Joan of Arc Read online

  Once Alençon heard that a girl had arrived at Chinon declaring she was sent by God to defeat the English and raise the siege of Orléans, he hurried to greet her from St-Florent, where he was hunting quails. The two took to each other at once. She welcomed him as a man of the blood royal and named him ‘mon beau duc’. He was charmed to find she was a tomboy. After dinner the following day, while the king went for a walk, Alençon watched as Joan coursed, and when he saw how well she managed her lance, he gave her a horse. He was a witness to her first interrogation by senior clergy and knew she told them she heard voices and received advice as to what to do, but he was not sure if she told them what the voices told her. Once when they dined together she told him she had not told the clergy everything. He did not go to the more searching examination at Poitiers, but knew the clergy there told Charles that in his dire troubles he could make use of her. He was then sent to the king’s mother-in-law, Queen Yolande of Sicily, to ask for supplies to be prepared for the army of Orléans. Alençon did not set out with her, but he joined her later. He remembered how the captains and soldiers who took part in the siege said that what happened was a miracle.

  He joined her after Orléans had been saved. He came to love her habit of taking risks. Outside Jargeau she urged him to attack. ‘On, gentle Duke, to the assault!’ (Avant, gentil duc, à l’assaut!) she called out; and, when he told her it was too soon to attack so quickly, ‘Have no fear,’ she said to him, ‘the time is right when it pleases God; we must work when He wills it. Act, and God will act!’ Later she added, ‘Ah! gentle Duke, are you afraid? Did you not know that I promised your wife to bring you back, as safe and sound as you were?’ His wife was anxious he should not be captured and ransomed again. Joan had promised to return him in one piece or in even better shape than he was. They spent several days together with his wife and mother at St-Laurent, near Saumur.

  Despite being the commander, Alençon did not object to Joan’s advice. He was conscious that during the attack on Jargeau Joan had told him to move from his current position just before enemy shot killed the Sieur de Lude beside him. It was she who led the attack and Alençon who followed. Forced to the ground by a stone that hit her helmet, she immediately got up and encouraged the troops: ‘Our Lord has condemned the English.’ Alençon yielded to her: she begged him to cooperate with Richemont, the disgraced Constable, who was Alençon’s uncle; and so together they won the battle of Patay. When the fighting was over, the defeated Talbot came into the presence of Joan, the Constable and Alençon, who said how surprised he was at what had happened. It is the fortune of war, commented Talbot tersely. And so they rejoined the king and went with him to Reims for the coronation.

  Joan had said many times that she wished to accomplish four things: to beat the English, to have the king crowned and consecrated at Reims; to deliver the Duke of Orléans from the hands of the English; and to raise the siege of Orléans. She did not live to see her four wishes achieved, but Alençon did. Twenty-five years after he last saw her, he still thought of her as a chaste young woman, who hated women camp followers – at St-Denis, sword in hand, she had once chased one away – and was angry with him if he swore. He had seen her clad in armour, he had seen her naked breasts. She was an excellent Catholic, so far as he could tell, who communicated often, and when not fighting was ‘a simple, young girl’, but when ‘bearing the lance, bringing an army together, making war, directing artillery’ she was as skilful ‘as a captain who had fought for twenty or thirty years’. In the use of artillery she was marvellous.

  This testimony is impressive since Alençon himself was hardly straightforward. Like his cousin Charles VII he dabbled in astrology. He was anti-English, but not always loyal to his king. During the Hundred Years War he rebelled with his godson Louis, the future Louis XI, and in the course of the nullification trial the king had him arrested. In 1458 he was condemned for treason by his peers, but on the accession of Louis in 1461 he was released. Louis, however, did nothing to prevent his being ruined from the results of his waywardness; and on his death the duchy of Alençon reverted to the crown. In fifteenth-century French history, Alençon was an erratic figure: in his unquestioning devotion to Joan, however, he was constant and consistent.

  Another John played an almost more important part in Joan’s story. The Bastard of Orléans, half-brother to Charles, Duke of Orléans, who was famously imprisoned in England for twenty-five years after Agincourt, had been brought up as a member of the Orléans family after the murder of his father, Duke Louis. Born in 1402, he grew up with the Dauphin Charles. This shared upbringing, together with the fact that his half-brother was out of the country for such a long period, gave him a prominence in national affairs rare even for the illegitimate son of a peer of royal blood. From his mid-teens he was a professional soldier determined to avenge the wrongs of his house, of which he was the virtual head. His marriage in 1422 to the daughter of Louvet, president of the Parlement, linked him to the legal and bureaucratic classes who ran the administration; but when Louvet fell from grace the Bastard fell too, and was sent into exile. The English attempt to overrun the duchy of Orléans brought him back into the war, and when Orléans itself was under threat, he was the obvious leader of the defence. It was this task that first brought him into close contact with Joan. She died long before he had turned into the statesman who as ‘one of the finest French speakers there is of the French language’ used his eloquence to draw up the Treaty of Arras in 1435 between France and Burgundy; who was made count of Dunois in 1439; who ransomed his half-brother the duke in 1440; who reconciled the king and the Dauphin Louis; whose capture of Dieppe in 1443 prepared the way for the reconquest of Normandy; who eventually became the Count of Longueville; and who marched towards Guyenne in 1451 near the end of the Hundred Years War. Apart from a short period of falling-out with Charles VII in the 1420s and a longer period of falling-out with Louis XI in the 1460s he was in royal favour for most of his fifty years in public life. To Joan, however, he was merely ‘the Bastard’, and it was as ‘the Bastard’ that he testified in 1455: ‘I think that Joan was sent by God, and that her deeds in war were divine rather than human in inspiration.

  ‘I was at Orleans, then besieged by the English, when the rumour spread that a young girl, commonly called the Maid, had just gone through Gien, on her way to the noble Dauphin’ so as to raise the siege of Orléans and take Charles to Reims for his anointing. ‘I was the man put in charge of the town of Orléans and was Lieutenant-General of the King in affairs of war.’ To find out more about Joan he sent the king Sieur de Villars, Seneschal of Beaucaire, and Jamet de Tilly, then Captain of Blois, later Bailly of Vermandois.

  They came back and told him publicly that the king had at first refused to see her, while she continued to repeat her views on her mission to save Orléans and take Charles to Reims. She also asked for men, arms and horses. For three weeks the king had theologians examine her, then he gave her what she asked for, sent her to Blois with the Archbishop of Reims and the Grand Steward; and there they joined Gilles de Rais, de Boussac, La Hire and others. As the English blocked the route, supplies had to be loaded on boats, but the winds blew in the wrong direction. The first time Joan met him, she asked him if he were the Bastard of Orléans and enquired about his plans. Dismissing his ideas of avoiding the English, she told him that God had better plans: He had taken pity on the town and would not let the English hold both town and duke. At that moment the wind changed and so supplies could be taken into Orléans by boat; and ever after the Bastard believed in her. She went with him, clutching her banner, on which Our Lord held a lily in His hand. Joan said she had seen St Louis and St Charlemagne (patrons of France) praying God for the safety of the king and the town.

  Other reasons led him to believe Joan was from God: her letter to the English that told them if they did not retreat she would attack and defeat them; her capture of the boulevard des Augustins, where she was wounded by an arrow; the capture of Les Tourelles the next day a
nd the relief of the city. Where he was cautious, she was reckless; and yet events proved she had been right. Only when the siege was over did she receive the care her wound needed and did she have a few slices of bread to eat.

  Once Orléans was safe, the Bastard and Joan went to see the king at Loches and begged him to let them attack other towns in the Loire valley. The Bastard, Alençon and other captains were given troops and the towns fell quickly – thanks, the Bastard believed, to the Maid’s intervention. At Loches he saw Joan on her knees begging the king to go to Reims –her ‘counsel’, she said, told him he must do so. When the king’s confessor, Christophe d’Harcourt, Bishop of Castres, queried her about her ‘counsel’, she blushed and replied that when people doubted how God advised her, she sought solitude to pray, grumbled to God and a voice told her ‘Daughter of God! Go on! Go on! Go on! I will be thy help: go on’ (Fille De, va, va, va, je serai, va). She said that when she heard this voice she was filled with joy.

  After the capture of so many strongholds, the nobles of the blood royal and captains urged the king to go to Normandy instead of Reims. But Joan insisted on his going to Reims, so that he could be consecrated, giving as her reason that once he were consecrated and crowned, his enemies’ power would decline, and so they would be unable to harm him or his kingdom: ‘All accepted her opinion.’

  Before the town of Troyes, the council debated what to do. Joan’s suggestion was followed, and the town was besieged. Once the city had surrendered to him, the king went to Reims, where everyone submitted and he was consecrated and crowned.

  While in Reims, Joan used to go every day to church at Vespers or towards evening; she had the bells rung for half an hour, collected the friars who were with the army and had them sing an anthem in honour of Our Lady. She was also preoccupied with her future: what was she to do? When the king was at La Ferté, Joan rode between the Archbishop of Reims and the Bastard and said she would love to be buried there. ‘Where do you want to die?’ asked the archbishop. ‘Where it pleases God,’ she replied, ‘for I cannot know either the time or the place, any more than you do.’ If it pleased God, her Creator, she would retire then, give up arms, go back to serve her father and mother and look after their sheep with her sister and brothers, who would be happy to see her again.

  The Bastard knew no one more sober, just as d’Aulon had known no one more chaste. ‘Neither I nor others when with her ever thought of her as a woman to be desired: she seemed holy.’ Fifteen days after the Earl of Suffolk had been made prisoner at the taking of Jargeau, someone sent him four lines, in which it was said that a Maid should come from the oak-wood and ride on the backs of the archers and against them (this was the so-called prophecy of Merlin). If some of Joan’s prophecies did not come true, she was sure that she had been sent to raise the siege of Orléans and lead the king to Reims.

  By the time these words of prophesy had been spoken, the Bastard had seen his cousin the king enter Paris, his half-brother the duke return to the city of Orléans, and the English driven from the mainland of France, with the exception of Calais.

  An even more intimate insight into Joan’s public life comes from the witness Louis de Coutes. Louis was the brother-in-law of Beauharnais, a bourgeois of Orléans, and a son of Jean de Coutes, captain of Châteaudun and chamberlain to the Duke of Orléans. Louis met Joan when he was fourteen or fifteen years old and page to Sieur de Gaucourt, captain of the castle, during her visit to Chinon with two gentlemen, who took her to the king. He saw her many times going and coming to the king. She was housed throughout her stay there in the tower of Coudray, and he passed the whole days with her, until night, when she always was with women. ‘He [Louis] remembered well while she was living at Coudray many days high-ranking people came to visit her there. He did not know what they did or said, because when he saw them coming he retired, nor does he know who they were.’ While she lived in that keep he often saw her on her knees praying, without knowing what she said, and sometimes she was weeping.

  Joan was taken to Poitiers, then to Tours, where she lived with a woman called Lapau. There the Duke of Alençon gave her a horse, which he saw at the home of the woman Lapau, and the king gave her a whole suit of armour and a military household. Louis became her page there, along with a boy called Raymond, and from then onwards he stayed with her ‘as her page, at Blois, at Orléans, and until she came to Paris’. From Tours she went with the army to Blois, where she remained for a while with them – how long he did not remember. Then she went to Orléans via the Sologne and set out fully armed, along with her men-at-arms, whom she constantly told to trust in Our Lord and confess their sins. Once she reached Orléans ‘he saw her receive the sacrament of the Eucharist’.

  When she reached Orléans on the side of the Sologne, Joan, many others and Louis were taken across the Loire, to the side of the city of Orléans; and from there they entered the town. During the journey from Blois to Orléans, Joan got badly bruised, as she had slept fully armed. In Orléans she lived at the house of the town treasurer, Jacques Bouchier, facing the Banner Gate, and there she received the Sacrament. The day after her arrival she went to seek the Bastard of Orléans, with whom she had an interview, and when she came back, she was annoyed because the captains had decided not to attack the English that day. All the same she went to a boulevard occupied by the French, opposite one under English control, and urged them in God’s name to leave or else she would drive them away. In response the Bastard of Granville said insultingly: ‘Do you want us to surrender to a woman?’ Although at first she retired to her lodgings (when Louis thought she would go to bed), she soon got up again saying, ‘Ha! sanglant garçon, vous ne me dyriez pas que le sanc de France feust repandu!’ (‘Ha, bloody boy, you didn’t tell me French blood was being spilt!’) He was sent to get her horse while Joan was dressed in her armour with the help of the ladies of the house; and so the French took the fort of St-Loup. She saw to it that clerics in their robes were spared, but Louis heard that all other English were taken away and killed by the local French. Once it was all over Joan came back to eat and Louis was amazed that as so often she ate only a piece of bread, and that just twice a day. Every night when women were with her she changed out of her armour, but if she could not find any women she slept fully clothed.

  Joan went on and on fighting until ‘the fort of the bridge’ fell, and once Orléans was relieved, she went after the English at Beaugency and Meung. She was distressed at the brutality evident at Beaugency – she was very humane – and when a Frenchman struck a prisoner and left him for dead, she got off her horse, had him make his confession and comforted him as best she could. She went with the army to Jargeau, which was taken by assault, along with many English (among them the Earl of Suffolk and John de la Pole, his brother), and then to Tours to join the king and to Châlons and Reims. Louis stated: ‘There our king was crowned and anointed in my presence for I was, as I have already said, page to Joan, and never left her. I stayed with her till she came to Paris.

  ‘She was a good, upright woman, living a good Catholic life, and, when possible, never missing Mass,’ de Coutes continued. Swearing in God’s name distressed her. If Alençon swore or blasphemed before her, ‘she told him off’. Soldiers dared not use bad language in front of her, for fear of being rebuked. She allowed no women in her army. ‘One day, near Chateau-Thierry, seeing the mistress of one of her followers riding on horseback, she pursued her with her sword, without striking her’ and gently and charitably told her she must no longer be . . . with the soldiers’, or she would be in trouble. ‘He know nothing else, not having seen her since Paris.’

  The last of the intimates who were with Joan during her few months of glory was her chaplain and confessor, Jean Pasquerel. Like that much more famous cleric Martin Luther, Jean Pasquerel was an eremitical friar of the order of St Augustine. He was at the convent of Tours in 1429 and at the convent of Bayeux in 1456. He first heard of Joan when at Anche, a place whose exact location is unknown. One day he was
invited by a group of people to join them in visiting her; they told him they would not leave him until he had seen her. So he went with them to Chinon, then to Tours, where ‘he was then a reader in a convent’; and there they found Joan staying with Jean Dupuy, a burgher of the town. His companions spoke to her: ‘Joan, we bring you this good father; if you knew him you would love him very much.’ She said that ‘she had already heard of me and would like to confess to me tomorrow’. On the following day he heard her confession and sung the Mass before her. ‘From that day on, I always followed her and was constantly with her, until Compiègne, where she was captured.’

  At Chinon, Father Jean heard that she had been visited on two occasions by women, the Lady de Gaucourt and the Lady de Trèves. Like many other witnesses he recalled how she went away to be examined at Poitiers, where Maître Jourdin Morin, Maître Pierre de Versailles, later Bishop of Meaux, and many others decided that ‘in view of the necessity weighing on the kingdom’, the king could use her help. They found nothing in her ‘against the Catholic Faith’. She returned to Chinon and thought she would be allowed to speak to the king but had to wait for the council to agree:

  On the day when she was to speak to the king, just as she was going into the castle, a man on horseback said, ‘Is that the Maid?’ and insulted her and swore. ‘In God’s Name,’ she said to him, ‘do you, who are so near your death, take God’s name in vain!’ And an hour later he fell in the water and was drowned. The friar said he heard this from Joan and many others who said they had witnessed it.