PART TWO
4
At Chinon, they were expecting her. She had sent ahead when she and her companions had reached the town of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, twenty miles to the east, to tell the king she was coming – a letter she had to dictate, since she could not write for herself. But, as Marie Robine and Jeanne-Marie de Maillé had discovered before her, divine instruction by itself was not enough to secure access to the royal presence. For that, she needed friends in high places on earth as well as in heaven – and, like Jeanne-Marie de Maillé before her, she would find one in the dowager duchess of Anjou.
Yolande had had warning of the girl’s existence weeks earlier. During the previous year Joan had appeared at Vaucouleurs, a walled town held by an Armagnac garrison in the far east of the kingdom, and asked the captain there, a man named Robert de Baudricourt, to take her to the king, for whom, she said, God had given her a message. De Baudricourt sent her away with a flea in her ear, but at the end of the year she came back, and this time the nature of the message she brought attracted more influential attention. Vaucouleurs – like the girl’s home village of Domrémy, a little more than ten miles further south – lay on the frontier between the duchy of Bar and the duchy of Lorraine, and at the beginning of 1429 the duke of Lorraine himself decided that he should hear what she had to say.
Avignon and the valley of the Loire had had no monopoly on visionaries during the duke’s lifetime. Thirty years earlier, in Champagne, the neighbouring county to the duchy of Bar, a poor widow named Ermine had been visited by both angels and demons in a case that had raised such troubling questions about how to tell one from the other – a process known as the ‘discernment of spirits’ – that they had been referred to the great theologian Jean Gerson. Now, as word of Joan’s insistent claims began to spread, the duke summoned her to his court for a private conversation. And when she returned to Vaucouleurs after this audience, she discovered that, whether as cause or consequence of the duke’s interest, Robert de Baudricourt had changed his mind: he was prepared to send her to Chinon.
By now, some of the inhabitants of Vaucouleurs, an Armagnac town in a region surrounded by Burgundian territory, had developed such hopes of Joan’s mission to their king that they offered help for this perilous journey. She was given a horse to ride and an outfit of men’s clothes – tunic, doublet, hose and breeches, all in black and grey – as a practical replacement for her rough red dress. When she left, with a black woollen hat pulled down over her cropped hair, her small escort included a royal messenger named Colet de Vienne, whose presence indicated that someone – perhaps the duke of Lorraine himself, or his son-in-law René of Anjou, twenty-year-old heir to the duchy of Bar – had already sent to Chinon to prepare her way. And there could be no doubt that any communication between the duchy of Bar and the royal court in the Loire, especially concerning a matter as weighty as a message from heaven, would come to the attention of René’s mother, Yolande.
Colet and his companions did their job well. Despite the dangers of the route – more than 270 miles across country, through Burgundian lands, with the constant risk that someone might take too close an interest in their strange little fellowship – Joan reached Chinon safely. Amid the luxury and ceremony of the court, she was an utterly incongruous sight: a village girl, not yet out of her teens, dressed in clothes that no reputable woman should ever have worn. But the guiding hand of Yolande – unseen but unmistakable in the very fact of her arrival – brought her to the presence of the king, and, though their meeting was witnessed only by his chief counsellors, the clarity of her message and the conviction with which it was delivered meant that news of her mission soon raced from the castle through the town and beyond. It was as startling as the girl herself. Joan, it seemed, had been sent by God not simply to instruct the king, but to help him in the recovery of his kingdom. If Charles – whom she sometimes addressed as ‘Dauphin’, because he was not yet God’s anointed – would give her an army, she would drive the English out of France, and lead him to Reims for his coronation.
The proposition was utterly extraordinary. Robert de Baudricourt, back in Vaucouleurs, had begun by treating this peasant girl as a fantasist whose family, he said, should give her a few slaps to snap her out of her delusions. But Baudricourt had eventually been persuaded to do as she asked, and now that she had reached the king, her words could not be dismissed so lightly. Still, the utmost caution was essential in responding to anyone who claimed prophetic insight or a special revelation of God’s will, since it was not easy to tell the difference between true revelations from heaven and trickery unleashed from hell. The devil, after all, could speak with a fair face as well as foul. In this case, it was also necessary to remember that Satan’s deceptions were practised more easily on women, whose moral and intellectual frailties made them more susceptible than men to demonic influence. Their fervour, Jean Gerson had written, was ‘excessive, overeager, changeable, unbridled, and therefore not to be trusted’ – and Joan, who was young, inexperienced and uneducated, was an especially fragile vessel.
There were other reasons, too, to be wary of her claims. Even before she opened her mouth, the girl’s virtue and modesty were called into question by the extraordinary outfit she wore. Her hose and breeches, both tightly knotted with many cords onto her doublet, undoubtedly served a useful purpose in allowing her to ride quickly through dangerous country, and in offering a measure of protection against sexual assault when she found herself alone among men, as she had been on her journey from Vaucouleurs. But it could not be denied that, according to the prescriptions of the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, a woman in men’s clothing was ‘an abomination unto the Lord’. And Joan not only dressed like a man, but dared to say that she had been sent to make war on the English. This was no humble recognition of a woman’s place, no acknowledgement of the proper order of God’s creation, but a rash boldness in which it was all too easy to guess that the devil might have taken a hand.
And yet. For Charles and his counsellors – encouraged, as always, by the wise advice of his mother-in-law Yolande – the possibility that God might at last, in his mercy, have been moved by the plight in which the holy land of France now found itself could only be intoxicating. At the same time, the profound risks that the girl embodied were clear, and terrifying. France had already been brought to the brink of destruction by God’s punishment for its sins. If the most Christian king now ordered his people to follow a false prophet, an instrument of the lord of hell, he would deliver them to certain disaster. But the outcome would be equally catastrophic if he were to reject the counsel of a true prophet inspired by the king of heaven. It was well known that God would not send a miracle until all human remedies were exhausted. Fourteen long years after the wretched day of Azincourt, might He have decided that the kingdom had suffered enough, and sent help?
The only possible way forward lay in seeking expert assessment of the girl’s claims. France’s great repository of theological knowledge was the university of Paris, a community of scholars of international influence that was already two centuries old. But the university, like the kingdom, had been torn apart by the war between Armagnacs and Burgundians. The academic battle to demonstrate the theological truths that underpinned each side’s position had already raged more than a decade earlier at the Council of Constance, where Jean Gerson, the university’s chancellor, had clashed publicly and bitterly with the Burgundian Pierre Cauchon over John the Fearless’s killing of the duke of Orléans. Now, however, the university was divided physically as well as intellectually: the theologians who remained in Paris were loyal to the Anglo-Burgundian regime, while those who offered their allegiance to the Armagnac heir had fled south to his kingdom of Bourges.
Gerson himself was not among the clerics around the king at Chinon. For a year after the Burgundian seizure of the capital in 1418 he had wandered in political exile in Germany. Then, when news came of the death of John the Fearless at Montereau, he returned to France to settle at Lyon. Ten years later, now in his mid-sixties, he was still there, and still writing with his characteristic speed and intensity while living the contemplative life of a hermit. But, even in his absence, the theologians at the Armagnac court could look to his three great treatises on the discernment of spirits, the most celebrated of which – On the Proving of Spirits, written in 1415 – provided a checklist of the principles on which theological investigation of mystical revelations should proceed. Amid his learned discourse, Gerson summed them up in a Latin jingle: ‘Ask who, what, why; to whom, what kind, whence.’ In other words, he proposed an interrogation of both vision and visionary: what could the nature of the revelation itself show about its origin, and what could the nature of its recipient show about its authenticity?
The first step was to test Joan’s integrity, her wholeness, in the literal sense of her physical being. Despite her alarming immodesty in wearing male clothes, she was a young unmarried woman who claimed to live a pious and God-fearing life – and if that were true she should by definition be a virgin, an unsullied state which would make it less likely that she had been suborned by the devil. A private examination by two ladies of the court, one the wife of Chinon’s military captain, Raoul de Gaucourt, the other the wife of the king’s counsellor Robert le Maçon, confirmed that she was indeed what she claimed to be: a maid, pucelle in French, from the Latin puella, meaning ‘girl’, a word that had come to signify the transitional state of chaste adolescence before a woman became a wife and mother. And pucelle was the word used to describe her when the clerics at court wrote to the archbishop of Embrun, the eminent theologian Jacques Gélu, to seek his advice about the next stage of investigation: testing Joan’s spiritual integrity.
She was, they said, a maid from the region of Vaucouleurs, about sixteen years old, who had been brought up among the sheep, but who had come to the king with predictions and prophecies of great advantage to the kingdom – if, of course, they were true. In the attempt to find out, they had questioned her on her faith and her habits, and found her in all things devout, sober and virtuous. Might she, perhaps, be an instrument of God’s will comparable to the biblical precedents of the prophetess Deborah, or Judith who had saved Israel from Assyrian invaders, or the sibyls who had foreseen the coming of Christ?
Archbishop Gélu’s response was equivocal. A staunch Armagnac, he had no doubt that God might well decide to send help to the king, given that the English invasion – as he pointed out with some passion – was contrary to every kind of law, divine, natural, canon, civil, human or moral. But that undeniable fact did not mean that credence should be given quickly or lightly to the words of a peasant girl whose youth and simplicity made her so vulnerable to the power of illusions, and who came from a frontier region so near to the influence of the Burgundian enemy. The king must be cautious, Gélu said, and should redouble his prayers, keeping Joan at a distance while she was questioned at length by learned men of the Church. If there was evil in her, it could not stay hidden forever. But however unlikely it seemed that divine assistance should come in female form, given that it was not the part of a woman to fight or preach or dispense justice, it was also essential to retain an open mind, since God might bring victory through any instrument He chose.
Further inquiries were clearly necessary before any firmer judgement could be reached and decisions made about what exactly should be done. The clerics around the king knew that greater theological expertise was available at Poitiers, the administrative centre of the kingdom of Bourges, which the Armagnac scholars who had fled the university of Paris in 1418 had adopted as their new home. And so the girl Joan, who had so far been lodged with care in the great keep of the Tour du Coudray at Chinon, was dispatched forty miles southward to Poitiers for more detailed questioning by the greatest gathering of theologians that Armagnac France could muster, under the leadership of the king’s chancellor, Regnault de Chartres, archbishop of Reims. For three weeks from the beginning of March, as they later explained, they observed and tested the girl ‘in two ways: that is, by using human wisdom to inquire about her life, her behaviour and her aims . . ; and by devout prayer, seeking a sign of some actual or hoped-for divine deed through which it could be judged that she has come by the will of God’.
These were Gerson’s principles put into action by the most skilled practitioners of the discernment of spirits in the kingdom of Bourges. And still, as the weeks passed and the conversations continued, no definitive verdict could be returned. The difficulty was that so much hung on an investigation for which there were no easy precedents. Female visionaries in the Church’s recent history had experienced their revelations when they were already under the care of a spiritual adviser, a confessor perhaps, who could testify to their morals and the nature of their claims. Joan, by contrast, had appeared alone, apart from her escort of armed men. And, rather than simply conveying a message from heaven, she – a teenage girl – wanted to lead the king’s troops into battle. Even when considered against a dossier of past cases that were by definition extraordinary, this one was exceptional.
But as the spring days gradually started to lengthen, some conclusions at last began to take shape. Under pressure though she was, in a place far from home and family, the girl’s conduct could not be faulted. ‘She has conversed with everyone publicly and privately,’ the doctors and prelates reported, ‘but no evil is found in her, only goodness, humility, virginity, piety, integrity and simplicity …’ It was just as clear that her belief in her mission could not be shaken. She continued to speak with the astonishing resolve that had brought her, against all the odds, from a distant village to the royal court, and, out of her unwavering insistence that she had been sent to repel the English and lead the king to be crowned at Reims, there emerged a plan to tackle the second of the theologians’ concerns. They were looking for a sign to confirm that her assertions might truly be sent from God. It was far from obvious what form such a sign might take, but when it was pointed out to Joan that her mission to lead the king from Chinon or Poitiers to Reims would be very difficult to achieve, given that the besieged town of Orléans lay directly in the way, her reply was immediate. She would raise the siege herself.
This was promising. An attempt to relieve Orléans would be a finite task, requiring only a minimum of resources to be committed by the king, that could stand as a practical test of the girl’s mission. Success, if it came, would be a miraculous vindication of her claims; failure would provide an incontrovertible judgement against her. Either way, God would have spoken – and, even if the verdict were negative, there was relatively little to lose by trying. Orléans would still be under siege, just as it was now, and there would be no shame for the beleaguered kingdom of Bourges in having sought to prove Joan in the furnace of war. Archbishop Gélu had worried about exposing the king to ridicule if she were welcomed with too much credulity; the French, he said nervously, already had enough of a reputation for being easily duped. But, especially given the desperate state in which the kingdom now stood, there could be no dishonour in sending her to Orléans to discover whether her inspiration truly came from heaven. ‘For to doubt or discard her,without there being any appearance of evil in her,’ the theologians at Poitiers argued, ‘would be to reject the Holy Spirit and render oneself unworthy of God’s help.’
When the learned doctors presented their conclusions, it was with palpable relief at having found a way forward. ‘The king’, they said, ‘… should not prevent her from going to Orléans with his soldiers, but should have her escorted there honourably, placing his faith in God.’ One last check on Joan’s continued virginity, the physical embodiment of her spiritual purity, was supervised by Yolande of Aragon herself. The approval of the queen of Sicily confirmed, once again, that Joan was a true maid, and that word now began to define the public persona of a girl from a background so humble that she did not use a family name to identify herself. She was not simply a maid, but the Maid – or so the theologians at Poitiers called her in reporting their findings. And when she was given her first chance to declare her mission to a wider audience than the counsellors and theologians who had so far heard her speak, it was a title she claimed for herself with astounding assurance.
Her opportunity came shortly before the court moved back from Poitiers to Chinon to make preparations for the test she now faced. On 22 March, the Tuesday before Easter, Joan dictated a letter to be sent to the English enemy. While she was growing up in Domrémy, more than 250 miles to the east, the hostile forces she had seen close at hand were the Burgundians. But she had come to rid France of the invading English, and the challenge she now issued showed how much she had learned about the war, and about the reality of the mission she had come to fulfil, in the month since she had first arrived at Chinon. At the head of the letter, she instructed the clerk to write two words in the Latin she heard in church: Jhesus Maria, ‘Jesus’ and ‘Mary’, bounded on either side by the sign of the cross. And then she began.
‘King of England, and you, duke of Bedford, who call yourself regent of the kingdom of France; you, William de la Pole, count of Suffolk; John, lord of Talbot; and you, Thomas, lord of Scales, who call yourselves lieutenants of the said duke of Bedford: submit yourselves to the king of heaven. Restore to the Maid, who is sent here by God, the king of heaven, the keys of all the fine towns that you have taken and violated in France.’ She herself stood entirely ready to make peace, she declared, just as soon as the armies of England left Orléans, and all of France, and returned to their own country, and paid for what they had taken; but if they did not, they would shortly find that the Maid would do them great harm. ‘King of England, if you do not do this, I am the military leader, and wherever I find your men in France, I will make them leave, whether they want to or not, and if they will not obey, I will have them all killed. I am sent here by God, the king of heaven, to face you head to head and drive you out of the whole of France. And if they will obey, I will show them mercy. And do not believe otherwise, for you will never hold the kingdom of France from God, the king of heaven, holy Mary’s son; but King Charles will hold it, the true heir, because God, the king of heaven, wishes it, and this is revealed to him by the Maid …’ There was more. The king, she said, would soon be back in Paris. If the English refused to listen, the Maid would raise a war-cry greater than France had heard for a thousand years. Blows would determine who had the greater right, though it was obvious that God would give victory to the Maid – and it was not too late for Bedford to join her. As prose, it was rambling and repetitive, looping in circles, veering from third person to first and back again. As a statement of intent, it was electrifying.
Singularity of purpose had brought this girl more than halfway across the country, and singularity of purpose had won her the chance to turn fighting words into action. Of course, men of experience knew that the war was not so simple, and opinion was still divided about the merits of her claims. But the disputations between the doctors of theology were not made public, nor the wranglings within the king’s council; only the careful conclusion that she should be sent to Orléans. And once that decision had been taken, however short-term its focus and however provisional its rationale, Joan’s utter conviction in her cause began to lend a new clarity to the actions of the kingdom of Bourges.
Once the court was back at Chinon in the last week of March, she was at last presented publicly to the king, in a piece of political theatre designed to set the scene for the launch of her mission. The story reached La Rochelle (where the town clerk noted in his register all the information that reached him) that Joan was first directed to the count of Clermont, who had recently returned from the siege, and then to one of the royal esquires, under the pretence that each was the king, only for her to declare that she knew it was not, and to recognise Charles as soon as she saw him. If this was pantomime, it nevertheless served as a dramatic demonstration of the Maid’s claim to more than human insight. And after pantomime came propaganda. Not only were the conclusions of the theologians at Poitiers copied many times over and distributed as far as Armagnac diplomacy could reach, but the king’s secretaries searched long and hard among the archives to find prophecies that might prefigure Joan’s coming. An otherwise incomprehensible chronogram – a verse in which letters became a date when read as Roman numerals, this one attributed to Bede – made mention of a maid bearing banners: surely a foreshadowing of Joan, and all the more significant from the pen of this venerable English writer? Most pertinently, the twelfth-century text of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain contained a telling prophecy by the great sage Merlin: ‘A virgin ascends the backs of the archers, and hides the flower of her virginity.’ What had once been obscurely allusive now clearly referred to the Maid, and a new Latin poem was hurriedly composed and disseminated, expanding on the theme of Merlin’s original in the attempt to explain the king’s decision to put a girl in armour at the head of his troops, and encourage loyal Frenchmen to join her.
Joan, too, played her part in elaborating the symbols of what the poet called the ‘maidenly war’ that she was about to undertake. She asked the king to send to the town of Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois, where she had stayed on her way from Vaucouleurs, to fetch a sword that, she said, lay hidden in the church there. Sure enough, and to general amazement, the weapon was discovered – according to the clerk at La Rochelle, inside a coffer at the high altar that had not been opened for twenty years. Christian warriors, contemporaries knew, carried holy swords, from King Arthur’s Excalibur to Charlemagne’s Joyeuse, and wise heads nodded at the thought that Joan’s should come to her from St Catherine, the patron of young virgins, who was so often depicted carrying the sword through which she had met her martyrdom.
At Orléans, though, Joan would need more than a symbol to defend herself. A full suit of fine armour, handmade for her slender shape, was ordered from the king’s master armourer, and a painter, a Scotsman in Tours, was commissioned to make the banners mentioned in Bede’s chronogram. On the Maid’s standard the golden fleurs-de-lis of France were sown across a white field, with the words Jhesus Maria and a painted Christ sitting in judgement over the world with an angel on either side; on her white pennon was an image of the Annunciation. During the first week in April Joan herself left Chinon for Tours, twenty-five miles further to the northeast, towards Orléans. The presence among the city’s inhabitants of a Scots painter was a reminder that Tours had seen the coming of saviours before; if it was a relief that this one was French, however extraordinary she might be in other ways, no one was prepared to say. She was, at least, accumulating the attributes of a military commander: she now had a squire, Jean d’Aulon, and two pages, Louis and Raymond, who at fourteen or fifteen were only a year or two her junior, as well as a chaplain, Jean Pasquerel, who travelled with her to sing mass and hear her confession. And, impatient though she was to pursue her mission, these weeks at Chinon and Tours gave her much-needed time to learn about managing the weight of plate armour on foot and on horseback, about balance in the saddle with a lance or banner in hand, and about the war she had come to fight and the siege that lay ahead of her.
There was time, too, for the men around her to get the measure of their new companion-in-arms. The twenty-two-year-old duke of Alençon had secured his freedom from five years of captivity after the defeat at Verneuil only to find Orléans under siege and the court in turmoil. It was perhaps a measure of his disillusionment that, in the early spring of 1429, he had turned his energies to the hunting of quail, but news of Joan’s arrival drew him back to Chinon. When he heard her speak and saw her ride with a lance, he was so impressed that he made her a gift of a horse for the campaign to come; then he set himself to help Yolande, with the assistance of the captains Ambroise de Loré, La Hire, Raoul de Gaucourt and the Breton knight Gilles de Rais, to prepare the supply train and the troops that Joan would lead to the besieged town.
There were influential interventions of other kinds. In Lyon, the great Gerson at last took up his pen to consider this most urgent case of discretio spiritum, the discernment of spirits. His strength was failing but, careful as ever, he compiled six propositions in favour of Joan’s claims, and six against. His purpose, he said, was to ‘invite the finest minds to reason more deeply’, but his introductory remarks began with a reference to Amos, the biblical shepherd called to prophesy to the people of Israel, and went on to describe at some length the chastity, piety and conviction of this young shepherdess who said she had come to restore France to its obedience to God. It was not difficult to detect the hopes of the Armagnac partisan beneath the scholarly rigour.
And the tantalising possibility of hope had also reached the scarred and hungry town of Orléans. After the disaster at Rouvray, the prospects of repelling the English at the point of a sword had appeared vanishingly remote; so much so that the future seemed todepend on an appeal to the ‘false French’ – the Burgundians who fought with the English – to remember their true loyalties. Shortly after the battle, a delegation led by the captain Poton de Xaintrailles made its way past the English blockade and rode to the court of Philip of Burgundy, to offer him a deal. They would surrender the town into his hands, they said, on condition that he should hold it in the name of his cousin, the captive duke of Orléans. The English could come and go freely, and half of the town’s revenues would be paid to the king of England, but the other half must be reserved for the duke’s ransom. Duke Philip was pleased to agree, but when he arrived in Paris in early April, he found that the regent Bedford refused to countenance the possibility that territory belonging to the crown of France should be given over into the hands of anyone but its rightful king. Towards the end of the month, after heated words had been exchanged, the duke of Burgundy left for Flanders, and news reached Orléans that the treaty could not be concluded. But the embassy had not been in vain. In Xaintrailles’s company on his return to the town was a herald from Duke Philip, bringing orders that the Burgundian forces present at the siege should withdraw. And, as the people of Orléans watched a part at least of the enemy at their gates melt away, rumours raced through the battered streets of a miraculous maid who was coming to save them.
From Chinon, Charles and his counsellors had been observing events at Orléans closely. On 21 April, four days after the Burgundian contingent abandoned the siege, Joan left Tours for Blois, another thirty-five miles along the Loire towards Orléans, and the place where her soldiers and supplies were gathering. From there, the letter in which she issued her roaring challenge to Bedford, Suffolk, Talbot, Scales and all the English in France was at last dispatched to the enemy. Carts were loaded, weapons polished, and the Maid’s discipline imposed on her men; even Jean Gerson, far away in Lyon, had heard that ‘she prohibits murder, rape and pillage, and any other violence’ towards those who were willing to submit to the justice of her cause. On the night of 25 April she slept in her armour. And the next morning, without looking back, the Maid rode to war.