The Maid and the Queen (33 page)

As difficult as it is to believe today, this unsympathetic view of Joan as a hardened, rather distasteful, unrepentant sinner was the one that in the aftermath of her execution was seemingly destined to prevail. To understand the heroism of the Maid it was necessary to hear her voice, to feel the force of her piety, to reflect on the magnitude of her courage and achievements,
and all of this stood in great peril of being lost or deliberately destroyed by her enemies. To rescue Joan from this fate, three exceedingly unlikely events had to occur: Charles VII had either to win a major battle decisively (a dubious prospect at best) or somehow find a way to get himself recognized as the legitimate king of France by those municipalities, most especially Paris, currently occupied by his enemies; the English had subsequently to be expelled from all of their strongholds on the continent; and, finally, a conscious effort had to be made to discredit and overturn the heretical conviction of the Church, not an institution particularly known for changing positions or admitting errors. This was a daunting agenda for any sovereign, let alone one whose abilities were as limited as Charles’s.

For all Joan’s courage, then, and despite the undeniable political legitimacy conferred upon Charles by the coronation at Reims, there was no indication at all at the time of her martyrdom that her king would ultimately prevail in his struggle against the English. The proof of this was that the war would drag on for a further
twenty years
. In the end, it would fall to another woman entirely, one unacknowledged by history, to take on the task left unfinished by the Maid.

I
RONICALLY,
in terms of the war effort, the period of Joan’s captivity—from May 1430 to her death in May of the following year—marked the most productive and active interval of Charles’s reign. The council meetings convened at Sully-sur-Loire in March 1430 (from which a frustrated Joan had slipped away, choosing instead to act independently rather than endure what she considered to be endless talk) had for once actually produced something approaching a coordinated plan of attack. The king had finally been made to realize that Philip the Good had not really been negotiating for peace but rather had only been using Charles’s offers to improve the terms of his alliance with the English. Above all, Charles did not like to be taken for a fool, and his anger was palpable in a letter issued on May 6, 1430, to his supporters, in which the king disdainfully referred to Philip the Good as “our adversary of Burgundy.” The duke, the king fumed, “has, for some time, amused and deceived us by truces and otherwise, under the shadow of good faith, because he said and affirmed that he wished to arrive at the well-being of peace, the which, for the relief of our poor people who, to the displeasure of our heart, has suffered and every day suffer so much for the matter of the
war, we greatly desired and do desire, he has set himself with certain forces to make war upon us and upon our countries and loyal subjects.” Charles’s bitterness over this duplicity had prompted him to approve an aggressive military campaign, much of it aimed directly at those areas held or desired by the duke of Burgundy. La Hire was sent into Normandy, the lord of Barbazan to aid the duke of Bar in Champagne, and the marshal Boussac and the count of Vendôme to Compiègne. Many of their efforts met with success. René besieged and won the Burgundian town of Chappes, which was heavily defended by an army sent by the marshal of Burgundy; the Bastard of Orléans joined La Hire in Normandy, worrying the English in Louviers, close to the Burgundian border to the north; and the lord of Boussac and the count of Vendôme not only raised the siege of Compiègne but won a further victory at Peronne.
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Philip the Good suddenly found his participation in the war to be a good deal more onerous than had previously been his experience.

But the energy displayed by the French military belied the poisonous nature of the royal court, which was rent by rivalry, intrigue, and corruption. Two principal political parties had formed, one under the leadership of Georges de la Trémoïlle, who, having vanquished Joan, once again occupied his former position as Charles’s closest and most influential adviser, and was very busy exploiting this advantage to maximum profit. The other, composed of the Angevins and their allies, focused on reconciling the king to Arthur of Richemont, Charles’s formerly rejected constable, as a means of obtaining a meaningful coalition with his brother, the ever-vacillating duke of Brittany. Bringing Arthur of Richemont back into Charles’s good graces meant restoring the constable to a dominant role at court and within the royal council, an appointment that La Trémoïlle, jealous of his authority (and riches), was desperate to prevent.

Although Yolande of Aragon was still Arthur’s primary supporter and the ostensible leader of the Angevin party, by the spring of 1430 the queen of Sicily seems to have been in the process of retiring from the day-to-day
workings of the court. She was, after all, nearly fifty years old and had been a dominant force in French politics since 1415, when the battle of Agincourt had thrust first her husband, and then herself, into a position of power within the old Armagnac coalition. Her great coup, the introduction of Joan to Charles at Chinon, had succeeded beyond all expectations. Orléans had been delivered from the enemy and by the coronation at Reims her daughter Marie’s position as the legitimate queen of France was established. Moreover, as a result of Joan’s intervention, Charles was no longer in doubt as to his parentage, and seemed well on his way to recovering his kingdom. Yolande’s third son and chosen political successor, Charles of Anjou, was nearing adulthood. She had never sent him away as she had Louis III to Naples or René to Bar and consequently he had had the benefit of her political experience and advice since childhood. He was familiar with the workings of the royal court and was a trusted confidant of both his sister, Marie, the queen, and her husband. The political situation had stabilized to the point where the aging queen of Sicily could begin the process of edging toward a quieter, more peaceful existence. On March 30, 1430, by letters patent, sixteen-year-old Charles of Anjou took his place as an official member of the royal council and his mother retreated to her castle in Saumur.

With this transition, Georges de la Trémoïlle saw his chance. In April, ambassadors from the duke of Brittany arrived to discuss the possibility, yet again, of the duke’s coming to a formal alliance with Charles VII. Charles of Anjou, not yet his mother’s equal at intrigue, was easily outmaneuvered by La Trémoïlle and seems to have been left out of these talks. He was therefore not in a position to protest when the ambassadors decided to cement the affiliation between the French king and the duke of Brittany by marrying the duke of Brittany’s daughter, Isabelle, to the count of Laval, a close friend of the constable’s, as a means of further protecting Breton interests at the royal court.

Ordinarily, Yolande would have been very happy with these negotiations. After all, she had been trying to separate the duke of Brittany from his English and Burgundian allies and bring him into an alliance with Charles VII for years. There was, however, a slight problem with this new arrangement: Isabelle of Brittany had been very publicly affianced for years to Yolande’s eldest son, Louis III, currently away in Italy and so conveniently unavailable to defend his marital rights. To sever the relationship was an act of treachery (not to mention highly reminiscent of what Yolande
herself had done when she had so abruptly and dismissively returned Louis III’s first fiancée, the duke of Burgundy’s daughter, those many years ago). Georges de la Trémoïlle was well aware of the offending nature of this arrangement and suggested that the king send Arthur of Richemont himself to Saumur to break the news to the queen of Sicily, hoping to cause a rupture between the constable and his most powerful supporter.

He very nearly succeeded. Yolande was above all committed to the welfare and advancement of her children, and, as the lord of Trémoïlle had expected, she reacted to the breaking of the marriage alliance between her eldest son and the daughter of the duke of Brittany as a profound insult. The woman who had taken with equanimity the murder of John the Fearless, the disinheritance of her son-in-law the dauphin, and the trials of a decades-long war with England, who had counseled forbearance and diplomacy in the face of nearly every emergency, lost all of her sangfroid and self-discipline when this news was delivered to her by her hapless protégé. “When the constable came, in the name of his brother, to see Yolande, accompanied by the count of Etampes and the Breton ambassadors, to obtain her agreement [to the marriage of Isabelle to the count of Laval] she became violently angry and it almost came to an open declaration of war,” reported G. du Fresne de Beaucourt, Charles VII’s definitive biographer. Although the constable managed to salvage his relationship with his patron, the queen of Sicily was reconciled to this betrayal only when Charles VII later appeased her by agreeing to a face-saving replacement marriage between her second daughter, Yolande of Anjou, and the duke of Brittany’s eldest son. She must have directed some choice words, too, at her youngest son for allowing himself to be outwitted, because Charles of Anjou later took his revenge in a way that implied he had strong feelings about the matter. But the principal outcome of this episode was that Yolande of Aragon was jolted out of retirement, and in this La Trémoïlle seriously miscalculated, for, once roused, the queen of Sicily made for a dangerous enemy.

She did not recover her former influence at once; La Trémoïlle’s power over Charles VII was still too strong. Through a combination of excessive solicitude for his well-being and an adroit manipulation of his many weaknesses, the councillor had made himself seemingly indispensable to the king. (One of the many services the lord of Trémoïlle provided to his sovereign was to openly encourage and enable Charles’s frequent infidelities. As might be expected, this did not endear him to the queen.) The planned marriage between Isabelle of Brittany and the count of Laval went through despite Yolande’s vociferous objections. Although the expense of underwriting the elaborate coronation at Reims had severely depleted the royal treasury’s resources, Georges de la Trémoïlle continued to reap substantial rewards, both in terms of tax revenues and outright gifts of gold and property, from the king in exchange for “the great, notable, profitable and agreeable” tasks that he performed for Charles’s benefit.
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René at home in his castle at work on a book of chivalry.

How long it might have taken to dislodge this favorite using the customary methods of politics is anyone’s guess. But in the summer of 1431 another Angevin family crisis arose, this one involving René, that, even more than the severed marriage contract, forced Yolande of Aragon to intervene once again in the management of her son-in-law’s kingdom, and by so doing win the war.

T
HAT RENé,
who had been Joan’s earliest (if clandestine) supporter, should be the means, however backhanded, of the accomplishment of her goals is somehow fitting. After the disaster at Paris, René had remained loyal to his brother-in-law the king and had pursued the struggle against Charles VII’s enemies from his home duchy of Bar and Lorraine, an enterprise that coincided nicely with self-interest, as he got to keep everything he conquered. As a further encouragement to this helpful relative, Charles sent him troops and an experienced captain, the lord of Barbazan, so that René might launch an offensive into the neighboring county of Champagne. In 1430 this strategy resulted in a major victory against the Burgundians, when René seized the town of Chappes, a feat for which he was approvingly described by a chronicler as “a brave knight of great heart who showed himself to be proud and courageous.”

Then, at the beginning of the succeeding year, on January 15, 1431, just as Joan’s trial for heresy was beginning in Rouen, René’s father-in-law, the old, gouty, philandering duke of Lorraine, finally succumbed to his various illnesses and René at last came into his inheritance. He was now officially titled duke of Bar and Lorraine (his uncle, the cardinal, had died the previous June), with all of the advantages that the distinction implied: overlordship of a large swath of land supplemented by the wealth of its rents and a highly prestigious position in the world.

Unfortunately, the dispensation of lucrative legacies such as the old duke had agreed to bestow on his son-in-law were frequently challenged by other family members who considered themselves cheated by these arrangements, and the duke of Lorraine’s estate was no exception to this rule. René’s father-in-law had had a younger brother, and this younger brother had had a son, Antoine, and Antoine thought that no matter what had been agreed to in the past, he was far more entitled to his uncle’s estates than was René. To buttress his position, Antoine appealed to Philip the Good, who was
already none too pleased that René had brazenly invaded Champagne and taken the town of Chappes away from him. Consequently, the duke of Burgundy was only too happy to provide Antoine with an army of approximately four thousand warriors. On July 2, 1431, Antoine’s forces met René’s near Bulgnéville, about ten miles southeast of Neufchâteau.