PART III
The French battle the English in the final stages of the Hundred Years War.
CHAPTER 12
IT WOULD BE GRATIFYING to be able to confirm the widespread belief that this one act, the terrible martyrdom of Joan of Arc—so unjust, so cruel, so iniquitous—resulted, as Master Jean Tressard predicted, in the immediate vanquishing of the English and the triumphal return of Charles VII to his hereditary throne. Or even that, if not quite the catalyst for a precipitous surrender, Joan’s execution at least marked the moral turning point in the conflict, the moment at which the native French population, repulsed by the deed, turned against the occupation and began the slow process of throwing off the yoke of the invaders. And yet the sad truth is that Joan’s death had absolutely no effect upon the war, or the politics of the period, or the eventual outcome of the struggle about which she had cared so deeply and in which, for a very brief period, she had played so critical a role. To her contemporaries, Joan’s condemnation and slaying, while deplored by those whose political leanings coincided with her own, represented little more than a sideshow, a momentary diversion—fleetingly noted and just as quickly forgotten.
In part, this uninterest was due to a lack of information regarding the more troubling aspects of her trial. The official record of the proceedings was kept secret at Rouen. This did not stop both the English and the University of Paris from disseminating as much incriminating evidence and hearsay as was necessary to gain support for their actions. Within a month of Joan’s execution, Henry VI sent a letter around addressed to “the prelates, dukes, counts, and other nobles and to the cities of his kingdom of France,” commanding them “through preaching and public sermons and otherwise” to trumpet the story of her many impieties, emphasizing that before she had burned, the Maid had acknowledged her voices to be shams; the University of Paris masters penned a similar letter to Rome. These measures of course influenced popular opinion. To the outside world, Joan’s words and actions had been impartially reviewed by high-ranking and learned members of the clergy and had been found (as many who adhered to the Burgundian side in the war had already suspected) to be heretical. An anonymous Burgundian chronicler, known simply as “un Bourgeois de Paris,” devoted a lengthy passage in his journal to Joan’s philosophy and execution that is instructive as to the manner in which she was viewed by ordinary people of the opposing camp. “She rode with the King every day, amongst very many men-at-arms, no woman with her, wearing men’s clothing, points, and armor, and carrying a great stick in her hand,” he wrote. “If any of her men did anything wrong, she would wallop them hard with this stick, like a very brutal woman. . . . In several places she had men and women killed, both in battle and in deliberate revenge, for she had anyone who did not obey her letters killed immediately without pity whenever she could. She said and affirmed that she never did anything except at God’s command, as given to her frequently by the archangel St. Michael, by St. Catherine, and by St. Margaret, who made her do these things—not as Our Lord did to Moses on Mount Sinai, but themselves, personally, told her secret things that were to come; that they had ordered and did order everything that she did, her clothes and everything else.
“Such and worse were my lady Joan’s false errors. They were all declared to her in front of the people, who were horrified when they heard these great errors against our faith which she held and still did hold. For, however clearly her great crimes and errors were shown her, she never faltered or was ashamed, but replied boldly to all the articles enumerated before her like one wholly given over to Satan,” the chronicler concluded.
As difficult as it is to believe today, this unsympathetic view of Joan as a hardened, rather distasteful, unrepentant sinner was the one that in the aftermath of her execution was seemingly destined to prevail. To understand the heroism of the Maid it was necessary to hear her voice, to feel the force of her piety, to reflect on the magnitude of her courage and achievements, and all of this stood in great peril of being lost or deliberately destroyed by her enemies. To rescue Joan from this fate, three exceedingly unlikely events had to occur: Charles VII had either to win a major battle decisively (a dubious prospect at best) or somehow find a way to get himself recognized as the legitimate king of France by those municipalities, most especially Paris, currently occupied by his enemies; the English had subsequently to be expelled from all of their strongholds on the continent; and, finally, a conscious effort had to be made to discredit and overturn the heretical conviction of the Church, not an institution particularly known for changing positions or admitting errors. This was a daunting agenda for any sovereign, let alone one whose abilities were as limited as Charles’s.
For all Joan’s courage, then, and despite the undeniable political legitimacy conferred upon Charles by the coronation at Reims, there was no indication at all at the time of her martyrdom that her king would ultimately prevail in his struggle against the English. The proof of this was that the war would drag on for a further twenty years. In the end, it would fall to another woman entirely, one unacknowledged by history, to take on the task left unfinished by the Maid.
IRONICALLY, in terms of the war effort, the period of Joan’s captivity—from May 1430 to her death in May of the following year—marked the most productive and active interval of Charles’s reign. The council meetings convened at Sully-sur-Loire in March 1430 (from which a frustrated Joan had slipped away, choosing instead to act independently rather than endure what she considered to be endless talk) had for once actually produced something approaching a coordinated plan of attack. The king had finally been made to realize that Philip the Good had not really been negotiating for peace but rather had only been using Charles’s offers to improve the terms of his alliance with the English. Above all, Charles did not like to be taken for a fool, and his anger was palpable in a letter issued on May 6, 1430, to his supporters, in which the king disdainfully referred to Philip the Good as “our adversary of Burgundy.” The duke, the king fumed, “has, for some time, amused and deceived us by truces and otherwise, under the shadow of good faith, because he said and affirmed that he wished to arrive at the well-being of peace, the which, for the relief of our poor people who, to the displeasure of our heart, has suffered and every day suffer so much for the matter of the war, we greatly desired and do desire, he has set himself with certain forces to make war upon us and upon our countries and loyal subjects.” Charles’s bitterness over this duplicity had prompted him to approve an aggressive military campaign, much of it aimed directly at those areas held or desired by the duke of Burgundy. La Hire was sent into Normandy, the lord of Barbazan to aid the duke of Bar in Champagne, and the marshal Boussac and the count of Vendôme to Compiègne. Many of their efforts met with success. René besieged and won the Burgundian town of Chappes, which was heavily defended by an army sent by the marshal of Burgundy; the Bastard of Orléans joined La Hire in Normandy, worrying the English in Louviers, close to the Burgundian border to the north; and the lord of Boussac and the count of Vendôme not only raised the siege of Compiègne but won a further victory at Peronne.23 Philip the Good suddenly found his participation in the war to be a good deal more onerous than had previously been his experience.
But the energy displayed by the French military belied the poisonous nature of the royal court, which was rent by rivalry, intrigue, and corruption. Two principal political parties had formed, one under the leadership of Georges de la Trémoïlle, who, having vanquished Joan, once again occupied his former position as Charles’s closest and most influential adviser, and was very busy exploiting this advantage to maximum profit. The other, composed of the Angevins and their allies, focused on reconciling the king to Arthur of Richemont, Charles’s formerly rejected constable, as a means of obtaining a meaningful coalition with his brother, the ever-vacillating duke of Brittany. Bringing Arthur of Richemont back into Charles’s good graces meant restoring the constable to a dominant role at court and within the royal council, an appointment that La Trémoïlle, jealous of his authority (and riches), was desperate to prevent.
Although Yolande of Aragon was still Arthur’s primary supporter and the ostensible leader of the Angevin party, by the spring of 1430 the queen of Sicily seems to have been in the process of retiring from the day-to-day workings of the court. She was, after all, nearly fifty years old and had been a dominant force in French politics since 1415, when the battle of Agincourt had thrust first her husband, and then herself, into a position of power within the old Armagnac coalition. Her great coup, the introduction of Joan to Charles at Chinon, had succeeded beyond all expectations. Orléans had been delivered from the enemy and by the coronation at Reims her daughter Marie’s position as the legitimate queen of France was established. Moreover, as a result of Joan’s intervention, Charles was no longer in doubt as to his parentage, and seemed well on his way to recovering his kingdom. Yolande’s third son and chosen political successor, Charles of Anjou, was nearing adulthood. She had never sent him away as she had Louis III to Naples or René to Bar and consequently he had had the benefit of her political experience and advice since childhood. He was familiar with the workings of the royal court and was a trusted confidant of both his sister, Marie, the queen, and her husband. The political situation had stabilized to the point where the aging queen of Sicily could begin the process of edging toward a quieter, more peaceful existence. On March 30, 1430, by letters patent, sixteen-year-old Charles of Anjou took his place as an official member of the royal council and his mother retreated to her castle in Saumur.
With this transition, Georges de la Trémoïlle saw his chance. In April, ambassadors from the duke of Brittany arrived to discuss the possibility, yet again, of the duke’s coming to a formal alliance with Charles VII. Charles of Anjou, not yet his mother’s equal at intrigue, was easily outmaneuvered by La Trémoïlle and seems to have been left out of these talks. He was therefore not in a position to protest when the ambassadors decided to cement the affiliation between the French king and the duke of Brittany by marrying the duke of Brittany’s daughter, Isabelle, to the count of Laval, a close friend of the constable’s, as a means of further protecting Breton interests at the royal court.
Ordinarily, Yolande would have been very happy with these negotiations. After all, she had been trying to separate the duke of Brittany from his English and Burgundian allies and bring him into an alliance with Charles VII for years. There was, however, a slight problem with this new arrangement: Isabelle of Brittany had been very publicly affianced for years to Yolande’s eldest son, Louis III, currently away in Italy and so conveniently unavailable to defend his marital rights. To sever the relationship was an act of treachery (not to mention highly reminiscent of what Yolande herself had done when she had so abruptly and dismissively returned Louis III’s first fiancée, the duke of Burgundy’s daughter, those many years ago). Georges de la Trémoïlle was well aware of the offending nature of this arrangement and suggested that the king send Arthur of Richemont himself to Saumur to break the news to the queen of Sicily, hoping to cause a rupture between the constable and his most powerful supporter.
He very nearly succeeded. Yolande was above all committed to the welfare and advancement of her children, and, as the lord of Trémoïlle had expected, she reacted to the breaking of the marriage alliance between her eldest son and the daughter of the duke of Brittany as a profound insult. The woman who had taken with equanimity the murder of John the Fearless, the disinheritance of her son-in-law the dauphin, and the trials of a decades-long war with England, who had counseled forbearance and diplomacy in the face of nearly every emergency, lost all of her sangfroid and self-discipline when this news was delivered to her by her hapless protégé. “When the constable came, in the name of his brother, to see Yolande, accompanied by the count of Etampes and the Breton ambassadors, to obtain her agreement [to the marriage of Isabelle to the count of Laval] she became violently angry and it almost came to an open declaration of war,” reported G. du Fresne de Beaucourt, Charles VII’s definitive biographer. Although the constable managed to salvage his relationship with his patron, the queen of Sicily was reconciled to this betrayal only when Charles VII later appeased her by agreeing to a face-saving replacement marriage between her second daughter, Yolande of Anjou, and the duke of Brittany’s eldest son. She must have directed some choice words, too, at her youngest son for allowing himself to be outwitted, because Charles of Anjou later took his revenge in a way that implied he had strong feelings about the matter. But the principal outcome of this episode was that Yolande of Aragon was jolted out of retirement, and in this La Trémoïlle seriously miscalculated, for, once roused, the queen of Sicily made for a dangerous enemy.
She did not recover her former influence at once; La Trémoïlle’s power over Charles VII was still too strong. Through a combination of excessive solicitude for his well-being and an adroit manipulation of his many weaknesses, the councillor had made himself seemingly indispensable to the king. (One of the many services the lord of Trémoïlle provided to his sovereign was to openly encourage and enable Charles’s frequent infidelities. As might be expected, this did not endear him to the queen.) The planned marriagebetween Isabelle of Brittany and the count of Laval went through despite Yolande’s vociferous objections. Although the expense of underwriting the elaborate coronation at Reims had severely depleted the royal treasury’s resources, Georges de la Trémoïlle continued to reap substantial rewards, both in terms of tax revenues and outright gifts of gold and property, from the king in exchange for “the great, notable, profitable and agreeable” tasks that he performed for Charles’s benefit.24
René at home in his castle at work on a book of chivalry.
How long it might have taken to dislodge this favorite using the customary methods of politics is anyone’s guess. But in the summer of 1431 another Angevin family crisis arose, this one involving René, that, even more than the severed marriage contract, forced Yolande of Aragon to intervene once again in the management of her son-in-law’s kingdom, and by so doing win the war.
THAT RENÉ, who had been Joan’s earliest (if clandestine) supporter, should be the means, however backhanded, of the accomplishment of her goals is somehow fitting. After the disaster at Paris, René had remained loyal to his brother-in-law the king and had pursued the struggle against Charles VII’s enemies from his home duchy of Bar and Lorraine, an enterprise that coincided nicely with self-interest, as he got to keep everything he conquered. As a further encouragement to this helpful relative, Charles sent him troops and an experienced captain, the lord of Barbazan, so that René might launch an offensive into the neighboring county of Champagne. In 1430 this strategy resulted in a major victory against the Burgundians, when René seized the town of Chappes, a feat for which he was approvingly described by a chronicler as “a brave knight of great heart who showed himself to be proud and courageous.”
Then, at the beginning of the succeeding year, on January 15, 1431, just as Joan’s trial for heresy was beginning in Rouen, René’s father-in-law, the old, gouty, philandering duke of Lorraine, finally succumbed to his various illnesses and René at last came into his inheritance. He was now officially titled duke of Bar and Lorraine (his uncle, the cardinal, had died the previous June), with all of the advantages that the distinction implied: overlordship of a large swath of land supplemented by the wealth of its rents and a highly prestigious position in the world.
Unfortunately, the dispensation of lucrative legacies such as the old duke had agreed to bestow on his son-in-law were frequently challenged by other family members who considered themselves cheated by these arrangements, and the duke of Lorraine’s estate was no exception to this rule. René’s father-in-law had had a younger brother, and this younger brother had had a son, Antoine, and Antoine thought that no matter what had been agreed to in the past, he was far more entitled to his uncle’s estates than was René. To buttress his position, Antoine appealed to Philip the Good, who was already none too pleased that René had brazenly invaded Champagne and taken the town of Chappes away from him. Consequently, the duke of Burgundy was only too happy to provide Antoine with an army of approximately four thousand warriors. On July 2, 1431, Antoine’s forces met René’s near Bulgnéville, about ten miles southeast of Neufchâteau.
Although René, still accompanied by the lord of Barbazan, commanded the larger force—some seventy-five hundred men in all—Antoine had the benefit of position. The Burgundians were entrenched behind a stream and had taken the precaution of digging trenches and erecting the customary line of stakes behind which stood a crack troop of four hundred archers lent by Philip. Antoine had also thought to bring along some heavy artillery. René had no bowmen to speak of and was without guns altogether, serious drawbacks that the more experienced Barbazan took pains to point out. But René, with one victory under his belt, was overeager for a second and was the superior in rank. He overruled Barbazan and ordered his men to cross the stream and attack. René would later defend this decision by observing that he felt that “he had so many men that it seemed that he could fight all the world for a day.”
This sentiment proved optimistic. René’s forces charged directly into a thumping bombardment of cannonballs and a storm of lethal arrows. It was one of the shortest battles in French history. The poor lord of Barbazan died alongside his men in the first wave of the assault. René himself was struck in the face and went down soon thereafter. Seeing their commander incapacitated, the remainder of René’s forces deserted, allowing Antoine to claim victory in a record fifteen minutes (although it took a further two hours for the Burgundians to chase down and slay the fleeing opposition). In the resulting chaos, the wounded duke of Bar and Lorraine was initially claimed by an ignominious squire intent on making a profit from his noble captive, but Antoine soon discovered the identity of the prisoner and took possession of René himself. But even Antoine was to be denied so great a prize, and René was almost immediately consigned to the duke of Burgundy, who had him carted off to Dijon and sequestered in a high tower cell at one of his castles, there to await his fate.
The defeat and capture of René of Anjou had infinitely more impact upon the court of Charles VII than had the burning of Joan of Arc six weeks earlier. “Intelligence of this defeat was spread throughout the countries of Bar and Lorraine, and that their lord had been made prisoner, which caused the severest grief to all attached to him,” wrote the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet. Not that anyone close to him feared for his life. The difference in René’s experience of captivity and Joan’s is striking. The duke of Bar and Lorraine was a man of high birth and position. The laws of chivalry had been expressly developed to safeguard such a lord as he, and he received the full benefit of their protection, even though he had somewhat broken the rules and surrendered to a mere squire and not a member of the nobility as was the proper etiquette. René was never shackled in irons nor threatened by his jailers. Nor was it conceivable that he would ever be sold to the English no matter what the sum offered; the very idea was ridiculous; the duke of Burgundy would never have lived down the dishonor. And although René was of course made melancholy by his confinement, he was certainly never reduced by terror to such despair that he felt the need to throw himself out the window. On the contrary, he was allowed visitors and furloughs. He seems to have whiled away most of his time in prison painting pictures on the walls of his room and preparing sketches of stained glass windows.
But to have the queen’s younger brother a prisoner of “our adversary of Burgundy” was a bitter pill to Charles VII. Philip the Good was fully cognizant of the boost that had been given to his bargaining position and would not in the beginning even consider setting a ransom for his hostage. To convince him otherwise, Charles was moved to real action. The military offensive against Burgundian territory, in both the north and east, was stepped up significantly in the wake of René’s capture. By a letter of July 22, the lord of Albret was named to replace the deceased Barbazan and sent to Champagne to continue to try to reclaim the area for Charles. On July 20, the duke of Austria was finally induced to declare war on Philip and began a series of border strikes that, while not seriously endangering his duchy, nonetheless forced the duke of Burgundy to divert resources to this area. Charles even sent ambassadors to the Holy Roman Emperor, who had his own territorial disputes with Philip, to arrange an alliance against Burgundy.
But above all else, René’s capture served to convince his mother that the time had finally come to separate Philip the Good from his English allegiance. She had always believed in and worked toward this goal, but now it acquired a new urgency. A truce alone was no longer acceptable; there had been truces in the past and these had been implemented merely as a means of stalling for advantage; they were easily made and just as easily broken. What was required now was a firm peace treaty between the king of France and the duke of Burgundy, for only in this way could her son be assured of his freedom. Keeping military pressure on Philip might encourage the duke to come to terms, but it could be only one component of the overall strategy. Of equal importance would be the opening of a confidential diplomatic channel between the two courts, aimed at assessing the duke of Burgundy’s state of mind and exploiting any potential friction between Philip and the regency government in France. The question was only how best to do this, and the prisoner himself soon provided the answer.
AS IT HAPPENED, by the summer of 1431, just at that critical juncture in the war when he had so fortuitously captured René, Philip the Good was in fact experiencing some deep reservations about his dealings with England. This was entirely based on the sudden realization by the English exchequer that the war in France was costing a great deal of money. In the Middle Ages, foreign conquests were undertaken as much for the expectation of profit as for glory; the whole point was to ravage the enemy and bring home whatever spoils could be conveniently appropriated. But in France, the English baronage was beginning to suspect, the reverse was true. It was the French who were making all the money! French priests and officials were on the English payroll; there was a seemingly endless demand for more soldiers, more supplies, more arms; after Charles’s coronation at Reims, the English treasury had been required to pay for a competing enthronement ceremony for ten-year-old Henry VI in Paris. The French, it seemed, could do nothing for themselves: the government had even to foot the bill for the purchase and prosecution of that Armagnac witch who had caused so much trouble in Orléans. For most of the 1420s, while the English were winning and Charles’s resistance was feeble, the war had more or less paid for itself. But in 1429, with the arrival of Joan of Arc, English outlays suddenly exceeded receipts by a distressing 10,000 pounds. And since that time, the trend had continued, and for precious little return, at least as perceived by the native English baronage. Henry VI’s forces held less territory in France in 1431 than they had in 1428 and there was apparently need of significant funds just to ensure against further losses. Although she never realized it, Joan’s most meaningful blow against her enemies was in making the war expensive.
And when it came to allies who expected to be paid for their assistance, no one’s hand reached deeper into the pocket of the English treasury, the regency government noted, than Philip the Good’s. The duke of Burgundy had already been much enriched—outlandishly so, it was believed by some in England—in terms of both authority and territory as well as by currency. And yet in November 1430, he had had the temerity to write a letter to Henry VI complaining that Compiègne had been lost because he hadn’t received his money quickly enough and that if his expenses weren’t met soon Burgundy would refuse to participate in the war altogether! “It is . . . true, most redoubted lord,” the duke of Burgundy had written disagreeably to the boy king, “that, according to the agreement drawn up on your part with my people, you ought to have paid me the sum of 19,500 francs of royal money each month for the expenses of my troops before Compiègne, as well as the cost of the artillery. . . . It was under the impression that this would be done on your part, and especially that the said payment would be made without fail, as agreed, that I had my men stationed before Compiègne all the time. But, most redoubted lord, these payments have not been kept up by you, for they are in arrears to the tune of two months. . . . My most redoubted lord, I cannot continue without adequate provision in future from you . . . and without payment of what is due me.”
The English response to this irksome dunning came addressed to Philip in a long letter issued by the regency council from Rouen on May 28, 1431, just two days before Joan’s execution. It was a masterpiece of evasion. “And firstly, with regard to . . . the great damages, outlays, and expenses which my said lord of Burgundy and his lands . . . have sustained by occasion of the wars; the king [Henry VI] is as much annoyed therewith as if they had been in his own country,” the letter began diplomatically, before going on to address, at some length, “the great diligence” with which the English king was prosecuting the war, and how much he was doing and had already done on Philip’s behalf. The issue of the outstanding debt owed to the duke was referred to only at the end of this extensive missive. “To the tenth article, which makes mention of what is demanded by my said lord of Burgundy in consequence of his troops who have been before Compiègne, and the artillery which has been there employed, the king will cause to be inspected the indentures and arrangements which have been made and taken in these matters . . . and if it shall be agreeable to my said lord of Burgundy to send him some of his people, he will cause such an arrangement to be made as ought reasonably to be satisfactory,” the English council concluded. Apparently what was satisfactory to the king of England did not involve actually paying Philip his money, because the duke had to remind Henry VI quite forcefully again six months later by a letter of December 12, 1431, that he still was not in receipt of his funds. “Notwithstanding all letters, statements, requests, and supplications, I have been unable to obtain from you, not even the payment of what you clearly owe me by the account made with your people, which amounts to a large sum. . . . In consequence of which I have been compelled to disband the said armies . . . and have been constrained to consent that certain truces and abstinences of war should be made in my said countries, and especially in my countries of Burgundy, with your said enemies and mine,” Philip finished ominously. To further communicate his displeasure at this unwarranted disruption to his cash flow, the duke of Burgundy pointedly did not attend the coronation of Henry VI that was held in Paris later that month, but instead made good on his threat to collaborate with the enemy by signing a truce (which he had no intention of keeping, of course) with Charles’s representatives at Lille in order to prevent further incursions into his territory while he regrouped and waited for reinforcements.
In the past, this behavior had always resulted in England’s capitulating to his demands, with perhaps some additional monies, territories, or honors thrown in as an extra incentive to remain true to the alliance. The duke of Burgundy no doubt waited confidently for this to happen; it must have come as quite a shock when it didn’t. And just as Philip came to the recognition that, inexplicably, a bribe would not be forthcoming, his chancellor, a man named Nicolas Rolin, who was the duke of Burgundy’s most trusted adviser (“it is he who does and decides everything, and through whose hands everything passes,” an eyewitness reported), found a convenient loophole in the treaty between Burgundy and England. According to Nicolas’s understanding of international law, Philip wasn’t obligated to maintain his allegiance to the English king, on the grounds that Henry V had died prior to the demise of the mad king Charles VI. Nicolas (who had tallied the devastation to the duke’s property caused by the war and had decided that peace would be far more profitable for all concerned, including himself) argued that although Henry V had been named Charles VI’s chosen successor, he had never actually assumed the French crown, being already dead when the reigning French monarch had died and passed it on. Therefore, as Henry V had never worn the crown of France, his son could not have inherited it from him, a legal nicety that had somehow been overlooked for the past decade while the English were winning and still paying.
While all of this was going on, in February 1432, Philip finally met face-to-face with his captive in order to hammer out the conditions of René’s release. The negotiations lasted off and on until April. No ransom figure was agreed on at this time, but René was required to marry his eldest daughter (four years old at the time) to the son of his rival, Antoine. The duke of Bar and Lorraine was allowed temporary freedom from his cell, but only on the condition that he pay an upfront installment of 20,000 gold pieces and substitute his two young sons (the eldest was six) as hostages in his place. This René did, and he was released on April 30. René was then required to travel to Brussels to continue discussions with Antoine under the mediating influence of Philip the Good as to who would inherit Lorraine after his death. Nicolas Rolin, Philip’s chancellor, also attended these meetings and was responsible for drawing up the documentation.
As a result of all of these negotiations, René got to know Philip the Good and Nicolas Rolin quite well. It didn’t take him long to figure out that the duke of Burgundy was not all that happy with his English allies, and that the duke of Burgundy’s chancellor had found a way out of their treaty arrangements. (Actually, it seems likely from later events that Nicolas deliberately leaked this information to René as a means of opening a backdoor diplomatic channel to Charles’s court.) Whichever way René came to this information, however, the message was the same: the glimmer of an opportunity to dislodge Philip from his heretofore unshakable adherence to England had suddenly appeared.
The exploitation of so rare an opening was too important and sensitive to leave to routine officials. Upon completion of the talks in Brussels in February 1433, René did not go directly home to his wife in Nancy. Rather, he went to see his mother.