Joan of Arc Read online

  JOAN OF ARC

  A History

  HELEN CASTOR

  For Luca

  At that time the English would sometimes take one fortress from the Armagnacs in the morning and lose two in the evening. So this war, accursed of God, went on.

  AN ANONYMOUS CITIZEN OF PARIS, 1423

  You men of England, who have no right in this kingdom of France, the king of heaven orders and commands you through me, Joan the Maid, to abandon your strongholds and go back to your own country. If not, I will make a war-cry that will be remembered forever.

  JOAN OF ARC to the English at Orléans, 5 May 1429

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of illustrations

  Cast of characters

  Family trees

  INTRODUCTION: ‘Joan of Arc’

  PROLOGUE: The field of blood

  PART ONE: Before

  1 This war, accursed of God

  2 Like another Messiah

  3 Desolate and divided

  PART TWO: Joan

  4 The Maid

  5 Like an angel from God

  6 A heart greater than any man’s

  7 A creature in the form of a woman

  8 I will be with you soon

  9 A simple maid

  10 Fear of the

  PART THREE: After

  11 Those who called themselves Frenchmen

  12 She was all innocence

  EPILOGUE: ‘Saint Joan’

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Plates

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  1 Map of France in early 1429 © András Bereznay.

  2 Figure of Charles VI of France from the altarpiece known as the Goldene Rössl (Golden Horse): Haus Papst Benedikt XVI. – Neue Schatzkammer und Wallfahrtsmuseum Altötting. Photograph © Bayerisches Nationalmuseum München.

  3 Portrait of Henry V of England: The National Portrait Gallery / The Bridgeman Art Library.

  4 Portrait of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.

  5 Portrait of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, after Rogier van der Weyden: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon / The Bridgeman Art Library.

  6 Portrait of Charles VII of France by Jean Fouquet: The Louvre, Paris / The Bridgeman Art Library.

  7 Photograph of Chinon Castle © Chris Gibbions.

  8 Drawing of Joan of Arc by Clément de Fauquembergue: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris / The Bridgeman Art Library.

  9 Illumination of Joan of Arc: Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Paris / The Bridgeman Art Library.

  10 Letter from Joan of Arc to the people of Riom, 1429: Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library.

  11 Illumination of St Catherine (detail) from the Tours breviary: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

  12 Illumination of John, duke of Bedford, with St George (detail) from the Bedford Hours: The British Library / The Bridgeman Art Library.

  13 Illumination of St Michael (detail) from the Salisbury breviary: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

  14 Portrait of Jean, Bastard of Orléans: Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library.

  15 Portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati by Jan van Eyck: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna / The Bridgeman Art Library.

  The War Within France: Cast of Characters

  FRENCH ROYAL FAMILY

  Charles VI, the Well-Beloved, king of France

  His uncles:

  Jean, duke of Berry

  Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy

  His wife:

  Isabeau of Bavaria, queen of France

  Among their children:

  Louis of Guienne, dauphin of France

  Jean of Touraine, dauphin of France

  Catherine of Valois, queen of England

  Charles, dauphin of France, later King Charles VII

  ARMAGNAC (ORLÉANIST) LORDS

  Louis, duke of Orléans, brother of King Charles VI

  Among his children:

  Charles, duke of Orléans

  Philippe, count of Vertus

  Jean, Bastard of Orléans, later count of Dunois

  Bernard, count of Armagnac

  Louis, duke of Anjou, titular king of Sicily and Jerusalem

  His wife:

  Yolande of Aragon, duchess of Anjou, titular queen of Sicily and Jerusalem

  Among their children:

  Louis, duke of Anjou

  René, duke of Bar and Lorraine, later duke of Anjou

  Marie of Anjou, queen of France

  Charles of Anjou

  Jean, duke of Alençon

  Jean d’Harcourt, count of Aumâle

  Charles, count of Clermont, later duke of Bourbon

  BURGUNDIAN LORDS

  John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, son of Philip the Bold and cousin of King Charles VI

  His brothers:

  Anthony, duke of Brabant

  Philip, count of Nevers

  His wife:

  Margaret of Bavaria, duchess of Burgundy

  Among their children:

  Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy

  Anne of Burgundy, duchess of Bedford

  Margaret of Burgundy, countess of Richemont

  Agnes of Burgundy, countess of Clermont

  Jean de Luxembourg, count of Ligny

  His sister:

  Jacquetta de Luxembourg, duchess of Bedford

  ENGLISH ROYAL FAMILY

  Henry V, king of England

  His brothers:

  Thomas, duke of Clarence

  John, duke of Bedford

  Humphrey, duke of Gloucester

  His uncle:

  Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, cardinal of England

  His wife:

  Catherine of Valois, queen of England

  Their son:

  Henry VI, king of England

  ENGLISH LORDS AND CAPTAINS, ALLIES OF THE BURGUNDIANS

  Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury

  William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk

  Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick

  Thomas, Lord Scales

  John, Lord Talbot, later earl of Shrewsbury

  Sir John Fastolf, captain

  SCOTS LORDS AND CAPTAINS, ALLIES OF THE ARMAGNACS

  John Stewart, earl of Buchan

  Archibald Douglas, earl of Douglas, later duke of Touraine

  His son:

  Archibald Douglas, earl of Wigtown

  Sir John Stewart of Darnley, captain

  ARMAGNAC COUNSELLORS, CAPTAINS AND CHURCHMEN

  Tanguy du Châtel, counsellor

  Robert le Maçon, counsellor

  Jean Louvet, counsellor

  Georges de La Trémoille, counsellor

  Étienne de Vignolles, known as La Hire, captain

  Ambroise de Loré, captain

  Poton de Xaintrailles, captain

  Raoul de Gaucourt, captain

  Gilles de Rais, captain

  Jean Gerson, theologian

  Jacques Gélu, archbishop of Embrun

  Regnault de Chartres, archbishop of Reims

  BURGUNDIAN COUNSELLORS, CAPTAINS AND CHURCHMEN

  Jean de La Trémoille, counsellor

  Hugues de Lannoy, counsellor

  Perrinet Gressart, captain

  Pierre Cauchon, theologian, later bishop of Beauvais, then of Lisieux

  Louis de Luxembourg, bishop of Thérouanne, brother of Jean de Luxembourg

  INDEPENDENT LORDS AND CHURCHMEN

  William, count of Hainaut, Holland and Zeel
and

  His daughter:

  Jacqueline, countess of Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland

  John, duke of Brittany

  His brother:

  Arthur, count of Richemont

  Cardinal Niccolò Albergati

  Family Trees

  English and French Claims to the Throne of France

  After Louis X of France died suddenly in 1316, his queen gave birth to a son, Jean I, who lived for just five days. The king’s only remaining child was his four-year-old daughter by his first wife. That marriage had been annulled on suspicion of her adultery. Both his daughter’s young age and the question marks over her parentage made her a less than ideal heir to the throne, and the crown was taken instead by Louis’s brother, Philippe V. When he too died without sons, the precedent of his own case was used to secure the succession of his brother, Charles IV, rather than one of his daughters. When Charles then also died leaving only daughters, the crown passed to his male cousin, Philippe VI, beginning the line of Valois succession.

  But Edward III of England, the son of Charles IV’s sister Isabella, disputed the developing custom that the crown could not be inherited by or through a woman, and claimed that the French throne was rightfully his. This was the basis on which he began what was later named the Hundred Years War, winning great victories at Sluys in 1340, Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. It was also the basis on which Edward’s great-grandson Henry V sought to emulate his military success in France and to secure the French crown for himself.

  In early fifteenth-century France, meanwhile, the combination of these fourteenth-century precedents with the urgent need to invalidate the English claim to the French throne produced the enduring myth that female royal succession was forbidden by an ancient ‘Salic Law’.

  The Valois Kings of France

  The Dukes of Burgundy

  The Plantagenet Kings of England

  Introduction: ‘Joan of Arc’

  In the firmament of history, Joan of Arc is a massive star. Her light shines brighter than that of any other figure of her time and place. Her story is unique, and at the same time universal in its reach. She is, famously, a protean icon: a hero to nationalists, monarchists, liberals, socialists, the right, the left, Catholics, Protestants, traditionalists, feminists, Vichy and the Resistance. She is a recurring motif, a theme replayed in art, literature, music and film. And the process of recounting her story and making her myth began from the moment she stepped into public view; she was as much an object of fascination and a subject of impassioned argument during her short life as she has been ever since.

  In outline, her tale is both profoundly familiar and endlessly startling. Alone in the fields at Domrémy, a peasant girl hears heavenly voices bringing a message of salvation for France, which lies broken at the hands of the invading English. Against all the odds, she reaches the dauphin Charles, the disinherited heir to the French throne, and convinces him that God has made it her mission to drive the English from his kingdom. Dressed in armour as though she were a man, with her hair cut short, she leads an army to rescue the town of Orléans from an English siege. The fortunes and the morale of the French are utterly transformed, and in a matter of weeks she pushes on, deep into English-held territory, to Reims, where she presides over the coronation of the dauphin as King Charles VII of France. But soon she is captured by allies of the English, to whom she is handed over for trial as a heretic. She defends herself with undaunted courage, but she is – of course – condemned. She is burned to death in the market square in Rouen, but her legend proves much harder to kill. Nearly five hundred years later, the Catholic Church recognises her not only as a heroine, but as a saint.

  One of the reasons we know her story so well is that her life is so well documented, in a distant age when that was true of very few. In relative terms, as much ink and parchment were expended on the subject of Joan of Arc by her contemporaries as print and paper have been in the centuries that followed. There are chronicles, letters, poems, treatises, journals and account-books. Above all, there are two remarkable caches of documents: the records of her trial for heresy in 1431, including the long interrogations to which she was subjected; and the records of the ‘nullification trial’ held twenty-five years later by the French to annul the previous proceedings and rehabilitate Joan’s name. In these transcripts we hear not only the men and women who knew her, but Joan herself, speaking about her voices, her mission, her village childhood, and her extraordinary experiences after she left Domrémy. First-hand testimony, from Joan, her family and her friends: a rare survival from the medieval world. What could be more reliable or more revealing?

  Yet all is not as simple as it seems. It’s not just that the official transcripts of their words were written in clerical Latin, rather than the French they actually spoke – a notarial translation alerting us to the fact that this first-hand testimony is not quite as immediate as it might initially appear. It’s also that, as befits such a star, Joan exerts a vast gravitational pull. By the time those who knew her spoke as witnesses in the nullification trial of 1456 about her childhood and her mission, they knew exactly who she had become and what she had accomplished. In recalling events and conversations from a quarter of a century earlier, they were grappling with the vagaries of long-treasured memories and telling stories that were deeply infused with hindsight – which by that stage included knowledge not only of her life and death, but also of the final defeat of the English in France between 1449 and 1453, events that served to vindicate Joan’s assertion of God’s purpose beyond anything achieved in her lifetime or for years thereafter. In many ways, then, the story of Joan of Arc as told in the nullification trial is a life told backwards.

  The same could also be said of Joan’s account of herself at the ‘trial of condemnation’ of 1431. The unshakeable conviction in her cause and the extraordinary self-possession that had brought her to the dauphin’s presence at Chinon in February 1429 only grew as time went on. We call her ‘Joan of Arc’, for example – taking her father’s appellation, ‘d’Arc’, and transferring it to her – but that was a name she never used. Just a few weeks after her arrival at court, she was already referring to herself as ‘Jeanne la Pucelle’, ‘Joan the Maid’ – a title redolent with meaning, suggesting not only her youth and purity but her status as God’s chosen servant and her closeness to the Virgin, to whom she claimed a special devotion. And the sense of herself that she expressed at her trial was no ‘neutral’ account of her experiences, but a defence of her beliefs and actions in response to prolonged questioning from hostile prosecutors intent on exposing her as a liar and a heretic. As such, it’s a rich, absorbing and multilayered text, but one that is as difficult to interpret as it is invaluable.

  Unsurprisingly, the effect of Joan’s gravitational field – the self-defining narrative pull of her mission – is equally apparent in historical accounts of her life. Most begin not with the story of the long and bitter war that had ravaged France since before she was born, but with Joan herself hearing voices in her village of Domrémy in the far east of the kingdom. That means that we come to the dauphin’s court at Chinon with Joan, rather than experiencing the shock of her arrival, and as a result it’s not easy to understand the full complexity of the political context into which she walked, or the nature of the responses she received. And because all our information about Joan’s life in Domrémy comes from her own statements and those of her friends and family in the two trials, historical narratives which start there are infused from the very beginning with the same hindsight that permeates their testimony.

  Distortion, then, is one risk; but, beyond that, what lies at the centre of this gravitational field is immensely difficult to read. On closer investigation it can seem, unnervingly, as though Joan’s star might collapse into a black hole. When we go back to the trial transcripts, at almost every point in her story there are discrepancies between the accounts of different witnesses – and sometimes within the testimony of a single witness,
including that of Joan herself – about the detail of events, their timing and their interpretation. The accounts we have, in other words, don’t straightforwardly build into a coherent and internally compatible whole. That’s hardly surprising: after all, eyewitness testimony can differ even about recent events and in relatively unpressured circumstances. Joan, we must remember, was interrogated over many days by prosecutors she knew were seeking to prove her guilt; and the nullification trial sought to clear her name by asking those who knew her to recall what she had said and done more than twenty-five years after the fact.

  Even if they aren’t surprising, however, these inconsistencies and contradictions raise the question of how the evidence should best be understood. Sometimes, historians have picked their way through the different accounts, choosing some details to weave into a seamless story and glossing over other elements that don’t fit, without explaining why one has been preferred to another. Sometimes, too, parts of a single testimony have been accepted while others are dismissed, apparently more on the basis of perceived plausibility than anything else. (Of the information that Joan offered only at her trial, for example, her identification of her voices as those of Saints Michael, Margaret and Catherine has been taken seriously; her description of an angel appearing in the dauphin’s chamber at Chinon to present him with a crown, by contrast, has not.) And, in general, much less attention has been paid to the questions witnesses were asked than to the answers they gave, despite the extent to which the latter were shaped and defined by the former. At the heart of both trials was the question of where the dividing line lay between true faith and heresy. Witnesses, therefore, were not offered a general invitation to describe their experiences of Joan (or, in her case, her own experience), but were instead asked to respond to precise articles of investigation framed – whether the respondents understood it or not – by particular theological principles.