Joan of Arc Page 2
That’s also a difficulty for us: whether we, with the mindset of a very different age, can understand not just the finer points of late medieval theology, but the nature of faith in the world that Joan and her contemporaries inhabited. There seems little purpose, for example, in attempting to diagnose in her a physical or psychological disorder that might, to us, explain her voices, if the terms of reference we use are completely alien to the landscape of belief in which she lived. Joan and the people around her knew that it was entirely possible for otherworldly beings to communicate with men and women of sound mind; Joan was not the first or the last person in France in the first half of the fifteenth century to have visions or hear voices. The problem was not how to explain her experience of hearing something that wasn’t real; the problem was how to tell whether her voices came to her from heaven or from hell – which is why the expertise of theologians took centre stage in shaping responses to her claims.
Similarly, it might seem to us as though part of Joan’s power lay in bringing God into play within the context of war; that, by introducing the idea of a mandate from heaven into a kingdom exhausted by years of conflict, she made possible a new invigoration of French morale. But in medieval minds, war was always interpreted as an expression of divine will. The particular trauma for France in the 1420s was that its deeply internalised status as the ‘most Christian’ kingdom had been challenged by the bloodletting of civil war and overwhelming defeat by the English. How were the disaster of Azincourt (as the French knew what the English called ‘Agincourt’) and the years of suffering that followed to be explained, if not by God’s displeasure? This was the context in which Joan’s message of heaven-sent salvation was so potent, and the need to establish whether her voices were angelic or demonic in origin so overwhelmingly urgent.
And this is the reason why I have chosen to begin my history of Joan of Arc not in 1429 but fourteen years earlier, with the catastrophe of Azincourt. My aim is not to see Joan’s world only, or even principally, through her eyes. Instead, I’ve set out to tell the story of France during these tumultuous years, and to understand how a teenage girl came to play such an astonishing part within that history. Starting in 1415 has made it possible to explore the shifting perspectives of the various protagonists in the drama, both English and French – and to emphasise the fact that what it meant to be ‘French’ was profoundly contested throughout these years. Civil war threatened France’s identity geographically, politically and spiritually; and Joan’s understanding of who the French were, on whom God now intended to bestow victory through her mission, was not shared by many of her compatriots.
What follows is an attempt to tell the story of Joan’s France, and of Joan herself, forwards, not backwards, as a narrative in which human beings struggle to understand the world around them and – just like us – have no idea what’s coming next. Of course, in the process I too have had to pick my way through the evidence, choosing what to weave into a seamless story; but in the notes at the end of the book I’ve tried to give a sense of how and why I have made my choices, and where the pitfalls might lie within the sources themselves and in the testing process of translation from the Latin and French in which most of them are written. Among all the challenges presented by this mass of material, the most difficult is dealing with the trials, which were defining events in Joan’s life and afterlife at the same time as providing evidence through which to interpret them. My aim has been as much as possible to let them take place as events in Joan’s story – in other words, to allow the testimony of Joan herself and of the other, later witnesses unfold as it was given and recorded, rather than to read their memories and interpretations backwards into the earlier events they were describing.
The result is a history of Joan of Arc that is a little different from the one we all know: a tale in which Joan herself doesn’t appear for the first fourteen years, and one in which we learn about her family and childhood at the end of the story, not the beginning. Many historians have taken, and will undoubtedly take, a different view of how best to use these remarkable sources for the life of a truly remarkable woman. But for me, this was the only way to understand Joan within her own world – the combination of character and circumstance, of religious faith and political machination, that made her a unique exception to the rules that governed the lives of other women.
It is an extraordinary story; and, at the end of it, her star still shines.
Prologue: The field of blood
25 OCTOBER 1415
It was the day of victory.
First light dragged, cold and sodden, over a camp of exhausted men. Exhausted from unpredictable weeks of forced march, parrying the enemy’s manoeuvres along the banks of the river Somme, or moving at speed to this urgent rendezvous. Exhausted from a fear-filled day with the enemy in sight, waiting for a battle that had not come before sundown. Exhausted, now, from a wet night bivouacked in the fields, or billeted nearby with the terrified villagers of Tramecourt and Azincourt. Exhausted, but expectant.
This was the feast of Saints Crispin and Crispian, brothers who had spread the gospel at Soissons more than a millennium before. Holy martyrs, they had given their lives for their part in making this land the ‘eldest daughter of the Church’, ruled by le roi très-chrétien, the most Christian king. But their blessed sacrifice was not the only reason to be certain of heaven’s favour.
As aching feet sank into liquid earth, these tired men knew that the enemy was suffering more. Across the fields, near the hamlet of Maisoncelle – within earshot, though somehow they had been almost silent in the rain-lashed darkness – stood an English army steeped in mud. It had seeped into bowels as well as baggage in the two months since the invaders had set foot on the coast of Normandy; the bloody flux – dysentery – had been the price of the success they had found at the port of Harfleur. They had left an English flag flying there, and an occupying garrison – and hundreds of sick and dying soldiers waiting for ships to take them home. The troops still standing had marched here, under the command of their grim and purposeful king. He carried the scars of battle – from an arrowhead embedded inches deep in his face when he was just sixteen – and scars, too, of a different kind, from his father’s sin in taking the English crown from his cousin Richard II. Now, here in France, retribution was almost upon him.
The weary men preparing to fight this presumptuous intruder were not led by their own monarch. Almost six decades earlier, amid the chaos of another battlefield near Poitiers – and despite the diversionary presence of nineteen identically dressed doppelgängers – the French king’s royal grandfather had been captured by the English. Four years had passed before his freedom could be secured, an unhappy interlude during which his kingdom had been convulsed by political crisis. It was hardly surprising that his son and successor had declined to lead France’s army in person, instead preferring to direct military operations from a safe distance behind the front line.
But even that was not an option available to the present king, Charles VI. He had been riding with his troops on the fateful August day back in 1392 when, under a blazing sun, he had exploded into psychotic violence, killing five of his attendants before he was overpowered, his eyes rolling in his head and his sword broken in his hand. His body soon recovered from this horrifying seizure, but his mind remained fragile. At times, as the years went by, he was calm, lucid and rational; but he could lapse without warning into episodes of derangement and paranoia in which he believed that his wife and children were strangers, that he was not called Charles, that he was not king, even that he was made of glass and might shatter into a thousand pieces.
So he could not lead his people to war; but this troubled man – with his wide, uneasy gaze and fair hair combed forward to disguise his baldness – was still le bien-aimé, France’s well-beloved king. And luckily there were many royal princes to lead his people for him. Not, however, his eldest son, the eighteen-year-old dauphin Louis, an overweight, handsome boy with some political
nous and many dazzling outfits, but by no means a warrior, and too precious to the kingdom’s future to be put at risk. Not his uncle, the duke of Berry, at almost seventy-five the éminence grise of the regime, but too old to bear arms. And not his cousin, the duke of Burgundy, for reasons that were painful even to articulate, let alone explain.
At forty-four, John of Burgundy had in abundance the military capability that the king so clearly lacked. ‘Jean Sans Peur’, they had called him for his commanding part in an earlier battle: John the Fearless. The difficulty, then, was not personal, but political. His father, the old duke, had dominated the government of France until his death in 1404. With his brother of Berry, Philip of Burgundy had seized the responsibilities – and the lavish rewards – of rule during the minority of their royal nephew in the 1380s and his madness thereafter. When Duke Philip died, John of Burgundy expected to inherit his place at the king’s right hand, but he found himself thwarted by the king’s vain and ambitious brother Louis, duke of Orléans, who had spent years chafing under his uncle’s yoke and was determined now to snatch the reins of power for himself.
For three years, the conflict between the cousins of Orléans and Burgundy smouldered. Louis of Orléans chose as his badge the threatening emblem of a wooden club; John of Burgundy’s arch response was to adopt the device of a carpenter’s plane, a tool with which an Orléanist cudgel might be smoothly whittled away. He was so taken with the conceit that soon his planes were everywhere, embroidered on his robes, engraved on his armour, and fashioned in diamond-encrusted gold and silver, complete with golden wood-shavings, to be distributed to his servants and supporters. His assault on Orléans’s control of government was equally thoroughgoing. He set himself up as the champion of the people against Orléanist taxes, and brought the kingdom to the brink of civil war before an uneasy peace was brokered, satisfying no one and settling nothing.
And then, in 1407, John of Burgundy decided that the time had come to put the blade of his plane to more than metaphorical use. On the evening of 23 November Louis of Orléans was in Paris, returning from a visit to the queen, with whom he shared oversight of the incapacitated king, along a street in the east of the city known as the Vieille-du-Temple. The torches held by his attendants threw pools of light onto the cobbles, but the shadows were deep, and their assailants were upon them before they knew what was happening. Blows rained down so fast and so hard that the duke’s left hand was severed as he sought desperately to shield himself from the onslaught. Within moments his skull was gaping and his brains spilled onto the ground. And when news of this terrible murder was brought to the royal council, it was clear that, to the duke of Burgundy, it came as no surprise.
If the duke had believed that a single act of ruthless aggression might cut the knot of dynastic ambition and personal rivalry that restrained him from his political destiny, he had been utterly mistaken. Instead, he found himself wound in the coils of a blood feud. The wife and young sons of Louis of Orléans demanded vengeance on his murderer. John of Burgundy admitted responsibility for the killing but claimed – through his mouthpiece, Jean Petit, a theologian at the university of Paris, who took four dogged hours to read his formal defence of his patron in the presence of the royal court – that the assassination was not only justified but meritorious, because Orléans had been a tyrant and a traitor. This piece of breathtaking casuistry – combined with the armed troops at Burgundy’s side and the support of the Parisian populace – was enough to win the duke a pardon from the tattered and brittle remains of the regime, and by the end of 1409 he had succeeded in enforcing a pantomime of reconciliation and in establishing his hold on king, queen and government in Paris.
But in 1410 the opposition to his rule took threatening shape once more. In a league formed at Gien on the Loire, fifteen-year-old Charles, the new duke of Orléans, won the promise of military support from the ageing duke of Berry and a powerful alliance of other noblemen, including young Orléans’s new father-in-law, the forceful count of Armagnac, who gave his name to this anti-Burgundian confederacy. By now John of Burgundy, who had once been named ‘the Fearless’, lived so much in fear of the same bloody end he had devised for his rival that he built a magnificent new tower at his residence in Paris – emblazoned, of course, with his badge of the plane – at the very top of which he slept each night under the careful watch of his personal bodyguard.
Sides had been chosen, and by the summer of 1411 armies were in the field. ‘Burgundian’ and ‘Armagnac’ were terms now fraught with fear and loathing; each called the other ‘traitor’, trading lurid accusations of injustice, corruption and brutality. Campaign followed truce and truce followed campaign until, in the summer of 1413, John of Burgundy was finally unseated from the capital, and the Armagnac lords took control of government – without, however, bringing an end to the fighting. One despondent Parisian, keeping a journal to record each violent turn of Fortune’s wheel, concluded wearily that ‘the great all hated each other’.
It might have seemed, then, in the summer of 1415, that Henry V of England had picked a fine moment to invade the fractured kingdom he claimed as his. But that was to underestimate the proud defiance of the princes of France. Both the duke of Burgundy and the Armagnac lords had been willing to solicit English help against their fellow countrymen for as long as England’s king remained safely on the right side of the sea. Once he had dared to set sail for France, however, the blood royal would unite in the kingdom’s defence. Though the port of Harfleur could not be relieved quickly enough to prevent its fall to the English siege, a call to arms had been sounded across northern France as soon as Henry’s army had landed in Normandy.
By 12 October, both the dauphin, Louis, and King Charles himself – a compromised but still iconic figure – had reached Normandy’s capital, Rouen. There they stayed as royal figureheads while their troops moved into the theatre of war, some shadowing the English army as it moved along the river Somme, others mustering for the battle ahead. The lords in command of these men included dukes, of Bourbon, Bar and Alençon; counts, among them Richemont, Vendôme, Vaudémont, Blâmont, Marle, Roucy and Eu; and the kingdom’s foremost military officers, the constable and marshal of France – the renowned soldiers Charles d’Albret and Jean le Meingre, known as Boucicaut. The duke of Burgundy had sent forces to join this imposing rendezvous but had been requested not to come in person – a reassuringly wise decision by the royal council, given his role in the vicious conflict of the previous years. His younger brothers, though, were ready to fight: the count of Nevers already in attendance, and the duke of Brabant on his way. The same policy of absence had originally been applied to Burgundy’s sworn enemy, Charles of Orléans, but – once it was clear that neither the king nor his son would be at or even near the battle – a summons had belatedly been sent to the young duke, as their nearest male relative and representative.
So now, in the watery light of early morning, exhausted men prepared themselves, confident in God’s purpose. They knew they numbered many more than the bedraggled English, and they knew that honour and glory were theirs to win. As battle lines were drawn, some – lords and others – seized the moment to embrace and exchange the kiss of peace, putting aside past division in the face of a present and greater enemy. The duke of Burgundy was not there to join this rapprochement, but the regret would be all his. The flower of French chivalry waited impatiently, men and horses jostling into the great mass of the front ranks, a steel-clad host ready to humble the English few.
Time slowed as the pale sun rose higher. Suddenly an English cry went up, and their banners began to move. This would be the hour: the French lines launched themselves across the land they had assembled to defend. Then the air shifted with a thrum, and all at once the sky was dark. Razor-tipped arrows, unleashed in a numberless, roiling storm, plunged through breastplates and visors, muscle and bone. Violent death was falling from the clouds; and, in response, spurs kicked screaming horses to charge down the archers from whose bows
this slaughter flew. They found only death of a different kind, impaling themselves on the sharpened stakes that – they saw too late – bristled from the ground on which the archers stood, or wheeling in panic and stumbling under the pounding hooves of those who pressed behind.
Dead and living fell together, crushed into suffocating earth, one on top of another, in heaped piles from which none would rise. For more than two hours French soldiers laboured onward, heavy feet struggling in sucking mud or tangled in the twisted limbs of the fallen, and all the while English blades hacked and stabbed and gouged. The sound of reinforcements, faint amid the cacophony of killing, brought a lurching hope of rescue; but the duke of Brabant, racing to reach the battle, had galloped too far too fast, outriding his troops and equipment. He was cut down within minutes of hurling himself into the mêlée, his wounds staining the banner he had wrested from his trumpeter to wear, with a raggedly improvised hole for his head, as a makeshift coat of arms.
When the fighting gave way at last to the dreadful work of excavating the mounds of the dead, Brabant’s disfigured corpse was counted alongside those of his brother, the count of Nevers, and the dukes of Alençon and Bar; of Constable d’Albret, and the counts of Vaudémont, Blâmont, Marle and Roucy. It was a noble roll-call rivalled only by the names of those who had lost their freedom rather than their lives: the duke of Bourbon; the counts of Richemont, Vendôme and Eu; the veteran Marshal Boucicaut, and young Charles, duke of Orléans. As these eminent prisoners, white-faced and numb with shock, began the long journey north to Calais and then London, messengers turned their horses south to Rouen, to bring unwelcome news to their anxious king.