent from his chosen path. And this would not be a momentary diversion. More than thirty watchtowers studded the ancient walls that surrounded Orléans on the north side of the Loire. A massive stone bridge, more than two hundred years old, reached from the town’s great gate to an island in the river and then on – a span of nineteen arches in total – to a fortified tower known as the Tourelles, from which a wooden bridge gave access to the river’s southern bank. It was a daunting prospect, but Salisbury showed no sign of intimidation. His first move was to launch a storming campaign to isolate the town by water, with the capture of Jargeau, ten miles upstream, and Meung and Beaugency, ten and fifteen miles downstream, among dozens of other nearby settlements and strongholds: ‘… the fare and speed since our last coming into this land has been so good’, he reported, ‘that I am ever beholden to thank God, beseeching him to continue it for his mercy’.
By 12 October, he was ready to take up position outside Orléans itself. Lacking enough men to surround it on all sides, he settled on an attack from the south; the bridge, he believed, was the key to possession of the town. For twelve days the Tourelles held out against English bombardment and assault until at last, on 24 October, its defenders withdrew across the river to take refuge behind the town walls. English triumph, however, was short-lived. As the besiegers advanced to secure the bridgehead, they saw that the Orléanais had somehow succeeded in mining the bridge across which they had just retreated. The English might hold the Tourelles, but their route into Orléans was gone. Not long after, Salisbury stood at an upper window in the fortress, gazing out across the fast-flowing water at the town he could not reach. Suddenly, a stone cannonball fired from one of the watchtowers on the opposite bank smashed into the wall beside him. When his shocked attendants reached the earl amid the rubble, he was still breathing; but, where one side of his face had been, there was only a gaping, bloody hole. He died eight days later.
This double loss, of the earl of Salisbury and the bridge he had hoped to cross, changed the essence of the English campaign. Instead of a bold strike under a brilliant commander to force their way over the Loire, they found themselves facing a grinding, protracted siege directed by a substitute leader, the earl of Suffolk, an intelligent but cautious man who had little of Salisbury’s daring or charisma. Suffolk strengthened the blockade that Salisbury had established round the town, so far as he could. Earthworks reinforced with wood, known as boulevards, topped with fortifications known as bastilles, were built at intervals outside the walls, but much of the territory to the north and east of the town remained open, because – as Salisbury had known – the English were too few for their grip to become a stranglehold. English guns continued to fire on Orléans, and reinforcements under the command of the lords Scales and Talbot were summoned, but the strategy of the siege was now simply to wait, in the hope that hunger and despair would do their work.
It was a plan fraught with risk. Winter was coming, and the same circumstance that made Orléans a prize to be won – its key position on the frontier between English and Armagnac France – left the army encamped around its walls exposed to danger. Bourges itself was only sixty miles to the south, and the task of maintaining supply lines to the besiegers was almost as difficult as that of doing the same, from the other side, for the besieged. Not, of course, that the English would have swapped places. There was no doubt that Charles was doing what he could to relieve the siege; he was determined to defend Orléans with all his power, reported the Burgundian chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet, ‘believing that, if it were lost into the hands of the enemy, that would mean the total destruction of his frontiers and country and of himself too …’. He sent the Bastard of Orléans to take command of the town, together with La Hire, who had helped the Bastard to victory at Montargis, John Stewart of Darnley, the constable of the Scots, and other captains including an experienced professional soldier named Poton de Xaintrailles. With them, the king sent specialist gunners, and his personal surgeon to tend to the wounded.
At Chinon, he had also gathered a meeting of the estates-general, representatives of their regions who were authorised to make grants of taxation for the defence of the realm. This they did, but they also appealed to the king for the restoration of good government, imploring him to reunite the princes of the blood around his throne, and especially that, ‘by all good means possible’, he should find a way to make peace with the duke of Burgundy. But this was palpably a plea made in hope rather than expectation. While the truces that offered some form of protection to the lands on the frontier between Burgundian territory and Armagnac France were still holding, the duke himself had paid a rare visit to Bedford in Paris that spring, and there was no sign that his preoccupation with the Low Countries – where he was in the process of securing his victory over Jacqueline of Hainaut – would produce any significant reordering of his alliance with the English in France, however equivocal that relationship might now be. Nor did the prospects of unity among the Armagnac lords seem any brighter. Their ranks had at least been reinforced by the return of the young duke of Alençon, newly ransomed from his captivity after Verneuil, but Richemont was still plotting against La Trémoille behind the walls of Parthenay – and the destructive manoeuvring of the constable Yolande had helped to appoint could only compromise her chances of mitigating the destabilising effects of La Trémoille’s presence within the court itself.
As the cold set in, and the weeks of the siege began to turn into grim and frozen months, the impasse at Orléans seemed to encapsulate the plight of the whole kingdom. Across great swathes of France, the oppressive and violent reality of armies moving through the countryside, of battles and sieges, pillage and plunder, had left behind scorched earth, torched homes, and lives and livelihoods destroyed. And over the long years of suffering, as the war slowed to an attritional struggle, the stakes for which it was being fought had begun to blur and fade. Once, this had been a conflict between two anointed sovereigns: Charles the Well-Beloved, who was, whatever his failings, the most Christian king of France, and Henry of England, hailed by his subjects as the true elect of God. Now, the rhetoric might remain, but neither of the two kings for whom so much death and devastation were being wrought had received unction from heaven – one, another Henry, because he was only a child, and the other, another Charles, because he had been disowned by his father, and the holy church at Reims where the most Christian king should receive his crown had been taken from him.
Now, too, there was no question of a king leading his troops in battle. Henry was too young, and although his uncle Bedford was a man of integrity and skill, in the conduct of the war one hand was tied behind his back by the fact that any policy deviating fromthat set by his dead brother – the release of significant prisoners, for example, or the negotiation of a treaty that might involve territorial concessions – could not in practice be pursued without the guaranteeing authority of an adult monarch. And on the other side it had become clear, to the point where it was no longer questioned, that Charles, at almost twenty-six, would not fight. He had a son to succeed him should he fall, but, all the same, the combined effect of the continuing fragility of the Armagnac regime with his own lack of military capability meant that there would be no repeat of the gestures towards equipping himself for the battlefield that he had made as a teenager.
So that winter, while the king remained at Chinon, it was the Bastard of Orléans who led the resistance to the English siege. His task – apart from directing dangerous but ultimately ineffective skirmishes and sorties, which the chronicler Monstrelet felt moved to declare were ‘too long and boring’ to describe – was to find a weakness in the English position. And it was clear to the soldiers in the town that the length of the English supply line was one such point of vulnerability. Most of the besiegers’ food came from Paris, seventy miles to the north, and at the beginning of February a convoy bound for Orléans was assembled in the city, consisting of more than three hundred carts packed with provisions – mainly flour and salted fish, because it was almost Lent, the season of fasting when eating meat was forbidden. The people of the countryside around Paris watched as the supplies they had been forced to give up began their journey south with a guard of archers under the command of Sir John Fastolf.
They were not, however, the only ones who knew the food was on its way. The Bastard of Orléans, with La Hire, Xaintrailles and Darnley, had succeeded in leading a detachment of troops from within the besieged town past the English blockade to meet a relief force approaching from Blois under the command of the count of Clermont, son and heir to the duke of Bourbon who was, like the Bastard’s brother, still a prisoner in England. On 12 February, after a bitterly cold night, they closed on the English convoy outside a village named Rouvray, thirteen miles north-west of Orléans. Across the plain, Fastolf saw them coming. Realising that his men were heavily outnumbered, he drew his carts into a defensive circle and ordered the civilians in his company to lead the horses into the shelter of this makeshift encampment. The archers drove their sharpened stakes into the ground where they stood guard at the only two points of entry left in this wall of wagons, while the men-at-arms took up position nearby. Then they waited.
Two hours passed while, at a distance, the Armagnacs prepared for battle and attempted to decide on their tactics. In the end, they could only agree to disagree, Darnley’s Scotsmen preferring to fight on foot, the French to prepare a charge on horseback. The details, after all, hardly mattered, given the crushing weight of their numbers. When Fastolf sent a messenger to ask if they would ransom prisoners, the answer was chilling: ‘if a hair of them escaped’, Clermont declared ringingly, ‘if they were not all put to the sword’, then he himself would give up all claim on God’s help for the future. And then, at three in the afternoon, the attack began. Fastolf’s archers were ready. Within moments, horses and men were falling, arrows tearing through flesh, animals screaming in pain and panic as longbows and stakes did their deadly work. Soon the frozen ground was sodden with Armagnac blood. More than four hundred men died that day, among them one-eyed John Stewart of Darnley, and with him the very last of the Scots army in France. In total, the English casualties numbered four.
The victory was remarkable. It mattered to the hungry English soldiers at Orléans, who would eat well that Lent, and it mattered that God had smiled on troops loyal to Henry, the true king of France. All the same, this triumph of English archers against overwhelming odds did not resonate with the grandeur of Agincourt, nor even of the ‘second Agincourt’ of Verneuil. Instead, people spoke of it, in tribute to the contents of Fastolf’s convoy, as the ‘Battle of the Herrings’. And the journal-writer in Paris drew his account of the fighting to a close with a heartfelt lament. ‘How dreadful it is, on both sides, that Christian men must kill each other like this without knowing why!’
If God’s purpose no longer seemed clear even to the winners, the losers stood little chance of making sense of their defeat. While the Bastard of Orléans, who had only narrowly escaped the field with an arrow wound in his foot, limped back to the besieged and hungry town with La Hire, Xaintrailles, Clermont and the rest of the battle’s survivors, their king, ninety miles away at Chinon, struggled to retain any vestige of hope that his right to his father’s throne might one day be vindicated beyond doubt or hesitation. His constable was making war on his courtiers; those among the great lords of his realm who were not still prisoners in England had all but left him to his fate; and the military fortunes of his kingdom were turning, it seemed, from bad to worse. After the deaths of Douglas, Buchan and now Darnley, the promise of salvation from Scotland appeared to have been no more than a vain imagination. Rumours began to fly that, if Orléans were to fall, Scotland itself, or perhaps Castile, might at least offer some kind of safe haven for the fugitive king.
Whatever the whispers, though, it was clear to Charles and his council that it was too soon to think of abandoning the realm. Retreat, on the other hand – perhaps to the Dauphiné in the far south-east, from where he could seek to defend the Lyonnais, Auvergne and Languedoc – might have much to recommend it. There, some suggested, he would be able to wait in greater safety for God to show His grace; but others warned that this was a counsel of despair, and that to give ground, however great the threat, would only incur heaven’s wrath and give heart to the enemy. The discussions, and the siege, went on. And every day the king heard his masses, calling constantly to mind (one chronicler suggested) ‘that the persecutions of war, death and famine are the rods with which God punishes the crimes of people or princes’.
And then, on 23 February, just eleven days after the massacre at Rouvray, a little band of six armed men arrived, dusty from the road, at the great castle of Chinon. With them rode a girl, dressed as a boy, her dark hair cut short. Her name was Joan, and she had come with a message from God.