Joan of Arc

by Castor, Helen

  The first few hundred Scots soldiers – archers, in the English style, as well as men-at-arms – had arrived in France in the spring of 1419. But by the end of that year a major force of six or seven thousand troops had made landfall at La Rochelle under the command of John Stewart, earl of Buchan, and his brother-in-law Archibald Douglas, earl of Wigtown, along with other captains including Buchan’s distant relative and namesake, Sir John Stewart of Darnley. This Scottish army had not been sent by the Scots king, James I; he had been captured by the English as a boy of eleven, fourteen years earlier, and the governor of the kingdom during the long years of his absence – Buchan’s father, the duke of Albany – had no particular enthusiasm for the prospect of curtailing his own power by securing the king’s release. The English response to the arrival of Scottish troops on French soil was to summon the captive King James to join the English army. The dauphin’s forces therefore found themselves confronting not one but three kings – Henry of England, the ailing Charles of France and the prisoner James of Scotland – in order that the Armagnacs and the Scots could be accused of treachery in bearing arms against their own sovereigns. This grandstanding from the moral high ground, always Henry’s favoured terrain, had dangerous implications for troops who could expect no mercy in defeat if they were deemed to have broken their allegiance. But the Scots remained unmoved, and by February 1421 another four thousand men had sailed from Scotland to join the contingent under Buchan’s command.

  Marching against them was not Henry himself, who was by now back in England for the first time in more than three years, but the lieutenant-general he had left behind, his brother Thomas, duke of Clarence. Clarence was eager to seize this chance to emerge from his older brother’s shadow as a hero of the war, and – apparently looking for a fight in which he might cover himself in glory to rival Henry’s – he led a detachment of the Anglo-Burgundian forces south from Normandy into Anjou. But there, on 22 March, just outside the town of Baugé, he encountered the fresh troops newly arrived from Scotland, with Buchan and Wigtown at their head. Clarence charged into the attack, neither listening to his captains’ advice nor waiting for his archers to catch up – and found himself overwhelmed in a bloody rout. He died on the field with hundreds of his men; and the Scottish earls wrote in exultation to invite the dauphin to advance immediately into Normandy ‘because, with God’s help, all is yours’.

  At last, divine favour had been restored to the true heir of the most Christian king. The dauphin, giddy with euphoria, hurried to give thanks in the great cathedral at Poitiers, and set out the same day to meet the victorious Scots at Tours. Until now, these interlopers from a tiny kingdom far to the north had been received with disdain by some at the dauphin’s court: ‘drunken, mutton-eating fools’ was the phrase whispered, with lips curled, behind elegant French hands. ‘What do you think now?’ the dauphin demanded after news came of the triumph at Baugé, one Scottish chronicler proudly reported; and ‘as if struck on their foreheads by a hammer, they had no answer’. Instead, the earl of Buchan ‘seemed to have arisen like another Messiah among and with them’. Within days, this saviour of France had been named constable of the kingdom – the highest military post in the gift of the crown, which gave Buchan authority second only to that of the dauphin himself. And the dauphin ordered some more armour – this time in the Scottish fashion – and another banner of St Michael, and prepared for an assault that would surely drive the English and their Burgundian allies from France for ever.

  With the image of the warrior archangel borne before them, the Armagnacs and the Scots pressed northward into Normandy and then turned east, in the direction of Paris; by the beginning of July the dauphin’s army was camped outside the walls of Chartres, just fifty miles south-west of the embattled capital. They were poised, at last, for a climactic confrontation with the traitors and invaders who had so grievously usurped the birthright of France’s heir. But amid the exhilaration of their triumph at Baugé, they had forgotten, for a joyous, fleeting instant, that defeating the duke of Clarence was one thing; facing his brother, the victor of Azincourt, quite another. After almost six months’ absence, Henry had returned to France in June, with fresh soldiers at his back. He arrived in Paris on 4 July, and the very next day – citing sickness among his troops, and the difficulty of feeding an army in the field after an exceptionally long and bitter winter – the dauphin began a southward retreat to the safety of his castles in the valley of the Loire and his court at Bourges.

  The hunger and disease were real, but so, unmistakably, was the loss of nerve. Military operations would continue under Buchan’s command, but the moment had been lost – and when manoeuvres resumed, the dauphin would no longer be there to witness them. Meanwhile, the serene and implacable elect of God, Henry of England, moved to besiege Meaux, a heavily fortified and strategically vital Armagnac town twenty-five miles east of Paris, whose garrison had long been a thorn in the capital’s side.

  This time, there would be no musical interludes as night fell on the siege: Henry had come back without his wife, Catherine. Instead, he brought news to strike dread into her brother’s heart. She was carrying a baby with Plantagenet and Valois blood mingled in its veins. The treaty of Troyes would soon be made flesh in an heir to the twin thrones of England and Burgundian France; and though the dauphin might be safe, for now, in his refuge behind the protective waters of the Loire, the glorious promise of the victory at Baugé was fading like the sunlight as summer gave way to a sodden autumn.

  With rain falling from leaden skies, the besiegers at Meaux needed all their king’s relentless determination to sustain them when illness took hold in the camp and food ran punishingly short. But Henry knew that God’s purpose was unfolding on both sides of the Channel. He sent a messenger riding sixty miles west to the abbey of Coulombs, near Chartres, to take possession of the foreskin of Christ, a sacred relic that offered special protection for women in childbirth, so that it could be dispatched to England for the approaching confinement of his young queen. Just before Christmas, word came that this holy object had done its work. On 6 December, Catherine had given birth to a healthy boy, named Henry after his royal father.

  While bells rang and bonfires were lit in the streets of Paris, the journal-writer in the city contemplated the future of the divided kingdom this infant had been born to rule. His hatred of the Armagnacs, whose treachery had caused ‘these bitter troubles, this intolerable life, this accursed war’, burned as fiercely as ever, but he saw little reason to celebrate. The cause of the Burgundian duke and the English king might be just, but peace had not come, and on every side it was the poor, betrayed by their rulers, who suffered. ‘It is not one year or two,’ he wrote in despair, ‘it is fourteen or fifteen since this dismal dance began …’

  That much the dauphin knew: those fourteen or fifteen years were all he could remember. But the salvation of his people – he was certain, even if they were not – lay in the vindication of the Armagnac cause. His Scots captains could not save Meaux from its fate; it fell after seven months of siege, through the grimmest of winters, in early May 1422. What he could, however, do for himself – even from the sheltering valley of the Loire – was offer a response to the dynastic threat of his nephew’s birth. He was eighteen, plenty old enough to be a husband and father, and the identity of his bride had been fixed years earlier, when they were both children: Marie, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Yolande, the dowager duchess of Anjou, who had done so much to establish Armagnac power in the south, in what some now disparagingly called the ‘kingdom of Bourges’. The dauphin had been encouraged by a visit the previous year from a holy hermit, Jean de Gand, who told him of a vision sent from heaven that he would wear the crown of France and father an heir to the throne. Now preparations were put in train, and in a magnificent ceremony in April 1422 the kingdom of Bourges acquired its dauphine. By the autumn, Marie was pregnant. But by then, everything had changed.

  After the fall of Meaux, Henry had spent some
time in Paris with his wife. They kept great state at the palace of the Louvre, dining in their jewelled crowns, while on the other side of the city her father and mother – who were still, hard though it might be to remember, the king and queen of France – were left to wander amid the gardens and galleried courtyards of the Hôtel Saint-Pol. But beneath the pomp of Henry’s court, a new vulnerability became suddenly, shockingly apparent. In June, the king set out southward in blistering heat to help relieve the siege of the Burgundian town of Cosne by Armagnac forces. He never arrived. He was only twenty-five miles south of Paris when it became clear that this unyielding soldier was too weak to stay in the saddle.

  Hollow-faced, Henry was carried in a litter to the castle of Vincennes, south-east of the capital. There, in the cool of the donjon tower that loomed against the blue summer sky, his terrified physicians found that they could do nothing to relieve his fever. The elect of God, invincible though he was in the face of the enemy, was not immune, it appeared, to the gnawing, cramping flux that had ravaged his army in the mud outside Meaux. In the will he had written when he left England for the last time fourteen months earlier, he had commended his soul to God, Christ, the Virgin and the saints, his patron St George chief among them. Now, on 26 August – as always, facing what lay ahead with lucid control – he dictated a list of the silver and gold plate he wished to bequeath to his wife Catherine and to the baby son he had never seen. He left altar hangings to the abbey of Saint-Denis outside his French capital and to the abbey of Westminster beside his English one. And on 31 August 1422, in the darkness of the early hours, Henry died.

  It seemed impossible that the ferocious energy that had bent two kingdoms to his will could be so abruptly extinguished, but the shocked observers who watched the imposing cortège that bore his body north from Vincennes had no choice but to believe it. On the large lead coffin, draped in crimson cloth of gold, lay an effigy of the king himself, fashioned out of boiled leather, delicately painted and dressed in royal robes, with a golden crown on its head and orb and sceptre in its hands – an embodiment of Henry’s majesty as an anointed sovereign, which endured even on this journey to the grave. The stately procession made its way first to Saint-Denis, the necropolis of the monarchs of France, and then, by water, to Rouen. There, three hundred mourners, men of England and Normandy, all dressed in black with torches blazing in their hands, attended the corpse as the tolling of church bells hung heavy in the city air, and everywhere voices were raised to sing the psalms and masses of the Office of the Dead, until the king reached Calais, and the sea, and England.

  It was 5 November by the time Henry entered London for the last time. The coffin was drawn through the streets to rest for a night in the great cathedral of St Paul’s, before its final journey beyond the city walls to Westminster. There, on 7 November, the requiem mass was sung. A knight dressed in Henry’s exquisite armour rode through the west door of the abbey and spurred his warhorse on to the choir, where – in a startling moment of spiritual theatre – man and horse were stripped of their arms, which were offered up, symbols of the king’s earthly power, at the high altar. And then, at last, Henry’s mortal remains were laid to rest in the tomb he had chosen, nestling close to the shrine of Edward the Confessor, England’s royal saint.

  Henry of England was in his grave at Westminster, and four days later another funeral rite was enacted, for another sovereign, at Saint-Denis. On 21 October, just seven weeks after Henry’s death at Vincennes, Charles of France had taken his last breath in the Hôtel Saint-Pol. For two or three days his body lay where he had died, ‘the room full of lights’, the journal-writer said, so that all those who wished could see him, and offer up their prayers. Then, on 11 November, he too was carried through crowded streets, with a crowned effigy dressed in ermine-lined robes lying on his coffin, for burial beside his ancestors in the hallowed vaults of France’s royal abbey.

  Henry had been feared, and poor, perplexed Charles had been loved. Both were succeeded by an heir who was neither: ‘Henry of Lancaster, king of France and of England’, as the herald proclaimed at Saint-Denis – the nine-month-old baby, son of Henry and grandson of Charles, now in the care of his nurses at Windsor Castle. In him the provisions of the treaty so carefully enacted at Troyes had been fulfilled, but with dangerous prematurity. Despite the obvious hazards of war, no one had truly expected the English king, God’s own soldier, to be struck down so young and so abruptly, before even his fragile father-in-law. Now that both were gone in the space of two months, the lords on either side of the Channel who had committed themselves to the union of the two crowns were shaken to find themselves suddenly responsible for securing the rule of this double monarchy.

  In England, the younger of the dead king’s two surviving brothers, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, established himself at the head of a council of nobles as protector of the realm and of the infant Henry VI. But in France it was his elder sibling, John, duke of Bedford – a steadier and more conscientious figure than either Gloucester or Thomas of Clarence who had died at Baugé – who was named regent on his nephew’s behalf. Charlemagne’s Joyeuse, the great sword of state of the French sovereigns, was carried upright before Bedford when he rode in procession from Saint-Denis back to Paris after the old king’s funeral, in token of his new authority – ‘at which the people murmured very much’, reported the Parisian observer, ‘but had to endure it for the time being’.

  Their disquiet was prompted by the absence of Duke Philip of Burgundy, the prince of the blood whose support had made a French heir out of the English monarch. But Philip – who had been a solemn presence, in the black velvet of mourning for his murdered father, at the wedding of Henry and Catherine and their triumphal entry into the capital two years earlier – did not appear at either of the royal funerals in the autumn of 1422. His interests and ambitions, much more clearly than his father’s, now lay principally in the Low Countries, where civil war had broken out over the disputed succession of his cousin Jacqueline to the counties of Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland that bordered his own rich territories of Flanders and Artois. While he was occupied there in the north, and his redoubtable mother kept a watchful eye from her court at Dijon on the fortunes of the two Burgundies in the east, his concerns within the war-torn kingdom of France centred on the protection of his own lands, rather than the quest for control in government that had consumed his father’s life. The onerous task of leading the campaign to defeat the dauphin was therefore one he was happy to leave to Bedford. From this secondary position ‘in the service of the king of France’, as his financial officers had pointed out in 1421, he could demand that his military costs be paid by the regime in Paris; he also retained enough elbow-room to renegotiate the terms of his engagement with the Armagnac enemy should the passage of time and political circumstance require.

  For now, however, the duke of Bedford was his ally – not least because Jacqueline of Hainaut had fled from her unhappy marriage to a Burgundian husband, Philip’s cousin John of Brabant, into the arms of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester in England. To keep Gloucester out of the Low Countries and his inexhaustible ambition in check, Philip of Burgundy needed the help of the duke’s elder brother, John of Bedford; and so, in the spring of 1423, a treaty was sealed at Amiens by which Bedford married Burgundy’s favourite sister, Anne. Bedford was thirty-three, an imposingly powerful man both physically and politically, while Anne of Burgundy was just eighteen, one of four girls who were all, one ungallant observer reported, ‘as plain as owls’. But she had charm, grace and an impressively quick mind, and soon, it was said, Bedford would go nowhere without her. By the same treaty, her sister Margaret married Arthur, count of Richemont, the brother of the duke of Brittany, and through these two marriages Bedford and Richemont stepped forward into the breach left in the Anglo-Burgundian front line by the sudden loss of England’s warrior-king.

  Supporters of the kingdom of Bourges, meanwhile, were preoccupied not simply with the practical consequences of Henry’s
death, but with its meaning. Armagnac chroniclers could not deny that there had been much to admire in a man who had been a brave soldier, a formidable leader and a prince whose justice was dispensed with unbending rigour; but for his life to be cut short in the midst of his triumphs, when he was just thirty-five, suggested something other than the divine mandate Henry had always claimed. Perhaps, they thought, he had been punished for disturbing the holy shrine at Meaux that held the relics of St Fiacre, whose feast day, tellingly, had been the last full day of his life.

  The dauphin – whose daily routine included two or sometimes three masses, so unstinting was his devotion – knew that God’s will could also be revealed to the world through the movement of His heavens. Among the gifts he had bestowed on the earl of Buchan after the victory at Baugé were the services of an astrologer named Germain de Thibouville, who (it was later reported) had immediately foretold the imminent deaths of the kings of England and France. Even for those less confident in the science of the stars than their royal master, it hardly mattered whether this was skilful prognostication or wishful thinking, now that it had come to pass. Whatever grief the dauphin felt for the father who had disowned him, France’s future depended on one overriding truth: that, in the moment when Charles VI’s soul had left his body, his son had become Charles VII, the new roi très-chrétien.