The Maid and the Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  The family tarried in the capital until the beginning of February 1414, when word suddenly reached the city that the duke of Burgundy had raised yet another army with the intention of marching on Paris. Louis II elected to stay behind and moved into the Bastille in preparation for defending the city. Yolande, concerned about the safety of her children, made plans to return to her castle at Angers. On February 5, with the duke of Burgundy’s forces having already achieved Compiègne, just two days’ ride from the city, the queen of Sicily gathered her brood and household together and hastily departed. She took her future son-in-law Charles with her, to be brought up with her own children, just as she had once taken the duke of Burgundy’s daughter Catherine into her home. There was nothing at all remarkable in this—nothing except that the quiet, withdrawn little boy Yolande shepherded out of Paris that cold February morning just two weeks short of his eleventh birthday would grow up to be the man Joan of Arc called the dauphin.

  UP UNTIL THE MOMENT of his adoption by Yolande and her family, young Charles’s life seems to have been one of long periods of neglect and loneliness punctuated by sharp bursts of confusion and fear. Born on February 22, 1403, he was the youngest of Isabeau’s seven surviving children. He had two older brothers and four sisters and was closest in age to his sister Catherine. As was common for the period, the children were given over to the care of nurses. Even so, the queen of France was reputed to be a particularly removed parent. A chronicler noted that complaints were brought to the king in June 1405 alleging that Isabeau was ignoring her offspring. The king asked his eldest son, the duke of Guyenne, eight years old at the time, about this. How long had it been since his mother had shown him affection, had caressed or kissed him? “Three months,” the child replied.

  Yolande of Aragon and her husband, Louis II, escort ten-year-old Charles out of Paris.

  Worse, the royal progeny were often used as bargaining chips or hostages in the power struggles that consumed the adults. When Charles was two, to escape the duke of Burgundy, the queen attempted to smuggle all three of her sons out of Paris. But John the Fearless got wind of the scheme, brought up an army, and intercepted Isabeau and the children as they were in the act of fleeing. There was a violent scene between John and Isabeau’s Bavarian brother, who was also accompanying her, and then the duke of Burgundy and his soldiers, brandishing their swords, grabbed the boys and brought them back to Paris. To prevent further escape, the royal princes were lodged under armed guard for the next four months in the Louvre. It was a period of intense unrest in Paris, and at night the frightened children could hear the shouts and clanging of weapons as well as cries of “Alarm! Alarm!” from the castle sentinels.

  When Charles was five, he and his siblings were again secretly removed from Paris by the queen. This time, Isabeau took her children to Melun, where they were barricaded for safety in a fortress surrounded by soldiers. The sojourn in Melun was interrupted by another precipitate departure, when Isabeau was again forced to evade the armies of the duke of Burgundy. The family did not return to Paris until the next year.

  And so it went throughout Charles’s childhood: the frightening, clandestine escapes from the capital, followed by the inevitable, heavily guarded return, often to the Louvre, and always more warfare, more violence, more blood. At ten, Charles witnessed the hostility of the butchers to his eldest brother and learned to fear the Parisian populace. The king’s insanity left him ill equipped to shoulder the demands of fatherhood, and even his youngest son knew better than to expect solicitude from that quarter. Charles’s mother, faced with an untenable political situation and desperately in need of allies, focused all of her familial attention on her eldest son, the duke of Guyenne, whose stature as heir to the throne lent her legitimacy, and whose goodwill was consequently necessary to her well-being. Absorbed in these, her own troubles, Isabeau simply had no time for her younger children. What crumbs of affection Charles managed to solicit came from the servants.

  And then came his engagement, and with it his transfer to Yolande’s care.

  For Charles, this must have been like stepping out of the darkness and into the light. Vanished were the fearful trappings of war-ravaged Paris—the angry voices of the soldiers, the threatening hostility of the crowds, the blood and beatings, all the evidence of the casual brutality that afflicted the city. Yolande’s castle at Angers was far removed from the front lines of civic unrest. Charles experienced the peace of the countryside. He could fall asleep at night without dread of being shaken awake and forced to flee in the darkness. There were no shouts of “Alarm!” and no rotting dead bodies piled by the side of the road in the morning. In September, he joined in the king and queen of Sicily’s annual migration to Provence. He took the long, slow barge ride with the rest of the family to the ancestral castle at Tarascon, and along the way was introduced to the beauty of the southern landscape of France.

  From being an annoyance and afterthought, overnight he became valued. Louis III, Yolande’s firstborn, was the same age and the two became friends; in later life, Louis III would put aside his own ambitions in order to fight for Charles. Marie, just a year younger, was also a playmate and companion. Although there seems to have been no real physical attraction between them (at least on Charles’s part), Marie nonetheless managed to forge a childhood bond with her future husband that over the years became the basis for the marriage. But of all his newfound siblings, it seems to have been little René who most wormed his way into Charles’s affections. An appealing child who would grow into an exceedingly charming adult, René possessed an artistic temperament that flourished in his mother’s household. He loved stories and books—he would eventually inherit Yolande’s extensive library and add to it—but also music, verses, and drawing. Perhaps because previously Charles himself had always been the youngest, he was attracted to René, or possibly he simply found the five-year-old less intimidating in the beginning, when he was still feeling his way in his new surroundings. For whatever reason, the pair established an early friendship and intimacy that survived into adulthood.

  But it was to Yolande herself that Charles, craving maternal affection, was most drawn. Yolande’s children, too, had nursemaids. René loved his so much that on her death nearly a half century later, he built her a beautiful crypt and had it inscribed with the playful dedication, “For the great love of nourishment.” (She had been his wet nurse.) But unlike Isabeau, the queen of Sicily paid attention to her children. She monitored their education and kept them with her whenever she could. There were no raving lunatics shut away in the recesses of Yolande’s palace; no cold, absent mother too busy with clothes and feasts and council meetings to notice a ten-year-old; only a warm, gentle, interested woman and happy children. This was Charles’s first experience of a loving parent and a normal family life, and he thrived on it.

  Yolande focused her attention upon Charles even more than was usual. Her daughter’s alliance with the royal family was very important to the queen of Sicily. She and Louis II had burned their bridges with the duke of Burgundy; there was no going back, this relationship had to work. Also, it is possible that she felt slightly guilty about having returned Catherine and so compensated for that act by being especially affectionate to Charles. Whatever the reason, Yolande made every effort to ensure that Charles was comfortable in her home and to earn his trust, and the boy, feeling himself loved and appreciated for the first time, opened up to her. He called her his “Bonne Mère”—his good mother—and became very attached to her, relying on her judgment and reflexively turning to her in moments of distress. No one had more influence with Charles than Yolande.

  Charles remained with the queen of Sicily without interruption for the next five years. This was the happiest interlude of his life. During that time, the entire family became intimately acquainted with him. As a result, there was no hope or dream, fear or worry, aspiration, fancy, apprehension, trouble, preoccupation, innermost thought, or secret prayer of Charles’s, expressed or unexpressed,
of which Yolande or one of her children was not aware.

  The family remained in Provence until the summer of 1415. Yolande was recuperating from the birth of her fifth child, a son whom she named Charles, yet another flattering sign of the esteem in which Isabeau’s son was held by the king and queen of Sicily. Then, in July, this peaceful domestic interlude was suddenly interrupted by the arrival of an official summons for Louis II from the French court. Word had arrived that the English were planning to invade France in the fall. To meet the threat, Charles VI had called upon all of his vassals to gather for a great council meeting at Rouen in October to prepare for war against England’s new king, Henry V.

  OWING TO THE EFFORTS of William Shakespeare, Henry V has had a very easy time of it throughout history. Handsome actors portray him in film and on stage. His memory is irrevocably intertwined with stirring speeches and lofty sentiments. He is soldier, lover, statesman, general, hero, majesty—the very definition of English daring and English mettle; the ideal king who, with a regiment of only six thousand ill and exhausted soldiers, took on the entire French army, an arrogant force ten times their size, and walloped them at Agincourt. What nobody ever mentions is that Henry’s noble assault on France took place at a time when the English king was perfectly aware that his enemies had spent the last eight years in a highly destructive civil war and were consequently in complete disarray, and that his counterpart, the French king, was a man who spent the majority of his time locked up in a castle ranting that he was being pursued by phantom enemies and insisting that he was actually somebody named George.

  Henry V was already a seasoned military commander by the time of his ascension to the throne in 1413, having honed his leadership skills during the numerous armed conflicts that had occurred during his father’s reign. Since it was generally recognized that Henry IV had usurped the crown from Richard II, there had been quite a bit of civil strife in the beginning. Not unreasonably, Richard’s legitimate heirs and their supporters resented this appropriation of the monarchy, and had done their best, through rebellion and warfare, to get it back. In 1403, when he was only sixteen years old, Henry had been enlisted by his father to help put down a revolt involving four thousand entrenched, well-trained Welsh and northern English soldiers. Early in the battle, the inexperienced Henry had taken an arrow full in the face but, to inspire his men, had left it there and fought on; afterward, he had to endure a lengthy, unanesthetized operation to remove the arrowhead, which was lodged deeply in his nose. Some makeshift tongs were inserted by degrees into the wound (which had to be widened bit by bit, the deeper the instrument was inserted) by the medical practitioner, a former counterfeiter turned king’s surgeon. “Then, by moving it to and fro, little by little (with the help of God) I extracted the arrowhead,” the reformed swindler later recounted. The rigors of war must have paled in comparison with the pain inflicted by this procedure, but by this experience did Henry V secure both his inheritance—he and his father won the battle—and his reputation for toughness.

  Still, a faint whiff of the sour odor of usurpation dogged Henry V’s coronation as it had his father’s, and the new king was sensitive to this. (At a meeting between the French and the English in July 1415, when Henry tried to press his government’s claims to lands in France, the French ambassador pointed out tartly that Henry was legally on rather thin ice, as the people with whom the archbishop should really be negotiating were the heirs of Richard II.) But Henry understood that nothing distracted from small improprieties at home like a triumph abroad. The question of his legitimate right to the English throne would forever be decided in his favor should he succeed in reclaiming some of these disputed territories in France. He would also never have a better opportunity to strike than at the beginning of his reign, when the Burgundians and Armagnacs were so consumed with killing each other that large portions of France might be available for the taking.

  Popular legend as encouraged again by Shakespeare records that the French reaction to this threat was one of scorn: the dauphin (the duke of Guyenne) reportedly sent Henry a box of tennis balls, implying that he should grow up. However, since the duke of Guyenne was only eighteen years old in 1415, while Henry himself was twenty-eight, this seems unlikely. Moreover, the duke of Guyenne was not involved in any of the negotiations preceding Henry’s invasion. The whole tennis ball anecdote “simply did not happen,” a noted expert on English medieval history stated flatly.

  What did happen was that both the Burgundians and the Armagnacs took Henry’s militarist stance very seriously, so much so that each side did its best to buy him off by proposing marriage alliances and other monetary and territorial inducements. The duke of Burgundy began the bidding by offering the hand of his daughter Catherine (now conveniently available, having been returned by the king and queen of Sicily), together with the suggestion that he and Henry together launch a campaign to seize the estates and fiefs currently held by the Armagnacs and split the spoils between them. The Armagnacs countered with the proposal that Henry instead marry the French king’s youngest daughter, also named Catherine, and threw in the lordship of Aquitaine, together with a whopping dowry of 800,000 crowns. Here the Armagnacs had the upper hand even without the financial and territorial incentives, as Henry was given an enthusiastic report of the princess Catherine’s looks by his brother, who had seen her, whereas the duke of Burgundy’s Catherine and her older sister (who was married to the duke of Guyenne) were unfortunately described by a fellow Burgundian as “looking like a couple of baby owls without feathers.”

  But far from forestalling the English king, these negotiations only reinforced Henry’s opinion of the weakness and division that existed among his enemies, and convinced him that he could achieve even more concessions by a show of strength. Although he took a sizable force with him, it is unlikely that he was intending a full-scale invasion; it is far more probable that he was simply hoping to make a reconnaissance for future attacks and to take home a quick spoil or two in the process. Whatever his true intent, on August 11, 1415, the king of England, in the company of an army of about twelve thousand men, of whom approximately six thousand were archers, set sail from Southampton, and by August 14 had landed in France near the town of Harfleur.

  On the French side, the great council meeting was slow to materialize. By the time the English had landed, the constable of France had managed to assemble a decent-sized army at nearby Rouen, enough to lend Harfleur an additional garrison of three hundred soldiers. But none of the other great lords of France and their respective men-at-arms had yet arrived. The constable took one look at the size of Henry’s battalion and sent back urgently to Paris for reinforcements.

  Charles VI was well enough to sign another summons on August 28, ordering up fresh troops. The question of the role the duke of Burgundy would play in the conflict was handled with some delicacy. The French army needed as many men as possible, but no one on the Armagnac side trusted the duke of Burgundy to lead his own soldiers into battle. There was too great a temptation, it was felt, that he would fight with the English rather than against them. In the end, the duke of Guyenne sent one of his own household to John the Fearless with the polite request that the duke supply five hundred knights and three hundred bowmen to aid the king’s effort against the English, but that it was quite unnecessary for the duke himself to put in an appearance.

  Despite the increasingly desperate messages from the constable asking for help in defending Harfleur, none of the major participants on the French side managed to get to Rouen with their forces until the middle of October. By that time, Henry V had taken the city, although at a significant cost: during the long siege of Harfleur his army had been decimated by dysentery. Approximately two thousand soldiers had succumbed outright to the disease, and thousands of others had either deserted or were too weak to be of use and had to be sent home. Harfleur fell on September 22, 1415, but by that time all that remained of the English army were nine hundred knights and about five thousand longbowmen
.

  The French—or rather the Armagnacs, for the duke of Burgundy’s forces did not get to Rouen in time—were finally in place, with the duke of Orléans and his troops arriving at the very last minute, around October 21. This left not much time for strategizing, but with the English army so reduced, and the French army so enhanced, there did not seem much need for a coordinated policy. They did decide, however, that for obvious reasons it was unwise for the king himself to participate, and they also insisted that the duke of Guyenne, as the heir to the throne, remain safely behind in Rouen. The only other high-ranking members of the French aristocracy excused from battle were the old duke of Berry, who was seventy-five, and Louis II, king of Sicily, who had contracted a bladder infection that prevented him from remaining for any extended period on his horse.

  The constable had scouts in place, watching the enemy’s movements. He knew that Henry and what was left of his army had left Harfleur the first week in October and set out for the safety of Calais, then in English hands, in preparation for returning to England. He had reports that the English soldiers were weary, ill, and hungry, and that their supplies were running out. Anxious that the king of England should not get away while the Armagnacs possessed such an overwhelming numerical advantage—there is no accurate estimate of the size of the French force, but the chaplain accompanying the English reported that “their numbers were so great as not to be even comparable with ours”—the French left Rouen as soon as the duke of Orléans arrived, and shadowed Henry’s troops, attempting to intercept him. On October 24, they caught up with him in a narrow field near the town of Agincourt, and the next morning advanced into battle.