A Great and Glorious Adventure (40 page)

On his deathbed, Henry V nominated his thirty-three-year-old brother John of Lancaster, duke of Bedford, as regent of France and guardian of his eight-month-old infant son, now Henry VI, and his
youngest brother, thirty-two-year-old Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, as regent of England. At first all went well, and, when Charles VI of Valois died two months later, it seemed that a smooth
succession of Henry VI of England as Henri II of France would be achieved, and the baby was duly proclaimed as such. Anglo-Burgundian armies continued to press south and the dauphin, whose court
moved between Poitiers, Chinon and Bourges, was generally considered to be of little account – even by those loyal to his cause. Bedford was not only a competent soldier but also an excellent
administrator, and he was well aware of the need to win what in a much later age would be called the campaign of hearts and minds. After he had purged the French civil service of Orléanist
sympathizers, it worked loyally for him, and, despite the provisions of the Treaty of Troyes, Normandy was still run as a separate territory. Militarily, Bedford was ably assisted by Thomas
Montague, fourth earl of Salisbury, and his second-in-command Richard Beauchamp, thirteenth earl of Warwick. Salisbury’s father had been involved in the plot to murder Henry IV in 1399 and
was killed by the mob as a result, but Thomas had proved his loyalty to the Lancastrians over and over again; he was an artillery expert and was said to have been Henry V’s favourite general.
Warwick had been brought up a Ricardian, but, when Richard II had turned against the family, they were saved only by Henry Bolingbroke’s assumption of the throne; he had served in most of the
Lancastrian wars and been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Between them, the pair, both in their early forties, directed operations to recover the rest of France. Under them there were a host of
thoroughly competent commanders, men who were by no means all
of noble blood but had earned their rank and position by professional ability in the field. All did well out of
the wars, most became immensely rich, and many acquired French titles and lands which, by and large, they administered fairly and well.

At the height of English power, the whole of Normandy, the valley of the Seine, the Île de France (Paris and its environs), Picardy, much of Maine and Anjou, Aquitaine, Calais and its
surroundings, and part of Champagne were under English rule. But however benign that rule was to begin with – and Bedford did his best to keep it so – there were problems. The English
parliament was becoming reluctant to raise the money to fund the war, thus taxes in English France, particularly in Normandy, had to rise. There was a sales tax (effectively VAT), a hearth tax
(council tax), the
pattis
(road tolls) and an ever-increasing tax on alcohol. On top of the officially levied taxes, there were the depredations of
routiers
, highwaymen and gangs
of brigands, and the unofficial enterprises of many English garrisons, which ran what were effectively protection rackets. Feelings among the peasantry, initially thankful for an English victory
that would bring peace and stability, began to turn. Nevertheless, Bedford intended to mount a major campaign in 1424 to subdue the rest of Maine and Anjou and then push south to Bourges and end
the war once and for all. Before the operation could be launched, however, there was the distraction of Verneuil, an English-controlled town sixty miles west of Paris on the borders of Normandy. A
Scots army had persuaded the town to surrender without a fight by convincing the garrison commander that there had been a battle and that the English army had suffered a major defeat.
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Bedford duly set off to retake the town with a force of around 1,500 men-at-arms and 4,500 archers. Arriving before Verneuil, he formed up in the usual English
way: himself commanding the right-hand division of dismounted men-at-arms and Salisbury the left, archers on each flank and a reserve of mounted archers behind. He then waited for the French
– a force of around twice his number, composed of Scots and French infantry, Italian mercenary cavalry and crossbowmen.

The Scots were too canny to attack an English body of men formed up, however small it might be, and from first light until mid-afternoon
the two armies looked at each
other. Eventually, Bedford gave the order to advance at a slow pace. The lines crashed into each other and the hacking and slashing began. At first it looked as if the Scots might win: their
cavalry outflanked the archers and attacked the baggage-train, and some of Salisbury’s archers ran away; but experience and leadership told, and, when Salisbury swung his division round and
attacked the Scots in flank, the balance swung in favour of the English and the Scots were driven back and the slaughter began. The English were accustomed to fighting the French and thought little
of it, but to be attacked by Scots was a very different matter, and many Englishmen had a genuine hatred of their northern neighbours. Few prisoners were taken and the Franco-Scottish dead may have
numbered as many as 2,000. In the aftermath of the battle, a captain of archers by the name of Young, who had panicked when the Italian cavalry swept around them and run away, taking some of his
men with him, was duly hanged.

Now matters in England began to distract Bedford from the planned campaign. His brother Humphrey had got himself involved with Jacqueline, countess of Hainault, who was now estranged from her
thoroughly unpleasant husband, and had taken a contingent of troops to Flanders to enforce her rights. The expedition was a disaster, which might not have mattered too much except that it
infuriated the duke of Burgundy, who had ambitions of his own for Flanders, so Bedford had to return to England to get a grip of his brother and then use all his diplomatic skills to preserve the
alliance – a task in which he was hardly helped by Burgundy making (unreciprocated) amorous advances towards the earl of Salisbury’s young wife, a granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Returning to France, Bedford now began a methodical reduction of Armagnac towns on the Loire. It was not without setbacks, including a defeat for the duke of Burgundy, the loss and recapture of
Pontorson in 1426, and a revolt in Maine in 1427 sparked by excessive taxation and English arrogance, but by 1428 all had been resolved and a major offensive could begin. By mid-August, the
combined Anglo-Burgundian armies under Salisbury had captured forty towns and fortified places en route to and in the area of Orléans, the jewel of the Loire. And, on 12 October 1428, they
laid siege to that town, the capture of which would give England control of the Loire and would trap the dauphin between Aquitaine to the south-west, Burgundy to the east and English France to the
north.

Then there occurred one of the most extraordinary episodes of an extraordinary age. The adventures of the Maid of Orléans, Jeanne d’Arc, Jehanne La Pucelle,
the Witch of Orléans, to give only some of her names, had been largely consigned to myth, legend and French folk memory until 1920, when, in the aftermath of the First World War – in
which France had found herself on the winning side but with her heart and soul ripped out and desperately seeking something of glory and pride in her distant past – Joan became Saint Joan.
Jeanne was probably born in 1412, the fourth child of five, in the village of Domrémy (now Domrémy-la-Pucelle) on the borders of the Holy Roman Empire twenty-five miles south-west of
Nancy. She was certainly not a simple peasant. Her father was a minor official responsible for the collection of taxes, the maintenance of law and order, and the general administration of the
surrounding area, and he owned, rather than rented, a fifty-acre farm with a substantial stone-built house. The transcript of her answers to questions at her eventual trial would suggest that she
had an education of some sort, but whether any of her letters were actually written by her or dictated to a clerk is uncertain. All those questioned at a subsequent investigation twenty-five years
after her death are adamant that she was given a good grounding in the Catholic faith and that she was unusually assiduous in attending church.

Sometime around the age of twelve, Jeanne began to hear voices, which she claimed were from various saints and then from God himself. It is not entirely uncommon for girls going through puberty
to experience emotional turmoil, but Jeanne was convinced that she really was the recipient of divine instruction and sometime in 1428 tried to obtain an interview with the captain of the nearest
French garrison, Robert de Baudricourt at Vaucouleurs, ten miles to the north. After several failed attempts, she was eventually seen by Baudricourt, who, after a number of meetings, became
convinced that she did indeed hear the voice of God and that she could help in expelling the English. Baudricourt gave her an escort and sent her off to Chinon to see the dauphin, who also thought
that there might be something in what she was saying and sent her on to Poitiers in March 1429 to be examined by a team of churchmen, an interrogation that went on for eleven days. By now, Jeanne
was claiming that God had instructed her to go to Orléans, where she would lift the siege. It was around this time that she took to wearing men’s clothing, a
fact that was subsequently held against her, but which may initially have been a simple ploy to avoid molestation on the road, and later was part of her persona as a soldier.

While one’s first reaction today might be to write Jeanne off as a mentally disturbed teenager, there must have been far more to her than that. Medieval man may have been superstitious but
he was not stupid, and to convince a hard-baked cynical soldier like Robert de Baudricourt, the dauphin (admittedly described at this time as ‘a graceless degenerate’
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) and a host of suspicious churchmen inherently reluctant to grant the right of audience with the Almighty to anyone but themselves would have required
extraordinary powers of persuasion. In the modern age, people who hear voices are generally considered to be mentally unbalanced and may be confined in psychiatric hospitals, so, assuming that,
whatever the voices Jeanne heard were, they were unlikely to be those of God, the question arises whether she was mad or whether she invented the voices to lend force to her arguments for a
military revival. While there are some signs of religious mania in what we know of her character, she does not appear to have exhibited any other symptoms of insanity – but then modern
murderers who claim to have killed on the instructions of a supernatural voice are not necessarily obviously mad either. The conclusion must be either that her affliction was confined to the
voices, or that she was inventing them. What motivated a country girl at the fringes of what would become France to set out to revive, or ignite, French patriotism, we cannot know at this distance,
but patriot she surely was.

Meanwhile, the English had surrounded Orléans, and within a few days had driven the French away from the Les Tourelles, a towered fort that guarded the southern end of the bridge across
the Loire. Then, on 27 October 1428, when Salisbury was observing the town from the towers, a lucky cannon shot from the walls took away half his face. He lived in agony for a week and died on 3
November. Command passed to William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, another example of social mobility in medieval England. Suffolk’s great-grandfather, also a William, was but a merchant,
albeit a wealthy one, when he became banker to Edward III, then anxious to escape the clutches of Italian money-lenders. So successful was he that Edward made his son a knight, and later the first
earl of Suffolk. The current William, like many younger sons, sought a career as a soldier and went to
France with Henry V in 1415. When his father, the second earl, was
killed at Harfleur, where he himself was wounded, and his elder brother killed at Agincourt, he became the fourth earl at the age of nineteen. Suffolk’s later career – his involvement
in Henry VI’s government when English fortunes in France had long been in decline and his extra-legal beheading as a so-called traitor in 1450 – has given him a bad press, but he was a
perfectly capable and experienced military commander, albeit not of the calibre or reputation of Salisbury, whose widow he married in 1430.

The siege dragged on into winter and rations were running short for both besieged and besieger when, on 12 February 1429, an English supply convoy with a military escort of around 1,500 men
commanded by the forty-eight-year-old Sir John Fastolf was intercepted by a Franco-Scottish force of perhaps 4,000 or 5,000.
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In what became known as
the Battle of the Herrings – the convoy included rations to last the army over Lent
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– Sir John ordered the wagons into a circle and put
his men within it. Attack after attack was broken up by the archers, and the French were driven off. The skirmish illustrated once again the inadvisability of attacking an English army with a
strong component of archers standing in a defensive position of its own choosing.

Fastolf’s reinforcements allowed Suffolk to tighten the cordon around Orléans, but that was soon nullified when the duke of Burgundy quarrelled with Bedford over the eventual
control of the town, flounced out in a fit of pique and left the siege along with his men. Suffolk was able to control the west side and the south bank but could only patrol around the eastern
approaches. Then, on 22 March 1429, a letter was delivered to the English camp signed by Jeanne and addressed to ‘You king of England, and you duke of Bedford who call yourself regent of the
kingdom of France. Surrender to the maid who is sent here from God, the king of heaven, the keys to all
the good cities that you have taken and violated in
France’.
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As nobody had any idea who this maid was, the letter was ignored, but copies survive. On 29 April, Jeanne herself arrived at
Orléans, probably in a convoy of boats bringing supplies (the English had omitted to place chains across the Loire) which were unloaded on the north bank and taken in by the Burgundy gate,
which was unguarded by the English. Jeanne seems to have had no problem convincing the garrison commander, the illegitimate son of the murdered duke of Orléans,
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that she was the answer to his prayers, and, clad in armour and carrying a standard that had been blessed in the church of Saint-Saviour in Blois, on 4 May, she accompanied a
French sally to occupy the fort of Saint-Loup, two miles east of Orléans on the north bank. There was nobody in the fort, but this could be attributed to God’s work and was a
much-needed morale boost for the French. Thursday, 5 May was Ascension Day, when Christians were not supposed to fight, but, on 6 May, the French, egged on by Jeanne, came out of the Burgundy gate,
crossed the river, and attacked the fort of Saint-Jean le Blanc on the south side of the river and the fort of the Augustins just south of the bridge. This latter gave them a jumping-off line for
an attack on Les Tourelles, which they duly attacked and captured next day. During this action, Jeanne was wounded in the shoulder by an arrow (as the voices of various saints had predicted), but
she crossed the bridge and entered the town. The next day, Sunday, 8 May, the English withdrew and the siege of Orléans was over. The French were convinced, then and now, that it was all due
to the Maid.