The Maid and the Queen (15 page)

But to believe this is to ignore one essential aspect of the village’s existence. Domrémy was situated in the duchy of Bar, ancestral home of Yolande of Aragon’s mother, Yolande of Bar, and an area as vital to the French crown in the fifteenth century as it had been during the reign of Yolande of Aragon’s grandmother, Marie of France. As before, half the inhabitants—those who lived, like Joan and her family, to the west of the Meuse River—were loyal to the French king, while those who lived to the east of the waterway gave their allegiance to next-door Lorraine, technically subject to the Holy Roman Emperor. Except, in Joan’s day, the duke of Lorraine, a weak, fearful man much given to gout, had allied himself—or rather been bullied into allying himself—with the duke of Burgundy. So Joan and those like her living on the western bank of the Meuse identified those of her neighbors
living on the eastern side not as citizens of the empire, but as Burgundians. Far from being removed from the Armagnac-Burgundian controversy that plagued the rest of France then, Domrémy was actually on the front lines of the conflict, literally face-to-face with the enemy across the river. Joan herself affirmed the accuracy of this portrait of her birthplace later, at her condemnation trial. Asked by an inquisitor, “Did the people of Domrémy take the Burgundian side or that of their opponents?” Joan replied, “I knew only one Burgundian there and I could have wished his head cut off—however, only if it pleased God.”

In 1419, when Joan was seven years old, a political event of some importance took place in the duchy. The former duke of Bar (Yolande of Aragon’s uncle) having been killed four years earlier at the battle of Agincourt, the duchy had devolved upon another of Yolande’s uncles, the duke’s younger brother, cardinal Louis, bishop of nearby Châlons-sur-Marne. Being a clergyman, however, the new duke of Bar had no children, and could not expect (at least legitimately) to beget any in the future, so to remedy this problem cardinal Louis agreed to adopt a male heir. Concurrent with this adoption, it was also decided that the young man chosen as cardinal Louis’s successor would marry Isabelle, the daughter of the duke of next-door Lorraine, with the understanding that after the deaths of the present dukes this couple together would inherit and rule both Bar and Lorraine.

There then only remained the question of whom cardinal Louis should elect to succeed him. In the summer of 1419, just before she left for Provence, Yolande of Aragon deftly used her family ties to put forward her own aspirant and successfully contrived to convince her uncle of the merits of her candidate. The lucky young gentleman chosen to inherit the prestigious and lucrative territories of both Bar and Lorraine was none other than Yolande’s second son, artistic little René.

With this one diplomatic stroke, Yolande managed through René not only to hold Bar for the dauphin Charles, but also to make inroads into rival Burgundian territory. The duchy of Lorraine was integral to John the Fearless’s political ambitions, and although there is no record of his reaction, he must have been furious to have been outmaneuvered in this fashion by his longtime enemy, the queen of Sicily. “Bar and Lorraine could provide invaluable links between [the Burgundians’] northern and southern blocks of territories and the sudden appearance of a Valois prince [René] loyal to the dauphin Charles was the worst thing that could have happened
to their plans for consolidation,” medievalist Margaret L. Kekewich ob served matter-of-factly. Before his assassination, John the Fearless had hoped that one of his English allies would succeed in winning the duke of Lorraine’s daughter and had exerted pressure in this direction, but to no avail. “Yolande had pulled off a double
coup
in the face of stiff competition since Henry V of England had asked for the hand of Isabelle for his brother, the duke of Bedford,” Kekewich continued.

And so in the summer of 1419, ten-year-old René left his childhood home in Angers and came to live with his great-uncle in Bar as preparation for one day assuming the lordship of the duchy. He was only three years older than Joan herself. His mother, who was expected in Provence, could not come with him, but she sent him with an entourage of trusted Angevin counselors to ensure his safety and training, just as she had once surrounded the dauphin Charles with advisers loyal to herself and her family while he was still a boy under her care.

On August 13, 1419, a mere month before the deadly rendezvous on the bridge at Montereau-Fault-Yonne that would take the life of John the Fearless, René was formally invested with the duchy of Bar at a solemn ceremony in his great-uncle Louis’s castle, and the next year married Isabelle, who was a year younger than he. The wedding took place amid general rejoicing on October 24, 1420, in Nancy, the capital of Lorraine. “Now it is true that the aforesaid cardinal adopted as his heir his nephew René, and gave to him and relinquished the duchy of Bar and many other beautiful dominions; and by means of these fiefs… the daughter and heiress of the duchy of Lorraine was given him in marriage,” wrote Jean Le Févre, a chronicler of the period. “Because for a long time these dominions [Bar and Lorraine] had endured war and division, and by this marriage would achieve peace and unity under one master.” From this time on, René lived with his wife, residing alternately with his great-uncle, cardinal Louis, and his father-in-law, the duke of Lorraine.

Domrémy was a small village, but not so small that its inhabitants did not know the name of their duke or the relation of his adopted heir to the royal family of France. Medieval courts—particularly regional courts like René’s in Bar and Lorraine—moved frequently from castle to castle and acted as social and political hubs for the surrounding area. Servants and vassals came and went; food and clothing were supplied by local merchants who chatted with the kitchen help or the ladies of the wardrobe; and the duke’s
officials and representatives traveled regularly throughout the countryside to check on rents and taxes. In René’s case, the threat from neigh boring Burgundian partisans—not everybody was happy about this marriage—meant that he had a military responsibility to protect his duchy from enemy incursions, so as he grew older, he and his counselors were in constant communication with the many knights and men-at-arms who were stationed in the various fortified castles scattered throughout the duchy. René, of course, also kept in touch with his own family, particularly his mother and his sister Marie and her husband, the dauphin Charles. Royal messengers from Charles’s suite at Bourges regularly braved enemy territory to make the trip to René’s various castles in Bar or Lorraine. As a result, the court life centering around the newly married young couple fairly pulsed with information—family news, military reports, political updates, snatches of overheard private conversations, whispers, gossip, rumor, innuendo—which by degrees made its way out of the aristocratic grand halls down into the depths of the servants’ quarters and finally out into the larger towns of the countryside.

Domrémy might have been too remote to have immediate access to all of these tidings, but inevitably echoes of this intelligence seeped down into the villages. Because later, when Joan had an opportunity to meet the old, gouty duke of Lorraine, she said to him very specifically “that he should give me his son [she meant his son-in-law; the duke of Lorraine had no son] and some men-at-arms for France and that I would pray to God for the restoration of his health,” indicating that she recognized René and was aware that he in particular could be of use to her. So Joan knew enough about René to gauge his relationship to the dauphin, and this knowledge must have come from the regional court. And if Joan from the tiny village of Domrémy knew it, this information must also have been well disseminated throughout the rest of the duchy.

In the end, the queen of Sicily’s decision to hold Bar for Charles was perhaps even more far-reaching than she herself might have realized. For if the English duke of Bedford or some other ally of the duke of Burgundy had succeeded in marrying Isabelle of Lorraine, local sentiment in favor of the dauphin and the Armagnac side in the civil war would likely have been stamped out and Joan’s own political leanings affected. Certainly there was no possibility that she would have been aided in her design by an officer of the court. As it was, the introduction of René into the duchy during Joan’s
early childhood served instead to nurture and fan the loyalties of this singular girl and those who lived near her. So when her inquisitors later asked, “In your extreme youth had you great wish to go out against the Burgundians?” Joan answered as Yolande or any of her family would have hoped one of their subjects would answer. “I had a great will and desire that my King have his kingdom,” she said.

B
UT IN THE EARLY
1420s, Charles was very far from doing that. The assassination of John the Fearless, meant to eliminate the principal threat to his rule, served only to unite his enemies against him. John’s widow screamed her fury and dispatched dozens of letters and embassies to the various heads of state, including the king and queen of France, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the pope, demanding that justice be done. In December 1420 she managed to have the murderers tried in absentia in Paris and then used the subsequent guilty verdict as justification for the savage torture and death of one of the suspected assailants whom her agents had managed to capture. Her twenty-three-year-old son, Philip, the new duke of Burgundy, was so tormented by the news of his father’s death that he writhed around on his bed in a fit of incoherent rage, swearing revenge, and was unable to compose himself sufficiently to assume his new duties for nearly two weeks. When he finally did emerge, he sent ambassadors to treat with Henry V, who coolly laid out the terms of an English-Burgundian alliance far more advantageous to England than to Burgundy. Henry was to have the princess Catherine in marriage, and to govern the kingdom as regent until the death of Charles VI, after which Henry and his heirs would rule France. If Philip was willing to put aside his own political aspirations with regard to the throne of France and agreed to support this plan, the English king promised to aid him by pursuing and punishing his father’s murderers, and he further offered to marry one of his own brothers to one of Philip’s sisters.

These were markedly weak incentives, but Philip, who lacked his father’s fierce ambition and homicidal ruthlessness (and for this reason was known as “Philip the Good”), felt he had no choice but to take them. The English king did not really need Philip the Good’s military support in order to take Paris; with his enemies in such disarray, his army was sufficiently intimidating to do that on its own. Besides, Isabeau, lured by Henry’s pledge that she could continue to live in queenly splendor during the English occupation,
had already convinced Charles VI to accept Henry’s conditions. Philip gritted his teeth, signed the treaty of alliance, and sent troops from Burgundy to aid England in the conquest of France.

In the spring of 1420, Henry V and his army, having been joined by Philip the Good’s men-at-arms, swept easily through northeastern France and took the cities of Laon, Reims, and Châlons, very close to the duchy of Bar. On March 23, Henry triumphantly entered Troyes, where he was met with great ceremony by Isabeau and Charles VI, who treated him like a long-lost and much-beloved member of the family. The final details of the French surrender were hammered out; Henry promised to bring all of France under his rule; and the dauphin Charles was officially disinherited. Not a man to waste time, Henry married Princess Catherine on June 2, 1420, at the cathedral of Troyes, and by June 4 was on the road again with his army, with the intention of attacking Montereau and Melun, whose citizens were still loyal to the dauphin. Melun in particular was strongly defended and held out as long as it could, but by November hunger forced its garrison to open the gates of the city to its besiegers.

On December 1, 1420, Henry V rode into Paris and took possession of the capital and the government of France. A month later, on January 17, 1421, Charles VI issued a formal letter to his Parisian subjects in which he in effect reiterated the clause in the Treaty of Troyes disinheriting his son. (“
Item,
In view of the horrific and enormous crimes perpetrated in the said kingdom of France by Charles, so-called dauphin of Vienne, it is agreed that neither we, nor our son Henry, nor our very-dear son of the duke of Burgundy, shall negotiate any peace or agreement with the aforesaid Charles.”) In his letter, the king warned his subjects against remaining loyal to the dauphin. “One should not take account of the youth of the said Charles,” the mad king wrote, “because he is quite old enough to tell good from evil.”

But the “so-called dauphin” was not ready to give up. On March 22, 1421, Charles fought back at the battle of Baugé, in Yolande’s duchy of Anjou, between Angers and Tours. A thousand knights and men-at-arms from Angers in service to the queen of Sicily were mustered under the command of one of her leading vassals, the lord of Fontaines, and these, in combination with a seasoned force of four thousand archers sent from Scotland to fight on the side of the dauphin (the Scots hated the English and could always be counted upon to fight against them) and a third troop of loyalists from La Rochelle, met an army of approximately sixty-five hundred
English soldiers led by Henry V’s younger brother, the duke of Clarence. (Henry had returned to England for a short visit to drum up additional money and troops for his French occupation.) Combat lasted into the darkness, but at midnight the Scottish commanders, the earls of Douglas and Buchan, were able to send a messenger to the dauphin, who had remained behind at Poitiers, with the glad tidings that the battle was won, the enemy vanquished or taken prisoner, and the English duke of Clarence killed.

But this victory, while protecting Yolande’s all-important duchy of Anjou and effectively preventing the English from making further inroads into the dauphin’s territories south of the Loire, represented Charles’s one bright moment in a time line of otherwise increasingly bleak episodes. No matter how hard the dauphin tried, Henry always seemed to have the upper hand. Never much of a soldier—“He didn’t willingly arm himself, and he didn’t love war at all, if he could avoid it,” wrote a chronicler of the period—Charles nonetheless managed to muster an army of some eighteen thousand men and made an attempt to take back Chartres in the summer of 1421, only to retreat in the face of the English king’s superior numbers. (Henry had returned from England accompanied by an alarming contingent of men-at-arms, some twenty-eight thousand in all.) On December 6, 1421, Charles’s sister Catherine launched a further attack on his fortunes by giving birth to her first child, a son, thereby providing her husband Henry V and the crown of France with a male heir. Charles countered feebly by finally marrying his longtime fiancée, Yolande’s daughter Marie (a commitment he had clearly been putting off for as long as he could), at a ceremony in out-of- the-way Tours on June 2, 1422. So limited were his funds and so great his military expenses that he had to sell the tapestries off the walls of one of his castles to pay for the wedding.