1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  All of this was fuel to the fire of Joan’s devotion to her cause, and she dictated a letter to the Dauphin informing him bluntly that she was going to have him crowned King of France in Reims. Despite the fact that the city is the capital of champagne production, and therefore a good spot for a post-coronation party, the Dauphin hesitated. He was probably afraid of being overshadowed by Joan, or of becoming politically vulnerable if she was eventually discredited. No worries – Joan wrote to Reims telling its citizens to get the cathedral ready. And finally, under pressure from the hordes of believers arriving to join Joan’s army, the Dauphin agreed.

  His coronation took place on 17 July 1429, admittedly not with the real crown – that was in the cathedral of Saint-Denis, near Paris, which was in English hands. But even so, this was an outcome that the Prince could never have dreamt of just a few weeks before. Here he was, King Charles VII of France, official rival to the false English monarch, on the crest of a wave of public support, his armies winning battle after battle against the invaders.

  The only shadow on this glowing picture, he seems to have decided, was the little commoner in her silly white armour, grinning at him from beside his new throne as if she owned him.

  Burning Joan’s bridges

  As soon as the coronation was over, Joan began ordering the new king to march on Paris and oust the English and the Duke of Burgundy. Charles was not at all sure about this – it was a massive undertaking compared to the isolated battles that Joan had fought so far, and, in case she hadn’t been told, an army would need paying and feeding, possibly for the duration of a long siege.

  Charles negotiated a two-week truce with Burgundy, and was furious when Joan wrote an open letter to the citizens of Reims declaring that ‘I am not happy with this truce, and do not know whether I will keep it.’

  From here on, things went rapidly downhill for Joan. She did manage to cajole Charles into marching on Paris, but he was secretly negotiating with Burgundy all the way there, while many of Joan’s underfed, unpaid troops deserted. Joan attacked the gates of Paris, but she was wounded in the thigh by an arrow and carried, under protest, from the battlefield. To stop her returning, Charles ordered a bridge to be burnt.

  Joan didn’t give up, though, and in May 1430 Charles sent her to Compiègne near Paris, which (he told her) would be a good base for an attack on the capital. On the way, she stopped at a town called Soissons, intending to billet there. But the people of Soissons had suffered at French hands before – soldiers ‘relieving’ the town from English occupation had raped and killed many of the innocent inhabitants. The townspeople refused to open their gates to Joan, and her army was forced to sleep in a field. Again, many of them deserted. Her spell had clearly been broken.

  She arrived at Compiègne with only a couple of hundred men to find a Burgundian army of several thousand camped nearby. Anyone else might have guessed that Charles had sent her on a hopeless mission. Typically, though, Joan attacked, and, when she was predictably chased off, galloped towards the safety of the town. The townspeople, though, raised the drawbridge and cut off her retreat. Just like Charles, they were telling her merci but non merci.

  She tried to fight her way to freedom, but was taken prisoner after an archer (a Frenchman from Picardy in the north) pulled her off her horse. As a commoner, Joan would normally have had her throat cut, but she was spared. She was, after all, a friend of the new king, who was sure to pay a huge ransom for her. Wasn’t he?

  The French abandon Joan to her fate

  It would be too harsh to say that the ex-Dauphin, crowned Charles VII thanks to Joan and her army of followers, was a typical male, and dumped her as soon as he had got what he wanted. But it does seem to be close to the truth. From the time of Joan’s capture to her execution a year later, Charles did not raise a little finger to help her.

  And, contrary to what most French people believe, the suffering he abandoned her to was inflicted by Frenchmen, not Englishmen (though the Anglais would do some of the dirtiest work towards the end).

  At first Joan was held prisoner by the local leader of the Burgundians, Jean de Luxembourg, who, despite his name, was a Frenchman, born in Picardy. Jean must have expected to receive generous ransom offers for Joan. Au contraire, one of the first responses he received was a declaration by the (French) Archbishop of Reims, Regnault de Chartres, saying that a shepherd boy had been discovered in Languedoc who would be replacing Joan as a holy messenger.

  Next came a demand from the Inquisitor of France, Martin Billori, that Joan be handed over to the clergy for trial on the grounds that she had committed ‘great scandals against divine honour and our holy faith’ and had caused ‘the perdition of several simple Christians’. Here was a Frenchman who wanted to burn Joan for heresy, and she was only saved from this fate because the Inquisitor failed to offer a ransom.

  Meanwhile, another French clergyman, Pierre Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais near Paris, was begging Duke Philip of Burgundy to let him try Joan (in the legal sense, that is). When he got no answer, he started to harass the Duke of Bedford, Henry VI of England’s regent, arguing that Joan ‘belonged’ to the English, and ought to be tried for heresy by them. Or rather, that he, Cauchon, should be allowed to do it on their behalf.

  Bedford was not fond of Joan, who had cost him the city of Orléans and had also been sending him poison-pen letters, boasting that she ‘had been sent by the King of Heaven to throw you out of France’, and threatening him that if he didn’t go home to England, he would ‘be hearing from the Virgin, and the meeting will cause you much pain’.

  Bedford duly handed over 10,000 livres tournois (pounds) – about 10 per cent of his annual income – as a ransom, and Joan was trussed up and handed over to the English. The future patron saint of France had been sold by a Frenchman to the enemy.

  However, the English were only to be her prison guards, not her prosecutors. Cauchon was so keen to be Joan’s inquisitor that he put in a rushed application to get jurisdiction in the diocese of Rouen, where the trial was to take place. He then appointed a second judge, a friend of his who was hostile to Joan: a man called Jean le Maître, who had the alarming title of ‘Vicar to the Inquisitor of Heretical Perversity’.

  The charges against Joan were many and varied; there were seventy of them, including witchcraft, blasphemy, fighting a battle on a Sunday and, most heinous of all, wearing men’s clothes – and pretty well all of them carried the death sentence. Even though she was only a teenager, and convinced that she had been given her instructions by God, Joan must have understood the situation well enough to know that she stood no chance of being acquitted.

  Nevertheless, she put up a spirited defence at the hearings, which went on for months. Professors of theology were shipped in from Paris University to try and catch her out with cunningly worded trick questions. For example, Joan was asked whether she thought she had obtained the grace of God. A ‘yes’ would have been blasphemy because only God knows who is in a state of grace, whereas a ‘no’ would have been a confession that she had committed mortal sins. But Joan answered: ‘If not, I pray God puts me there, if so, that he keeps me there.’ It was the perfect reply, the ecclesiastic equivalent of an untrained kid avoiding a punch from an Olympic boxing champion, and then flooring him with the riposte.

  Joan also dodged leading questions about whether she had not only heard voices and seen angels, but also smelt and touched them. One might assume that this would be a logical extension of her visions, but saying yes would have been a confession of idolatry and a mortal sin; as far as divine visitations went, it was a case of ‘look – and listen – but don’t touch.’ In the event, though, Joan was so careful with her answers, so devout and pious in her opinions, that it even looked for a time as though she might escape death.

  Sadly for her, however, the French love an intellectual debate, and the one subject her judges wouldn’t drop was her male clothing, even though she said that she had worn it to fight a holy war. Back then, it ju
st wasn’t the done thing for women to wear armour. It was as shocking as, say, a modern army being led by a transvestite in a dress.*

  In medieval times, it was a mortal sin for women to cut their hair short, put on a helmet and fight – their role in war was restricted to being raped and/or murdered.

  Some have suggested that Joan liked wearing men’s clothing because she was a lesbian. One theory I have heard is that she had large breasts and was sick of male harassment. Whatever Joan’s original reason, by the time of the trial she was so scared of being raped by her (English) prison guards that she refused to exchange her trousers for a skirt. Bizarrely to modern minds, the guards seem to have been too scared to touch her while she was dressed as a man in case she was a witch or a she-devil.

  Joan’s judges knew about her fears, and used the knowledge to trap her – they offered to spare her life and have her transferred away from her guards to a religious prison if she would only confess her sins and put on a dress. Joan, who still believed that God would ultimately boot the English out of France and install her good friend Charles VII on the throne as the unchallenged king, accepted the plea bargain, no doubt thinking that she would be freed as soon as the political pendulum swung Charles’s way again.

  A ceremony – probably the one mentioned in the Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris – was held in a Rouen cemetery at which Joan, wearing a dress for the first time in at least two years, publicly signed a confession, or rather drew a cross because there was no prison education system and she hadn’t learned to write.

  But yet again, the French betrayed her. As soon as she had signed, she was taken back to her old prison with its rapacious guards. Terrified, she put her trousers back on, to the delight of her judges, who declared her a ‘relapsed heretic’ and condemned her to be burnt at the stake in Rouen’s market square.

  On 30 May 1431, her head shaven, Joan was made to walk through the streets past a jeering (French) mob, and when she arrived at the place of execution, her judges denied her the comfort of a crucifix to take to her death. It was an English soldier who put two sticks from the bonfire together to make her an improvised cross.

  The French joke to this day about Joan being ‘the only thing the English have ever cooked properly’. This probably refers to the fact that, after the fire had burnt out, the executioner raked through the ashes to expose her charred body and prove to the crowd that she was indeed female – the Bourgeois de Paris says that ‘the fire was pulled back and everyone saw her naked, and all the secrets that a woman must have … When they had seen all they wanted, the executioner lit the fire again and the pitiful carcass was completely consumed by the flames.’

  A rare view of Joan of Arc out of armour. She was burned in Rouen in 1431, and despite French jokes about her being ‘the only thing the Brits ever cooked properly’, she was in fact captured, tried and condemned by Frenchmen.

  So yes, the English are guilty as charged of killing Joan of Arc. They burned her, and then burned her again to make sure. But the people who made sure she ended up tied to the stake were Frenchmen, who were collaborating with the English invaders. In short, les Français got les Anglais to do their dirty work, and have spent the last 500-odd years in denial. And there’s a lot to deny, because the bare truth of the matter is that France martyred its own future patron saint for wearing trousers. Which, it could be argued, is taking the famous French fashion sense just a step too far.

  France is beaten up, but not beaten

  From there on, the Hundred Years War more or less petered out, with the English gradually giving up the fight.

  The French had finally got the measure of English archers, and had mastered a new weapon, the cannon. The English possessed these, but they had previously been used to make noise more than anything – as early as Crécy, cannon blasts were said to have scared French horses (another excuse). But by the mid-1400s, the French had learned how to aim their artillery, and anyone trying to besiege a town in France was likely to have their camp bombarded with hot lead. This understandably put English opportunists, in search of a bit of easy booty, off their pillaging, and after a golden century of profit the chevauchées started to lose money. It was a chevauchée crunch.

  Furthermore, the infighting between the Burgundians and Armagnacs that had weakened France was ended when Duke Philip of Burgundy saw the tide turning and wriggled out of his alliance with the English, claiming that, on second thoughts, Henry VI of England might not be the rightful heir to the throne of France after all. In 1435, Duke Philip signed a new treaty with Charles VII, effectively reuniting France. Charles decreed that, from now on, anyone who even mentioned the words Burgundian or Armagnac was to have a hole burnt in their tongue with a hot iron. Fifteen years of French collaboration with the enemy officially no longer existed.

  The English tried a rearguard action, and a certain Sir John Falstof, the man who inspired Shakespeare’s Falstaff, tried to get support for the creation of an annual chevauchée season from June to November. His plan was that two armies of 750 men each should be sent across the Channel to spend the summer and autumn burning houses, crops, animals and peasants, thereby reducing as much of France as possible to famine. But by now chevauchées were totally passées, and the idea found no takers.

  Charles VII’s armies took Paris and Normandy, and then England’s traditional stronghold in Aquitaine. On 19 October 1453, Bordeaux capitulated, and the English had finally been booted out of France – not by Joan of Arc herself, but as she had predicted.

  And as soon as the war was over, the French started sweeping more bad memories under the carpet. To Charles VII’s annoyance, people kept harking on about Joan of Arc, many of them claiming that she was still alive. Joan’s own brothers were travelling around France with a woman claiming to be Joan, and collecting ‘contributions’ to her cause. Charles VII’s argument that ‘if she’s alive, what are you all moaning about?’ cut no ice, and after years of putting off the inevitable, he granted Joan a posthumous retrial.

  The new hearing was just as fixed as the first, but this time it was biased in Joan’s favour. The judges included Joan’s own confessor, as well as enemies of the bishops and professors involved in the original case. Joan’s mother made a heartfelt declaration of her daughter’s innocence (written for her by clerics), and even managed to faint in the witness box. No one mentioned the touchy cross-dressing issue, Joan’s voices were declared authentic because she herself believed they were true, and in 1456, twenty-five years after her death, the guilty verdict was overturned. Not that that helped Joan much.

  Continuing the sweeping-embarrassing-evidence-under-the-carpet theme, the records of the original trial were publicly burnt on the spot where Joan herself had perished.

  This did not mean, though, that Joan was immediately hailed as a saint; on the contrary, Charles was hoping that her memory would be expunged as completely as the written proof of her mistrial. He subsequently did everything he could to prevent her becoming an icon and to stop pilgrimages to Rouen and Orléans. It was even forbidden to display images of her.*

  The most important thing for the French King was not an amnestied female heretic, but that he was now sitting unopposed on the throne. The official version of the war was that Crécy and Agincourt were mere glitches in the overall scheme of things, and, after a few lucky breaks in the first half of the fighting, the English had been humiliatingly booted out of France by King Charles VII. All on his own. OK, then, maybe with a little help from his bosom buddy Joan who had been treacherously murdered by the ‘goddams’.

  And what did the English think of all this? Well, the ordinary people of England would have scoffed at Joan’s retrial and supposed innocence. Right up to Shakespeare’s time and beyond, they thought she was a witch, a she-devil used as a kind of ungodly secret weapon by the hated French enemy.

  Defeat made a real dent in English national pride, of course, but many would have shrugged their shoulders at the war’s final score. The gains during the
conflict, had, after all, been enormous. Huge numbers of Englishmen had made money – from archers sharing in ransoms to merchants in second-hand French armour (‘one previous owner, few arrow holes in breastplate’) – and pretty well every stately home and castle built in England between 1330 and 1450 was at least partly financed by money extorted from France.

  On the less material side, the Hundred Years War had served to give England a real sense of identity. Its monarchs had at last begun to speak English as their native language, and at Crécy and Agincourt the Brits had won victories that were branded for ever into folk memory.

  And after all, what the French were conveniently forgetting during their ‘total victory’ celebrations in 1453 was that England still possessed Calais, one of the most strategically important towns in France.

  * Joan would have to wait more than four centuries before she came in useful to France again. To read about the arguments surrounding her canonization, see Chapter 24.

  * From 1350 right up until 1830, male heirs to the throne were called ‘dolphins’, not because of any swimming ability, but because their coat of arms sported frisky-looking aquatic mammals alongside the fleur-de-lis.

  * Although in some Scandinavian countries that is probably quite acceptable. And, ironically, the Pope’s Swiss Guards wear skirts.

  5

  Calais: The Last Last Bit of English

  Territory in France

  For over 200 years, from its capture by Edward III in 1347 to its eventual fall to the French in 1558, the port of Calais was, all commentators agree, a thorn in France’s side – although most people with a thorn in their side would pull it out, dab a little antiseptic cream on the wound and forget about it. Calais was much worse than a thorn. It was a veritable boil on the backside of France, a festering, incurable excrescence that for two centuries prevented the French sitting comfortably, sitting on their laurels, and many similar metaphors.