The Maid and the Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  Not that Charles at this point demonstrated any particular interest in reviving Joan’s memory. The king’s overriding aspiration was to put the war behind him, either by defeating the English in battle or by bribing them to leave, two alternatives at which, in the years following his dramatic entrance into Paris, and despite Charles’s having finally matured into a much more effective ruler, he was remarkably unsuccessful. It would fall once again to Yolande of Aragon and her family, and in particular the hapless René, to help him to finish the war and, in so doing, reclaim the Maid for posterity.

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  THE QUEEN OF SICILY’S second son certainly made for an unlikely hero. In the years following his defeat at Bulgnéville and subsequent imprisonment by the duke of Burgundy, René’s career bore an unfortunate resemblance to the sort of fairy tale generally associated with the Brothers Grimm. The most deplorable luck dogged his heels even as the greatest of honors were showered on his head; he, who would help usher the Renaissance into France, was the recipient, often simultaneously, of the best and the worst the medieval world had to offer. Here was a man who by nature and inclination reveled in music, painting, and literature, but whose advancement lay in the mastering of the martial and political arts, a personal combination that resulted in disaster with an almost staggering consistency.

  It was therefore entirely symptomatic of René’s lot in life that, having done so much to advance his own cause by furthering the peace negotiations between Charles and Philip the Good, he would see his bargaining position with the duke of Burgundy suddenly deteriorate in an alarming fashion by virtue of an unlooked-for promotion. On November 12, 1434, just before the reconciliation talks at Nevers, while René still languished in his prison cell in Dijon, his older brother Louis III died unexpectedly of fever in Ca labria, at the southern tip of the kingdom of Naples. Poor Louis had lived in Italy for over a decade, with only brief excursions home to France to see family and friends, while he waited impatiently for the reigning queen of Naples, Joanna II, to die and pass along his inheritance. Unfortunately for Yolande’s eldest son, his benefactor outlived him by three months, and as Louis died childless, Joanna II instead named René as her successor. So when she too passed away on February 2, 1435, all of Louis III’s many titles and appendages fell to his younger brother, and Philip the Good suddenly found himself in possession not simply of René, duke of Bar and Lorraine, but of René, king of Sicily, duke of Anjou and Maine, and count of Provence—a transformation that represented, in the rank-sensitive hierarchy of medieval prisoners, a stunning upgrade to a much more valuable hostage. Moreover, the duke of Burgundy knew, as everyone did, that Joanna II’s will would be contested by the king of Aragon, and that René could be assured of this fabulous inheritance only by raising an army and going to Naples as soon as possible in order to claim his kingdom and defend his rights. That meant that every day René spent in Philip’s prison cell would make him that much more desperate to get out, and the more desperate René became, the duke of Burgundy reasoned with undeniable logic, the more his captive would be willing to pay for his freedom.

  Consequently, despite a concerted effort on the part of Yolande, Charles VII, the duke of Bourbon, Arthur of Richemont, and Regnault of Chartres to have René freed as a condition of the peace treaty of Arras, Philip the Good absolutely refused to consider this option. He had, by the purest stroke of good fortune, got a king rather than a mere duke in hand, and he wasn’t about to give up what was likely to be the most lucrative acquisition of his career just to make peace with his father’s killer. In the end it came down to reconciliation or René, and reconciliation won. The Treaty of Arras was signed without mention of the duke of Burgundy’s illustrious hostage, and the new king of Sicily remained miserably in prison.

  In this emergency, friends and family alike rallied to René’s cause. He was extremely fortunate in the determined character of his wife, Isabelle of Lorraine, who upon being informed of the situation in Naples volunteered to go to Italy to hold and administer the kingdom while René negotiated for his release. This seemed like a good plan, and so by letters of June 4, 1435, issued from Dijon, René appointed his wife lieutenant general of his southern Italian kingdom. Isabelle immediately picked up her two youngest children, Louis and Margaret, aged eight and five respectively (her eldest son, John, was a hostage along with his father, and her older daughter, Yolande, had already been promised to Antoine’s son and was living with the family of her betrothed), and sped down to Provence to assemble a fleet. She set sail from Marseille in a small convoy of five galleys, her children apparently still with her, at the beginning of October 1435, and by the eighteenth of the month had arrived at the capital city of Naples. A woman who clearly understood the importance of first impressions, no sooner had she disembarked than Isabelle made a point of parading all over town in great state under a velvet-and-gold canopy before appropriating a prominent royal castle as her living quarters, a bravado performance that, together with her five warships, won over the local population and allowed her time to establish her claim as ruler of the kingdom in her husband’s place.

  While René’s wife secured his holdings in Italy, his mother guarded his property in France. Isabelle had left the bishops of Metz and Verdun in charge of administering Bar and Lorraine, but in the absence of their legitimate overlord the civilian populations were plagued by incursions from roving mercenaries. The bishops appealed by a letter of March 10, 1436, to Yolande of Aragon for military aid—“expressing a confidence in her abilities second only to God,” René’s authoritative biographer, A. Lecoy de la Marche, observed drily—and the queen quickly convinced Charles VII to send both troops and artillery to protect her son’s territory. Yolande, of course, also acted as regent for René’s lands in Anjou and Provence, keeping the peace and defending against further inroads by the English, as she had for his older brother Louis while he was alive. Most important, she kept pressure on Philip the Good to release her son, enlisting the aid of not only the king of France and all of the extended royal family but also the pope and the most senior members of the Church in this effort.

  Philip, however, intent upon wringing the most from his prize, responded to these various entreaties with a series of startling exorbitant demands. First, he wanted three million gold ducats, then two million, then the duchy of Bar, all of which were completely unreasonable, and so poor René sat in his prison cell, literally growing a long gray beard and feeling very sorry for himself, throughout the long months of 1436. Finally, casting about for a new enticement, his supporters floated the rumor that Joanna II had left a great treasure at her castle in Naples that could be claimed only by her heir, and the duke of Burgundy began to think that letting his hostage go and collect this sum might be a better strategy after all than having him simply pine away, and perhaps even die of unhappiness, in his tower in Dijon.

  And so at the beginning of the following year, these two great lords met in Lille one last time to hammer out acceptable terms for René’s release. On February 11, 1437, a treaty highly favorable to the duke of Burgundy was finally signed. By this document, in exchange for his permanent release from captivity, René agreed to pay Philip the Good the whopping sum of 400,000 écus in four yearly installments of 100,000 apiece, and he and his mother had to cede all of their rights to their territories in Flanders. (Yolande was made to sign the treaty as well.) René was allowed to keep the duchies of Bar and Lorraine but had to put up several towns, including Neufchâteau, as surety against the payment of the ransom money. Many of his most important vassals, including Robert de Baudricourt, had also to indemnify payment and go to prison in René’s place in the event of default, and the marriage between his eldest daughter and Antoine’s son was again confirmed. As René was already substantially in debt and did not have 10,000 écus to his name, let alone 400,000, he had to engage his eldest son, John, to the duke of Bourbon’s daughter, who fortunately came with a dowry of 150,000 écus, to make the first payment.

/>   The agreement represented a staggering financial blow, but at least the new king of Sicily had his liberty. He had to spend the rest of the year fund-raising, scrounging off friends, begging for funds from Anjou and Provence, and appealing to Charles VII for help from the royal treasury, but eventually he scraped together enough money to assemble a small army. Isabelle sent back her five galleys to Marseille for her husband’s use, and René, in the company of his eleven-year-old eldest son, who had been released with him, finally embarked for Italy and by May 1438 was in Naples. In a chivalric gesture that he no doubt came quickly to regret, knowing that he would soon have to fight the king of Aragon for his title, he gallantly sent his wife and children home to Provence, even though Isabelle was by this time far more familiar than he with the local baronage and serpentine ways of Neapolitan politics. Soon after his family sailed, the new king of Sicily, alone in a city of which he understood precious little, whose previous experience of warfare was limited to three battles, the last of which had ended in debacle, nervously barricaded himself in a castle while he waited for the enemy forces to mount an attack.

  YOLANDE OF ARAGON was in her late fifties, a venerable age for the period, by the time her son René was at last released from his prison cell and free to pursue his all-important Angevin Italian inheritance. Although the queen of Sicily was nearing the end of her life, there is no indication of her slowing down in any way, or retiring from public affairs, or losing her influence at court. On the contrary: at the important representative meeting of the États généraux held in October 1439 in Orléans, convened to discuss military reforms and the implementation of a permanent tax to help finance the war effort, two thrones were set up for the opening convocation—one for the king of France, and the other for his mother-in-law.

  Although certainly subject to personal tragedy—the death of her eldest son, Louis III, in 1434 was followed by the untimely loss of her youngest daughter in 1440—Yolande of Aragon could look back over her career with satisfaction. Despite the continued presence of the English in Maine and Normandy, the great work of her life, the reclamation of the throne of France for her daughter and son-in-law, had been accomplished. Charles VII’s legitimacy was unquestioned; his eldest boy, Louis, Yolande’s grandson, would inherit the kingdom at his death; the line of succession was firmly established. As Raymondin, with Melusine’s aid, had taken over his cousin Aimery’s lands and risen to become a richer and more powerful lord than he whom he had murdered, so had Charles VII, by the Treaty of Arras, taken over his assassinated cousin’s lands and been acknowledged to be a greater lord than Philip the Good. And just as Melusine had provided her husband with sons who would go on to perform great feats that brought honor to the family’s name, so too would Charles’s descendants rule gloriously after the king’s demise.

  Nor in achieving this remarkable turnaround had the queen of Sicily neglected her other children, or her husband’s legacy. After René’s release from prison, she had not only given him as much of her own money as was available but used her influence in Anjou and at court and within the Church to help him secure the funds necessary to raise his army. Similarly, by her efficient elimination of Georges de la Trémoïlle, Yolande had placed her third son, Charles of Anjou, count of Maine, in a position of great power at court. No sooner had the previous favorite left than the count of Maine took his place in Charles VII’s affections. The king could not do without him, and kept the younger Charles beside him always as his closest adviser, calling him “a brave prince, a true man of war endowed with a remarkable beauty.” So influential was the count of Maine that he provoked the jealousy of the other barons, and the duke of Bourbon tried more than once to unseat him at court. But between them, Charles of Anjou and his mother had managed to defeat these conspiracies, and by 1439 very little could be accomplished in France without the support of the count of Maine.

  There was, in fact, only one circumstance for which Yolande of Aragon could reproach herself: the loss of the duchy of Maine, which included the capital city of Le Mans. The English occupation of this important Angevin holding had occurred during her regency, and she could not reconcile herself to its forfeiture. She had tried to retrieve it militarily, by working with Arthur of Richemont and the duke of Alençon, both of whom had sporadically sent in commando units to try to force the English out, but these had been unsuccessful. At the time of the Treaty of Arras, when hopes of peace ran high throughout the occupied territories, artisans at the cathedral of Le Mans were at work on a stunning stained glass window depicting the figures of Louis I and his wife, Marie of Blois, and Louis II and Yolande of Aragon alongside the duke of Bourbon, a touching symbol of the faith the community still had in its lineage and in particular its surviving duchess. To have this cathedral (which she still supported financially) in the hands of the enemy was a provoking reminder of her impotence, and the queen of Sicily was not a woman who liked to lose.

  Coincidently, toward the end of the decade—the exact date is not known, but certainly by 1439—she had one of her granddaughters, René’s younger girl, nine-year-old Margaret, sent back from Italy to live with her. Margaret, who was dowered with the duchy of Bar, had been promised to the son of the count of Saint-Pol on March 25, 1437, as part of René’s ongoing effort to keep his property out of the hands of the duke of Burgundy. The usual procedure was of course for the girl to go to live with her intended’s family, as her older sister had done. But this did not happen in Margaret’s case; instead, she was given over to the care of her indomitable grandmother. It might have been that René felt the need to have his mother safeguard the fate of the duchy of Bar, or it might have been that Yolande herself was not entirely happy with this alliance and, observing that strong-willed, intelligent Margaret was developing into something of a beauty, wished to try for a more prestigious match. Certainly, the queen of Sicily took pains to train her granddaughter, of whom she would become very fond, to be a great lady, and did not neglect to instruct her in all the skills necessary to the administration of a noble appendage. At the age of eleven, Margaret was already checking payments and learning to balance the accounts of her grandmother’s treasury.

  Margaret’s arrival at her grandmother’s chateau in Saumur seems also to have coincided with a new round of diplomatic talks between England and France that occurred in July 1439 at the port of Gravelines, northeast of Calais. “In this year, many noble ambassadors were assembled…. They held several meetings to consider if they could not bring about a general peace between the two kings and their allies, and also respecting the deliverance of the duke of Orléans, who had remained a prisoner in England since the battle of Agincourt,” reported Enguerrand de Monstrelet. The English again floated the idea of a long-term truce supported by a royal marriage between the two kingdoms, but as they still insisted that Henry VI be recognized as king of both England and France, “they could not agree on any conclusion worth speaking of; for the English refused to treat with the king of France unless the duchy of Normandy, together with all their other conquests, remained to them independent of the crown of France,” the chronicler observed. However, this was the second time that marriage had been mentioned as a means to peace, and with good reason. The conflict had by this time lasted so long that Henry VI, who had been an infant when the crown passed to him through his father, was now eighteen. It began to occur to those on the French side that the king of England would be married, and married soon, and that whom he married—what allies might yet be brought into the fray on the side of their enemies through matrimony—could very likely determine the direction of the war.

  ALTHOUGH ENGLAND’S public position as regards Henry VI’s sovereignty over France did not waver at the conference at Gravelines, there was strong and growing disillusionment among the English baronage with the war effort, which cost so much and returned so little. A movement toward surrendering the dream of the double monarchy and protecting what was left of England’s holdings on the continent by bringing the conflict to
an honorable end was taking hold among a number of Henry VI’s counselors. That by the beginning of the next year their influence began to dominate the government is evidenced by the decision in 1440 finally to ransom the duke of Orléans, in the hope of using this gentleman to promote peace.

  The wisdom of selecting as a goodwill ambassador an individual who had just spent the past twenty-five years in an English prison cell might ordinarily be questioned, but in fact the duke of Orléans was at this point so wretched, and had been disappointed so many times in the past, and had so lost all hope of rescue, that he was willing to agree to almost anything his captors suggested. The ransom figure was set at 200,000 écus and, in another implausible twist of history, was actually paid by Philip the Good, whose father had started the whole mess by murdering the duke of Orléans’s father three decades earlier. Philip had no problem meeting the English demands because he happened to have a sizable cash outlay on hand owing to René’s having paid the first two installments on his ransom. “While these negotiations were pending, and afterward, the duke of Burgundy had a great desire to aid the duke of Orléans in his deliverance, as well from their near connection by blood, as that, on his return to France, they might remain good friends, forgetting all former feuds that had existed between their houses,” Enguerrand de Monstrelet observed. “He caused him to be sounded, whether he would be willing to marry his niece… and also, in case of his deliverance, if he would agree to ally himself with the duke of Burgundy, without taking any measures in times to come against him or his family, in consequence of the former quarrels between their fathers…. The duke of Orléans, considering the long imprisonment he had suffered and might still undergo, readily assented to these propositions.”