A Great and Glorious Adventure

by Gordon Corrigan

  The Scots were too canny to attack an English body of men formed up, however small it might be, and from first light until mid-afternoon the two armies looked at each other. Eventually, Bedford gave the order to advance at a slow pace. The lines crashed into each other and the hacking and slashing began. At first it looked as if the Scots might win: their cavalry outflanked the archers and attacked the baggage-train, and some of Salisbury’s archers ran away; but experience and leadership told, and, when Salisbury swung his division round and attacked the Scots in flank, the balance swung in favour of the English and the Scots were driven back and the slaughter began. The English were accustomed to fighting the French and thought little of it, but to be attacked by Scots was a very different matter, and many Englishmen had a genuine hatred of their northern neighbours. Few prisoners were taken and the Franco-Scottish dead may have numbered as many as 2,000. In the aftermath of the battle, a captain of archers by the name of Young, who had panicked when the Italian cavalry swept around them and run away, taking some of his men with him, was duly hanged.

  Now matters in England began to distract Bedford from the planned campaign. His brother Humphrey had got himself involved with Jacqueline, countess of Hainault, who was now estranged from her thoroughly unpleasant husband, and had taken a contingent of troops to Flanders to enforce her rights. The expedition was a disaster, which might not have mattered too much except that it infuriated the duke of Burgundy, who had ambitions of his own for Flanders, so Bedford had to return to England to get a grip of his brother and then use all his diplomatic skills to preserve the alliance – a task in which he was hardly helped by Burgundy making (unreciprocated) amorous advances towards the earl of Salisbury’s young wife, a granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer. Returning to France, Bedford now began a methodical reduction of Armagnac towns on the Loire. It was not without setbacks, including a defeat for the duke of Burgundy, the loss and recapture of Pontorson in 1426, and a revolt in Maine in 1427 sparked by excessive taxation and English arrogance, but by 1428 all had been resolved and a major offensive could begin. By mid-August, the combined Anglo-Burgundian armies under Salisbury had captured forty towns and fortified places en route to and in the area of Orléans, the jewel of the Loire. And, on 12 October 1428, they laid siege to that town, the capture of which would give England control of the Loire and would trap the dauphin between Aquitaine to the south-west, Burgundy to the east and English France to the north.

  Then there occurred one of the most extraordinary episodes of an extraordinary age. The adventures of the Maid of Orléans, Jeanne d’Arc, Jehanne La Pucelle, the Witch of Orléans, to give only some of her names, had been largely consigned to myth, legend and French folk memory until 1920, when, in the aftermath of the First World War – in which France had found herself on the winning side but with her heart and soul ripped out and desperately seeking something of glory and pride in her distant past – Joan became Saint Joan. Jeanne was probably born in 1412, the fourth child of five, in the village of Domrémy (now Domrémy-la-Pucelle) on the borders of the Holy Roman Empire twenty-five miles south-west of Nancy. She was certainly not a simple peasant. Her father was a minor official responsible for the collection of taxes, the maintenance of law and order, and the general administration of the surrounding area, and he owned, rather than rented, a fifty-acre farm with a substantial stone-built house. The transcript of her answers to questions at her eventual trial would suggest that she had an education of some sort, but whether any of her letters were actually written by her or dictated to a clerk is uncertain. All those questioned at a subsequent investigation twenty-five years after her death are adamant that she was given a good grounding in the Catholic faith and that she was unusually assiduous in attending church.

  Sometime around the age of twelve, Jeanne began to hear voices, which she claimed were from various saints and then from God himself. It is not entirely uncommon for girls going through puberty to experience emotional turmoil, but Jeanne was convinced that she really was the recipient of divine instruction and sometime in 1428 tried to obtain an interview with the captain of the nearest French garrison, Robert de Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs, ten miles to the north. After several failed attempts, she was eventually seen by Baudricourt, who, after a number of meetings, became convinced that she did indeed hear the voice of God and that she could help in expelling the English. Baudricourt gave her an escort and sent her off to Chinon to see the dauphin, who also thought that there might be something in what she was saying and sent her on to Poitiers in March 1429 to be examined by a team of churchmen, an interrogation that went on for eleven days. By now, Jeanne was claiming that God had instructed her to go to Orléans, where she would lift the siege. It was around this time that she took to wearing men’s clothing, a fact that was subsequently held against her, but which may initially have been a simple ploy to avoid molestation on the road, and later was part of her persona as a soldier.

  While one’s first reaction today might be to write Jeanne off as a mentally disturbed teenager, there must have been far more to her than that. Medieval man may have been superstitious but he was not stupid, and to convince a hard-baked cynical soldier like Robert de Baudricourt, the dauphin (admittedly described at this time as ‘a graceless degenerate’45) and a host of suspicious churchmen inherently reluctant to grant the right of audience with the Almighty to anyone but themselves would have required extraordinary powers of persuasion. In the modern age, people who hear voices are generally considered to be mentally unbalanced and may be confined in psychiatric hospitals, so, assuming that, whatever the voices Jeanne heard were, they were unlikely to be those of God, the question arises whether she was mad or whether she invented the voices to lend force to her arguments for a military revival. While there are some signs of religious mania in what we know of her character, she does not appear to have exhibited any other symptoms of insanity – but then modern murderers who claim to have killed on the instructions of a supernatural voice are not necessarily obviously mad either. The conclusion must be either that her affliction was confined to the voices, or that she was inventing them. What motivated a country girl at the fringes of what would become France to set out to revive, or ignite, French patriotism, we cannot know at this distance, but patriot she surely was.

  Meanwhile, the English had surrounded Orléans, and within a few days had driven the French away from the Les Tourelles, a towered fort that guarded the southern end of the bridge across the Loire. Then, on 27 October 1428, when Salisbury was observing the town from the towers, a lucky cannon shot from the walls took away half his face. He lived in agony for a week and died on 3 November. Command passed to William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, another example of social mobility in medieval England. Suffolk’s great-grandfather, also a William, was but a merchant, albeit a wealthy one, when he became banker to Edward III, then anxious to escape the clutches of Italian money-lenders. So successful was he that Edward made his son a knight, and later the first earl of Suffolk. The current William, like many younger sons, sought a career as a soldier and went to France with Henry V in 1415. When his father, the second earl, was killed at Harfleur, where he himself was wounded, and his elder brother killed at Agincourt, he became the fourth earl at the age of nineteen. Suffolk’s later career – his involvement in Henry VI’s government when English fortunes in France had long been in decline and his extra-legal beheading as a so-called traitor in 1450 – has given him a bad press, but he was a perfectly capable and experienced military commander, albeit not of the calibre or reputation of Salisbury, whose widow he married in 1430.

  The siege dragged on into winter and rations were running short for both besieged and besieger when, on 12 February 1429, an English supply convoy with a military escort of around 1,500 men commanded by the forty-eight-year-old Sir John Fastolf was intercepted by a Franco-Scottish force of perhaps 4,000 or 5,000.98 In what became known as the Battle of the Herrings – the convoy included rations to last the army over Lent99 – Sir
John ordered the wagons into a circle and put his men within it. Attack after attack was broken up by the archers, and the French were driven off. The skirmish illustrated once again the inadvisability of attacking an English army with a strong component of archers standing in a defensive position of its own choosing.

  Fastolf’s reinforcements allowed Suffolk to tighten the cordon around Orléans, but that was soon nullified when the duke of Burgundy quarrelled with Bedford over the eventual control of the town, flounced out in a fit of pique and left the siege along with his men. Suffolk was able to control the west side and the south bank but could only patrol around the eastern approaches. Then, on 22 March 1429, a letter was delivered to the English camp signed by Jeanne and addressed to ‘You king of England, and you duke of Bedford who call yourself regent of the kingdom of France. Surrender to the maid who is sent here from God, the king of heaven, the keys to all the good cities that you have taken and violated in France’.46 As nobody had any idea who this maid was, the letter was ignored, but copies survive. On 29 April, Jeanne herself arrived at Orléans, probably in a convoy of boats bringing supplies (the English had omitted to place chains across the Loire) which were unloaded on the north bank and taken in by the Burgundy gate, which was unguarded by the English. Jeanne seems to have had no problem convincing the garrison commander, the illegitimate son of the murdered duke of Orléans,100 that she was the answer to his prayers, and, clad in armour and carrying a standard that had been blessed in the church of Saint-Saviour in Blois, on 4 May, she accompanied a French sally to occupy the fort of Saint-Loup, two miles east of Orléans on the north bank. There was nobody in the fort, but this could be attributed to God’s work and was a much-needed morale boost for the French. Thursday, 5 May was Ascension Day, when Christians were not supposed to fight, but, on 6 May, the French, egged on by Jeanne, came out of the Burgundy gate, crossed the river, and attacked the fort of Saint-Jean le Blanc on the south side of the river and the fort of the Augustins just south of the bridge. This latter gave them a jumping-off line for an attack on Les Tourelles, which they duly attacked and captured next day. During this action, Jeanne was wounded in the shoulder by an arrow (as the voices of various saints had predicted), but she crossed the bridge and entered the town. The next day, Sunday, 8 May, the English withdrew and the siege of Orléans was over. The French were convinced, then and now, that it was all due to the Maid.

  It was, of course, nothing of the sort. The English withdrew because they had bitten off far more than they could chew, they were running out of rations, the Burgundian contingent had gone, money and reinforcements were slow in coming from England, and Bedford needed the army elsewhere. To suggest that Jeanne was a military commander who planned the movement of troops and led them into battle, as some historians do (mainly French but some British ones too), is surely not believable. While the potential for leadership may be inborn, the execution of it requires training and practice, and it is not remotely credible that a farmer’s daughter, however intelligent, with no involvement or previous experience of war, could possibly have acquired the skills needed to direct the activities of large bodies of troops. It was not Jeanne d’Arc who drove the English out of France but money, population, defecting allies and political in-fighting at home. There can be little doubt, however, that Jeanne was an inspiration to the French troops, who had become accustomed to being beaten by smaller but far more professional English armies. The French resurgence would have happened anyway, once the dauphin’s supporters stopped fighting among themselves and concentrated on raising the funds to prosecute the war – and Valois France, which had not been fought over time and again, was potentially far richer than English France.

  French forces under the duke of Alençon – a fervent believer in Jeanne – now began to try to recover English positions along the Loire, and, on 18 June 1429, 2,000 archers under John Talbot, the forty-two-year-old first earl of Shrewsbury – another younger son who had made his name as a professional soldier – and a contingent of 1,000 Parisian militiamen in English pay under Sir John Fastolf were surprised at Patay by an Armagnac army of perhaps 7,000. Talbot was forming up his archers when the French attacked in flank, dispersing them. The Paris militia broke and ran, Talbot was captured, and only Fastolf with some archers got away. It was an embarrassment to the English for which Jeanne got all the credit, whereas in reality it was caused by Talbot’s overconfidence. Now many Frenchmen were convinced that God, so long on the side of the English, had switched allegiance.

  Mad King Charles VI having died in 1422, Jeanne’s next ploy was to suggest to the dauphin that he should be crowned in Rheims, the traditional coronation site of French kings, and by carefully avoiding English armies and garrisons – and in spite of the fact that much of the necessary regalia was in Paris – the dauphin was duly crowned as Charles VII by the archbishop of Rheims in July 1429. Militarily, this might have made no difference whatsoever, but it had an enormous propaganda effect and persuaded the duke of Burgundy to sign a truce with the French. When the Armagnac army moved towards Paris, egged on by Jeanne, many towns opened their gates to them and they got as far as Saint-Denis before Bedford drove them back and Charles ordered the army to disperse for the winter. Jeanne was furious and constantly urged the resumption of the war. She managed to persuade some of Alençon’s men to accompany her and a few minor towns were taken and then lost again.

  Jeanne’s usefulness to Charles VII had, however, now run its course. She had inspired French armies to great things, she had been the motivating spirit for the march to Rheims and the coronation, and French soldiers had got almost to Paris with her name on their lips. But she was becoming an embarrassment; more and more she was excluded from council meetings and her supposedly God-given advice ignored. When in May 1430 Burgundian troops were laying siege to Compiègne, despite the supposed truce, she was captured during a French retreat back into the town from an unsuccessful sortie. It has been suggested that the French commander of the Compiègne garrison deliberately closed the gate in her face and allowed her to be captured.

  Jeanne was transferred between various Burgundian prisons – and made several attempts to escape – before the English bought her for 10,000 francs (£1,600) and put her on trial in Rouen, the heart of English Normandy. The English had to destroy Jeanne’s reputation, and, while most Englishmen seemed to believe that she was a witch, it was not for that that she was put on trial, but on the far more serious charge of heresy. There was some tolerance of witchcraft in England and in France, but not of heresy, which, if not abjured, carried the death penalty by burning. It was vital that Jeanne be found guilty, for by association the inference could be drawn that Charles VII was a heretic too; and vital, too, that the churchmen who tried her were French and not English. The first trial, before a French bishop, a French Dominican monk and a number of clerical assessors, opened in January 1431 and ended on 24 May. Jeanne conducted herself well, was careful not to incriminate Charles VII, refused to relate any conversations they had had and, when faced with a difficult question, fell back on invoking the will of God. She denied all charges but finally signed a disavowal of her voices and agreed to stop wearing men’s clothing. To the fury of the English, she was sentenced not to death but to life imprisonment. Four days later, however, the English demanded the court take note that Jeanne had relapsed by once more cutting her hair short and wearing men’s clothing, and, on 30 May 1431, she was burned at the stake in the Place du Vieux Marché in Rouen. Her last prophecy, which was probably invented in hindsight, was said to be that within seven years the English would suffer a greater loss than that of Orléans and that they would eventually be driven out of France.

  With the witch burned and the Valois resurgence only just held, the English had to do something to restore prestige and emphasize Bedford’s claim that he was the rightful regent for the rightful king. So, in December of the same year, 1431, an English bishop crowned the ten-year-old Henry VI of England as Henri II of France in Notre Dam
e Cathedral in Paris. It was not lost on the populace that the crowning was carried out by an Englishman and that it was not in Rheims. There was now a military stalemate and once again both sides turned to negotiation, overseen by representatives of the pope, who was now, following the ending of the schism in 1417, in Rome. In 1435, the interested parties gathered at Arras and the horse-trading began. It went on for weeks but neither side would budge, and the only result of significance was that the duke of Burgundy formally withdrew from the Treaty of Troyes and renounced his allegiance to Henry as king of France. This was seen by the English as a disgraceful act of betrayal – as indeed it was – and from now on Burgundy would either stay neutral or, if he fought at all, would do so on the side of the French. Burgundy’s relations with Bedford had been difficult for some years, exacerbated by the death of Bedford’s childless wife, a sister of the duke’s, and his somewhat rapid remarriage. It may be, too, that Burgundy realized that, once the magnates of Valois France stopped their internecine quarrelling, a far smaller and less rich England could not hold the vast tracts of France to which she laid claim.