Joan of Arc Read online

  1. France in 1429. Control over France was divided between the English, the Burgundians and the Dauphin.

  The best English commander, the Earl of Salisbury, was to direct the siege. On 12 October he was outside the walls. A few days later, however, while inspecting the walls from the twin towers of Les Tourelles, a stray piece of gunshot shattered a window nearby, an iron bar hit his visor and his head was sliced in two. After his death a lesser man, the Earl of Suffolk, took over, and a long, tough siege seemed to lie ahead. Though defended bravely by two generals, La Hire and the Bastard of Orléans in the name of his half-brother the Duke, the city was as hard to save as to take. On 12 February 1429, 500 men, mostly Scots, were beaten by Anglo-Parisian troops. The English already held the lower Seine. Strategically Orléans was the key to the Loire valley but symbolically it was even more important. Whether told by a heavenly or an earthly messenger, Joan was right to say Orléans must not fall. They were also right who held that at Orléans her mission would be tried by battle.

  2. Northern and central France, 1429–31. This area is the setting of the story of Joan.

  TWO

  What Need of the Maid?

  In 1429 Charles’s supporters thought he needed a miracle if his cause was to recover. Those who had struggled for control of France during the past century were all related to one another; and in 1429 Charles looked like the poor relation. To Joan who had not yet met him, he was God’s chosen king, Her passionate convictions about God’s intentions for the kingdom impelled her on to the stage of history when, in May 1428, she arrived at the château of Vaucouleurs and demanded an audience of Robert de Baudricourt, the castellan. A century earlier, the first Valois, Philip VI, had been acknowledged as king. Joan was determined to help Philip’s great-great-grandson to gain recognition too.

  She had had to leave Domremy in 1428 when Burgundians raided the village and the church was burnt. Along with her family she took refuge in the nearby village of Neufchâteau. While there she was cited before a Church court in Toul in a case of breach of promise of marriage, a promise she maintained she had never made. Winning the case confirmed her belief in her call to be virginal; and the Burgundian attack gave a new sense of urgency to her mission. To go to a château alone was unthinkable for a young woman, so she made an excuse to visit a pregnant cousin who lived in a little village three miles from Vaucouleurs and then sought the help of her cousin’s husband, Durand Laxart. Laxart was the first person to believe in her. Many years later, he recalled how ‘Joan told me she wished to go into France, to the Dauphin, to have him crowned.’1 In January 1429 the unlikely pair, a labourer and his cousin by marriage, turned up at Vaucouleurs to see the castellan. Without hesitation, Joan told de Baudricourt that she came in the name of her Lord; Charles must be forced to fight, he would be helped before the end of Lent, the kingdom belonged to her Lord but had been entrusted to the Dauphin, whom she would make king. Who was her Lord, the astonished castellan enquired? When Joan replied ‘the King of Heaven’, de Baudricourt turned to Laxart, told him to take her to her father and to tell him to give her a good whipping.

  Historians disagree over whether she went home and came back or whether she stayed on in the town. What is clear is that she grew impatient and decided to set out at once, wearing her ‘uncle’ Laxart’s cast-offs. At the entry into a forest she stopped at the little chapel of St-Nicolas de Septfonds, where, praying before the wooden crucified Christ, she realised she had disobeyed her voices, who had told her to seek the support of de Baudricourt. She went back to Vaucouleurs. As in a good fairy story, she had failed the first time, failed a second time and would succeed the third time; and this is what happened. She now had useful supporters, among them two squires, Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy; she was summoned by the ailing Duke of Lorraine, who probably hoped she would perform a miracle. She told him frankly that she could not oblige, but that, if he gave her an escort, she would pray for him. Back in Vaucouleurs, she learnt from her voices that the French had been routed near Orléans. She told de Baudricourt what had happened and impressed on him the urgency of her journey to the royal court at Chinon. News came from Chinon that if nobody could find evil in her, she should be sent for. On 23 February she appeared in the courtyard of the château of Vaucouleurs, her escort swore their loyalty to the castellan, and, armed with letters for the king, she set off.

  Any journey in 1429 could be dangerous. It took Joan eleven days to pass through enemy territory, where fortunately she was able to stop at places held by Valois sympathisers or French soldiers. At no time did she show any fear, but instead reassured her companions that God was protecting them. What worried her was that she could seldom go to Mass – until the party reached the monastery of Ste-Catherine-de-Fierbois, where she felt able to relax in congenial surroundings and where she dictated a letter to Charles to announce that she would be with him soon.

  Her arrival in Chinon is one of the best-known incidents in her short life. High above a little medieval town on the River Vienne stands the château of Chinon, built by Henry, Count of Anjou and soon Henry II King of England, and from 1204 a castle of the kings of France. It was this building with its spectacular views over a lush landscape that Charles had made his principal stronghold. Subsequently, when Louis XIII granted the castle to Cardinal Richelieu, the building fell into disrepair, and today only the outlines of a few walls remain, but to one of them is attached part of the chimney of the noble fireplace that warmed the great hall; and in that hall Joan met her king.

  Charles, cunning, timid and superstitious, was intrigued by Joan but was dominated by his fat chamberlain, La Trémoïlle, who paid his debts, and by his formidable mother-in-law, Yolande of Aragon, who was also the mother-in-law of Isabella, daughter of the Duke of Lorraine. La Trémoïlle would do what was needed to hold on to power: the queen mother did not mind showing that she was a keen supporter of Joan. At court there may already have been enthusiasts for Joan. Of these the most important would be John II, Duke of Alençon, a cousin of the king, a warrior and like his cousin a dabbler in astrology. Charles must have heard of a prophecy that a virgin would save the kingdom; his cousin may have encouraged him to trust in Joan; he was willing to test her out. The story goes that on her arrival he hid in the crowd of courtiers, and that once she found him, she gave him some sort of sign during a private interview. What the sign was is unclear, but Charles was no fool. He knew that the people who must investigate her claims were the clergy. Before he would do anything for her, he insisted that she should be questioned by theologians resident at the University of Poitiers at a meeting whose details are lost. Since the most famous university in the land, the University of Paris, was under Anglo-Burgundian control, this was a prudent initiative.

  The examination took eleven days. The clergy questioned her at length about her voices. They also asked her that if it were God’s will that the English should be driven back to England, why did she need soldiers? She snapped back that the soldiers were to fight in God’s name and that God would give the victory. Their findings were cautious. The king should neither reject Joan nor be in a hurry to believe her. He should seek a sign by which he could know if she were sent by God; and she herself said that she would give the sign before Orléans. As the king could find no evil in her, he agreed to supply troops to accompany her to Orléans. There was at this stage no mention of her plans for the coronation. A follow-up to the interrogations led to a test, at Tours, to find out whether she was a virgin; the test showed that she was.

  It was now time for a grander test, a test on the field of battle. Having passed her first trial before clerics, Joan moved into action. She dictated a letter to the King of England. She was sure that once she intervened, she would help to change the course of the war.

  THREE

  Victory at Orléans and Reims

  The relief of Orléans changed Joan from God’s herald into God’s warrior. Joan’s strident claims, her eccentric election to dress as a man, her irrup
tion into court life could have been mere topics for gossip if she had not led men to fight and win. Against the cautious policy of diplomacy advocated by La Trémoïlle she urged decisive action – and she had succeeded in getting men to follow her. She later said she had an army of 10,000–12,000, which the chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet estimates at 4,000–5,000, which was still a large force for the time; and she also had an abundance of provisions (supplies often determined the result of a siege). Charles paid for them, his mother-in-law produced them and Alençon organised them.

  Before being greeted at Blois by the royal commander, the Bastard of Orléans, Joan turned her army into an unusual spectacle. At its head marched a brigade of priests, who were to sing hymns to Our Lady twice a day and to hear the soldiers’ confessions. As they began the march to Orléans, they held aloft their new banner, on which was painted an image of Christ crucified, while they intoned the ‘Veni Creator spiritus’ (‘Come Holy Spirit, Creator, come’). Joan could be practical, and so after two nights most of the priests returned to Blois. She had brought with her some of the most influential military men in France, the Marshal of Boussac, the Admiral of France, the Duke of Alençon and Gilles de Rais, the notorious bluebeard of popular legend, and the gruff La Hire. And yet, after the priests had gone, she still meant to impress on her army that her task was God-given and royally sanctioned; as proof, she had a standard, said to have been made of white canvas fringed with silk on a field of fleur-de-lis, on which was painted a Christ in Majesty flanked by two angels and inscribed at the side with the words ‘Jhesus Maria’. She was clad in armour the Dauphin had ordered for her. She carried a sword that she had sent for from the monastery of Ste-Catherine-de-Fierbois. Much to the monks’ surprise this had been retrieved from under an altar – a weapon located by a miracle indicated a holy cause. On the First Crusade, for example, when the crusaders wilted in Antioch, the lance that had pierced the side of Christ had been divined in a vision; and after its discovery the crusaders’ fortunes had changed dramatically. Joan’s sword, decorated with five crosses, may have belonged to a crusader; the weapon gave her campaigning the quality of a holy war; she carried the weapon until she was beaten for the first time at St-Denis, outside Paris. What the banner, the armour and the sword indicated for all to see was that she was no common soldier, but a knight.

  Chivalry was the code of behaviour that had come to be seen as appropriate to the upper classes. Its prestige was bolstered by a military assumption, that the chevalier, the mounted knight, was the most effective arm in any army. Around 1100, when crusaders had just scaled the walls of Jerusalem, it was a reasonable assumption, for nothing had equalled the effectiveness of the charge of Christians clad in their chain mail. By about 1400, ways of winning wars had been transformed. At Nicopolis in 1396 mobile Turkish mounted archers routed the Latin cavalry under John of Burgundy. At Agincourt in 1415 longbow men sheltering behind stakes and English men-at-arms on foot slaughtered the French cavalry trapped in the mud. By then armour was so weighty that any knight needed a squire to help him mount, and if he fell over, he needed a squire to help him get up. Simultaneously a new weapon had been devised, the cannon that could blast a knight off his horse. And yet, socially, there was never a time when there was more cachet in being a knight. If a man joined a military order, he sported its stars and ribbons; in quarterings on his coat of arms and shield he displayed his ancient lineage; if he were captured, etiquette demanded that he should be ransomed at any cost; while in flamboyant pinnacled castles ladies and gentlemen, arrayed in the fantastic, graceful costumes, listened to improbable tales of chivalry about Arthur, Charlemagne and Alexander – and so a future King of England was named Arthur, Kings of France Charles, Kings of Scotland Alexander. Joan took for granted this aristocratic view of contemporary warfare. And for some months reality corresponded to dreams, as a maid in armour led men to victory.

  Joan did not forget the practicalities of a siege. Even with the help of some 1,500 Burgundians, the English had lacked the men and the artillery to force Orléans to surrender, so they now hoped to persuade the citizens to give up the struggle by undermining their morale. They had surrounded as much of the city as they could, putting up earthworks or boulevards manned by small numbers of troops, four to the west, one to the north, one on an island in the river to the west and one (the boulevard de St-Loup), that was meant to block the road into the Orléans from the east. Most of the east and north of the city was not blockaded, so the English relied on the effect of capturing Les Tourelles, a stone castle that lay at the southern end of the southern bridge spanning the Loire. As the French blew up two of the arches of the bridge, Les Tourelles became just a good vantage point from which to conduct the siege, but when to the south of it the English constructed the new boulevard des Augustins, in which the new commander, the Earl of Suffolk, placed a strong defensive force, it became obvious that he and his captains were thinking that the best form of offence was defence. Unless they were dislodged, the city would fall.

  Before his death, Salisbury had turned his guns on and destroyed twelve water mills that were vital to provide the besieged with bread, but the citizens quickly built eleven new horse-driven mills. Suffolk was more cautious: he intended to wait. There was no sign that the acting head of the Orleanists, the Bastard of Orléans, was enthusiastic to continue the fight. His attacks on English positions in December and January had been in vain. When he tried to surprise the army under Sir John Falstolf that was bringing the besiegers supplies, including a quantity of fish for Lenten meals, he had been mauled; and the so-called battle of the Herrings, on 12 February, could have been his last attempt to save his brother’s city. That day Joan had her final interview with Robert de Baudricourt before setting out for Chinon. For the next two months the Bastard held on, and in late April he went to Blois to meet her. What may have impressed him most was that she was bringing provisions as well as men.

  The problem was how to gain access to the city. Initially the French avoided confrontation by marching far to the south of the river, but eventually they knew that they would have to try to cross it. To the west of the city, on the Blois side, the English had erected the majority of their boulevards and held the towns of Beaugency and Meung. To the east, however, they held just one town, Jargeau, and had put up just one boulevard, that of St-Loup. Luckily too, for the French, they had not blocked a ford east of Orléans, near Chécy, and accordingly Joan decided to cross there. But if she could quickly get men on to the north bank, she could bring neither provisions into the city – unless the boats carrying them were helped by a favourable wind – nor her men, unless they could get past the boulevard de St-Loup. That she achieved both easily was said to be the result of two miracles: once she had made up her mind, the wind changed direction; and the English made no attempt to stop her. How provisions sent from Blois, to the west, had to cross at Chécy, to the east, is not clear, but perhaps boats were needed just to move them from one bank to the other. One chronicle, the Journal du siège d’Orléans, an account of the siege written probably thirty to forty years later, gives a reason for English inaction: the citizens themselves made a sortie to distract the defenders of the boulevard.1 And yet, even if the citizens’ cooperation had helped Joan to enter the city, there was still rejoicing, says the Journal, at the ‘divine virtue that was said to be in this simple maid’. The Bastard, however, remembered she had rebuked him for making a cautious entry rather than precipitately rushing at the English.

  I am bringing you better help than ever came from any soldier or any city, as it is the help of the King of Heaven. It comes not from me but from God Himself, who, on the petition of St Louis and St Charlemagne, has had pity on the town of Orléans, and has refused to suffer the enemy to have both the body of the lord of Orléans (still in prison in England) and his city.2

  The Bastard was unmoved, so Joan next tried to convince the English that they must leave. She went to the boulevard de Belle Croix on the bridge and talked t
o soldiers in Les Tourelles, but Glasdale, their leader, replied only with insults. She next demanded the return of her herald, perhaps the man who had delivered her letter to the English, and threatened she would kill all the English prisoners in Orléans. This time they did what she requested, but added that if they captured her they would torture and burn her. If she had a plan, it was to be provocative to those who opposed her. At the same time, as she showed while the Bastard was away seeking more men, she was adept at winning friends and influencing the people she needed, in this case the townsfolk. On 4 May she got her way when the French attacked and took the isolated boulevard de St-Loup. She may have wept over the English who died without having been to confession, but she also was thrilled that she was proved right. Attacking worked. On the following day she wrote another, but more terse letter to the English, and took another, deserted boulevard; and yet she was clear in her mind that picking off such weak points one after another might make decisive victory harder to achieve. Her preference was for taking risks, a preference that was realised when the boulevard des Augustins, which lay at the south end of the bridge, was taken. Those in Les Tourelles were now caught between the citizenry of Orléans on the north bank and the relieving troops on the south bank. Though wounded, Joan was not to be deflected from her course, and, after the bloodiest fighting since Agincourt, the castle fell, Glasdale fell into the river and was drowned and Joan was left to weep for the foes who had died for not listening to her words. Although the English were undefeated to the north of Orléans, without Les Tourelles they had little chance of investing Orléans. They realised that to continue the siege was pointless, and on 8 May they withdrew.