PART TWO
NINE
Everyone knew that in condemning Joan, the court was judging her king. If Charles had been deceived by a witch and heretic, then her role in the relief of Orléans, her part in the victories in the Loire, even his own anointing and crowning might be the work of the devil. Charles had been the unmentionable presence at her trial, just as he had been that mission’s chief concern, the beneficiary of her success and the man whom his enemies wished to associate with her final failure.
Upon the King! Let us our lives, our souls,
Our debts, our careful wives,
Our children, and our sins, lay on the King!
. . . I know
’Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,
The sword, the mace,
the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running ’fore the king,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world,
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
Who with a body filled and vacant mind
Get him to bed, crammed with distressful bread.1
Shakespeare portrayed Henry V as his ideal king of England. It is an ideal of kingship that Joan would have recognised, even though she would have added that the actual Henry V had been wrong to claim the throne of France. From Charles VII’s point of view and hers, the Treaty of Troyes had justified the unjustifiable – an act of usurpation.
In Henry V’s soliloquy before Agincourt Shakespeare takes for granted the sacred nature of Christian monarchy. This assumption, as fundamental to Joan as to the real or imagined Henry V, was dramatised symbolically in the ceremony of anointing and coronation. As the soliloquy also reveals, there was another side to kingship: the lonely role of one born to rule, a burden taken up at the moment of succession that must be endured to the moment of death. As far as the lawyers were concerned, this truth was expressed by the declaration, ‘The King is dead, long live the King!’ From the moment the old king died, the new king took over his authority. For this reason, all laws made in a new reign were dated from this moment. Charles VII may have been known as the Dauphin to his friends and as the King of Bourges to his foes, but in the eyes of his legal officials all laws he approved were royal.
When he first met Joan in March 1429, Charles the Dauphin was isolated partly by feelings of inadequacy; and it is possible that her private interview with him and the spectacular change in French morale that ensued in the following few weeks began a transformation in his character that helped make him a formidable politician. But he remained isolated by his office as well as his character. To such a man Joan had her uses, but he also understood, which she did not, that he could not fight continuously and might have to treat with his cousin of Burgundy and even his nephew of England.
The king, the only person who was always at the centre of affairs, might discard Georges de la Trémoïlle or Alençon or Joan, but never his own kingship, for it was as king that he, not his generals or his counsellors, would earn the title of le très victorieux (the very victorious) by winning the Hundred Years War; and, when the final triumph was imminent, it became timely to remember the strange, difficult girl who had held such a high view of his own authority and yet had not always obeyed him, who was uncommonly Catholic and yet would not yield to bishops and priests who did not accept her private revelations. On the nullification of her sentence depended the silencing of any doubts that he was indeed God’s anointed.