This invitation of the Flemings gave Edward III a welcome pretext for laying his claims officially before his own Parliament and also before his princely equals on the Continent. It was, of course, an unjustifiable and, as it proved in the end, an exceedingly foolish step. However, he took it, backed by the support of the German Emperor, the Duke of Brabant, and other rulers. The Hundred Years’ War between France and England had begun (1337). (See map at start of book).
The Hundred Years’ War means, in brief, that for a hundred years the Kings of England attempted to unite France and England under one crown – their own. They tried hereditary justification, and they tried force of arms. Neither attempt, in the long run, was successful. A certain amount of blood was shed, and a considerable amount of suffering entailed, all to no purpose. The Hundred Years’ War was one of the most foolish and ill-advised wars ever undertaken.
It is fortunately not in the least necessary to follow the ups and downs of the English cause throughout the first eighty-odd years of the war. The battles of Poitiers, Crécy, and Agincourt were only incidents in the general complication which obliged the reluctant Jeanne d’Arc to become the saviour of her country. The treaties of Toumai (1340), Brétigny (1360), Auxerre (1412), Arras (1414) the truces of Calais (1347), Bruges (1375), were no more than temporary interruptions in a conflict which must already have begun to seem interminable and insoluble. These battles and treaties and truces all preceded the day when Jeanne rode into Chinon to take control of the situation, and require no more than a passing mention. It is necessary, however, to explain in greater detail the vital Treaty ot Troyes (May 1420). By the terms of this treaty, it was agreed that Henry V of England should:
(i) take the title of regent and heir of France;
(ii) marry Catherine, the daughter of the French King Charles VI, succeed to the throne of France, and thus unite France and England.
(iii) Furthermore it was agreed that no consideration should be accorded to Charles the ‘so-called’ Dauphin, son of Charles VI, the then reigning King: no treaty of peace or concord was to be concluded with him, without the consent of ‘us three’ (the Kings of France and England, and the Duke of Burgundy). This extraordinary clause in the Treaty of Troyes really meant that Charles the Dauphin could henceforward and legally have no say at all in the affairs of France. He was declared a bastard, if not in so many words, then at least by implication.fn1
The marriage of Henry V of England and Catherine of France duly took place (June 1420), but neither Henry nor Charles VI long survived it. Henry V died two years later (August 1422), and Charles VI within two months of his son-in-law (October 1422). Men of very different types, they each left a son who, by reason respectively of his age and his nature, was quite incapable of dealing with the more than awkward position created by the Treaty of Troyes. There were now, in fact, two Kings of France, one of them a baby nine months old, the other a futile youth of nineteen. How could either the little Henry VI of England, or the ineffectual Charles VII of France, grapple with the problem his father had bequeathed to him? Henry VI, of course, was out of the running altogether. His rattle was still more important to him than his sceptre. Cutting his teeth troubled him more than the succession to the throne of France. Charles VII was out of the running also, though for a different reason. In his case, it was not his tender age which precluded him from playing his part in public affairs, but the inherent weakness of his character. For this he was perhaps no more to blame than was Henry VI to blame for having inherited the double crown of England and of France at an age when he could neither walk nor talk. Charles VII could not help being born a backboneless creature, any more than Henry VI could help being nine months old. Neither of them had any choice in the matter. Little people should not be called upon to become great kings. Such a demand of destiny is fair neither upon the sovereign nor the kingdom.
Charles VII had the further excuse of a bad heredity. We cannot know for certain who his father was, his mother, Isabeau de Bavière, according to that clause in the Treaty of Troyes, having implied that he was not the son of his official father Charles VI. Otherwise, she would scarcely have allowed him to be described as the ‘so called’ Dauphin. Was he the son of Charles VI or was he not? Perhaps even his mother could not have answered this question by a yes or a no.fn2 At any rate, she allowed it to be understood by all those who could read between the lines of the Treaty of Troyes that the parentage of her son was, to say the least of it, doubtful. Neither the first nor the last woman to entertain such doubts, she stands out in history as one of the few women so brazen as to declare those doubts in an official document.
Whether Charles VII was the son of the mad Charles VI or not, his heredity on his mother’s side was sufficiently dangerous. Isabeau de Bavière was a woman of the dominating type which tends to produce weak sons. Whetl1er he was the son of Charles VI or not, he was indubitably the son ofisabeau, a mother who had not only allowed it to be publicly insinuated that her child was a bastard, but had also allowed him to be described in terms surely as offensive as were ever applied to a royal prince. He was excluded from all part in public affairs – considéré les horribles et énormes crimes et débits perpétrés audit royaume de France par Charles, soi-disant dauphin viennois, as it was expressed in the Treaty of Troyes. Although there is little to be said in favour of Charles VII, one cannotwithhold all sympathyfrom the son of such a mother. The pressure of her personality on him in his early years must have been crushing, and, moreover, it was his misfortune to be born with a nature meekly resigned to accept insults. Both his mother and his enemies might insult him with impunity. You, Charles of Valois, who used to call yourself Dauphin and now without reason call yourself King … thus the Duke of Bedford addressed him in a letter inviting Charles to meet him in the open field. Charles offered no more retaliation to this piece of insolence than he had previously offered to the brutality of his mother. A poor creature – a poor warped weak creature – it is not surprising that he should have allowed his kingdom to remain split under the domination of other princes, who, whatever their faults, were at least more vigorous men than he.
III
The above reference to the domination ofother princes leads inevitably to some further exposition of the state of affairs in unhappy France on the deaths of Henry V and Charles VI in 1422. This state of affairs was by then so complicated that the only clear way of setting it forth must lie in numbered paragraphs:
(1) Henry VI of England, an infant nine months old, was recognised, according to the terms of the Treaty of Troyes, as King of France and England, with his uncle, the Duke of Bedford, as regent during his minority.
(2) Charles the Dauphin, nominally Charles VII of France, was excluded from his succession to the French throne by the terms of the Treaty of Troyes.
(3) The French themselves were divided into two parties, known as Burgundians and Armagnacs. The former party took its name from their head, the Duke of Burgundy; the latter from Bernard d’Armagnac, who had assumed the leadership on behalf of the three young sons of the murdered Duke of Orleans. The Armagnac party should thus more properly have become known later on as the Orleanist party, but, since Armagnac’s name stuck to it, its adherents are always referred to as the Armagnacs. Roughly speaking, the west and south were Armagnac, the north and east Burgundian.
(4) These two parties were at bitter enmity. This enmity, which had originated in the old rivalry for power between the Dukes of Burgundy and Orleans, had been further increased by the assassination, in 1407, of Louis of Orleans by John of Burgundy. (This was the occasion when Bernard d’Armagnac had undertaken the leadership of the party for the young sons of the murdered duke.) So bitter was the hostility between the two parties, both personal and political, that all considerations of patriotism were swept aside in the struggle for supremacy. Naturally the French should have united to drive the English for ever out of France. Far from this, the Burgundians entered into a definite alliance with the English, for which reaso
n their faction is often referred to as the Anglo-Burgundian party.
(5) A further incitement was given to their mutual hatred by the murder of John of Burgundy, himself the murderer of Louis of Orleans, in 1419, at Montereau, where he had gone for a meeting with Charles the Dauphin. It is not known for certain whether Charles himself was privy to the plot, but he was regarded by the Burgundians as guilty, and the new Duke of Burgundy, Philip, took an oath that his father’s assassin should never assume the crown of France. In pursuit of this revenge, he acquired the support of Charles’s mother, Isabeau de Bavière, and the Treaty of Troyes (1420) was the direct result, by which the English were more firmly than ever assured of their claim to France.
(6) The Armagnacs, on the other hand, may be regarded as the Nationalist party, since their opposition to the Anglo-Burgundians involved them logically in hostility with the English.
This extremely bald and simplified statement may help to explain the situation in France at the time when Jeanne D’Arc was receiving her first celestial commands at Domremy.
IV
It may help, also, to explain the magnitude of the task Jeanne regarded herself as summoned to undertake. A child in years, she was asked to solve a problem which the most experienced and violent men of two nations had been struggling to solve for nearly a century. On her own side, she was to meet with the poorest backing. Trying to make an impression on Charles VII was almost as unprofitable an occupation as trying to make a permanent dent in a pillow. On the other side, she had at least two men of outstanding personality and ability as her adversaries. What peasant girl could prove herself a match for Philip of Burgundy and John of Lancaster?
John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, son of Henry IV and Mary Bohun, brother of Henry V, uncle and godfather of Henry VI, had already lived for twenty-three years in this world when Jeanne d’Arc entered it, and thus had attained the age offorty when she arose to take arms against him. The difference in their ages was even less considerable than the difference in their upbringing. The King’s son had been brought up in the magnificence of the Court; invested with the Order of the Bath at ten years old, with the Garter at eleven, with his duke-dom at fifteen; by the time he was thirty-three he found himself the guardian of his nephew the infant King, Henry VI. It was not very longbefore he found himself Regent of France also. His soldier brother, Henry V, had on his death-bed (1422) directed him to offer this positon to the Duke of Burgundy: the Duke of Burgundy had declined it. The mantle of regency thus descended upon Bedford himsel (Two months after the death of Henry V, he was attending the funeral of Charles VI at St Denis, and re-entered Paris with the naked sword of sovereign power carried before him.
Within a very few months (April 1423) he had concluded an alliance with the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, and had married the Duke of Burgundy’s young sister, Anne, at Troyes, in June of the same year.
The Duke of Bedford, however unsympathetic a figure he may appear to the partisans of Jeanne d’Arc, was in fact no sinister character. His business, so far as we are concerned, was to look after the English interest in France, and in doing it he was only doing his duty. As an English prince, and a soldier, he could do no less. It must be recorded to his credit that when he could spare the time from his job of keeping the country in subjection, and of managing the turbulent elements he had to deal with, he did his utmost as an administrator to bring contentment and even prosperity to the people under his rule, encouraging their commerce, reorganising their debased coinage, suppressing so far as lay within his power such abuses as the ill-treatment of prisoners and the prevalent system of bribery. Hot-tempered and red-faced as he was, with a strong beaked nose and strong prominent chin, his humane qualities surprise us by their unexpectedness in that savage age. In war he was ever opposed to the rash act, although his courage was beyond question; in peace a dignified and sober servant of his country, he never allowed his personal ambitions to come between himselfand the duty he owed to the crown. The blackest charge against his name is, of course, his treatment of Jeanne d’Arc when once she had fallen, by purchase, into his hands, but even here it is necessary to remember that he regarded her, not only as the most dangerous enemy of the English cause, but also as an evil thing acting under the guidance of some dark sorcery, which, to a devout son of the Church like Bedford, could be nothing but anathema. ‘That limb of the Fiend,’ he called her, and no doubt sincerely meant it. With soldierly generosity, however, he would not deny her the credit of the amazing services she had rendered to France.
Of his troubles at home, it is not necessary to speak here. It should, however, be noted that the activities of his brother, Gloucester, in the Netherlands, had had a considerable effect in cooling the pro-English sympathies of the Duke of Burgundy and in giving him an occupation in that country which diminished his value as a powerful ally. Thus, in a sense, Jeanne arrived upon the scene at the very moment when the Anglo-Burgundian coalition was at its weakest; when the English were rapidly wearying of their prolonged sojourn and struggle in France; and when the almost fictitious dread they had managed to cast over the minds of the French demanded only to be broken by some determined stroke. How to deliver that stroke was to become the mission of the daughter of Jacques d’Arc, a farmer in the valley of the Meuse.
3. DOMREMY (1)
I
Domremy lay, a small village of the Meuse valley, relatively far removed from the troubles of a harried France. Relatively, but not wholly. Both politically and geographically its position was as absurdly complicated, on a small scale, as the position of its greater neighbour, the rest of France. It had the misfortune to be a border village, half of it situated in France and the other half in the duchy of Bar.fn1 It is even a matter of dispute whether Jacques d’Arc’s house was included in the French part or the Barrois part of the village. M Siméon Luce tends to the opinion that it lay in the French part.fn2 Without going into the question of which half could actually claim Jeanne’s birthplace, the fact remains that the allegiance of the inhabitants of Domremy was difficult to decide. It meant that half the village belonged immediately, officially, and geographically to France, and the other half to a duchy committed to the Anglo-Burgundian party. It meant, moreover, that according to the terms of a treaty of capitulation concluded in 1428 between the Anglo-Burgundian parry and the duchy of Bar, reinforced by an act of homage exacted from the Barrois by the Dulce of Bedford, the semi-dependent village of Domremy ran a grave risk of falling entirely under the domination of English arms – a risk which Jeanne, her patriotism aroused, could never have tolerated. It was bad enough to hear of the whole of France threatened by the domination of the foreigner; it gave an extra twist, a more personal stab, to see her native village threatened in the same way. It brought the menace nearer home. Domremy, in spite of the position geographically imposed upon it, was not in the least inclined to submit to Anglo-Burgundian rule: according to Jeanne’s own subsequent statement, it counted only one avowed Burgundian in the whole of its population, whose head she would gladly have seen cut off, if that had been God’s pleasure. Whether that one Burgundian was her own compère or not makes little difference.fn3 Jeanne’s unusually vindictive comment shows what she thought of Burgundians in her village. Even admitting that her first resentments and her first perceptions of the danger were limited and local, she had only to extend her range a little, looking up and down the river, to realise that Domremy among the villages of the Meuse valley was not unique in its unfortunately divided situation. Badonvilliers, Burey-en-Vaux, Mauvages, Goussaincourt, Saint-Germain and others suffered from the same disadvantage. On the other hand, some more fortunate of the neighbouring villages, such as Maxey-sur-Meuse, were wholeheartedly Anglo-Burgundian. The remarkable thing is that, in spite of these differences and difficulties, local feeling should not have run higher in the officially split villages themselves, or between such villages as Domremy and Maxey, which were entirely opposed as to their politics, both geographically and by conviction. Litt
le boys and rowdy youths took part in rival fights, echoes of the larger quarrel in progress in greater France, but a certain Doctor Liétard, a native of Domremy, told M Siméon Luce that he, as a boy, had taken part in these schoolboy squabbles which still went on between Domremy and Maxey, between l840 and 1850. Now by 1840 the Hundred Years’ War could scarcely still be held responsible, and it seems more likely that both Jeanne’s contemporaries in 14.20 and thereabouts, and the adolescents of l 840, squabbled for the sake of squabbling, as a healthy and normal outlet for their high spirits and hot young blood. In Jeanne’s day, of course, the squabble arose out of a more immediate pretext. It was natural that the pugnacious youth of the Meuse valley should pretend to be violently Burgundian or Armagnac. It was suggested, even, that Jeanne herself might have joined in the fun with the boys, but on this point she replied, most unbelievably, that she could not remember; she remembered, however, that she had seen those of the village of Domremy who had fought against those of Maxey, when they returned badly hurt and mishandled (bene læsi et cruentati).fn4 We may here suspect Jeanne of not answering her judges quite truthfully. Either she went out with the boys of Domremy to fight the boys of Maxey or else she did not. In either case, she could not have forgotten. Whatever the truth may be, and whatever her reasons for evading it, there seems to be no particular reason for imagining that she participated in these escapades. There seems to be no justification for imagining Jeanne as a tomboy. On the contrary, all the evidence points to her having been a serious and aloof little girl, even to the extent of being regarded as rather a prig by the other children. This point is perhaps worthy of consideration, remembering that her adoption of boy’s clothes was later held against her as one of the principal articles of her accusation.
Saint Joan of Arc Page 3
