Joan of Arc (18 page)

The picture these reports build up is of a simple, pious, serious girl, of no special status in her village, and one whose strong convictions alone marked her out from her friends. Before her original trial, investigators had been sent to Domremy, but they were searching only for evidence with which they could convict her; and they found none. Nicolas Bailly, Notary of Andelot, had come one day to the village with several other persons and, at the request of Jean de Torcenay, bailly of Chaumont for the ‘pretended King of France and England’ (Henry VI), he set about inquiring into Joan’s conduct and life, but could not ‘induce the inhabitants of Vaucouleurs to depose’. Now he admitted he had seen her often in her father’s house and said ‘she was a good girl, of pure life and good manners, a good Catholic who loved the Church and went often on pilgrimage to the church of Bermont, and confessed nearly every month’, as ‘I learned from a number of the inhabitants of Domremy, whom I had to question on the subject at the time of the inquiry that I made with the Provost of Andelot’.

At Vaucouleurs Joan moved for the first time into a grander world; and she astonished those she met with her assurance. Jean de Metz or de Novelompert, the first knight to follow her, heard her say that before the middle of Lent she must be with the king, for ‘no one in the world, neither kings, nor dukes, nor the King of Scotland’s daughter [Margaret, daughter of James I, who was betrothed to Louis, afterwards Louis XI] nor any others can recover the kingdom of France’; only she could provide the help that was needed. Who had told her that, he asked? ‘God,’ she replied. Jean was willing to take her to the king, but would she go dressed as she was? ‘I will willingly wear men’s clothes,’ she replied, so Jean then gave her the dress and equipment of one of his men. He was impressed by her lack of fear: ‘I had absolute faith in her, her words and her ardent faith in God inflamed me, I believe she was sent from God; she never swore, she loved to attend Mass, she confessed often, and frequently gave alms.’

Catherine Leroyer (who with her husband, a wheelwright in Vaucouleurs, had become an early convert to Joan’s cause), took Joan as a guest in her house at Vaucouleurs, where Durand Laxart had brought her to stay, and got to know her well. Joan, she said, was ‘good, simple, gentle, respectful, well behaved, and went freely to Church and to confession’. She believed that through Joan the prophecy, of which Joan reminded her, would be fulfilled, that France, which had been lost by a woman (presumably Charles VII’s mother), would be saved by a virgin from the borders of Lorraine. Bertrand de Poulengey testified that on the journey to Chinon ‘at night, Joan slept beside Jean de Metz and me, fully dressed and armed. I was young then; still I never felt for her any physical desire: I would never have dared to approach her, because of her great goodness.’

In Chinon Joan first came across the great of the land. The courtiers of the ‘King of Bourges’ may have lacked the glamour she would have expected, as they were dispirited by repeated failure. Of the people she met there none was so important to her as Charles himself, who could not testify on her behalf; and none was so true to her as one of the royal cousins, John II, Duke of Alençon, a descendant of Philip III (1270–85), so third cousin to Charles VI, and nephew by marriage to Charles VII’s sister. Although of the blood royal, he was yet more closely related to Charles by his recent marriage to Joan, daughter of Charles of Orléans, the king’s cousin, which firmly attached him to the loyal side of the royal family. He was young, handsome, brave, passionate. His father was killed at Agincourt and he himself had been captured at Verneuil in 1424 and ransomed for the huge sum of 80,000
saluts
. To help raise his ransom money his wife pawned her jewels, while he had to give up the barony of Fougères to his uncle the Duke of Brittany and a property in Touraine to the Bishop of Angers; he was released from his oath to surrender his lands only after victory at Orléans. As Henry V had bequeathed Alençon itself to Bedford, now English Regent, Alençon’s true duke was a natural foe of Henry VI.

Once Alençon heard that a girl had arrived at Chinon declaring she was sent by God to defeat the English and raise the siege of Orléans, he hurried to greet her from St-Florent, where he was hunting quails. The two took to each other at once. She welcomed him as a man of the blood royal and named him ‘
mon beau duc
’. He was charmed to find she was a tomboy. After dinner the following day, while the king went for a walk, Alençon watched as Joan coursed, and when he saw how well she managed her lance, he gave her a horse. He was a witness to her first interrogation by senior clergy and knew she told them she heard voices and received advice as to what to do, but he was not sure if she told them what the voices told her. Once when they dined together she told him she had not told the clergy everything. He did not go to the more searching examination at Poitiers, but knew the clergy there told Charles that in his dire troubles he could make use of her. He was then sent to the king’s mother-in-law, Queen Yolande of Sicily, to ask for supplies to be prepared for the army of Orléans. Alençon did not set out with her, but he joined her later. He remembered how the captains and soldiers who took part in the siege said that what happened was a miracle.

He joined her after Orléans had been saved. He came to love her habit of taking risks. Outside Jargeau she urged him to attack. ‘On, gentle Duke, to the assault!’ (
Avant, gentil duc, à l’assaut!
) she called out; and, when he told her it was too soon to attack so quickly, ‘Have no fear,’ she said to him, ‘the time is right when it pleases God; we must work when He wills it. Act, and God will act!’ Later she added, ‘Ah! gentle Duke, are you afraid? Did you not know that I promised your wife to bring you back, as safe and sound as you were?’ His wife was anxious he should not be captured and ransomed again. Joan had promised to return him in one piece or in even better shape than he was. They spent several days together with his wife and mother at St-Laurent, near Saumur.

Despite being the commander, Alençon did not object to Joan’s advice. He was conscious that during the attack on Jargeau Joan had told him to move from his current position just before enemy shot killed the Sieur de Lude beside him. It was she who led the attack and Alençon who followed. Forced to the ground by a stone that hit her helmet, she immediately got up and encouraged the troops: ‘Our Lord has condemned the English.’ Alençon yielded to her: she begged him to cooperate with Richemont, the disgraced Constable, who was Alençon’s uncle; and so together they won the battle of Patay. When the fighting was over, the defeated Talbot came into the presence of Joan, the Constable and Alençon, who said how surprised he was at what had happened. It is the fortune of war, commented Talbot tersely. And so they rejoined the king and went with him to Reims for the coronation.

Joan had said many times that she wished to accomplish four things: to beat the English, to have the king crowned and consecrated at Reims; to deliver the Duke of Orléans from the hands of the English; and to raise the siege of Orléans. She did not live to see her four wishes achieved, but Alençon did. Twenty-five years after he last saw her, he still thought of her as a chaste young woman, who hated women camp followers – at St-Denis, sword in hand, she had once chased one away – and was angry with him if he swore. He had seen her clad in armour, he had seen her naked breasts. She was an excellent Catholic, so far as he could tell, who communicated often, and when not fighting was ‘a simple, young girl’, but when ‘bearing the lance, bringing an army together, making war, directing artillery’ she was as skilful ‘as a captain who had fought for twenty or thirty years’. In the use of artillery she was marvellous.

This testimony is impressive since Alençon himself was hardly straightforward. Like his cousin Charles VII he dabbled in astrology. He was anti-English, but not always loyal to his king. During the Hundred Years War he rebelled with his godson Louis, the future Louis XI, and in the course of the nullification trial the king had him arrested. In 1458 he was condemned for treason by his peers, but on the accession of Louis in 1461 he was released. Louis, however, did nothing to prevent his being ruined from the results of his waywardness; and on his death the duchy of Alençon reverted to the crown. In fifteenth-century French history, Alençon was an erratic figure: in his unquestioning devotion to Joan, however, he was constant and consistent.

Another John played an almost more important part in Joan’s story. The Bastard of Orléans, half-brother to Charles, Duke of Orléans, who was famously imprisoned in England for twenty-five years after Agincourt, had been brought up as a member of the Orléans family after the murder of his father, Duke Louis. Born in 1402, he grew up with the Dauphin Charles. This shared upbringing, together with the fact that his half-brother was out of the country for such a long period, gave him a prominence in national affairs rare even for the illegitimate son of a peer of royal blood. From his mid-teens he was a professional soldier determined to avenge the wrongs of his house, of which he was the virtual head. His marriage in 1422 to the daughter of Louvet, president of the Parlement, linked him to the legal and bureaucratic classes who ran the administration; but when Louvet fell from grace the Bastard fell too, and was sent into exile. The English attempt to overrun the duchy of Orléans brought him back into the war, and when Orléans itself was under threat, he was the obvious leader of the defence. It was this task that first brought him into close contact with Joan. She died long before he had turned into the statesman who as ‘one of the finest French speakers there is of the French language’ used his eloquence to draw up the Treaty of Arras in 1435 between France and Burgundy; who was made count of Dunois in 1439; who ransomed his half-brother the duke in 1440; who reconciled the king and the Dauphin Louis; whose capture of Dieppe in 1443 prepared the way for the reconquest of Normandy; who eventually became the Count of Longueville; and who marched towards Guyenne in 1451 near the end of the Hundred Years War. Apart from a short period of falling-out with Charles VII in the 1420s and a longer period of falling-out with Louis XI in the 1460s he was in royal favour for most of his fifty years in public life. To Joan, however, he was merely ‘the Bastard’, and it was as ‘the Bastard’ that he testified in 1455: ‘I think that Joan was sent by God, and that her deeds in war were divine rather than human in inspiration.

‘I was at Orleans, then besieged by the English, when the rumour spread that a young girl, commonly called the Maid, had just gone through Gien, on her way to the noble Dauphin’ so as to raise the siege of Orléans and take Charles to Reims for his anointing. ‘I was the man put in charge of the town of Orléans and was Lieutenant-General of the King in affairs of war.’ To find out more about Joan he sent the king Sieur de Villars, Seneschal of Beaucaire, and Jamet de Tilly, then Captain of Blois, later Bailly of Vermandois.

They came back and told him publicly that the king had at first refused to see her, while she continued to repeat her views on her mission to save Orléans and take Charles to Reims. She also asked for men, arms and horses. For three weeks the king had theologians examine her, then he gave her what she asked for, sent her to Blois with the Archbishop of Reims and the Grand Steward; and there they joined Gilles de Rais, de Boussac, La Hire and others. As the English blocked the route, supplies had to be loaded on boats, but the winds blew in the wrong direction. The first time Joan met him, she asked him if he were the Bastard of Orléans and enquired about his plans. Dismissing his ideas of avoiding the English, she told him that God had better plans: He had taken pity on the town and would not let the English hold both town and duke. At that moment the wind changed and so supplies could be taken into Orléans by boat; and ever after the Bastard believed in her. She went with him, clutching her banner, on which Our Lord held a lily in His hand. Joan said she had seen St Louis and St Charlemagne (patrons of France) praying God for the safety of the king and the town.

Other reasons led him to believe Joan was from God: her letter to the English that told them if they did not retreat she would attack and defeat them; her capture of the boulevard des Augustins, where she was wounded by an arrow; the capture of Les Tourelles the next day and the relief of the city. Where he was cautious, she was reckless; and yet events proved she had been right. Only when the siege was over did she receive the care her wound needed and did she have a few slices of bread to eat.

Once Orléans was safe, the Bastard and Joan went to see the king at Loches and begged him to let them attack other towns in the Loire valley. The Bastard, Alençon and other captains were given troops and the towns fell quickly – thanks, the Bastard believed, to the Maid’s intervention. At Loches he saw Joan on her knees begging the king to go to Reims –her ‘counsel’, she said, told him he must do so. When the king’s confessor, Christophe d’Harcourt, Bishop of Castres, queried her about her ‘counsel’, she blushed and replied that when people doubted how God advised her, she sought solitude to pray, grumbled to God and a voice told her ‘Daughter of God! Go on! Go on! Go on! I will be thy help: go on’ (
Fille De, va, va, va, je serai, va
). She said that when she heard this voice she was filled with joy.

After the capture of so many strongholds, the nobles of the blood royal and captains urged the king to go to Normandy instead of Reims. But Joan insisted on his going to Reims, so that he could be consecrated, giving as her reason that once he were consecrated and crowned, his enemies’ power would decline, and so they would be unable to harm him or his kingdom: ‘All accepted her opinion.’

Before the town of Troyes, the council debated what to do. Joan’s suggestion was followed, and the town was besieged. Once the city had surrendered to him, the king went to Reims, where everyone submitted and he was consecrated and crowned.

While in Reims, Joan used to go every day to church at Vespers or towards evening; she had the bells rung for half an hour, collected the friars who were with the army and had them sing an anthem in honour of Our Lady. She was also preoccupied with her future: what was she to do? When the king was at La Ferté, Joan rode between the Archbishop of Reims and the Bastard and said she would love to be buried there. ‘Where do you want to die?’ asked the archbishop. ‘Where it pleases God,’ she replied, ‘for I cannot know either the time or the place, any more than you do.’ If it pleased God, her Creator, she would retire then, give up arms, go back to serve her father and mother and look after their sheep with her sister and brothers, who would be happy to see her again.