Joan of Arc

by Helen Castor

  His title was proclaimed in the sumptuous surroundings of the royal chapel at Mehun-sur-Yèvre on 30 October, but his difficulty was that the crown itself remained physically out of reach. The circlets of Charlemagne and St Louis rested, as they always had, in the abbey of Saint-Denis, under the usurping power of the duke of Bedford. Although the coronation of the most Christian king could perhaps be performed in their absence, the sacred rite could only take place in the cathedral at Reims, with the holy oil of Clovis that was guarded there. And Reims – eighty miles north-east of Paris in the county of Champagne, where only a few hardy Armagnac garrisons held out in beleaguered isolation – lay beyond the current borders of the kingdom of Bourges.

  In the circumstances, unction from the Holy Ampulla would have to wait. But there were, at least, other signs of God’s blessing. In the last week of September, while his father languished in his final illness at the Hôtel Saint-Pol, the dauphin had set out westward from Bourges to muster the threatened defences of La Rochelle, the only seaport on the Atlantic coast that remained in Armagnac hands. There, on 11 October, he sat in state to receive his supporters in the great hall of the bishop’s palace. Suddenly, with a heart-stopping lurch, the floor collapsed beneath their feet into the void of the chamber below. Amid the choking dust and splintered debris, many died and more were badly hurt – but, apart from a few scratches, the dauphin was miraculously unharmed. A fortnight later, when reports arrived of his father’s death, the divine purpose for which he had been saved became clear. And the new king knew where thanks were due: he made a generous donation to the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel to provide that each year, on the anniversary of the accident, there should be sung a mass of St Michael, ‘the archangel whom we venerate and to whom we entrust the greatest confidence’. St George might fight for the English, but St Michael, the standard-bearer of heaven, would protect the true king of France. From now on, Charles and his court would put aside the white sash of the Armagnacs in favour of the white cross – not just the ancient badge of the French crown, but the emblem of St Michael himself.

  Even with the archangel’s help, however, it was apparent that the task of driving the English into the sea would take some time. The renewed sense of purpose within the court at Bourges was matched by the duke of Bedford’s determination to defend his brother’s legacy, and military operations continued with fresh energy, but to inconclusive effect. In the summer of 1423, an Armagnac army commanded by John Stewart of Darnley besieged the town of Cravant, which lay seventy miles north-east of Bourges, within the duchy of Burgundy itself. Bedford’s troops were occupied elsewhere, to the north and west; but, from Dijon, Philip of Burgundy’s mother sent for help from her son’s allies, and on 31 July four thousand men, English and Burgundian, appeared at Cravant like lightning from the clear sky. Their effect was as deadly: Darnley’s soldiers were slaughtered, and Darnley himself lost an eye in savage fighting before he was taken prisoner. If the Scots were the saviours of France, their intervention, clearly, would not always be as miraculous as it had been at Baugé. Charles quickly wrote to reassure his faithful subjects in Lyon that very few French noblemen had been party to the defeat – only Scots and Spaniards and other foreign soldiers, he said – ‘so the harm is not so great’.

  Smoothly dismissive words might be necessary in public to maintain confidence in his cause, but that did not mean the Scots were any less vital to his plans. Darnley had been in command at Cravant only because the earls of Buchan and Wigtown had sailed for Scotland that summer to raise more troops, and by October there was good news to report: Buchan was about to return with eight thousand men, Charles told the people of Tournai cheerfully. The recovery of Normandy was in hand, and once this new Scots army stood on French soil, he intended to defeat the traitors and rebels, reclaim his kingdom and make his way to Reims for his coronation. And in the meantime, it had pleased God to provide France with an heir. On 3 July, at Bourges, his young queen had given birth to a fine son, named Louis after France’s royal saint.

  Despite Cravant, then, the omens were good when Buchan made landfall at La Rochelle in the spring of 1424, bringing with him not only fresh soldiers but Wigtown’s father, Archibald, earl of Douglas, a fifty-five-year-old veteran of the wars between Scotland and England, who had already lost an eye and a testicle in earlier battles. The grand old man had decided to take his son’s place on the front line in France in part because the rewards on offer were so great. When he arrived at Bourges in April to kneel before the twenty-one-year-old king, Douglas was immediately granted the royal duchy of Touraine and named Charles’s ‘lieutenant-general in the waging of his war through all the kingdom of France’.

  This was unprecedented honour and extraordinary power to bestow on a foreigner, but if it resulted in the expulsion of the English and the defeat of the Burgundians, it would be a price worth paying. Appalled though they privately were at the prospect of their uncouth Scottish duke, the citizens of Tours welcomed Douglas with stiff-necked public ceremony, and watched, grim-faced, while he set about plundering the city’s treasury as thoroughly as his troops were pillaging the countryside round about. Sooner or later, they knew, he would have to earn his extortionate keep; and on 4 August – having extracted another small fortune from the city to pay his soldiers – he led his army north towards Normandy, and the war they had come to fight.

  Marching beside the Scots were French troops under the command of two lords whose own Norman lands had been overrun by the English: seventeen-year-old Jean, duke of Alençon, whose father had died at Azincourt, and Jean d’Harcourt, count of Aumâle, the experienced captain of Mont-Saint-Michel, who had struck deep into Normandy the previous autumn and had begged his king to launch this campaign. And riding to join this Franco-Scottish force was another contingent from outside the realm: heavy cavalry, two thousand strong, recruited from the duchy of Milan. These Lombard riders and their horses – men and animals all plated in steel, thanks to the superlative skill of Milanese armourers – were equipped to withstand English arrows, and the archers within the Scots army stood ready to return English fire. This, Charles and his commanders could be certain, would be no Azincourt.

  The thought had almost been enough to bring the king to the battlefield. In the weeks before his troops moved north, Charles had once again ordered new coats of arms and trappings for his warhorse. Now that France had an heir – his baby son, kicking in his cradle – should he ride with his men to reclaim his kingdom? But St Michael’s protection had already been tested once at La Rochelle, and by August all were agreed that prudence was the better part of royal valour. The army of France would be led by Alençon and Aumâle, Buchan and Douglas. Their target was Ivry, a castle on the Norman frontier reclaimed a year earlier by an Armagnac garrison, but now close to breaking point under English siege. Knowing how few cards they had left to play, Ivry’s defenders had negotiated a truce according to the chivalric laws of war: fighting would stop while they appealed for help from their king, but if reinforcements did not arrive by 15 August, they would lay down their arms and surrender the castle into English hands.

  While Charles’s army marched to save Ivry, therefore, the duke of Bedford mustered his troops to stop them. On 14 August the duke arrived outside the walls of the castle and picked his ground for battle. But the next day the summer sun rose and fell, and the Armagnacs did not come. Instead, there were riders, breathless and terrified, from the town of Verneuil, twenty-five miles further west, with shocking news. Alençon, Aumâle, Buchan and Douglas had realised that the Lombard knights, still behind them on the road, could not reach Ivry in time, and too much was at stake to risk meeting the English without them. It would mean grave dishonour if the army of France failed to appear at Ivry on the appointed day, but honour had not saved the princes of the blood at Azincourt. So, while Bedford waited, they had turned west to Verneuil. They had called for volunteers from within the Scots ranks – men who spoke English – and bound them backwards on their horses, spatt
ered with blood, as if they were prisoners. Before Verneuil’s walls they paraded these bogus captives, who shouted to the townspeople that the English at Ivry had been slaughtered, and there was no hope of help. In consternation and fear, the people of Verneuil opened their gates and gave up the town without a fight. And when Bedford heard of this brazen trick, he set out in furious pursuit.

  On 17 August, the English army reached the broad plain just outside Verneuil to the north-east, to find the might of France – or at least the part of it that the kingdom of Bourges could command – ready for battle. Together, the French and the Scots outnumbered the English almost two to one, and in front of their lines stood the newly arrived Lombard cavalry, a wall of muscle and bone encased in steel. This time, lowborn English archers would not preside over a field of blood; this time a noble French assault – in the ominous shape of Milanese mercenaries – would break them where they stood. At a signal, the cavalry wall began to move, faster and faster, hooves pounding into tinder-dry earth. When the shuddering impact came, the English ranks buckled and staggered. Sharpened stakes, too quickly planted, could not bring down horses in armour, and the Lombard riders carved a path of devastation, of trampled, broken bodies, through the heart of the English army. The cavalry had done its work. But, as the Lombards fell upon the spoils of the English baggage-train, they did not see the battered ranks of the enemy taking shape again behind them.

  It was the French and the Scots, in shock, who saw English men-at-arms advancing out of the dust-storm kicked up by the horses’ heels. Braced though they were, the assault was brutal. In dense, chaotic fighting so ferocious that the earth was dark and slippery with blood, no one could tell who was winning – until, with a great roar, the English archers who had flung themselves out of the way of the Lombard charge regrouped to join the mêlée, daggers and axes in hand. English pressure began to bite, and, at last, the French line broke. Panic spread, and men fled for their lives, only to be trapped and butchered in the deep ditches outside the town walls. The count of Aumâle died where he fell; the young duke of Alençon was captured on the field. Of the few who escaped, almost none were Scots. As the plain of Verneuil became a killing ground, Douglas, Buchan and the army they led were hacked to pieces.

  Outside Ivry two days earlier, Bedford had ridden before his troops wearing a blue velvet robe emblazoned with a red cross of St George within a white cross of St Michael. Two saints, two kingdoms, England and France; the claim could not have been clearer. Now it was vindicated in the bloody triumph of Verneuil. Bedford himself – who ‘did that day wonderful feats of arms’, said an admiring Burgundian chronicler who fought with the English army – returned to Paris, to be greeted with processions, songs and pageants by elated crowds all dressed in the red of St George. Relief at the defeat of the vile Armagnacs was so profound, the journal-writer observed, that the duke was welcomed to the great cathedral of Notre-Dame ‘as if he had been God’.

  While celebrations continued in Anglo-Burgundian France – lubricated, fortuitously, by the best and most plentiful vintage anyone could remember – the kingdom of Bourges occupied itself with more sombre tasks. The city of Tours received the lifeless bodies of its duke, Archibald Douglas, and his son-in-law, John Stewart of Buchan, and buried them quietly in the choir of the cathedral. ‘Dearly loved and delightful they were in life’, said the Scottish chronicler Walter Bower, ‘and in death they were not divided.’ The people of Tours made no comment, other than to blockade the garrison of Scots soldiers that Douglas had left in the castle until they agreed to go away.

  It was clear to the roi très-chrétien, contemplating the state of his kingdom, that France was going to need another saviour.

  3

  Desolate and divided

  It seemed strange, to the people of Paris, that their country now appeared to have two capitals, neither of which was their own incomparable city.

  Bourges, more than a hundred miles to the south, was home to the court of the disinherited dauphin, Charles the ill-advised. Loyal Parisians knew that he was surrounded by traitors and murderers – not just the killers of the good duke John of Burgundy, but all those evildoers who had inflicted years of barbarous suffering on the people of France. But, disconcertingly, the righteous lords to whom France’s greatest city had been so conspicuously faithful were not resident in Paris either. The duke of Bedford, regent of the kingdom on behalf of the infant king Henry, had moved into the Hôtel de Bourbon, just beside the palace of the Louvre on the westernmost edge of the city, and held a great feast there before Christmas 1424; but then, as was his habit, he returned to Rouen, the capital of English-held Normandy, and the centre of English government in France since before the treaty of Troyes.

  Duke Philip of Burgundy, meanwhile, had been at his Parisian home, the Hôtel d’Artois, earlier in the autumn for the lavish wedding of the master of his household, Jean de La Trémoille, to one of Queen Isabeau’s ladies; then, said the journal-writer in the city, he ‘went back to his own country’. ‘His own country’ – his pays – meant his own territories, not his own kingdom; but even the most steadfast Burgundian adherent, which this observer had once been, could not help noticing that ‘Burgundian’ no longer straightforwardly meant ‘French’. The duke – a lean, long-nosed figure whose habit of dressing entirely in black emphasised the unhappy circumstances in which he had inherited his title – had replaced his dead father’s emblem of a carpenter’s plane with his own personal badge, a flint and steel producing sparks and flames. But after the conflagration that his father’s determination to rule had fuelled in the most Christian kingdom, the fires of Philip’s ambition burned elsewhere, in the new Burgundian state he was forging in the Low Countries. As a result, his visits to Paris – ‘a city which had loved him so well and which had suffered so much and still was suffering for him and for his father’, lamented the disillusioned journal-writer as early as 1422 – dwindled almost to nothing.

  By 1424, then, it seemed that there were two Frances. One, in the north, was ruled from Rouen by the regent Bedford, who decreed that none of King Henry’s loyal subjects should refer to the so-called dauphin as ‘king’, or to the Armagnac traitors as ‘French’, on pain of hefty fines. Meanwhile, the other France, in the south, looked to the government of King Charles VII in Bourges, from where he promised to sweep the usurping English into the sea and to reduce those of his subjects who had rebelled against him to the obedience they owed.

  These, obviously, were incompatible claims. In theory, each kingdom of France was dedicated to the annihilation of the other. In practice, they were locked in a deathly embrace, a stalemate sustained by devastation and bloodshed. ‘At that time’, the Parisian had written wearily in his journal in 1423, ‘the English would sometimes take one fortress from the Armagnacs in the morning and lose two in the evening. So this war, accursed of God, went on.’ Though the kingdom of the north had been strengthened by victory at Verneuil, and English forces were pushing southward from Normandy into Maine and Anjou, neither side had yet shown themselves capable of making a decisive move across the great natural boundary of the river Loire, which now, in effect, divided the Armagnac kingdom of the south from English France to the north and its ally, the duchy of Burgundy, to the east.

  It even seemed possible that a decisive part in this bloody struggle might now be taken by a different war, fought for different reasons on different soil. In the summer of 1424, while Bedford hammered the Scots into the dust of Verneuil, his brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was mustering troops in England for a continental invasion of his own. At Gloucester’s side was his new wife, Jacqueline of Hainaut, whose previous unhappy marriage to the duke of Brabant had not yet been annulled to the satisfaction of the Church – nor, indeed, of the duke of Brabant himself, who was not prepared to relinquish Jacqueline’s counties of Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland along with his unloved bride. Gloucester, however, was not about to let matrimonial technicalities stand in his way. He and Jacqueline were mar
ried by the beginning of 1423, their union blessed, since Rome refused to sanction it, by the last remaining antipope, who had been living in Spanish obscurity ever since the rest of Europe had ended the papal schism without him. And in October 1424, the duke and his new duchess landed at Calais with an army, ready to reclaim her inheritance.

  This irritating intervention was not what Philip of Burgundy’s alliance with England had been designed to achieve. Even before Gloucester’s expedition had reached the Low Countries, its potential repercussions within Anglo-Burgundian France were beginning to be felt. As news of Gloucester’s military preparations spread that summer, tentative diplomatic approaches – the first in years – took place between Burgundian Dijon and Armagnac Bourges. Wild rumours that Duke Philip had already made peace with the man who had murdered his father reached Bedford on the eve of battle at Verneuil, and as a result he decided at the eleventh hour to send away the Burgundian troops under his command, preferring to fight with a smaller number of soldiers on whose loyalty he could depend absolutely, rather than run the risk of treachery from within. There was, of course, no chance that John the Fearless’s blood could be washed so easily from the hands of the young king of Bourges, but it was clear that the reordering of Burgundian priorities might at last mean that the stain was starting to fade. That September, Duke Philip put his seal to a truce with the Armagnacs to protect the frontiers of his lands in eastern France – thereby freeing himself to tackle Gloucester’s aggression in the north – which acknowledged for the first time the claim of the ‘so-called dauphin’ to style himself a king. Instead of this disparaging Burgundian circumlocution, the text of the treaty called him simply ‘le roi’.

  It took only months, however, for Gloucester’s assault on the Low Countries to reveal itself as a damp squib. The English duke discovered that he faced not only a Burgundian army but a public challenge to fight in single combat. Young knights like themselves, Duke Philip declared, should risk their own lives to settle such a quarrel, rather than spill the blood of their followers. This was an offer Gloucester could not, with honour, refuse. At his suggestion the date was set for St George’s day, 23 April 1425. In preparation, Philip retired to his castle at Hesdin, where he took lessons to refine his swordsmanship and spent the eyewatering sum of nearly £14,000 on new armour, pavilions, coats of arms, banners and horse harness in embroidered silks and velvets. Humphrey of Gloucester, meanwhile, sought a safe-conduct to return to England to make his own preparatory arrangements, leaving his wife, Jacqueline, in Hainaut. He took with him one of his duchess’s most beautiful attendants, an Englishwoman named Eleanor Cobham; and gradually it became clear that he was not coming back.