Joan of Arc (9 page)

Certain traditional parts of the ceremony could not be followed at Charles’s coronation. At one stage, the twelve peers of France, six ecclesiastical and six lay, should have been summoned to stand before the high altar. Three of the clerics were present – the Archbishop of Reims, the bishops of Laon and of Châlons – but three were absent, among whom Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, was deeply involved in Burgundian politics. Among the laity, the Duke of Burgundy, conspicuous by his absence, alone was a peer in his own right; the other five peerages had reverted to the Crown. Of the twelve peers, then, nine had to be substituted. Another official who should have been present was the leading military officer in France, the Constable, but Richemont, who had fought alongside Joan in the Loire valley, had since been disgraced, so his ceremonial sword was carried by the brother-in-law of Joan’s critic, Georges de La Trémoïlle. Other than the king, however, the person most prominent in the cathedral was Joan. She stood beside him, holding her banner, next to him the focus of attention. At the end of the ceremony she knelt down, and clasping him by the knees wept tears of joy. ‘Gentle King,’ she exclaimed, ‘now is God’s pleasure fulfilled. He desired that the siege of Orléans be lifted, and that you should be brought into this city of Reims to receive your holy consecration, so showing that you are the true king, the man to whom the kingdom of France should belong.’

It is not clear if Joan was present at the banquet mounted to celebrate the coronation. If she was not, the reason must have been because she had not yet been ennobled. Among the people of Reims, however, she was revered; and as Charles rode round the city, his crown on his head, she rode at his side. The crowds pressed towards her to touch her. She was thrilled that the great aim of her mission had been accomplished. She remained sure that she was called to do more; but what precisely and how precisely she would do it, she was uncertain.

Joan’s days in Reims were the high point of her public career, for the coronation ceremony gave meaning to everything she had done for her king. A modern visitor to the cathedral may be awe-struck by its beauty and in looking to explain such feelings will probably point to the daring of the masons’ work. Gothic engineering was a new skill, which facilitated the building of churches much taller than Roman and Romanesque arches could sustain. The pointed arches at the royal abbey of St-Denis led to a proliferation of glass where before there had been massive walls; the use of flying buttresses at Chartres produced higher, lighter walls and yet more glass; at Reims and then more ambitiously at Amiens, the pitch of the nave was still steeper. Finally, the Ste-Chapelle in Paris was made into an exquisite glass house and at Beauvais the pillars strained so high till the nave came crashing down.

We cannot tell whether Joan had an aesthete’s eye. What we can believe is that for her Reims was the home on earth of St Rémi, a saint she had known as a child in Domremy. Reims Cathedral was the holy place where kings of France were consecrated by God for the sacred task of ruling France. What mattered to Joan was her assurance of God’s presence and action there. During the final year of her life she would find that such convictions were to be harshly tested by events.

I
n her letter to the English, Joan had asserted that ‘Charles, the rightful heir, to whom God has given France . . . will shortly enter Paris in a grand company.’
¹

Charles was in an anomalous position: he was now a consecrated king who had no control of his capital. Paris had been the capital of the duchy of the west Franks before it became the capital of France. The treasury of the kings of France was kept on the Île de la Cité. The Parlement of Paris was the supreme court of appeal for most of northern France, and the University of Paris had long been regarded as the first seat of learning in Latin Christendom. Paris may also have been the most populous city north of the Alps. The defences of the city had been so strengthened by Charles V that it had the most formidable walls to the west of Constantinople. All the same, in 1429 the English and their Burgundian allies had reasons to be anxious, and the defenders of the city were far from complacent. Other than the duchy of Guyenne, nearly all France south of the Loire was in the hand of Charles and now much of Champagne had fallen to him too. Anglo-Burgundian lands in Picardy and Normandy were vulnerable and would be more so were Paris to fall.

Work began to make the city virtually impregnable. Boulevards were placed before the gates, houses by the walls were pulled down, gunpowder and stones were stored ready for use, ditches and moats were cleared of debris. A diplomatic campaign was also set in motion to win friends for the Anglo-Burgundian cause. The English concluded an alliance, for what that was worth, with the changeable Jean V, Duke of Brittany, and offered his younger brother Richemont, the Constable of France currently out of favour with Charles VII, a similar rank in the English army; though Richemont was not drawn, he remained detached from the French cause. At the same time, Bedford still defied Charles, saying to him ‘[you] now without reason call yourself king’ in the name of his nephew, ‘Henry, by the grace of God, true, natural and lawful King of France and England’. He blamed Charles for trusting in the ignorant people who were seduced by ‘a disordered and defamed woman, dressed in man’s clothing and base in conduct’. He blamed the French for disturbing the peace and to secure it he took command.

Philip of Burgundy, as so often, was devious. On 17 July, the day of the coronation at which he should have been present, Joan wrote to him in her inimitable style: ‘the Maid calls upon you by the King of Heaven, my rightful and sovereign Lord, to make a firm and lasting peace with the King of France’. She goes on to say that he and Charles should pardon one another – she must have thought of the bridge of Montereau – and, if Philip must fight, then he should fight the ‘Saracens’, that is the Turks. She assured him that Charles wished to make peace with him and warned him that he would win no more battles against royalists. Cunning as ever, Philip did offer Charles a truce of fifteen days, at the end of which he would surrender Paris and then prepare for further negotiations. Joan, rightly, was not convinced that Philip was trustworthy and told the people of Reims that she retained her instinct for fighting. After the two weeks were up, Paris had not yielded; instead it had been made harder to capture. Joan began to move against Paris early in August. Hitherto she had acted in accordance with the advice of her voices, but on this occasion there are grounds for arguing that she was acting as a leader of a faction rather than as the inspiration of the royalist cause. Her letter to the English had mentioned Paris; at the nullification trial Seguin Seguin, who had interrogated her at Poitiers, and Alençon, her chief royalist supporter, both asserted that the capture of Paris was a part of her mission; during the heresy trial at Rouen, after she had failed to take the city, she maintained that she had acted to please certain noblemen, in other words the war party. Even before the coronation she had ignored the king’s wishes in accepting Richemont’s help. In the last months of her military career less and less did she seem to act as the king wanted and less and less confident was she that she was following the advice of her voices. The tone of her own voice became shriller, her actions became more independent and she lost her reputation for invincibility.

In 1453 Sultan Mehmet II was to demonstrate how to conduct a successful siege against an enormous city – with overwhelming superiority in numbers, with inventiveness and with well-directed cannon. A generation earlier, Joan had lacked such advantages. Unlike Constantinople, which was almost deserted by 1453, Paris in 1429 had a population large enough to frustrate a besieger; only a vast army could invest it on all sides and make its inhabitants hunger; only an army with the appropriate siege machines could damage its defences. Joan’s preferred idea of attack was direct assault. Charles did not yet have the resources that at the close of the war would enable him to eject the English from city after city. Yet he would never have what he needed to take Paris by force, and he was only to win the city as a reward for a policy of dogged diplomacy of the kind favoured by Joan’s opponent at court, the rich, obese and wily Georges de La Trémoïlle. Against Paris Joan’s stubborn impetuosity never had a chance.

On 21 July the army left Reims and on the 23rd reached Soissons, which surrendered to the king. It moved on to Château-Thierry four days later, where it stayed until 1 August. While there, Joan was enough in royal favour to ask the king to exempt Domremy and the neighbouring village of Greux from taxation, a privilege they retained until 1789. At Provins on 2 August the army was joined by René of Anjou, duc de Bar, son-in-law of the Duke of Lorraine and thus again connected with Joan’s part of the country; but even more important was the fact that yet another royal relation pledged himself to support the head of the family. The army marched to the northern side of Paris, and on 15 August was camping outside the cathedral city of Senlis when at last the English under Bedford offered battle. Though it was the feast of the Assumption, Joan was keen to fight, preferably to attack first, but the army commanders, only too aware of how unwise French armies had been in the past, had no intention of being caught yet once more in an English defensive trap. As a result, in the field near the village of Montépilloy, between 6,000 and 7,000 Frenchmen spent the day staring at 8,000–9,000 English soldiers, among whom were between 6,000 and 8,000 Burgundians. Joan, accompanied by Alençon, tried to taunt the English into coming out from behind their stakes, ditches and wagons, but they equally would not be moved. As night fell, the French returned to their lines. At break of day the English left for Senlis and Paris.

Like the English, Charles also left, in his case for the royal residence of Compiègne, which he found so agreeable that he stayed there for days. Joan remained with him, fretting at her inactivity. Philip of Burgundy had not given up Paris; surely now was the time to take it from him? La Trémoïlle spoke against the idea, Charles was unwilling to press forward and Joan had to be content that he allowed her the Dukes of Alençon and Bourbon and lesser nobles such as Gilles de Rais and professionals such as La Hire to march towards Paris; she would have been disillusioned had she known that while she went south, Regnault of Chartres, the Archbishop of Reims, was in touch with Philip the Good. Remorseful perhaps for the death of Philip’s father and anxious to detach Philip from the English alliance, Charles asked Philip what his terms would be. He promised to vacate Compiègne, Senlis, Creil and Pont-St-Maxence, all towns that had submitted to him, in return for a four-month truce (he did not know that simultaneously Philip was offering more troops to the English, in return for titles to Brie and Champagne). It was then, and with halfhearted support, that Charles sanctioned the attack on Paris.

The army made for St-Denis, home of the royal abbey where traditionally kings of France were buried. From there skirmishers were sent out to discover the weakest point in the walls, but no attack could start without Charles’s permission. Eventually, on 7 September, the king arrived and ordered the attack. The assault, made the following day, failed, and Joan was wounded. On 9 September Charles suspended the siege.

The failure before Paris proved that Joan did not always win. Her enemies were quick to learn from her recent successes and failure. While Paris was Anglo-Burgundian in sympathy, its university regarded her as a foe to the faith and its Parlement still upheld the Treaty of Troyes that had disinherited Charles. Inevitably, Paris became the setting for a ceremony to rival the one Joan had inspired for Charles at Reims. In November 1431, when Joan was dead, King Henri II (Henry VI of England) came to St-Denis, as Joan had done, and on 2 December, unlike her, from the abbey made a
joyeuse entrée
into Paris. In the cathedral of Notre-Dame his uncle Cardinal Beaufort anointed him as true King of France, although without the oil of St Rémi. The occasion was mismanaged, however: English lay peers had to take the place of the lay peers of ‘France’ (as none of the appropriate French ones was available); the rights of the Bishop of Paris were ignored; the feast was chaotic and the food stale. Nevertheless, the people of Paris were loyal to their Anglo-French king. His rival, Charles VII, was not yet
de facto
master of the country; and until arms had settled the question
de jure
, the canny Parisians waited to decide whom to back.

Philip of Burgundy learnt a second lesson about Paris. In 1429 he was still hedging his bets, still trying to keep the kind of watch over French affairs that his father had done. But in 1430 he married into the pro-English Portuguese royal family and he began to think that his future lay in acquiring yet more of the Netherlands, so that spending money on fighting in France began to look like a bad investment. Others around him had their own reason for wanting an accommodation with Charles. Georges de La Trémoïlle had a brother at the Burgundian court. If Joan were out of the way, such men were thinking, the tortuous route to a Franco-Burgundian rapprochement could be opened. Voices at the court of France began to speak in the same sense. In late September the king dissolved Joan’s army and sent Alençon home. In late October Joan was sent off to the upper Loire.

Joan had her uses. Much of the upper Loire was dominated by a freebooting captain, Perrinet Gressaert, nominally an ally of the English and Burgundians, but in fact a self-seeking mercenary, one of the last survivors of a military type that the Hundred Years War had fostered. Gressaert was not much more than an irritant, a fly soon forgotten when he was swotted. In October Joan set out from Bourges on her least memorable and least-known campaign. She moved on St-Pierre-le-Moûtier, a stronghold on the River Allier – and therefore difficult to help – and in early November she took the town, retaining enough authority to be able to prevent a massacre. For the last time her characteristic plan of impetuous frontal attack was successful. But on turning east to the River Loire she was faced with the formidable defences of La Charité-sur-Loire. In vain she pleaded for reinforcements from local people, as in Riom. The weather was harsh, the bombardment had little effect and in a grim mood the siege had to be lifted. Back at Jargeau, which she had attacked so enthusiastically and taken just six months earlier, Joan learnt that she and her family had been ennobled. It was perhaps a pay-off, but she did not take the hint.