Joan of Arc

by Timothy Wilson-Smith

  None of these women was a model for Joan of Arc, but it is beside this group that she belongs, both as a visionary and as a woman of action; and yet her social background was different to theirs, for whereas the others came from cities where international trade flourished, she never forgot that she was a country girl. Like her, some béguines were suspected of heresy; like her, St Catherine of Siena found that her life was threatened by political enemies; all were like her in their devotion to temporary or permanent virginity. Of those who ‘visited’ Joan, Sts Catherine (of Alexandria) and Margaret (of Antioch) reinforced her resolve to remain a virgin, though curiously St Margaret is patron saint of childbirth and as such it is probably her statue that is on the bedstead of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini wedding portrait, which dates from 1434. There could have been many other such heavenly visitants, such as St Barbara, along with the tower in which her father had immured her to force her to marry, or the huge company, some 10,000 virgins who traipsed round Europe with St Ursula before suffering martyrdom for the sake of virginity. And besides these there were numerous virgin martyrs, set in serried ranks like those standing with loosened hair and palms in their hands among the heavenly hosts who adore the Lamb in the Ghent altarpiece that Jan van Eyck was in process of finishing while Joan became famous. One female saint, St Uncumber, had a beard to put men off; and it was for similar reasons, not as a transvestite, that Joan wore men’s clothes. To accomplish what she fervently believed she was called to do, she had to neutralise men’s sexual urges. She was strong and fit and became a good horsewoman, but she never struck anyone as unfeminine. To be whole-hearted, however, she had to be a virgin.

  Most virgins called themselves virgins for the kingdom of heaven. What marks out Joan is that she was also a virgin for the kingdom of France or, rather, for Charles the Dauphin, whom she was sure was God’s choice as King of France.

  Playgoers will be familiar with Shakespeare’s habit of indifferently using the words ‘England’ and ‘France’ (or ‘Worcester’ or ‘York’) for a country, a county, a city and for the person who has authority over the place. The man is identified with his title and the title with his land. In a feudal society, where a lord could expect loyalty from those who held their land from him, tight bonds kept upper-class society together; even when, by Joan’s time, those bonds had been so loosened that lords thought more in terms of retainers and servants than of vassals, there was still a tendency to think of a king as sovereign, suzerain or overlord; he was the linchpin of lay society.

  The King of France was also something more. As God’s anointed, he was given divine authority over his people; he had a miraculous power to heal when he touched for the king’s evil or scrofula, a power that his brother of England also exercised. From the 1160s, following the canonisation of Edward the Confessor, the King of England was able to claim a royal saint; a century later Henry III built a great shrine for St Edward in the abbey the Confessor had founded in Westminster and also named his son and heir Edward. It took the French royal family 150 years to catch up, but when Louis IX was declared to be St Louis, at least every King of France since the saint’s death in 1270 could claim a saint as ancestor (Edward the Confessor had died childless). The aura of holiness clung to the kings of both countries.

  The lawyers of the French king drew attention to his rights as king. He could tax his subjects, lay down laws, call them to account in his courts. Indeed, in the fifteenth century the distinguished English lawyer Sir John Fortescue noted that the rights of the King of France were far greater than those of his English counterpart. Whereas the English kingdom was a dominium regale et politicum, the kingdom of France was a dominium regale tantum. Fortescue was probably writing while in exile in France in the 1460s, during the period of the dynastic civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses, when a struggle for the throne was symbolised as a contest between the white rose of the Dukes of York and the red rose of the Dukes of Lancaster. In this period English institutions were crumbling, but the point Fortescue made was still a valid one. Kings had the right and the duty to govern in a dominium regale, but while the English king had to consult with his peers and his commoners in parliament, the French king did not have to listen to or even summon the Estates General. In more modern terms, the King of England was a constitutional king, the King of France was an absolute monarch. Fortescue may have been too sanguine about English practice and understandably he overestimated the French king’s actual freedom of action, as he was writing when Joan’s Charles VII had just driven the English from all French soil except that round Calais. Throughout his reign Charles had been only too well aware that his power was restricted by the privileges of many of his subjects, above all those of his dukes, his counts and sometimes even of burgesses or bourgeois in cities. Peasants had almost no rights, but the whole pyramid of society rested on them; and there was nothing more feared than a peasant revolt.

  For generations French royal power had been centred on the Île de France, the countryside round Paris, but gradually it had been extended to include neighbouring lands to the north-east, such as Artois, and in the Loire and Seine valleys, where Touraine, Anjou, Maine and Normandy were wrested from John of England. Further gains, in Poitou (also from the English), in Languedoc, in the northeast and the centre of France put most of the land now called France under the control of its king. By 1300 the King of France was the most powerful lay ruler in Latin Christendom, far stronger than the Holy Roman Emperor – whom even a man as intelligent as Dante liked to believe to be still the leading monarch in the West. Even the Church, when Philip IV cajoled the pope to move to Avignon in 1309, appeared to be a spiritual adjunct to the French Crown. A French king and pope should have been an unstoppable combination; and yet the army of Philip IV had been routed by the cities of Flanders at the battle of Courtrai in 1302.

  Extensive though the royal demesne had become, four fiefs lay beyond its bounds; and, besides, the Count of Anjou, who was descended from Louis IX’s youngest brother, was semi-independent both as count of Provence, a county outside France, and as sometime King of Naples. Of the four fiefs, Flanders and Brittany scarcely identified with France, as many of their inhabitants did not speak French; Burgundy, closer to the kingdom’s heart, had reverted to the French Crown and would pass to the son of a king; and the English lands in the south-west, making up the duchy of Guyenne, were remote and hard to handle, as its duke was also King of England. From 1258 the English king held these lands from the French king. Philip IV made inroads into Guyenne but failed to conquer it; Philip had, however, prepared the way for France’s acquisition of the duchy by making Edward I agree to the marriage of his son Edward to Philip’s daughter Isabella – on condition that he, Philip, return Gascony, the southern coastal area of the duchy he had seized, to his ‘dearest cousin’. With this marriage in mind, Philip could anticipate the day when his grandchild, as King of England and France, would bring to an end France’s problems with English Guyenne.

  It turned out that it was the Crown of France that had the problems. When Philip IV died in 1314, the French dynasty, hitherto so stable, was threatened by an unfamiliar sequence of occurrences. From 987, when Hugh Capet had become king, survival had never been an issue, because in each generation of the royal line of Capet a son had succeeded a father. Now the normal chain of events was broken. Philip’s oldest son Louis X died in 1316, as did Louis’s son, John I, who reigned for only ten days. The infant’s uncles, Philip V and Charles IV, dying in 1322 and 1328 respectively, had no male heirs, leaving as nearest male relative the son of their sister Isabella and her husband Edward II of England. In 1327 this teenager, another Edward, became Duke of Guyenne and King Edward III of England. In Paris, his mother’s representatives argued that there was no good reason why a woman should not inherit a title, but the French assembly ruled out any claim that would involve her. The French had an immediate practical problem: they needed a regent, as the late king’s wife was pregnant. They chose the late king’s adult male c
ousin, Philip Count of Valois, to take that role; and, when a baby girl was born to the widowed queen, the count quickly became King Philip VI.5 This decision accorded later with a fundamental principle of the French constitution according to Salic Law, not only must the throne of France be inherited by a man, but also through the male line. At the time the choice of Philip VI was wise. Edward III was young, far away and apparently dominated by a mother nobody in Paris liked.

  Exactly a century later, Joan too was concerned with rights of inheritance, for she held that Charles the Dauphin was the man God meant to be the king, not Henry VI of England and II of France, who was connected to the French throne by his mother Catherine, Charles’s sister. Joan believed that nothing could set aside God’s intended order of succession. She also valued another Frankish legacy: the work of St Remigius, apostle of the Franks, patron of her parish church in Domremy. St Remigius, in French Rémi, was the man who baptised Clovis, the first King of the Franks to extend his hold over large parts of northern Gaul.

  Clovis made his ruthless way as a barbarian and a pagan until in 496, yielding to the arguments of his Christian wife and Remigius, he became a Catholic. Being Catholics did not prevent Clovis or his successors from indulging in the internecine struggles that fill the depressing pages of Bishop Gregory of Tours’s History of Gaul. The Franks, however, were a conduit by which the Catholic faith and so the influence of the Roman Church, flowed over Western Europe. When the line of Clovis died out, it was replaced by the line of Charles Martel, who had stopped the Moors from overrunning Gaul; and his grandson Charlemagne extended Frankish rule beyond Gaul into parts of Germany, Italy and even Spain. The fame of Clovis and Charlemagne was cherished by the western or Salian Franks, whose kingdom became the nucleus of France, so that the two names most common among the kings of France were the Frankish names of Clovis, Clodovicus or Lodovicus in Latin, Louis in French, and of Karl, Karolus or, in French, Charles. Joan’s king was a Charles and his son and heir was a Louis. Both had to play a role uniquely French, for thanks to Clovis France was called the oldest daughter of the Church. But no French king, Joan believed, was truly king until he had been anointed with the oil of St Remigius in Reims Cathedral and crowned.

  The legal case for English kings to be also kings of France rested on the assumption that as the late king’s closest relative, Edward III should have inherited the throne of France. The assumption mattered only because some members of the English royal family were formidable generals. It was not until 1340, backdating his claim to 1337, that Edward declared he was the rightful King of France. It was a derisory assertion until first he beat Philip at Crécy and took Calais, and then his heir, Edward the Black Prince, defeated King John II, Philip’s son and successor, at Poitiers. In 1361, by the Treaty of Brétigny, Edward was conceded sovereignty over the whole of Guyenne, one-third of France, in return for renouncing his claim to France. But that claim was revived when most of the duchy was won back by Charles V (1364–80). In 1369, as Charles prepared to invade Gascony, Edward reasserted his claim to France. On his royal banner, alongside the two lions of Normandy and the single lion of Aquitaine, he placed the lilies of France – which remained there until 1802 – long before the three lions had been nationalised as the emblems of England.

  By the time the next English king, Richard of Bordeaux, inherited the English throne in 1377, he did not hold much land near his birthplace in Bordeaux. As an adult Richard II sought a rapprochement with France and to this effect he married Isabella, eldest daughter of Charles VI (1380–1422). He was less skilful in handling his English royal relatives; and when his cousin Henry, Duke of Lancaster, reacted to Richard’s high-handedness by seizing power as Henry IV, Richard’s peace policy towards France became a subject for debate. As a usurper, Henry IV hesitated to intervene, but his successor Henry V (1413–22) was confident he would show that by God’s grace he was the true King of France as well as of England. He prepared to fight.

  The second part of the Hundred Years War lasted less than a decade. Henry’s victory at Agincourt in 1415 was effective because he followed it up by overrunning Normandy and negotiating in 1420 a treaty with the spasmodically insane Charles VI. At Agincourt large numbers of the French aristocracy, including brothers of the Duke of Burgundy, were killed and the king’s nephew, Charles, Duke of Orléans, was captured. By this stage only one of Charles VI’s sons had survived, another Charles, as heir or Dauphin. In 1420 at Troyes, however, the father agreed to disinherit his own child and make Henry V his heir. Within a fortnight Henry took the hand of Catherine, Charles VI’s last unmarried daughter. Under the treaty, he also promised to continue with his conquests. To be acknowledged by the French as the next king of France, however, he had to outlive his father-in-law, but Henry died in 1422, some six weeks before Charles VI. His brother John, Duke of Bedford, was named regent for his son in France and his brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, regent for his son in England.

  Henry V’s victories in France had been aided by infighting within the French royal family. The insanity of their king had encouraged his nearest relations to struggle for power. In 1407 the king’s brother Louis, Duke of Orléans, had been assassinated as a result of a plot by their cousin John, Duke of Burgundy. The Orleanists were known as Armagnacs because of the second marriage of Charles, the new Duke of Orléans, to the Count of Armagnac’s daughter Anne.

  Throughout this period there were also rival popes. Louis of Orléans had supported the pope in Avignon, John of Burgundy the pope in Rome. Duke John took the same line as the University of Paris; and after the murder of his cousin there was a pay-off when Jean Petit, a university theologian, defended the killing of Duke Louis as the killing of a tyrant. Louis had behaved in a grand way: he had arranged the marriage of the king’s elder daughter Isabella, widow of Richard II of England, to his own son Charles (his first marriage) and given her an enormous dowry out of royal funds; he had showered himself with royal gifts; he had taken land in north-east France for himself and his supporters; he had also raised unpopular taxes for war against the English. He made it easy for John to be loved in the capital. With Louis out of the way, John made Paris his power base, forced Louis’s sons to be publicly reconciled with himself and purged the government of anyone he did not trust. In the end he overreached himself, however, and at a wrong moment for him, Charles VI recovered his sanity just long enough to favour the Armagnacs, so that even the people of Paris grew restive and John had to retreat to his own lands. His Flemish subjects, many of them involved in the cloth trade, were keen to have good commercial relations with the English, who supplied the cloth, so John was careful to maintain a truce with Henry V; and neither he nor his son Philip rallied to the side of their king at the battle of Agincourt in 1415.

  During the chaotic aftermath of that battle, he put loyalty aside and devised a scheme to regain the dominant position in France. In 1417 he persuaded Queen Isabella of Bavaria to join him in setting up a joint government, and in March 1418 he seized Paris. While Henry V took over more and more of northern France and the Dauphin Charles set up his Parlement, or supreme court, in Poitiers and a financial court in Bourges, Duke John had a dilemma: with whom should he ally? At first he favoured the English, but Henry’s capture of Pontoise near Paris made him and the queen withdraw to Champagne. He could not control Henry, but he might control the sixteen-year-old Dauphin. He met Charles for talks on the bridge of Montereau, where the Seine meets the Yonne: there was a scuffle and the duke was stabbed to death. Philip, his son, weighed advice coolly and chose to ally with Henry.

  Agincourt and Montereau determined French political events wholly for one decade and largely for two. In 1415 and after 1435 most of the French, except for long-time subjects of the English like the Gascons, fought the English. Between 1415 and 1435, however, they fought each other. When Joan erupted into public life, she assumed that Burgundians were the natural enemies of France. That was what her voices told her, though most Burgundians were French and th
eir duke was the premier peer of France.

  Joan’s political and military career had been determined by events in the 1420s. From 1420 France was effectively divided into three: in the north was English France, centred on Normandy; in the east, Burgundian France (Picardy and Champagne); and to the south of the Loire lay Dauphinist France, refuge of those Frenchmen who had transferred their allegiance from Charles VI to his son. By 1422, Henry V controlled most of the two northern sections and after his premature death it was from this area that his senior surviving brother, Bedford, worked to construct an Anglo-French kingdom for the infant-king Henry. Brother-in-law to Duke Philip, Bedford was just and efficient; and a steady run of victories confirmed his hold on northern France. Charles’s army was cut to pieces beside Cravant in 1423, his trusty Scots constable, James Earl of Buchan, was killed at Verneuil in 1424, and the logic of events persuaded Charles to avoid further military confrontation. While Bedford was in England in 1425–7 stemming a quarrel between his brother of Gloucester and his uncle Cardinal Beaufort, there was a reprieve. At Montargis the bastard of Orléans (half-brother to the captive duke) opened sluice gates to divide the forces of English besiegers and drown half of them, and soon much of Maine was in revolt. But the rising was crushed and in 1428 the English were poised to advance to the heart of Armagnac France and invest the city of Orléans itself. If Orléans fell, France would be bisected; and the richest, most populous parts of the country would be Anglo-Burgundian.