6
There was one person, at least, in London who received the news from France with pleasure. By now, the duke of Orléans had been a prisoner in England for fourteen of his thirty-five years. He was an honoured captive, allowed to live in the luxury his royal blood demanded and to receive carefully monitored visits from his French servants, but he was powerless to help his town of Orléans during its long months of suffering under English siege. Now it was free, thanks to the marvellous intervention of this extraordinary girl. In tribute, the duke sent her a gift: a fine robe and short jacket in crimson and darkest green, the livery colours of the house of Orléans, to be made up for her by a draper and tailor in the town.
Jean Gerson had believed, when he wrote his first treatise to consider the Maid’s case, that she changed back into women’s clothes when she was not riding with soldiers; whenever she dismounted from her horse, he said, this peasant girl was as inexperienced in worldly matters as an innocent lamb. Gerson might once have been right on both counts, but no longer. When she took off her armour, she dressed as a man, in silken hose and satin doublets like the one sent by the captive duke. She had servants to wait on her. She could summon wine when she was thirsty, as she did when she drank with the bedazzled Guy de Laval, and she could send Laval’s aristocratic grandmother a gold ring, apologising as she did so that it was only a tiny trinket. Now, she was not just a peasant girl but a player on the political stage of the Armagnac court – a position that, day by day, brought with it new experience of a complex and frustrating kind.
After their triumph at Patay, Joan and the duke of Alençon had rejoined the king at Sully-sur-Loire, a moated fortress belonging to his favourite, Georges de La Trémoille, that lay twenty-five miles eastward along the river from Orléans. Charles greeted them with delight, thanking God for giving the Maid such courage in her mission, and extending an elegant welcome to her noble English prisoners. But when Joan knelt to petition the king that Richemont, who had brought so many soldiers to her cause and fought bravely at her side, should be pardoned his previous offences, the reply was much less fulsome. Richemont was forgiven, Charles said, but he should not come to court, nor join the king on his progress to his coronation at Reims. To Joan, this was baffling. God had sent her to reunite France in the service of its true sovereign. Why, then, would the king not embrace a prodigal son returning to the fold? The answer, it was clear, lay with La Trémoille, whose enthusiasm for Joan’s victories was diluted by concern that they might reintroduce undesirable influences into the politics of a kingdom in which he currently held such sway. The unhappy lesson Joan was beginning to learn was that even a mission from heaven could not easily repair the rifts in this fractured court.
Still, at least the king had agreed to leave the renewed safety of the Loire to make the journey to Reims for the coronation that the Maid had promised. This would be his first foray into enemy territory since the aftermath of the Armagnac victory at Baugé eight years earlier, when his father and the warrior-king Henry of England had still been alive – and, for a king who had never led his people from the military front line, it was not a reassuring prospect. Reims itself, where the sacred oil of Clovis was kept in the Holy Ampulla, lay under Burgundian control, and much of the hundred miles and more of territory between there and the Loire was in English or Burgundian hands. Other voices at court argued that Reims was a distraction, and pressed instead for a strike into the English heartlands in Normandy, but Joan was adamant that the king must be anointed and crowned. Once God had sanctioned his kingship, she knew, the power of his enemies would wither away. She had been right at Orléans, a verdict confirmed by glorious victory at Patay. Men were flocking to join the king’s army for the first time in years, and towns such as Janville, twenty miles north of Orléans – where Fastolf had attempted to take refuge after the fighting at Patay, only to find the gates closed against him – were spontaneously reverting to Armagnac loyalties. Her mission, in other words, was unanswerable. And so, on 29 June, the royal party set out.
The king rode at the head of thousands, the largest army he could muster; he had summoned all of his subjects who were fit to bear arms to come to his aid, and now he sent letters ahead to warn the Anglo-Burgundian towns that lay in his path of his imminent approach. If they would render the obedience that was rightfully his, the past would be forgotten, with no further thought of royal vengeance for their disloyalty. The scarcely veiled threat did its work at Auxerre, where the Burgundian town governors showed no appetite for armed confrontation, and by the morning of 5 July the Armagnac army had moved on to Troyes, the place where the outrageous sentence of disinheritance had been formally pronounced against France’s true heir almost a decade earlier.
But the people of Troyes, it turned out, would not so easily be persuaded to open their gates. They had sworn allegiance to the duke of Burgundy and to King Henry, the lawful successor to King Charles the Well-Beloved by the terms of the treaty that had been sealed in their cathedral, and their garrison of English and Burgundian soldiers stood ready to defend them against the pretensions of the so-called dauphin and his army of traitors. Nor were they cowed by the presence of the girl who called herself the Maid. Within their walls was a man well qualified to judge her claims of divine inspiration: a friar named Brother Richard, who had first come to public attention in Paris three months earlier. For ten days in April he had preached warnings of the coming of the Antichrist to crowds of thousands, summoning up the pains of hellfire with such terrifying immediacy that men burned great heaps of chess-boards, dice, cards ‘and every kind of covetous game that can give rise to anger and swearing’, said the journal-writer in the city, while women tossed elaborate headdresses and other such feminine vanities into the flames. Now he had brought his apocalyptic message to Troyes, and so the townspeople sent him out to discover whether Joan had come to them from heaven or hell.
When he returned, however, it was not with the answer for which they were hoping. They had thought he might declare her a heretic or a witch, to be condemned like the mandrake roots – kept by the foolish in the superstitious belief that they would bring earthly riches – which he had tossed onto the bonfires in Paris. Instead, Brother Richard had been so impressed by the Maid that he brought back a letter she had dictated the day before her arrival outside the walls of Troyes, addressed to the town’s inhabitants. They had received a missive already from Charles, the rightful king of France; now Joan brought them word from the almighty king of heaven. She did not forget that the people of Troyes were Frenchmen, to be welcomed back to the path of righteousness, not Englishmen to be threatened with God’s wrath, but her instructions – after her customary invocation of the holy names Jhesus Maria – were no less direct.
‘Very dear and good friends,’ she began, ‘if that is what you are: my lords, townsmen and people of the town of Troyes, Joan the Maid brings you a message from the king of heaven, her rightful sovereign lord, in whose royal service she spends each day, that you should submit yourselves in true recognition to the noble king of France, who will very soon be in Reims and in Paris, whosoever may oppose him, and in his fine towns of this holy kingdom, with the aid of King Jesus. Loyal Frenchmen, come before King Charles, and do not fail; and have no fear for your lives or your possessions if you do so.’ Her arms were open to receive them, but still there was steel behind her words. ‘If you do not do this, I promise and swear to you, on your lives, that we will enter with God’s help into all the towns which rightfully belong to this holy kingdom, and we will impose a good and lasting peace, whosoever opposes us. I commit you to God; may God preserve you, if that be His will. Reply at once.’
But the authorities in Troyes felt little inclined to obey this peremptory demand. Brother Richard was not the honourable man they had thought, it was clear, but a sorcerer, and this girl was a madwoman inspired by the devil; not Joan the Maid, but Joan the Braggart. They read her letter and mocked it – it had no rhyme or reason, they declared – and then burned it without responding. As they watched the Armagnac army range itself outside their walls, they wrote urgently instead to the citizens of Reims, asking them to petition the regent Bedford and the duke of Burgundy to come to their aid. In the meantime, they prepared themselves to defend their town to the death.
It was not long, though, before an early sortie by some of their soldiers demonstrated that the army of traitors was unnervingly larger than they had imagined. As the impasse dragged on from one day into two, and from two into three, their hopes of rescue began to fade, along with the certainties of their position. Was it possible that Brother Richard might be right after all that this girl had some kind of authority from God? They could not know, as heralds moved fruitlessly between the two sides, that anxiety was building outside as well as inside the town walls. There were many hungry mouths in the Armagnac army, and little with which to feed them. The besiegers were short of money and artillery, and the town was strongly defended. Perhaps, as the king’s chancellor Regnault de Chartres, archbishop of Reims, suggested to a receptive audience of royal counsellors and captains, they should leave Troyes to its intransigence, and move back to the safety and plenty of the Loire. But the veteran Robert le Maçon insisted that one more opinion should be sought: that of the Maid, who rode at the head of the king’s troops, but who was not a regular presence among the wise heads of the king’s council. She, le Maçon said, was the reason they were there; she should therefore be given the chance to speak.
Joan was duly summoned, and the difficulties of their position explained. Not for the first time, she was mystified. These details were irrelevant. What reason was there, now or ever, to deviate from a course set by God Himself? The answer was simple. Within two or three days she would lead the king through the gates of Troyes, of that there could be no doubt. The counsellors knew they had a choice: either follow her faith, or set it aside in favour of reason. But, if they opted for the latter course, why had they left the Loire for the dangerous journey to Reims in the first place? Put that way, their decision was already made.
And so, with the reluctant blessing of the royal council, Joan rode out on her warhorse in full view of the watching townspeople, directing her soldiers to make ready what guns they had and to fill the ditches around the walls with brushwood. After four days of fear and deepening uncertainty, the sight of these preparations for an assault led by the miraculous Maid finally shattered the town’s resistance. The gates opened, a deputation emerged to offer terms for surrender, and the next morning the king rode into Troyes in imposing procession, with Joan and her banner at his side. The following day, 11 July, the governors of the town hastily wrote again to Reims. This time, there was no mention of the regent Bedford and the duke of Burgundy, of their oath to serve King Henry, or of fighting to the death; this time, they explained that King Charles was prepared to forget the past, and that he would bring peace to his realm, just as his ancestor St Louis had done. The people of Reims would surely share the joy that Troyes now knew, once they had submitted to a prince of such discretion, understanding and valour.
It was not long before the people of Reims received another letter offering a rather different version of events. As bad luck would have it, the captain of their own garrison was not with them in the town, but his brother wrote urgently from nearby Châtillon-sur-Marne to tell them that many loyal knights at Troyes had not wanted to capitulate. Despite this firm opposition, and the evident weaknesses in the enemy position, the wiles of Brother Richard – or so the captain’s brother had heard – had persuaded the bishop and many of the common people to open the gates to the Armagnacs. The squire who had brought him this news from Troyes had seen Joan the Maid with his own eyes, and heard her speak, and swore that she was so simple as to be almost half-witted; she made no more sense, the man reported, than the greatest fool he had ever seen.
Not everyone, it seemed, was convinced by the peasant girl dressed in armour, talking about God and playing at soldiers. But whatever view the people of Reims now took of her, the fact was – as their returning captain was unwillingly forced to admit – that any prospect of rescue by the dukes of Bedford and Burgundy was weeks away, while the enemy was almost within sight. On 16 July, the inhabitants of Châlons, twenty-five miles south-east of Reims, wrote to inform their neighbours that they too had decided to receive the gracious and merciful King Charles as their sovereign, and to advise that Reims should do the same without delay. In the end, the choice was quickly made. When the king and his army arrived at Sept-Saulx, just twelve miles from the town, they were met by a group of dignitaries from Reims who knelt to offer Charles their obedience as their rightful monarch.
That evening, the king rode through the gates of Reims while crowds cried ‘Noël!’ in welcome. The cheers were politic, but their meaning was inscrutable; after so many years of conflict it was impossible to distinguish between expressions of relief and fear, between enthusiasm and exhaustion. Charles was greeted by the town’s archbishop, his own chancellor Regnault de Chartres, who had left his side only a few hours earlier to take possession at last of the archiepiscopal seat from which he had been exiled during itsyears in Burgundian hands. And that night, while the king rested in the sumptuous surroundings of the archbishop’s palace, his officers, counsellors and servants worked through the hours of darkness to prepare for the makeshift coronation that would take place in the great cathedral the very next day.
At nine in the morning of Sunday 17 July, forty-nine years after his father’s coronation and seven after his father’s death, Charles VII of France entered the cathedral of Reims for his own consecration. The octagonal labyrinth inlaid in black and white marble in the floor of the nave might have seemed to represent the tortuous path which God in His wisdom had required the king to tread, had it not been for the fact that, since the Maid’s arrival, heaven had opened the way before him with a new and startling directness. Four months earlier, he had contemplated retreat to the far south of his kingdom in the face of a usurpation that had begun to seem inexorable and irreversible. Now, after the miracle at Orléans and victory at Patay, he had advanced deep into territory held by his enemies, without a blow being struck to resist him. The ancient regalia of Charlemagne still, for the moment, lay out of his reach at Saint-Denis, but a substitute crown and sword had been made ready, and at six o’clock that morning four of his knights, including Gilles de Rais, had gone to the nearby abbey of Saint-Rémi to collect the sacred oil of Clovis with which his kingship would, at last, be given sacramental force.
Now the knights rode fully armed on their great chargers through the west door of the cathedral to present the Holy Ampulla to the archbishop at the entrance to the choir. And so the ceremony began. Lacking though it might have been in prepared magnificence, its sanctity was palpable. With prayers and psalms, the king was presented to God, and the holy oil with which he was touched at the head, breast, shoulders and arms consecrated him to the service of heaven as the anointed sovereign of his people. At that sacred moment, and again when the archbishop placed the crown on his brow, cries of ‘Noël!’ echoed to the vaulted ceiling that soared high above, and trumpets sounded so loudly, one observer declared, that it seemed the vaults themselves might shatter. And throughout it all, Joan the Maid stood at Charles’s side, dressed in her shining armour and holding her white banner in her hand.
Now, at last, the true king of France was truly a king. After the ceremony, Joan knelt at his feet. ‘Noble king, God’s will is done,’ she said, and began to weep, overcome with the magnitude of what heaven had helped her accomplish. As she had promised, she had brought the man she had once called the dauphin to Reims and seen him crowned, with the nobility of the most Christian kingdom gathered around him. The duke of Alençon, the count of Clermont and the Bastard of Orléans were there. The devoted Guy de Laval, who had fought at Joan’s side ever since meeting her at Selles, was made a count that day, along with the king’s most beloved counsellor Georges de La Trémoille. Gilles de Rais was appointed a marshal of France, under the approving gaze of the captains with whom he and Joan had ridden to war at Orléans and Patay. They had been joined in time for the ceremony by the king’s brother-in-law, Yolande’s son René of Anjou, heir to the duchies of Bar and Lorraine. And also newly arrived from Bar, along with the young duke-to-be, was a small group of wondering faces that were dearly familiar to Joan: her father, her brothers, her cousin’s husband and her godfather, who were given lodgings at an inn at the expense of the townspeople.
But, despite the tears and the jubilation, there were figures missing from this loyal gathering whose absence was a pointed reminder of what still remained to be done. Regardless of Joan’s pleas, the constable, Arthur of Richemont, who should have carried the sword of state in procession before the king, had been refused permission to attend, his place taken instead by the half-brother of his enemy La Trémoille. The duke of Orléans, the king’s first cousin, was unavoidably detained by the bars of his gilded English prison. And the most significant absentee of all was the duke of Burgundy, the prince of the blood royal whose feud with the newly crowned king lay at the heart of France’s self-mutilation. If the kingdom were to be made whole again, and the English driven away for good, then Philip of Burgundy would need to stand at King Charles’s side. All parties within the Armagnac court knew that to be true, however wide the rifts between them yawned. La Trémoille, who had been a Burgundian before he was an Armagnac and whose brother Jean remained in Burgundian service, had been involved in diplomatic exchanges with Duke Philip’s envoys since the end of June, and at that point Joan too had taken it upon herself to write to the duke to remind him of his duty to come to Reims for the coronation of his rightful king.
Now, on the triumphal day of the ceremony itself, she summoned her clerk once again. ‘Jhesus Maria’, she began. ‘High and mighty prince, duke of Burgundy, Joan the Maid calls upon you by the king of heaven, my rightful and sovereign lord, that you and the king of France should make a good and lasting peace. Forgive one another entirely, in good faith, as loyal Christians should do; and if you wish to make war, do so against the Saracens.’ She was respectful – ‘prince of Burgundy, I pray, beseech and call upon you as humbly as I can that you should make no more war in the holy kingdom of France’ – but she did not hesitate to make clear how much was at stake, and what the consequences would be if the duke took no account of her words. ‘I bring you word from the king of heaven, my rightful and sovereign lord, for your good, for your honour and upon your life, that you will win no battle against loyal Frenchmen, and that all who wage war against the holy kingdom of France wage war against King Jesus, the king of heaven and of the whole world, my rightful and sovereign lord. And, with my hands clasped, I pray and call upon you that you fight no battle and wage no war against us, neither you, nor your men or subjects; and know surely that, however many men you bring against us, they will win nothing at all, and great sorrow will be the result of the great battle and the blood that will be shed there by those who come against us.’
The evident truth of her words was demonstrated by the fates of those to whom she had written before: the English at Orléans, defeated, and the Frenchmen of Troyes, surrendered. And yet Philip of Burgundy had made no reply to her first letter, nor did he respond to this, her second. If any flicker of hesitation had crossed the duke’s mind, any moment of questioning whether the gift of prophecy this girl claimed might truly come from heaven, it had been extinguished – in public, at least – exactly a week earlier, when he was welcomed with great magnificence into the city of Paris by his brother-in-law, the duke of Bedford.
These were ceremonies in which Bedford’s elegant words of greeting were uttered through gritted teeth. The regent could have been forgiven for wondering how he came to find himself facing such parlous news that summer. He had not wanted to besiege Orléans in the first place; that had been the earl of Salisbury’s plan, until a cannonball had torn his face away. Even then, the so-called dauphin and his Armagnac rebels had been almost on the run, until the arrival of this girl, this witch, who was now leading the false king to Reims for a spurious coronation. Back in April, even before Joan had arrived at Orléans, Bedford had written to the council in England to request reinforcements, and to propose that the child-king Henry should himself be crowned as soon as possible. He knew how important it was to demonstrate that God was with this boy who ruled two kingdoms, just as He had been with his glorious father at Agincourt. But the council in England had done nothing. And now, after the extraordinary reverses that had befallen the English in the intervening months, it was left to Bedford to remind his Burgundian brother-in-law of his divinely sanctioned duty to fight the Armagnacs.
The public ritual that marked Duke Philip’s five-day visit to Paris included a grand procession and a sermon preached at Notre-Dame, but at the heart of this political performance was a spectacle that took place on 14 July in the presence of the two dukes at the royal palace on the Île de la Cité. There, reported the journal-writer, it was publicly rehearsed how ‘in former times’ the so-called dauphin and his perfidious Armagnacs had made peace with the duke of Burgundy’s noble father, and had sworn solemn oaths and taken together the sacrament of the Eucharist, ‘the precious body of Our Lord’, and how then the duke’s father – ‘desiring and longing that the kingdom should be at peace, and wishing to keep the promise he had made’ – had knelt before the dauphin on the bridge at Montereau, only to be treacherously murdered. At this reminder of the crimes committed by the man the Armagnacs dared to call their king, there was uproar in the Parisian crowd, until the regent Bedford called for silence to allow the duke of Burgundy to speak of his sorrow at the broken peace and his father’s untimely death. Then the two dukes together swore to defend the city, and called on its inhabitants to swear in their turn that they would be loyal and true.
In the emotion of the moment, it was easy to forget how rare it was these days for the two dukes to be in Paris at all, let alone at the same time. As his interests in the Low Countries grew and his differences with the English multiplied, Philip of Burgundy seemed increasingly to be a sleeping partner in the Anglo-Burgundian alliance. And that was dangerous, if it gave the impression that the war had become a conflict between the English and the French, rather than between the true French loyal to King Henry and the false French of the pretender Charles. To speak simply of the French fighting the English, after all, was to use the language of the girl who had been sent by the devil to break the siege at Orléans. But Bedford’s Parisian coup de théâtre – reinforced behind the scenes by the help of his devoted wife, Burgundy’s much-loved sister Anne – now meant that Duke Philip had no choice but to reassert his commitment to his alliance with England against the Armagnac traitors.
All the same, the continuing fragility of the Anglo-Burgundian coalition was everywhere apparent. Despite their public gestures of solidarity, Bedford was forced to agree that the duke of Burgundy should continue to be paid in full for the military support he provided to English France. And well might the regent have wondered whether an ally who required payment was an ally at all: on the very day that Duke Philip left Paris after his meeting with Bedford, envoys from his court arrived at Reims in time to witness the coronation of King Charles. While they set about negotiating a temporary truce between Burgundians and Armagnacs, the Armagnac king and his army moved on, edging closer to Paris as more Burgundian towns opened their gates and submitted to his authority.
But his heaven-sent champion, Joan the Maid, was not happy with this piecemeal approach. Her renown was growing; though the great Armagnac theologian Jean Gerson had died on 12 July, five days too soon to witness the apotheosis of his king at Reims, other writers of a different stamp took up their pens to record Joan’s achievement. One of the king’s secretaries, an accomplished poet named Alain Chartier, composed a Latin letter describing the miraculous deeds of this ‘she-warrior’ who was ‘the glory not only of the French, but of all Christians’. And his praise was echoed by the extraordinary figure of Christine de Pizan, the daughter of a Venetian physician at the French royal court who, despite the odds stacked against her by her sex, had become one of the most distinguished writers of her day. In 1418, when the Burgundians seized Paris, Christine had retreated in horror to the abbey of Poissy outside the city walls; now, in her late sixties, she emerged from more than a decade of literary silence to celebrate the renaissance of the Armagnac cause, rejoicing in effervescent verse at the restoration of the rightful king through this blessed Maid. Joan, she declared, was sent by God, ‘who has given her a heart greater than any man’s’.
Now, however, the Maid’s heart was troubled. On 5 August, she sent a letter to her ‘dear and good friends’, the people of Reims. They should not have a moment’s doubt of her commitment to them, she said, or of the cause for which she was fighting, but it was true that the king had made a truce with the duke of Burgundy, by the terms of which the duke must hand over the city of Paris at the end of fifteen days. Joan was not convinced. ‘Do not be surprised,’ she told them, ‘if I do not enter there so quickly. Although this truce has been made, I am not at all content, and I do not know if I will keep it. But if I do, it will only be to preserve the honour of the king, and also as long as they do not further demean the blood royal in any way, because I will be holding and keeping together the king’s army in order to stand ready at the end of the said fifteen days if they do not make peace.’ The responsibility God had given her had always been singular, but now – after the euphoria of the coronation, and finding herself suddenly caught amid unpredictably swirling political currents – she sounded newly conscious of how alone she was with her duty. ‘My dearest and most perfect friends,’ she added, ‘I pray you that you should not feel uneasy as long as I live; but I ask that you keep a good watch and protect the good city of the king, and let me know if there are any traitors who wish to harm you, and as soon as I can I will drive them away; and let me know your news.’
Christine de Pizan, finishing her hymn of praise to the Maid six days earlier, had been certain that Joan would soon lead the king into Paris, and to Joan herself the recapture of the kingdom’s great capital seemed the obvious next step. Obvious perhaps, but not God-given. She had known she would take the king to Reims from the moment she arrived at Chinon, and at Poitiers, shortly after, she had learned that her sign would be to free Orléans. What now remained was the rest of her mission: to drive the English from French soil. That much God had made clear – but the question was how it should be achieved. Peace with the duke of Burgundy would heal France’s wounds, but that, for Joan, required the duke’s submission to his king, not the subtle and insubstantial words ofdiplomats. She also knew that if she attacked the enemy – and to take Paris from English hands would be a great and necessary prize – then God would give her victory. But in this large army that had escorted the king to Reims, she was one among many captains, and a place was not habitually made for her in the arguments about policy and strategy that consumed the attention of the king’s counsellors.
She had been an exceptional leader in an exceptional moment – a miraculous anomaly who, by the will of heaven, had transformed the landscape in which she stood. She knew that God was with her, and how much work still lay ahead. But what if those around her believed the moment of miracles had passed?