CHAPTER 14
WITH THE TREATY OF ARRAS and the surrender of Paris, the first of the three conditions necessary to establish Joan of Arc’s place in history was achieved. In a stunning reversal of English interests, Charles was now not only the acknowledged sovereign of France, but for the first time during his reign actually in possession of three-quarters of his kingdom. Henry VI might still call himself king of France, but barring a string of further military successes, this was an empty title. For this reason, England clung to its holdings on the continent, and particularly Normandy, with a ferocity that made clear its government’s intentions to stay and fight for the legacy left by Henry V. And in the heart of Normandy lay the capital city of Rouen, in which the damning evidence of Joan’s trial was locked away. Without those records nothing could be done to rehabilitate her image.
Not that Charles at this point demonstrated any particular interest in reviving Joan’s memory. The king’s overriding aspiration was to put the war behind him, either by defeating the English in battle or by bribing them to leave, two alternatives at which, in the years following his dramatic entrance into Paris, and despite Charles’s having finally matured into a much more effective ruler, he was remarkably unsuccessful. It would fall once again to Yolande of Aragon and her family, and in particular the hapless René, to help him to finish the war and, in so doing, reclaim the Maid for posterity.
THE QUEEN OF SICILY’S second son certainly made for an unlikely hero. In the years following his defeat at Bulgnéville and subsequent imprisonment by the duke of Burgundy, René’s career bore an unfortunate resemblance to the sort of fairy tale generally associated with the Brothers Grimm. The most deplorable luck dogged his heels even as the greatest of honors were showered on his head; he, who would help usher the Renaissance into France, was the recipient, often simultaneously, of the best and the worst the medieval world had to offer. Here was a man who by nature and inclination reveled in music, painting, and literature, but whose advancement lay in the mastering of the martial and political arts, a personal combination that resulted in disaster with an almost staggering consistency.
It was therefore entirely symptomatic of René’s lot in life that, having done so much to advance his own cause by furthering the peace negotiations between Charles and Philip the Good, he would see his bargaining position with the duke of Burgundy suddenly deteriorate in an alarming fashion by virtue of an unlooked-for promotion. On November 12, 1434, just before the reconciliation talks at Nevers, while René still languished in his prison cell in Dijon, his older brother Louis III died unexpectedly of fever in Calabria, at the southern tip of the kingdom of Naples. Poor Louis had lived in Italy for over a decade, with only brief excursions home to France to see family and friends, while he waited impatiently for the reigning queen of Naples, Joanna II, to die and pass along his inheritance. Unfortunately for Yolande’s eldest son, his benefactor outlived him by three months, and as Louis died childless, Joanna II instead named René as her successor. So when she too passed away on February 2, 1435, all of Louis III’s many titles and appendages fell to his younger brother, and Philip the Good suddenly found himself in possession not simply of René, duke of Bar and Lorraine, but of René, king of Sicily, duke of Anjou and Maine, and count of Provence—a transformation that represented, in the rank-sensitive hierarchy of medieval prisoners, a stunning upgrade to a much more valuable hostage. Moreover, the duke of Burgundy knew, as everyone did, that Joanna II’s will would be contested by the king of Aragon, and that René could be assured of this fabulous inheritance only by raising an army and going to Naples as soon as possible in order to claim his kingdom and defend his rights. That meant that every day René spent in Philip’s prison cell would make him that much more desperate to get out, and the more desperate René became, the duke of Burgundy reasoned with undeniable logic, the more his captive would be willing to pay for his freedom.
Consequently, despite a concerted effort on the part of Yolande, Charles VII, the duke of Bourbon, Arthur of Richemont, and Regnault of Chartres to have René freed as a condition of the peace treaty of Arras, Philip the Good absolutely refused to consider this option. He had, by the purest stroke of good fortune, got a king rather than a mere duke in hand, and he wasn’t about to give up what was likely to be the most lucrative acquisition of his career just to make peace with his father’s killer. In the end it came down to reconciliation or René, and reconciliation won. The Treaty of Arras was signed without mention of the duke of Burgundy’s illustrious hostage, and the new king of Sicily remained miserably in prison.
In this emergency, friends and family alike rallied to René’s cause. He was extremely fortunate in the determined character of his wife, Isabelle of Lorraine, who upon being informed of the situation in Naples volunteered to go to Italy to hold and administer the kingdom while René negotiated for his release. This seemed like a good plan, and so by letters of June 4, 1435, issued from Dijon, René appointed his wife lieutenant general of his southern Italian kingdom. Isabelle immediately picked up her two youngest children, Louis and Margaret, aged eight and five respectively (her eldest son, John, was a hostage along with his father, and her older daughter, Yolande, had already been promised to Antoine’s son and was living with the family of her betrothed), and sped down to Provence to assemble a fleet. She set sail from Marseille in a small convoy of five galleys, her children apparently still with her, at the beginning of October 1435, and by the eighteenth of the month had arrived at the capital city of Naples. A woman who clearly understood the importance of first impressions, no sooner had she disembarked than Isabelle made a point of parading all over town in great state under a velvet-and-gold canopy before appropriating a prominent royal castle as her living quarters, a bravado performance that, together with her five warships, won over the local population and allowed her time to establish her claim as ruler of the kingdom in her husband’s place.
While René’s wife secured his holdings in Italy, his mother guarded his property in France. Isabelle had left the bishops of Metz and Verdun in charge of administering Bar and Lorraine, but in the absence of their legitimate overlord the civilian populations were plagued by incursions from roving mercenaries. The bishops appealed by a letter of March 10, 1436, to Yolande of Aragon for military aid—“expressing a confidence in her abilities second only to God,” René’s authoritative biographer, A. Lecoy de la Marche, observed drily—and the queen quickly convinced Charles VII to send both troops and artillery to protect her son’s territory. Yolande, of course, also acted as regent for René’s lands in Anjou and Provence, keeping the peace and defending against further inroads by the English, as she had for his older brother Louis while he was alive. Most important, she kept pressure on Philip the Good to release her son, enlisting the aid of not only the king of France and all of the extended royal family but also the pope and the most senior members of the Church in this effort.
Philip, however, intent upon wringing the most from his prize, responded to these various entreaties with a series of startling exorbitant demands. First, he wanted three million gold ducats, then two million, then the duchy of Bar, all of which were completely unreasonable, and so poor René sat in his prison cell, literally growing a long gray beard and feeling very sorry for himself, throughout the long months of 1436. Finally, casting about for a new enticement, his supporters floated the rumor that Joanna II had left a great treasure at her castle in Naples that could be claimed only by her heir, and the duke of Burgundy began to think that letting his hostage go and collect this sum might be a better strategy after all than having him simply pine away, and perhaps even die of unhappiness, in his tower in Dijon.
And so at the beginning of the following year, these two great lords met in Lille one last time to hammer out acceptable terms for René’s release. On February 11, 1437, a treaty highly favorable to the duke of Burgundy was finally signed. By this document, in exchange for his permanent release from captivity, René agreed to pay Philip the Good the whopping sum of 400,000 écus in four yearly installments of 100,000 apiece, and he and his mother had to cede all of their rights to their territories in Flanders. (Yolande was made to sign the treaty as well.) René was allowed to keep the duchies of Bar and Lorraine but had to put up several towns, including Neufchâteau, as surety against the payment of the ransom money. Many of his most important vassals, including Robert de Baudricourt, had also to indemnify payment and go to prison in René’s place in the event of default, and the marriage between his eldest daughter and Antoine’s son was again confirmed. As René was already substantially in debt and did not have 10,000 écus to his name, let alone 400,000, he had to engage his eldest son, John, to the duke of Bourbon’s daughter, who fortunately came with a dowry of 150,000 écus, to make the first payment.
The agreement represented a staggering financial blow, but at least the new king of Sicily had his liberty. He had to spend the rest of the year fundraising, scrounging off friends, begging for funds from Anjou and Provence, and appealing to Charles VII for help from the royal treasury, but eventually he scraped together enough money to assemble a small army. Isabelle sent back her five galleys to Marseille for her husband’s use, and René, in the company of his eleven-year-old eldest son, who had been released with him, finally embarked for Italy and by May 1438 was in Naples. In a chivalric gesture that he no doubt came quickly to regret, knowing that he would soon have to fight the king of Aragon for his title, he gallantly sent his wife and children home to Provence, even though Isabelle was by this time far more familiar than he with the local baronage and serpentine ways of Neapolitan politics. Soon after his family sailed, the new king of Sicily, alone in a city of which he understood precious little, whose previous experience of warfare was limited to three battles, the last of which had ended in debacle, nervously barricaded himself in a castle while he waited for the enemy forces to mount an attack.
YOLANDE OF ARAGON was in her late fifties, a venerable age for the period, by the time her son René was at last released from his prison cell and free to pursue his all-important Angevin Italian inheritance. Although the queen of Sicily was nearing the end of her life, there is no indication of her slowing down in any way, or retiring from public affairs, or losing her influence at court. On the contrary: at the important representative meeting of the États généraux held in October 1439 in Orléans, convened to discuss military reforms and the implementation of a permanent tax to help finance the war effort, two thrones were set up for the opening convocation—one for the king of France, and the other for his mother-in-law.
Although certainly subject to personal tragedy—the death of her eldest son, Louis III, in 1434 was followed by the untimely loss of her youngest daughter in 1440—Yolande of Aragon could look back over her career with satisfaction. Despite the continued presence of the English in Maine and Normandy, the great work of her life, the reclamation of the throne of France for her daughter and son-in-law, had been accomplished. Charles VII’s legitimacy was unquestioned; his eldest boy, Louis, Yolande’s grandson, would inherit the kingdom at his death; the line of succession was firmly established. As Raymondin, with Melusine’s aid, had taken over his cousin Aimery’s lands and risen to become a richer and more powerful lord than he whom he had murdered, so had Charles VII, by the Treaty of Arras, taken over his assassinated cousin’s lands and been acknowledged to be a greater lord than Philip the Good. And just as Melusine had provided her husband with sons who would go on to perform great feats that brought honor to the family’s name, so too would Charles’s descendants rule gloriously after the king’s demise.
Nor in achieving this remarkable turnaround had the queen of Sicily neglected her other children, or her husband’s legacy. After René’s release from prison, she had not only given him as much of her own money as was available but used her influence in Anjou and at court and within the Church to help him secure the funds necessary to raise his army. Similarly, by her efficient elimination of Georges de la Trémoïlle, Yolande had placed her third son, Charles of Anjou, count of Maine, in a position of great power at court. No sooner had the previous favorite left than the count of Maine took his place in Charles VII’s affections. The king could not do without him, and kept the younger Charles beside him always as his closest adviser, calling him “a brave prince, a true man of war endowed with a remarkable beauty.” So influential was the count of Maine that he provoked the jealousy of the other barons, and the duke of Bourbon tried more than once to unseat him at court. But between them, Charles of Anjou and his mother had managed to defeat these conspiracies, and by 1439 very little could be accomplished in France without the support of the count of Maine.
There was, in fact, only one circumstance for which Yolande of Aragon could reproach herself: the loss of the duchy of Maine, which included the capital city of Le Mans. The English occupation of this important Angevin holding had occurred during her regency, and she could not reconcile herself to its forfeiture. She had tried to retrieve it militarily, by working with Arthur of Richemont and the duke of Alençon, both of whom had sporadically sent in commando units to try to force the English out, but these had been unsuccessful. At the time of the Treaty of Arras, when hopes of peace ran high throughout the occupied territories, artisans at the cathedral of Le Mans were at work on a stunning stained glass window depicting the figures of Louis I and his wife, Marie of Blois, and Louis II and Yolande of Aragon alongside the duke of Bourbon, a touching symbol of the faith the community still had in its lineage and in particular its surviving duchess. To have this cathedral (which she still supported financially) in the hands of the enemy was a provoking reminder of her impotence, and the queen of Sicily was not a woman who liked to lose.
Coincidently, toward the end of the decade—the exact date is not known, but certainly by 1439—she had one of her granddaughters, René’s younger girl, nine-year-old Margaret, sent back from Italy to live with her. Margaret, who was dowered with the duchy of Bar, had been promised to the son of the count of Saint-Pol on March 25, 1437, as part of René’s ongoing effort to keep his property out of the hands of the duke of Burgundy. The usual procedure was of course for the girl to go to live with her intended’s family, as her older sister had done. But this did not happen in Margaret’s case; instead, she was given over to the care of her indomitable grandmother. It might have been that René felt the need to have his mother safeguard the fate of the duchy of Bar, or it might have been that Yolande herself was not entirely happy with this alliance and, observing that strong-willed, intelligent Margaret was developing into something of a beauty, wished to try for a more prestigious match. Certainly, the queen of Sicily took pains to train her granddaughter, of whom she would become very fond, to be a great lady, and did not neglect to instruct her in all the skills necessary to the administration of a noble appendage. At the age of eleven, Margaret was already checking payments and learning to balance the accounts of her grandmother’s treasury.
Margaret’s arrival at her grandmother’s chateau in Saumur seems also to have coincided with a new round of diplomatic talks between England and France that occurred in July 1439 at the port of Gravelines, northeast of Calais. “In this year, many noble ambassadors were assembled. . . . They held several meetings to consider if they could not bring about a general peace between the two kings and their allies, and also respecting the deliverance of the duke of Orléans, who had remained a prisoner in England since the battle of Agincourt,” reported Enguerrand de Monstrelet. The English again floated the idea of a long-term truce supported by a royal marriage between the two kingdoms, but as they still insisted that Henry VI be recognized as king of both England and France, “they could not agree on any conclusion worth speaking of; for the English refused to treat with the king of France unless the duchy of Normandy, together with all their other conquests, remained to them independent of the crown of France,” the chronicler observed. However, this was the second time that marriage had been mentioned as a means to peace, and with good reason. The conflict had by this time lasted so long that Henry VI, who had been an infant when the crown passed to him through his father, was now eighteen. It began to occur to those on the French side that the king of England would be married, and married soon, and that whom he married—what allies might yet be brought into the fray on the side of their enemies through matrimony—could very likely determine the direction of the war.
ALTHOUGH ENGLAND’S public position as regards Henry VI’s sovereignty over France did not waver at the conference at Gravelines, there was strong and growing disillusionment among the English baronage with the war effort, which cost so much and returned so little. A movement toward surrendering the dream of the double monarchy and protecting what was left of England’s holdings on the continent by bringing the conflict to an honorable end was taking hold among a number of Henry VI’s counselors. That by the beginning of the next year their influence began to dominate the government is evidenced by the decision in 1440 finally to ransom the duke of Orléans, in the hope of using this gentleman to promote peace.
The wisdom of selecting as a goodwill ambassador an individual who had just spent the past twenty-five years in an English prison cell might ordinarily be questioned, but in fact the duke of Orléans was at this point so wretched, and had been disappointed so many times in the past, and had so lost all hope of rescue, that he was willing to agree to almost anything his captors suggested. The ransom figure was set at 200,000 écus and, in another implausible twist of history, was actually paid by Philip the Good, whose father had started the whole mess by murdering the duke of Orléans’s father three decades earlier. Philip had no problem meeting the English demands because he happened to have a sizable cash outlay on hand owing to René’s having paid the first two installments on his ransom. “While these negotiations were pending, and afterward, the duke of Burgundy had a great desire to aid the duke of Orléans in his deliverance, as well from their near connection by blood, as that, on his return to France, they might remain good friends, forgetting all former feuds that had existed between their houses,” Enguerrand de Monstrelet observed. “He caused him to be sounded, whether he would be willing to marry his niece . . . and also, in case of his deliverance, if he would agree to ally himself with the duke of Burgundy, without taking any measures in times to come against him or his family, in consequence of the former quarrels between their fathers. . . . The duke of Orléans, considering the long imprisonment he had suffered and might still undergo, readily assented to these propositions.”
And so the duke of Orléans, at the age of forty-five, was finally liberated and immediately married Philip’s niece at a lavish wedding paid for by the duke of Burgundy, well attended by both great nobles from France and ambassadors from England. But instead of being a force for unity, the reintroduction of the duke of Orléans into the fragile balance of power surrounding France became a source of division. “For . . . the king [Charles VII] had been informed of the whole conduct the duke had held since his return from England—of his oaths and alliance with the duke of Burgundy—of having received his order—how grandly he was accompanied—of his having admitted into his household numbers of Burgundians, who had formerly waged war against him and his crown,” explained Enguerrand de Monstrelet. “The king was also told that these connections had been formed in opposition to him and his ministers—and that many great lords, such as the dukes of Brittany and Alençon, had joined the two dukes, with the view of forming a new administration. . . . The king, who was ever inclined to suspicion, and to listen to such information, from the many plots that had been formed against him during his reign, readily believed what was now told him.”
Nor were these idle rumors. The duke of Burgundy had indeed joined in a new triple alliance with the dukes of Orléans and Brittany, which left open the possibility of a rebellion against Charles that could potentially be exploited by England. Also at this time the count of Armagnac, old ally of the duke of Orléans, offered one of his daughters to Henry VI in marriage without bothering to consult the king of France. Such an alliance could strengthen England’s position on the continent and put the southern portion of the kingdom at risk.
It had been more than ten years since Charles VII had vacillated, irresolute and conflicted in the face of the English threat, unable to act until Joan had appeared. He was now a different man, a man inured to threats to his rule, a king convinced of the legitimacy of his cause, and with the experience to lead. Consequently, he did not wait for the conspirators to make a move but at the first hint of collusion acted with energy to protect his government. “King Charles of France now assembled a very large body of men from different provinces of his realm, and ordered those captains . . . to join him instantly with their troops,” reported Enguerrand de Monstrelet. “When all were collected on the banks of the Loire, the king departed from Bourges in Berry, attended by the dauphin, the constable of France, the lord Charles of Anjou, and lords without number.” In 1441, the king himself took command of this army and invaded Champagne, reaching to the outskirts of Burgundy, and achieved the submission of the major forts and the town of Troyes, an act that reestablished and confirmed the population’s obedience to the crown. From Champagne, Charles continued to accompany the royal militia north of Paris, where he attacked and won the city of Pontoise, despite its being defended by an English garrison under the highly experienced command of Captain Talbot, one of the original members of the besieging force at Orléans and the commander who later fought against Joan and La Hire at the battle of Patay. Encouraged by these successes, the king continued his offensive the next year, moving against the English occupation in Guyenne, in the heart of the Aquitaine.
In England, the political faction committed to the war roused itself and succeeded in convincing Henry VI to raise a new army to repel the French attack and take back the kingdom. During the winter of 1442, an imposing force of some seven thousand men-at-arms was recruited for a spring of ensive. And this was where matters stood in France when René lost Naples.
RENÉ’S SOJOURN in his southern Italian kingdom had been plagued by his customary perverse luck. Although initially the forces he commanded were of equal strength to those of his opponent, the king of Aragon, and he had some early successes, his fortunes fell when he lost one of his best commanders, a man named Jacopo Caldora, who was killed leading an assault in 1439. Jacopo was succeeded by his son, Antonio, who had neither his father’s strategic skills nor his sense of loyalty. Antonio was more of an entrepreneur—he regarded war as a moneymaking activity and was happy to switch sides at a moment’s notice depending upon whose offer was the most lucrative. This did not make him the most reliable soldier, particularly as René’s funds were already running low. The king of Sicily had to write home to his mother for more silver.
Matters came to a head in 1440 when René’s troops encountered the king of Aragon’s at the interior city of Benevento and lost due in large part to the nonparticipation of Antonio, who was too busy being bought off by the enemy to bother to fight. The fickle commander and his men eventually defected to the Aragonese side altogether. It was at this point that René sent Isabelle and his two sons back to Provence, an act that did not exactly instill confidence in his abilities among his Neapolitan subjects.
By the spring of 1442, the king of Aragon’s forces had surrounded the capital, and his fleet had cut off food supplies to the city. The population began to suffer from hunger, and what support René and Isabelle had managed to garner in the past eroded. On June 1, a company of Aragonese soldiers quietly infiltrated Naples through an underground well by bribing the local guard; a second squadron followed the first; and by the next morning enough enemy soldiers were inside the city to open two of the gates. The king of Aragon’s army poured into the streets of the capital. There was very little resistance from the starving population; on the contrary, most people welcomed the intruders, and a group of nuns even went so far as to toss ropes to the enemy soldiers in order to help them scale the high walls of the city.
René rushed out of his castle with a small band of loyalists. Fighting in the streets, he made an attempt to repel the invaders, but soon saw that it was hopeless and escaped to a waiting galley. “Were I certain of death I should not care, but I fear being taken prisoner,” he gasped as his final poignant farewell to his men. In the confusion of the assault his ship managed to elude the enemy fleet, enabling the last in the long line of Angevin pretenders to the throne of Naples to watch from beyond the shore as the army of the king of Aragon took control of the capital—and with it, the kingdom.
By the end of the year, René was back in Provence and reunited with Isabelle and his sons. He arrived in Marseille depressed, defeated, and insolvent, just in time to hear that his mother had passed away.
YOLANDE OF ARAGON was sixty-one years old in 1442, the year she died. She was such an extraordinary presence that it must have seemed to her vassals that she was indestructible. The year before her death, the bishopric of Angers fell vacant, and she nominated her secretary to the position as a reward for his long years of loyal service. Charles VII made the mistake of trying to overrule her, and put his own candidate into the office. The queen of Sicily, in a fury, let it be known that if the king’s appointee made an appearance in Angers she would have his head cut off. The king backed down. Yolande’s candidate got the position. Clever little Margaret, still living with her grandmother, took it all in.
Yolande must have been very close to her granddaughter by this time, because her last public act was an attempt to elevate Margaret’s nuptial prospects. It happened that the Holy Roman Emperor himself was looking for a wife, and had heard of the exceptional beauty of King René’s younger daughter. Ambassadors were sent to Saumur to inspect the girl and make an offer. They arrived in September 1442. The queen of Sicily was noticeably failing in health, but she roused herself to one last great effort. Yolande’s own dressmakers were called in, and Margaret was outfitted in a sumptuous robe made of cloth of gold and trimmed in white fur. In the account book of the period it was specifically noted that the queen of Sicily had ordered that no expense be spared as she wanted her granddaughter to look “dazzling.” The imperial representatives were presented, Margaret was observed in all of her finery, and afterward everyone was treated to a series of extravagant feasts and entertainments. Although nothing definite could be concluded in her father’s absence, the ambassadors were clearly impressed and no doubt made an extremely positive report of the young lady’s charms upon their return to Germany.
By the time the envoys left Saumur at the beginning of October, the energy it had taken to entertain on such a lavish scale had begun to take its toll. Aware that she was terminally ill, Yolande sought refuge in religion and affiliated herself with a monastic house as a layperson or oblate. Practical to the end, on November 12, 1442, while staying at the chateau of the lord of Tucé, the queen of Sicily signed her last will and testament. In it, she divided the rights to her lands between her two surviving sons, René and Charles of Anjou. As remembrances, she gave René some important tapestries, and to her daughter Marie, some jewelry. Again, there is evidence of her deep affection for Margaret, as she alone among Yolande’s grandchildren was also willed a special ornament. But there was no great pile of coins or saved hidden fortune with which to surprise her heirs, as had been the case with her own mother-in-law, Marie of Blois. In fact, there was no money at all—the queen of Sicily had held nothing back but had unstintingly, over the course of twenty-five years, given her entire fortune to the prosecution of two wars. Conscious of the meagerness of her legacy, she made a point of explicitly explaining the lack of gold and the absence of silver plate and precious stones in her will. “The most beautiful and the best of these were used for the purposes of the kingdom of Italy and given to King Louis,” Yolande of Aragon wrote simply.
Stained glass window of Yolande of Aragon at the cathedral in Le Mans.
Two days later, the queen of Sicily died. She was buried in the cathedral Saint-Maurice of Angers, next to her husband, and with her death the last and the greatest of the Armagnac leaders of her generation passed away.
THE LOSS OF HIS MOTHER, who had ever been a source of strength and aid, deprived René of his most powerful supporter. Impoverished by his abortive campaign in Italy, already in arrears on the final two payments of his ransom due to the duke of Burgundy, and desperate to stay free of that prison cell in Dijon, René turned to his brother-in-law, Charles VII. In March 1443, he reunited with the king when the royal court convened at Toulouse. Charles had already raised a large body of soldiers and was intending to march them into Normandy in anticipation of the enemy counterattack. But when the formidable new English army, numbering some seven thousand men, landed at Cherbourg in April, its commander, the earl of Somerset, a man of excellent political connections but very little military experience, inexplicably shunned a decisive battle with his French counterpart. Instead, he stayed timorously within the occupied lands of the duchy of Maine, wreaking havoc and marching his men haphazardly through its own territory before ending up for no apparent purpose in Brittany, which was not in contention. (The earl of Somerset, challenged by his own staff on this questionable course of action, refused to explain his strategy, declaring somewhat enigmatically, “I will reveal my secret to no one. If my shirt knew my secret I would burn it.”) Whatever his secret was, it clearly did not involve an offensive strike against the French, as the earl of Somerset stayed in Brittany for only a few weeks, just long enough to extort some money from the duchy, before turning tail and sailing back to England.
This was the end of the war party’s influence in London. A substantial English army, once so feared by the French that the threat of fighting alone had brought the kingdom to submission, had retreated without even giving battle! At the beginning of 1444, the English sent a new embassy to Charles VII, this one led by the earl of Suffolk, the leader of the faction that argued in favor of a general peace in combination with a royal marriage. Henry VI was by this time referring to Charles VII as “our dear uncle of France.”
In April, Suffolk and his emissaries met with their counterparts in the French court at Tours and an agreement was hammered out. The issue of sovereignty was left unresolved but a two-year moratorium on all hostilities was successfully negotiated. “The meetings for peace were, during this time, continued with much activity at Tours, whither came many of the high nobility of France and England,” Enguerrand de Monstrelet wrote. “A general truce on the part of the king, our sovereign lord, and his kingdom, as well by sea as by land, his vassals and subjects, including those most powerful princes the kings of Castille and Leon, of the Romans, of Sicily, of Scotland; the dukedoms of Anjou, Bar, and Lorraine; the dauphin of Vienne; the dukes of Orléans, Burgundy, Brittany, Bourbon, Alençon; the count of Maine; and generally the whole of the princes of the blood-royal of France . . . including, likewise, all their vassals, subjects, and adherents . . . promising, on oath, to preserve the truce inviolate.” The agreement was signed on May 20, 1444, and was known as the Truce of Tours.
That left only the issue of the royal marriage, a far thornier solution, at least on the French side, than would first appear. To give one of Charles VII’s daughters to Henry VI was out of the question; it would only prejudice the dauphin’s chances of inheriting the throne peacefully after his father’s death, since any male offspring of such a marriage would inevitably claim rights to the kingdom through his mother. Charles wasn’t about to conclude a marriage that might start the whole Hundred Years War over again in the next generation. In fact, for this very reason, no daughter of a king of France was wed to an English sovereign for the next two centuries, an astute policy that had the added undeniable benefit of saving the head of at least one French princess during the reign of Henry VIII.
But neither could the king of France simply walk away from the possibility of a marriage alliance and allow Henry VI to choose his own bride—there was too much risk that one of Charles VII’s many enemies might use this device to try to amass power in order to challenge his rule. What was needed was the daughter of a nobleman upon whose loyalty the king of France could unquestionably rely; someone of very high rank who was nonetheless not a threat; someone who could perhaps be bullied into taking this on, as nobody really wanted to marry his child to Henry VI and send the girl over to live with the hated English. There was only one candidate who fit all of these requirements: René of Anjou’s daughter Margaret. “The marriage of Margaret was concluded . . . in the interest of Charles VII and at his demand,” René’s biographer stated flatly. Without his mother to support him, René was in no position to deny the king this or, for that matter, any request. A short time after the signing of the Truce of Tours, Margaret’s engagement to the son of the count of Saint-Pol was officially broken, the Holy Roman Emperor’s advances were courteously but firmly denied, and Yolande of Aragon’s favorite granddaughter was affianced to the king of England.
And so fifteen-year-old Margaret of Anjou, descended from the line of remarkable Frenchwomen that included Marie of Blois and Isabelle of Lorraine, and a girl who had just spent three years in the home and under the watchful tutelage of perhaps the most astute and powerful politician in the kingdom, was launched at the unsuspecting English aristocracy and married to Henry VI, a monarch so unsuited to his position that he made Charles VII look like a tower of energy and strength by comparison. The lessons acquired at her grandmother’s side bore fruit almost immediately. Margaret was crowned queen on May 30, 1445, at Westminster, promised in a letter of December 17 of the same year to do all she could to retrieve Maine for France, and by December 22 Henry VI had officially renounced his rights to the entire duchy, including the capital city of Le Mans, in favor of his father-in-law, René.26 Even more provocatively, Margaret would later be credited by many with starting the infamous Wars of the Roses, a bitter civil conflict that would consume England for thirty years. Not quite retribution for Agincourt, of course—but close.
By the summer of 1444, when he was forced to accede to his daughter’s marriage, René’s position was especially vulnerable. The citizens of Metz, just north of Nancy in Lorraine, encouraged by the duke of Burgundy, had revolted against René’s authority, and some of its inhabitants had even had the temerity to steal his wife’s luggage when she had visited as part of a pilgrimage. Impecunious René had not the resources to strike back on his own, and needed to convince the king of France to lend him his army to help him subdue the town quickly lest the duke of Burgundy gain a foothold in the duchy. Also, he was hoping to induce the king to intervene on his behalf with Philip the Good to settle the outstanding debt associated with the payment of his ransom. Accordingly, René invited Charles VII and all of his court to Nancy, where he feasted the king and introduced him to one of his wife Isabelle’s ladies-in-waiting, a notorious beauty by the name of Agnes Sorel, who would very quickly become the king’s mistress.
It was customary to present the visiting monarch with a memento on these occasions out of gratitude for the distinction conferred by the royal presence. René must have known that it would be helpful if he could give Charles something that would discreetly remind the king of everything that René and his family had done for him and the kingdom over the long course of the war. Being of an artistic nature, the duke of Lorraine ceremonially bestowed upon Charles VII a beautifully bound volume specially produced to commemorate the event. It cannot be by mere chance that, out of all the works of literature, history, and theology that were available, René elected to present Charles VII with a copy of The Romance of Melusine.
The following year, Charles took his army to Metz and helped René bring the city back to obedience. Afterward, the king hosted a conference attended by the duchess of Burgundy, who was empowered to act for her husband, at which the payments owed on the final installments of René’s ransom were forgiven.
FINALLY, IN 1449, citing infringements of the truce, Charles VII, encouraged by the reacquisition of the duchy of Maine, sent three separate armies into Normandy in one last great push to rid the kingdom of the invader. Although the English still maintained an overall advantage in terms of superior numbers of soldiers and garrisons, their commanders were caught by surprise. The native French population was jubilant. The regency government had never been popular, and the local people welcomed Charles’s advancement, joined his units, and in many cases did not even wait for the king’s soldiers to arrive but rose up against the occupiers independently. From Beauvais in the north came forces commanded by the counts of Eu and Saint-Pol, which compelled the surrender of Lisieux on August 16; from Verneuil in the south swept the Bastard and the duke of Alençon and their soldiers, who, joining troops commanded by Charles himself at Louviers, fought their way east into the heart of Normandy, securing Argentan in October; and from the west out of Brittany came the constable, Arthur of Richemont, with enough men-at-arms to conquer every fortress between Coutances and Fougères, the last of which fell on November 5.
At length, on October 9, French forces fought their way to within a few miles of the English capital of Rouen, which was defended by a garrison of twelve hundred men under the command of the duke of Somerset and Captain Talbot. A week later, on October 16, the Bastard led a frontal assault but was pushed back by the English soldiers, and after that the population took matters into its own hands. There was rioting in the streets, the garrison was forced to take cover in the royal castle, and the gates were thrown open to the Bastard and his army. The French immediately surrounded the castle and prepared for a siege, but the duke of Somerset preferred to cut a deal: promising to pay a substantial fine and leaving poor Talbot behind as a hostage to his good intentions, he and the rest of the English garrison slunk out of the fortress and retreated to Caen, leaving the former capital of the regency government in the possession of the French.
A month later, on November 20, 1449, Charles VII ceremoniously entered the city of Rouen. And a mere three months after that, on February 15, 1450, one of his principal theological advisers, a man named Guillaume Bouillé, who was the dean of Noyon, received an assignment that came directly from the king:
“As heretofore Joan the Maid was taken and seized by our ancient enemies and adversaries the English . . . against whom they caused to take place a certain trial by certain persons . . . in the process of which they made and committed many falsifications and abuses, so much so that, by means of this trial and the great hatred that our enemies have against her, they caused her death iniquitously and against reason, very cruelly indeed,” Charles VII wrote. “For this reason we wish to know the truth of the aforesaid trial, and the manner according to which it was conducted and carried out. We command you, instruct you, and expressly enjoin you to inquire and inform yourself well and diligently on what was said; and that you bring before us and the men of our council the information that you have gathered on this event under a closed seal . . . for we give you power, commission and special instruction by these presents to carry this out.”