Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (12 page)

Joan was unaware that the Duke of Bedford, in particular, was moving to support Philip’s betrayal of the truce because he sought an end to the meddlesome Maid who had sabotaged English supremacy. Bedford and Philip, often hostile to each other, were united on the matter of Joan. Their diplomatic entente was helped by the fact that Bedford had married Philip’s sister.

Bedford maneuvered quickly: he summoned to his side a number of soldiers who had been sent to fight heretics in Bohemia, thus in effect turning his campaign into a crusade, a sacred venture against heretics. Their target, Bedford wrote to the king of France in a tone astonishingly disrespectful, was Joan herself—a heretic and, because she beguiled and corrupted the goals of good Christian men, a witch. “You seduce and abuse the ignorant and rely on the assistance of the superstitious and reprobate, and even of that deranged and infamous woman who goes about in men’s clothes and is of dissolute conduct.”

There was no evidence for heresy, but Bedford was certain that he and his Burgundian bishops could contrive a rationale for condemning her if she could be captured and put on trial. Those goals seemed achievable, and then it would be a short route to her execution, the complete demolition of French morale, the defeat of Charles VII, and—voilà!—the eight-year-old Henry VI of England would also become king of France.

At the same time, Georges de la Trémoïlle was making every effort to poison Charles against Joan, and in his perfidy he exploited Charles’s wife and mother-in-law. Of Joan, la Trémoïlle wrote to them, “She leaves no doubt that she will bring Paris under her control”—not the control of France, not that of the king, but
her
control.

As she had said, Joan feared only treason, and now she sensed the proximate reality of it. Most poignant of all, her voices seemed no longer to provide clear direction as to her future activities with the king, and this she took to mean that her military career was drawing to a close.

SEVEN

A Leap of Faith

(August 1429–December 1430)

B
y the time the royal expedition arrived at Crépy-en-Valois on Thursday, August 11, Joan sensed that forces both English and French were seeking her disgrace and demise. She had won the king’s approval; she had earned the loyalty and respect of noblemen and battle leaders; and she had won the admiration and affection of soldiers and ordinary citizens. How could such enmity on the part of a few so suddenly become so potent?

The French too had their cunning and formidable men, such as la Trémoïlle, the king’s chamberlain and his chief negotiator with Burgundy, to whom Charles owed vast sums of money and whose counsel, therefore, he could not reject outright. La Trémoïlle’s scheme, which he recommended daily to the king, was to maintain a truce between French and Burgundian troops and then hire foreign soldiers to battle the English. There was no place in la Trémoïlle’s plan for the likes of Joan, who rightly distrusted the idea of a truce and recommended acting at once to retake Paris for the anointed king. The chamberlain wanted her dismissed and sent home, but the king was not ready to do so; she was an asset, at least in what passed for his public relations, and he wanted to keep her a while longer. It is unclear whether Charles knew that la Trémoïlle was sowing the seeds of suspicion about Joan among those at court as well as with the queen and her mother.

In addition, those who proclaimed themselves friends of the king were furtively making deals with both the Burgundians and the English, for they realized that alliance with England, even now, would offer them large financial advantages. The coffers of Charles VII were virtually empty, but the situation across the channel was quite different. These conspirators also felt that England would eventually prevail, and they wanted to be on the winning side. Their traitorous collaboration represented the most perfidious era in French history until the Nazi occupation and the Vichy government, to which this period bears several unfortunate similarities.

Joan was rigorously unique—not a queen, a mother, an aristocrat, a nun, or an intellectual but a woman of action and profound religious faith, convinced that God willed the integrity of her country. In other words, her clarity and simplicity put to shame all the wily, selfish politicians and conniving churchmen doing business with them, who finally decided that she had outlived her usefulness and had to go.

The faculty of the University of Paris was also involved. Theologians, philosophers, and clergy in the capital were impatient to eradicate Joan’s influence and to have her silenced. A number of professors signed a letter to none other than the pope, in which they charged Joan with rank heresy; their primary accusation was that she claimed to know the future. Such academic involvement was not as surprising as it may seem today, for the University of Paris presented itself to the world as the intellectual guardian of orthodoxy, standing ready to condemn anyone who spoke or acted in God’s name without seeking its approval. In addition, the university faculty championed the Treaty of Troyes and endorsed an English king on the throne of France as the shortest route to peace. Their position was virtually a legal judgment, and it carried great weight all over France: according to these august men, Joan of Arc was a dangerous charlatan.

B
EFORE THE SUMMER
of 1429 was over, the representatives of Philip of Burgundy were quietly negotiating with the Duke of Bedford about a hypothetical price to be paid for handing over Joan of Arc if she could be captured. There was something almost fateful about her, the English decided, something that seemed to be the devil’s own work. She must be a witch to have accomplished so much, to have secured such loyalty from troops—and witches must be eliminated from the world. Precisely at this point in the fifteenth century, belief in witchcraft reached a pitch of frenzy hitherto unknown: religious folk were terrified of those considered witches, and clergymen were hunting down countless innocent women in the belief that they consorted with or were tools of demonic powers.

A great deal had to be demonstrated, however. And Joan could not be put on trial and executed by an English court merely for succeeding in battle and routing English plans. She would have to be condemned by an ecclesiastical court for reasons of witchcraft and heresy; alas, an ecclesiastical court favorable to England and ready to accept cash and favors for the deed would be readily available.

Joan read the prevailing winds, believed that her task for France was complete, and wanted to go home. “I wish it were God’s will for me to go away now,” she said to Dunois in August, “and to lay down my armor and return to serving my parents by looking after the flocks with my sister and brothers, who would be so happy to have me at home.” Poignantly, Joan spoke of her “sister and brothers” and life at home as it had been before her brothers joined her in battle and her sister died.

Although she had spent only five months in royal circles and two months in the thick of warfare, she understood that now her real troubles would begin, and she longed to avoid them. In Reims, her farewell to her family as they returned to Domrémy must have been difficult for them all; now more than ever, she missed life at home. Disillusionment followed disappointment from the summer of 1429 to the spring of 1430, for Joan had made it possible for Charles to be anointed king, and now he was the most acute source of her regret. Not that she would have reversed the coronation, and not that she lamented any moment of battle, but Charles preferred not to face the unpleasant realities at hand, and Joan preferred to confront them promptly.

Apparently she was of two minds. On the one hand, she became ever more anguished and depressed over the apathy of the king and the foolish and often treacherous counsel he heeded—hence her wish to return to Domrémy. But on the other hand, she saw how much might be done, with proper troops, to effect a rapid departure of the English from French soil. Most of all, she grew angry and impatient at the king’s inclination to grasp at every diplomatic straw thrown at him by the wily Philip of Burgundy.

Charles still hoped that Philip would simply surrender Paris to him. Reluctantly, however, he provided some troops to attend Joan and Alençon in an attempt to recapture the city on September 8. “The Maid took her standard in hand,” according to Perceval de Cagny, the duke’s squire and chronicler,

and the assault was hard and long, lasting from about two in the afternoon until nightfall. After the sun had set, the Maid was hit by a crossbow bolt in her thigh. After she had been hit, she insisted even more strenuously that everyone should approach the walls so that the place would be taken. But because it was night and she was wounded and the men-at-arms were weary from the daylong assault, Gaucourt and others came to the Maid and, against her will, carried her away. And so the assault ended.

Joan agreed to take but one night’s rest, and then she told the astonished Alençon that she was ready to resume with another plan of attack the following day. The troops rallied, but then messengers from the king arrived, ordering Joan and the duke to meet him at Saint-Denis. The king ordered the army to abandon the attack on Paris, and he went back to Gien, in the Loire Valley; there he formally disbanded his troops and announced that henceforth he would pursue only a reconciliation with Philip—an expectation that everyone but the king knew was both futile and dangerous.

After her meeting with the king at Saint-Denis, Joan went to the chapel royal, where she left her armor and sword—the traditional gesture of thanksgiving for surviving a recent war wound. But it is also the sign by which a soldier acknowledges that the battles are over, the race run. Joan had effected Charles’s coronation, and now he was her king; she may well have thought that with the formal disbanding of the royal army she would henceforth be without purpose to the man she had brought to the throne, and therefore to the country.

Because he was a nobleman, Jean d’Alençon did not require the king’s permission to raise troops and go to battle—which is just what he proposed that autumn when he invited Joan to accompany him on a campaign to Normandy, which was Burgundian territory. But Charles was persuaded by la Trémoïlle not to permit this, in order to avoid provoking the Burgundians while negotiations continued on yet another truce with Philip (despite the fact that he had failed to yield Paris after the first truce). “The Maid remained much annoyed at the king,” wrote Alençon’s chronicler.

That situation was aggravated by Charles’s decision to prevent any further possible undertakings between the Maid and the duke; this he accomplished by a formal instruction that Joan and Alençon were never to meet again. No doubt he envied their accomplishments, which highlighted his own inefficiency and weakness. By severing this friendship, the king also ensured that any troops under their separate commands would be weakened. This, of course, was exactly what men like la Trémoïlle wanted, for Charles had neither the inclination nor the talent for military strategy. And so the Maid and her “fair duke,” good friends and comrades-in-arms, were never reunited.

B
Y THE AUTUMN
of 1429 Joan felt utterly useless. Charles commanded her presence at court, in Gien and elsewhere, and there she resided in comfortable indolence—not without complaining of her inactivity—in quarters provided for herself, her staff and her two brothers. At the home of the king’s finance minister (where she was treated for her leg injury), Joan was often besieged by people who wanted her to bless rosary beads and other pious objects by touching them. “Touch them yourselves,” she said with a laugh. “Your touch will do as much good as mine!” She had no desire to be considered an object of veneration.

In November, probably at la Trémoïlle’s instigation, the king decided to send Joan to battle in order to avoid her interference in the ongoing but futile negotiations with Burgundy. She was given troops for an assault on Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, southeast of Bourges, where the English swiftly capitulated.

But at the next offensive, La Charité, a Burgundian town crucial to the king’s protection, Joan’s forces were few. Like all leaders of battle during the Hundred Years’ War, she had to beg for help from neighboring towns and aristocrats. “To my dear and good friends at Riom,” she dictated in a letter,

You well know how the town of Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier was taken by assault, and with God’s help I intend to clear out the other places which are against the king. But because so much gunpowder, projectiles and other war materials had been expended before this town, and because I and the lords who are here are so poorly supplied for laying siege to La Charité, where we will be going shortly, I pray you, upon whatever love you have for the well-being and honor for the king and also all the others here, that you will immediately send and donate for the siege gunpowder, saltpeter, sulfur, projectiles, arbalests [crossbow catapults] and other materials of war.

Joan’s signature was obviously her own, for it came from one who was just learning to write: the letters are wobbly, and the initial
J
of her name resembles the number seven.

Contributions and reinforcements from Riom never arrived, and Joan had to beg Charles for help. Finally she abandoned the attack “because the king did not raise funds to send her either supplies or money to maintain her company,” wrote one witness. “She had to raise the siege and withdraw in great displeasure.”

At Christmas the king announced the ennoblement of Joan, her family and their descendants. “We desire to offer thanks,” the decree stated, “for the many remarkable benefits of divine largesse that have been accorded us through the agency of the Maid, Jeanne d’Ay [
sic
] de Domrémy…[and] we consider also the laudable, graceful, and effective services already rendered by the aforesaid Jeanne in every way, to us and to our kingdom….” On the coat of arms were two gold lilies and between them a sword supporting a crown, the symbolic rendering of what Joan had done for France. It was very much a farewell gesture to a woman, like a gift to a retiring employee. Joan’s rank, of which she never spoke, was essentially that of a
comtesse,
similar to an English marchioness or countess. Her family received the surname du Lys, from the lilies on their emblem.

This was a crafty deed. By any measure, the king could not be faulted for a lack of gratitude to one so widely admired. But at the same time, ennoblement had an important effect on Joan. Like Alençon and others, she no longer required the king’s permission to raise troops and wage war, for nobles could do this entirely on their own. But if she did in fact go to battle, she would be completely responsible for its consequences; in effect, Charles was separating himself from her. He did not want her to act or lead in his name or beneath his banner. She had saved Orléans and the monarchy, and now she had the eminence of a noblewoman. Thank you, Joan, and good-bye: that was essentially the king’s mind.

Thus began a cold and lonely winter, which Joan spent mostly at Sully-sur-Loire, in a castle belonging to la Trémoïlle’s family, who were not warm hosts. In addition to her somber inactivity and her separation from those she loved and trusted in and out of the army, she was also denied the consolation of her voices, which now seemed to fall silent. She prayed and maintained a composed stillness as much as possible, but there was no clear indication of her future. For perhaps the first time, Joan of Arc knew the kind of spiritual darkness that is part of the experience of everyone who seeks God.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1430, with the king’s tacit approval, she proceeded north with a company of about three hundred fifty mercenary men-at-arms, prepared to defeat an enemy offensive against the town of Compiègne, fifty miles north of Paris. There resistance to the occupation and loyalty to Charles were strongly entrenched, and so a turning back of the Anglo-Burgundians would provide another opportunity to move forward and seize the capital, thus repeating the success of Orléans.