The Maid and the Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  These were markedly weak incentives, but Philip, who lacked his father’s fierce ambition and homicidal ruthlessness (and for this reason was known as “Philip the Good”), felt he had no choice but to take them. The English king did not really need Philip the Good’s military support in order to take Paris; with his enemies in such disarray, his army was sufficiently intimidating to do that on its own. Besides, Isabeau, lured by Henry’s pledge that she could continue to live in queenly splendor during the English occupation, had already convinced Charles VI to accept Henry’s conditions. Philip gritted his teeth, signed the treaty of alliance, and sent troops from Burgundy to aid England in the conquest of France.

  In the spring of 1420, Henry V and his army, having been joined by Philip the Good’s men-at-arms, swept easily through northeastern France and took the cities of Laon, Reims, and Châlons, very close to the duchy of Bar. On March 23, Henry triumphantly entered Troyes, where he was met with great ceremony by Isabeau and Charles VI, who treated him like a long-lost and much-beloved member of the family. The final details of the French surrender were hammered out; Henry promised to bring all of France under his rule; and the dauphin Charles was officially disinherited. Not a man to waste time, Henry married Princess Catherine on June 2, 1420, at the cathedral of Troyes, and by June 4 was on the road again with his army, with the intention of attacking Montereau and Melun, whose citizens were still loyal to the dauphin. Melun in particular was strongly defended and held out as long as it could, but by November hunger forced its garrison to open the gates of the city to its besiegers.

  On December 1, 1420, Henry V rode into Paris and took possession of the capital and the government of France. A month later, on January 17, 1421, Charles VI issued a formal letter to his Parisian subjects in which he in effect reiterated the clause in the Treaty of Troyes disinheriting his son. (“Item, In view of the horrific and enormous crimes perpetrated in the said kingdom of France by Charles, so-called dauphin of Vienne, it is agreed that neither we, nor our son Henry, nor our very-dear son of the duke of Burgundy, shall negotiate any peace or agreement with the aforesaid Charles.”) In his letter, the king warned his subjects against remaining loyal to the dauphin. “One should not take account of the youth of the said Charles,” the mad king wrote, “because he is quite old enough to tell good from evil.”

  But the “so-called dauphin” was not ready to give up. On March 22, 1421, Charles fought back at the battle of Baugé, in Yolande’s duchy of Anjou, between Angers and Tours. A thousand knights and men-at-arms from Angers in service to the queen of Sicily were mustered under the command of one of her leading vassals, the lord of Fontaines, and these, in combination with a seasoned force of four thousand archers sent from Scotland to fight on the side of the dauphin (the Scots hated the English and could always be counted upon to fight against them) and a third troop of loyalists from La Rochelle, met an army of approximately sixty-five hundred English soldiers led by Henry V’s younger brother, the duke of Clarence. (Henry had returned to England for a short visit to drum up additional money and troops for his French occupation.) Combat lasted into the darkness, but at midnight the Scottish commanders, the earls of Douglas and Buchan, were able to send a messenger to the dauphin, who had remained behind at Poitiers, with the glad tidings that the battle was won, the enemy vanquished or taken prisoner, and the English duke of Clarence killed.

  But this victory, while protecting Yolande’s all-important duchy of Anjou and effectively preventing the English from making further inroads into the dauphin’s territories south of the Loire, represented Charles’s one bright moment in a time line of otherwise increasingly bleak episodes. No matter how hard the dauphin tried, Henry always seemed to have the upper hand. Never much of a soldier—“He didn’t willingly arm himself, and he didn’t love war at all, if he could avoid it,” wrote a chronicler of the period—Charles nonetheless managed to muster an army of some eighteen thousand men and made an attempt to take back Chartres in the summer of 1421, only to retreat in the face of the English king’s superior numbers. (Henry had returned from England accompanied by an alarming contingent of men-at-arms, some twenty-eight thousand in all.) On December 6, 1421, Charles’s sister Catherine launched a further attack on his fortunes by giving birth to her first child, a son, thereby providing her husband Henry V and the crown of France with a male heir. Charles countered feebly by finally marrying his longtime fiancée, Yolande’s daughter Marie (a commitment he had clearly been putting off for as long as he could), at a ceremony in out-of- the-way Tours on June 2, 1422. So limited were his funds and so great his military expenses that he had to sell the tapestries off the walls of one of his castles to pay for the wedding.

  Even in death, the English king seemed to triumph. When Henry V was cut down by dysentery at the age of thirty-five on August 31, 1422, and Charles’s own father, the poor insane king of France, finally made peace with his demons and followed his adopted English heir to the grave on October 21 of the same year, it was not the dauphin who was recognized publicly in Paris to succeed to the throne, but Henry’s infant son, Henry VI, with Henry V’s brother, the duke of Bedford, acting as regent. Charles could not even attend the funeral of his father, which was held in grand manner, first at Notre Dame, before an audience consisting of the masters of the university, the mendicants, and the Parlement of Paris, and then at Saint-Denis, where he was buried by some estimates before a crowd of eighteen thousand. The common people were bereft; Charles VI had ruled for over forty years, and although his terrible illness had made possible the turmoil in which the kingdom found itself, the king himself had ever held the loyalty, compassion, and goodwill of his subjects, some of whom could still remember the golden promise of his youth. “All the people in the streets and at the windows sobbed and cried as if every one of them were watching his own heart’s darling die,” wrote an eyewitness. “In front were two hundred and fifty torches carried by the poor servants, all dressed in black and weeping bitterly; just ahead were eighteen funeral bell-men. There were also thirty-four crosses of religious orders, and others who went before him sounding their bells.”

  Yet eerily, for all of the outpouring of grief among the populace, not a single member of the royal family was in attendance. Catherine was in En gland with her child, and Isabeau, although living in Paris at the time, did not put in an appearance. The queen was no doubt aware that she was not held in the same high regard by the citizens of Paris as her husband had been and might have been afraid to show herself publicly. “Thus his body was borne along and after it came the Duke of Bedford, brother of the late King of England, all alone, the only mourner; there was not one French prince there.” At the burial site, the chief of the gendarmes shouted, “‘God grant life to Henry, by the grace of God, king of France and of England, our Sovereign Lord,’ to which the masses cried out in a single voice, ‘Vive le roi! Vive le roi! Long live the king! Long live the king!’”

  By contrast, Charles was forced to hold his own induction ceremony a few days later. It was reported by chroniclers that he wept when informed of the death of his father, and wore black, but for only one day; the next morning he appeared in church in a majestic crimson robe, “and there were many heralds clothed in coats fashioned with the arms and blazons of their lords and masters.” Charles was in Auvergne, in southern France, when he heard the news, so the inaugural, such as it was, took place at a local church near Le Puy. “Then there was raised a banner of France within the chapel, and those officers of the arms began to cry many times loudly and clearly, ‘Long live the king,’” the chronicler reported. “After the cry had ceased, Divine Service began in the church, and no other solemnity was then performed, and from that day forward those adhering to his party began to call him king of France.”

  Portrait of the man Joan of Arc called the dauphin, the future Charles VII.

  Altogether, this convocation was a decidedly depressing affair that only served to highlight Charles’s impotence; no French king in living m
emory had assumed the throne so ignominiously, and with such a paltry display of pomp and ritual. “French historians have speculated that he would not even have made the gesture if it had not been for the promptings of his mother-in-law, Yolande, who… enlisted Regnauld of Chartres’s [the archbishop of Reims] help in badgering Charles into speaking up for himself,” observed one of Joan of Arc’s biographers. Worse, this self-administered investiture only added to the humiliation heaped on Charles by his enemies, the English and the Burgundians, who thereafter derisively referred to him as “the king of Bourges.”

  DURING THIS PERIOD, passions in Domrémy mirrored those in the kingdom at large. With the inhabitants of the duchy of Bar loyal to the dauphin, and those of Lorraine partisan to Philip the Good, conflict broke out regularly, as if the war were being fought in miniature. In May 1422, while Henry V was still alive, René’s father-in-law, the gouty duke of Lorraine, observing that Charles’s fortunes were not very promising, made a special visit to the Burgundian city of Dijon in order to pledge his alliance and goodwill to Philip the Good; at the same time he recognized Henry V as the legitimate sovereign of France. René, only thirteen at the time, was in no position to stop him. Encouraged by their duke’s action, Joan’s neighbors on the east bank of the river—the Burgundians—began conducting raids against those of the dauphin’s loyal subjects living on the west bank. When an inquisitor later asked Joan, “In the town of Maxey, were they Burgundians or enemies of the Burgundians?” she answered, “They were Burgundians.” When he pressed her further—“Were you ever with little children who fought for the side which is yours?”—she responded, “No, I have no memory of that; but I did see that certain people of the town of Domrémy had fought against those of Maxey, whence they came back sometimes much wounded and bleeding.” Joan also volunteered that during these years of her childhood she frequently had to help take her father’s cattle “to a fortified place which was called the Isle, for fear of men-at-arms.”

  It was in late childhood, with a dangerous conflict swirling around her, and the tacit presence of soldiers ever in the background, that Joan began to display a deep spirituality. She attended church regularly and her obvious devotion to religion was remarked on by her friends and neighbors. “Jeannette would go often and of her own will to church and to the hermitage of Notre Dame de Bermont near to the town of Domrémy, when her parents thought that she was ploughing or working elsewhere out in the fields,” said a farmer from nearby Greux who knew her in childhood. “When she heard the bell toll for Mass while she was out in the fields, she came away to the town and to the church to hear the Mass, as I have seen her do.” “She was brought up in the Christian religion and full of good ways, as it seemed,” said her next-door neighbor, Marguerite. “She went of her own will and often to church and gave alms out of her father’s property and was so good, simple and pious that I and the other young girls would tell her that she was too pious.” Joan confessed regularly to her parish priest and was so reverent that her overt displays of devotion provoked some teasing, particularly by the boys of the village. She was particularly drawn to the peaceful quiet of her local church, which might have contained images of the virgin martyrs Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Margaret of Antioch, or perhaps a statue of Saint Michael the Archangel, “the captain-general of the armies of heaven”; in any event, she would have learned about the lives of these saints from the sermons given on their annual feast days.

  Saints, soldiers, God, devotion, the dauphin, and the Burgundians—these were the disparate influences that contrived to weave their pattern on Joan’s soul as she grew into adolescence. She did not, as so many believe, become who she was despite having been born in provincial, out-of- the-way Domrémy, but because of it.

  THEN, IN THE SUMMER of 1423, Yolande of Aragon finally returned from Provence.

  The queen of Sicily had been extremely productive during her four-year absence from Anjou. She had installed her eldest son, Louis III, as count of Provence in her deceased husband’s place, and seen to it that he received the homage of all of the most important barons in the county. In keeping with the hopeless Angevin tradition of trying to reclaim the family’s Italian inheritance, she had then sent seventeen-year-old Louis III to Rome in 1420 to obtain the consent of the pope for his enterprise, convinced the general assembly in Aix to contribute 100,000 florins toward his war effort, used the money to purchase an army and a fleet of Provençal ships, and then sent this force to Naples to aid her son in his conquest. Southern Italy, plagued by political factions, folded in the face of such competent management. By June 1423, Louis III had been officially accepted as the heir to the throne by the then reigning queen of Naples, Joanna II, and was ensconced at her court, learning the ways of his future kingdom and waiting for her to die so he could come into his inheritance. Her eldest son’s future being thus assured, Yolande turned her attention once again to the fortunes of her daughter and son-in-law in France.

  She found Charles’s campaign to be a disaster on nearly every front. If he had been trying to lose the monarchy he could not have done a more efficient job of it. On April 17 of that year, the duke of Brittany, whose friendship Yolande had so carefully cultivated before she left for Provence, had abandoned Charles’s cause as unsalvageable and signed a treaty with the duke of Bedford and Philip the Good, which became known as the Triple Alliance. This diplomatic disappointment had been followed almost immediately by a further military setback when on July 30 Philip’s forces had trounced Charles’s at the town of Cravant in Champagne. The English were again advancing into Yolande’s dominions of Maine and Anjou; an army led by the duke of Suffolk was within ten leagues (about thirty miles) of her home castle of Angers; and Charles himself was demoralized, profligate, and surrounded by a staff of bickering counselors who jostled for money and influence. About the only positive development at court for which Charles could take some credit had occurred on July 3 when Yolande’s daughter Marie had given birth to the couple’s first child, a son, Louis, thereby establishing a line of succession, although even here Charles could not really be said to have done the heavy lifting.

  Yolande wasn’t at Bourges with her daughter and son-in-law a week before she realized that if anything was going to be done to remedy this situation she was going to have to do it herself. Her first and most pressing problem was the English invasion of Anjou. The castle at Angers, which Yolande as regent was responsible for maintaining in the absence of Louis III, was one of the most important fortresses in France. If the enemy occupied that great stronghold they would be almost impossible to dislodge; Angers simply could not afford to be lost. Yet Charles’s army had been decimated by the Burgundians at the recent battle at Cravant—more than six thousand of his men-at-arms had been killed, with another two thousand taken prisoner—and he had neither the will nor the resources to launch another counteroffensive so soon. Some other means of defense would have to be arranged.

  So Yolande left the safety of Bourges and traveled to her threatened castle in Angers to mobilize and prepare for an assault. She arrived on August 19, 1423, and immediately summoned her vassals from Anjou and Maine as was her legal right as duchess, ordering them to present themselves and their required men-at-arms for battle. Her call was heeded by both the nobility and the peasantry, and a strong force—one chronicler put it at as large as six thousand armed men—was quickly organized under the banner of the count of Aumale, an experienced Angevin commander. The English, under the earl of Suffolk, thinking the territory undefended, were at this point ravaging the countryside. “In this same year [1423] there assembled in Normandy about two thousand five hundred English combatants, under the lead of lord de la Pole [the earl of Suffolk]… and [these] passed in good order the country of Maine, and from thence, laying waste the country, they went as far as Angers, where they did great damage, and took in the said country a great spoil of prisoners, cattle, and other goods,” wrote an English chronicler.

  But the count of Auma
le, who was far more familiar with the terrain than his opponents, crept up with his army from behind Suffolk’s men, cut them off, and on September 26 launched a sneak attack. “The said English, not knowing of the approach of their enemies, were so taken by surprise, that… at length they were forced to yield the victory to their said enemies; and they lost upon the spot about eight hundred men…. And there were taken prisoners the said lord de la Pole, and with him thirty gentlemen of his party.” Those English who were not killed or captured were forced to retreat out of Anjou and Maine. This was not a decisive battle—Suffolk’s troops represented only a fraction of the overall English force—but the initiative at least gave Charles’s adversaries pause; more important, the castle of Angers remained safely in Yolande’s hands.

  Having bought herself some breathing room, she was able to focus on diplomacy, an art at which, after so many years of practice, she excelled. In November, the queen of Sicily traveled to Nantes to confer with her old friend, the duke of Brittany. The upshot of this parley was that the duke of Brittany’s brother, Arthur of Richemont, although married to one of Philip the Good’s sisters, nonetheless deserted the Burgundians and instead agreed to be Charles’s constable. “There can be little doubt that [this]… was a result of the mediation of Yolande of Aragon, who used her influence with [the duke] of Brittany to win him over,” observed medievalist M. G. A. Vale.

  However, as promising as these negotiations were, they were not in themselves enough to resuscitate Charles’s political and military fortunes. Because the next year, 1424, he lost another terrible battle, this time to the English at Verneuil.