Joan of Arc (8 page)

3. Orléans and its environs.

According to the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
, ‘everyone was filled with great joy and praised the Lord for the great victory He had given them’.
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The clergy and people alike sang the
Te Deum
and Joan had time to have her wounds treated. She then joined the soldiers who were preparing to fight any English who continued to resist, and watched her foes slink away. The mud boulevards had not been a strong defence; the English would put their trust henceforward in the stone fortresses that they still held on either side of Orléans. To her Orleanist followers, however, it was clear that God was with the Maid. After her death she would be called ‘the Maid of Orléans’, and until her collateral heirs died out her family would be Orléannais and 8 May, the day on which the English marched away, became a day of celebration in the city, with a re-enactment of events in her honour. In London, Charles, Duke of Orléans, rejoiced that his city had not fallen. He must have been grateful to his half-brother but showed his gratitude to Joan by sending her a beautiful robe.

There was a pause for a month, perhaps so that new recruits could be found to replace those killed during the siege. Two strategies were debated at Charles’s court. One idea, supported by the lords of the blood royal and the captains (said the Bastard) was to move on Normandy, and then on Paris. The other idea, Joan’s idea, was to clear the route to Reims so that Charles could be crowned. Joan won the debate by pleading to her lord on her knees. Charles put his cousin Alençon in charge of the army as lieutenant-general and told him to ‘do entirely according to her counsel’. That meant there would be direct assaults on other Loire strongholds.

The first objective was Jargeau to the east, a town strongly defended with five towers, three fortified gates and a fortified bridge over the river, full of gunpowder weapons and protected by some 700 troops under the command of the Earl of Suffolk. The French leaders hesitated until Joan shamed them, saying that if she was not sure God was on their side she would rather have stayed at home to herd her sheep. This led to an attack that was countered by an unexpected sortie. When the French faltered, Joan picked up her standard and encouraged them to fight back. Her resolution paid off and the counter-attack was beaten off. Joan sent a peremptory letter telling the enemy to give up: ‘Surrender this place to Heaven’s King and to gentle King Charles, and you can go. If not you will be massacred.’
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Suffolk tried to negotiate with La Hire rather than with Alençon or Joan. In any case, his offer was rejected and yet he did not leave. While Alençon wished to continue bombarding, Joan urged an immediate assault on the walls. On Sunday 12 June the French put ladders in the ditch and Joan went forward with her standard. After some three or four hours, just as the French were at the point of clambering into the town, Joan was struck on the head with a stone that broke on her helmet. Quickly on her feet again, she cried out: ‘Our Lord has condemned the English. At this hour they are ours. Have courage.’
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Her words seem to have prevented any last-minute attempt at a negotiated surrender. One of Suffolk’s brothers was killed, another was captured and for social reasons – a nobleman could not surrender to a commoner – the noble lord felt compelled to knight a squire from Auvergne before allowing himself to be taken alive. Other Englishmen were less distinguished and less fortunate. Many were killed and many prisoners executed on their way to Orléans.

Back in Orléans, Joan went to Mass and told Alençon that she wished to leave for Meung next day. As had happened so often before, she had to accept an unwelcome delay, in this case for three days, while Jargeau was garrisoned, the army prepared and the gunpowder weapons shipped downstream. This time she would go west.

On 15 June the French marched on Meung, halted to take the bridge and then set out to besiege Beaugency. By then the repute of Joan had attracted many volunteers, including the Lord of Laval, the Lord of Lohéac and his brother, the Lord of Chauvigny de Berry, the Lord of La Tour d’Auvergne and the
vidame
of Chartres, and, most important of all, Arthur de Richemont, brother of the Duke of Brittany and Constable of France, who had recently been banished from court. Being threatened by an English force under the redoubtable Sir John Falstolf, Joan needed Richemont’s men. Seeing the large numbers ranged against him, however, Falstolf left Beaugency and did not offer battle. He withdrew on 17 June, by which time the French had been steadily bombarding the town for two days, and the commanders of the garrison decided to leave if they could get favourable terms. They were offered free passage if they did not fight for ten days; they accepted, and in the meantime Falstolf, without the use of artillery, made a botched attack on the bridge at Meung. The failure of this effort and English awareness that their enemy was superior in forces and morale persuaded the leaders in Meung that this stronghold too was indefensible. The English army under Falstolf and Talbot withdrew northwards in good order, yet dispirited and feeling weak.

Falstolf prepared for one last stand before he abandoned the Loire valley. Adopting the defensive tactics that had worked so well in the past, he concealed his vanguard, provisions and artillery in a wood on the way to Patay, a village on the road from Orléans to Chartres. Talbot meanwhile hid 500 mounted archers between two strong hedges, where he believed the French must pass. Unluckily for him a stag rushed through this position, so disclosing the intended ambush to the pursuing French cavalry. The archers fled into the woods, where they collided with the other troops whom Falstolf had not had time to deploy. On the heralds’ count 2,200 English, now in disarray, were slaughtered. Talbot could not escape and Falstolf fled with as many men as he could save. Joan’s role in the victory is unknown, for no chronicler mentions her, but at the rehabilitation trial, her page, Louis de Coutes, tells how she held a dying Englishman’s head in her hands while hearing his confession. Thanks to this action, the Loire was once again a French river. Joan prepared to go to Reims.

Joan, who had seen off the English, now had to contend with the Burgundians too, for Reims, her destination, was under Burgundian control. The route there was not as difficult to follow as might appear, for neither the English nor their French allies had the men to garrison all the intervening villages and towns. Many in territory held by the Burgundians were sympathetic to the Anglo-French monarchy of Henry VI only because they preferred being on the winning side; and as this was no longer the case, feelings of loyalty to Henry evaporated. After Patay, the people of Janville closed their gates to the fleeing English and opened them to the pursuing French; and this pattern of behaviour became common as Joan and the Dauphin’s large army made their way first east and then north into the heart of Champagne. Besides, Joan had promised to save Orléans and had done so. As she had said that Charles would be crowned in Reims, people assumed that that too would happen.

In mid-June Charles moved to Gien, east of Orléans, from where it was relatively easy to set off for Champagne. At court, however, La Trémoïlle was all for temporising. The way ahead was not safe; it would be wiser to wait till relations with Philip of Burgundy had improved; the king should go to Bourges. On 25 June Joan sent a letter to the citizens of Tournai in which, after outlining the recent triumphs of French arms, she invited the citizens to the anointing of the king at Reims, ‘where we shall soon be’. This must have been one of several such letters. Clearly she had every intention of setting out in the near future. But as so often, she was frustrated that others, in this case Charles, did not share her sense of urgency. For two days she camped with the soldiers outside the city, which showed Charles how devoted his troops were to her. He could not afford to pay them; they knew they could get him safely to Reims; he gave way.

On 30 June Charles’s troops came to Auxerre, which for ten years had been pro-Burgundian and had even been ruled by Burgundians. The sight of a huge French army, numbering perhaps 10,000, encouraged the town council to make terms. After three days of negotiation, Charles magnanimously pardoned anyone who had sided with his enemies. No one was killed, the gates were opened and the army was reprovisioned. The army next passed through a succession of villages until it came to Troyes. A town long famous as a market town on important trade routes, to Charles Troyes was infamous as the place where nine years earlier his father had denied his right to the French throne, with the added humiliating condition that his sister Catherine, who was to marry Henry V of England, would be wife and mother to future kings of France – in fact she never became queen but was mother to Henry VI and II. With this past in mind, the people of Troyes had reason to reflect. To direct their thoughts to the future, on 4 July Joan wrote yet another letter instructing the citizens to recognise the true King of France, her master, ‘who will soon be at the city of Reims and at Paris . . . And with the aid of the King Jesus he will be in all good cities in his holy kingdom.’
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To this Charles added a practical incentive to make them submit: if they did so, he would grant them an amnesty.

At first the drawbridges were raised, the gates shut and soldiers from the garrison made a show of a sortie, with one beneficial effect: it made the defenders realise they were far outnumbered by the force beyond the walls. Once again days passed while heralds and envoys went from town to camp and from camp to town. The citizens sent their own holy person, Friar Richard, a Franciscan with a line in prophesying the end of the world, to see Joan. When he had made the sign of the cross and sprinkled her with holy water, she told him to approach: ‘I will not fly away.’ On 8 July Charles called a council of war, from which Joan was excluded, to debate whether to bypass the town, as Archbishop Regnault of Chartres urged, or to attack it. Joan was called in to give her views, and she proposed an attack. The very sight of her preparations was enough for the people of Troyes. Once she began the attack, the rules of war meant that the besieged would have no legitimate defence against whatever fate Charles might allow. The prospect of the terrible consequences that could follow from their defiance made Troyes submit. A triumphal entry and the free gift of supplies was enough to buy Charles off. In return he freely pardoned the people of Troyes their offences. The march to Reims was turning into a procession.

The people of Reims were now the only possible obstacle left to the coronation. Charles was anxious because he was aware that if they resisted he had inadequate artillery and siege machines. Joan reassured him that they would come to meet him; and once more she proved to be right. She was almost in her home country. A neighbour, a farmer called Gérardin d’Épinal, came with four friends to see her. He would recall that previously she had told him that she had a secret she would not disclose because he was a ‘Burgundian’ and that now she was afraid of nothing except treason. On Saturday 16 July the royal party reached Reims. On the following day Charles was crowned.

The lengthy coronation service in Reims Cathedral was the happiest time in Joan’s short life. The ceremony enacted publicly Charles’s calling to be the sacred monarch of a holy kingdom; it was for his role in life that she had fought; it was his vocation that gave her life its meaning.

Reims was the royal, national cathedral of France. On its façade is a sculptural group consisting of Clovis, King of the Franks, his Christian wife Clotilda and St Rémi. The pagan chief is being baptised while the saint receives the ampulla from a dove; in the ampulla is the holy oil that will be used to anoint all Frankish and French kings; and the dove stands for the Holy Spirit. There are variations on the royalist theme. The priest-king Melchisedek gives communion in bread and wine to the patriarch Abraham, clad in the armour of a thirteenth-century knight. King Solomon, standing for Christ the King, stands beside the Queen of Sheba, representing the Church. Inside the nave are representations of twenty kings, beside the bishops who consecrated them. Only Karolus (Charlemagne) is named, as he is the most important of all since Clovis. In other French Gothic churches are other examples of devout kingship: at Chartres the story of Charlemagne; at St-Denis the story of Godfrey de Bouillon, the Frankish leader chosen after the First Crusade to rule in Jerusalem; in the Ste-Chapelle in Paris the story of St Louis. Nowhere else, however, is there so much emphasis on the Most Christian King as there is at Reims. On the western front by the great rose window King David is anointed by the prophet Samuel, King Solomon by the prophet Nathan. David shows kingly courage by slaying Goliath, Solomon kingly justice by returning the disputed child to its true mother and kingly piety by building the Temple. Above all these scenes God gives his fatherly blessing to the kings.

Nobody knows if Joan studied these figures, but they were biblical stories familiar to the illiterate poor, from which class she sprang. Nobody knows what exactly she witnessed; for 1429 there is no equivalent to the
Coronation Book of Charles V
that contains the liturgy by which Charles’s grandfather had been consecrated King of France. We do know, however, that from nine o’clock in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon the drama moved steadily towards its climax, when Charles was anointed on the head, hands and chest with the holy oil from the ampulla of St Rémi by the saint’s living embodiment, the Archbishop of Reims; and then he was crowned. In October 1422 Charles had been acknowledged as king at Mehun-sur-Yèvre by a forlorn group of followers. From the moment his father died, according to his lawyers, he had the legal authority of a king, yet he was still known as the Dauphin. What made him the Most Christian King were the sacred mysteries of 17 June,
le beau mystère
as it was described. His anointing made him, unlike all his lay subjects, a priest-king after the order of Melchisedek, who had the right to take communion in both kinds; and it prepared him to become, by a separate rite, a thaumaturge who could ‘touch’ for the tubercular condition called scrofula, the so-called king’s evil. His anointing also gave him, unlike many other kings, some authority within the Church.