The Maid and the Queen (17 page)

However, as promising as these negotiations were, they were not in themselves enough to resuscitate Charles’s political and military fortunes. Because the next year, 1424, he lost another terrible battle, this time to the English at Verneuil.

The French defeat at Verneuil was devastating. By some accounts as many as fifteen thousand of Charles’s men-at-arms were killed. Yolande saw Le Mans, the most important city in her home duchy of Maine, fall to En gland and the regency government. Charles’s Scottish generals, the earls of Douglas and Buchan, and almost all of their army of six thousand also perished, as did Yolande’s most experienced commander, the count of Aumale, and many of her troops. Charles despaired at the news; his soldiers had significantly outnumbered the English and yet they had lost again.

The destruction of the French army at Verneuil was so crushing, the human slaughter so profound, that it triggered a spiritual crisis within Charles. He began to fear that he could not win—that for some reason God looked unfavorably upon him. Perhaps his cause was not just. His trepidation and uncertainty were obvious to those around him. Yolande in particular understood that in the wake of these losses, the issue became one of faith. The queen of Sicily had already given Charles military and diplomatic aid; now she sought intervention of a higher order.

Sometime after the battle of Verneuil, an unusual prophecy, attributed to a seer from Provence named Marie of Avignon, began circulating throughout southern France. There were wise men and women all over medieval Europe who purported to be able to foretell the future; Marie of Avignon was one of the better known of these mystics. She had even taken the trouble to write down her revelations in a book, although, strangely, this particular prediction did not appear with the others. It just seems to have surfaced one day at Charles’s court at Bourges and was attributed to her, and since Marie of Avignon was already famous for her prophecies, no one questioned that she had said it.

Because it was not among those previously published, but was passed along verbally, the prognostication took different forms as it made its way from person to person; however, two principal versions were eventually written down. The first of these was that “France, ruined by a woman [a reference to Isabeau of Bavaria], would be restored by a virgin from the marches [border region] of Lorraine.” The second was that “a Maid [a virgin] would come… who would carry arms and would free the kingdom of France from its enemies.”

That the divination singled out Isabeau as the principal culprit in the conflict is interesting. After all, the queen of France had been only one of a group of seditionists whose actions had led to the current strife. Certainly
the duke of Burgundy (not to mention the English!) had as much to do with provoking the civil war as Isabeau, if not more. Yet to her alone was attributed the evils that had befallen France. This sentiment seems more in the nature of a private grievance than a political manifesto, and is consistent with Yolande of Aragon’s position that she had been personally betrayed when Isabeau had renounced her original contract with the queen of Sicily and her family by helping to convince Charles’s father to disinherit him and, by extension, Yolande’s daughter Marie.

Similarly, the focus on a female savior was unusual. There was no precedent for it in French history—unless the parallels to
The Romance of Melusine
are considered.

The dissemination of this prophecy, which was purported to have emanated from that part of the country of which Yolande was countess, and which referred specifically to the duchy of which her son René was heir, was so widespread that it was astonishing. People over a hundred miles away repeated it. It was almost as if the divination was some sort of code or message—or perhaps, more accurately, a prayer—that was being broadcast purposely to the outermost reaches of the kingdom in the faint but desperate hope of an answer.

In nearly every hamlet, town, or village in fifteenth-century France there lived someone who claimed to have visions, or who could interpret dreams, or who was otherwise believed to have been somehow touched by God. These were the likely targets of the prophecy, and it acted upon them like a recruitment slogan.

And just at this time, Joan began to hear voices.

C
HAPTER
7

The Angels Speak
to Joan

HIRTEEN, THE AGE OF PUBERTY:
a rush of hormones accompanied by new and confusing emotions, turbulent mood swings, and a heightened sensitivity to the often conflicting demands of responsibility and desire. The difficult and complex entry into adolescence was made even more challenging in the fifteenth century since thirteen was the legal age at which a girl could be married. Partly, this was a function of economics—for a poor family, an early wedding meant one less mouth to feed. But there was also an element of control involved, as a thirteen-year-old could on the whole be cajoled or bullied into an undesired marriage much more easily than an older girl.

Joan clearly felt this pressure as, by her own admission, her first experience with what she would later identify as the voice of an angel had nothing to do with politics but rather focused on her personal life. In addition to eliciting a promise that she keep her virginity, the voice instructed her in how to behave, which included regular attendance at church. Joan later
described the occasion of this first heavenly encounter in detail to her inquisitors. “When I was thirteen years old, I had a voice from God to help me govern my conduct,” she said. “And the first time I was very fearful. And came this voice, about the hour of noon, in the summer-time, in my father’s garden; I had not fasted on the eve preceding that day. I heard the voice on the right-hand side, towards the church; and rarely do I hear it without a brightness. This brightness comes from the same side as the voice is heard. It is usually a great light…. After I had thrice heard this voice, I knew that it was the voice of an angel.”

The voice seems to have first come to Joan when she was feeling guilty about her behavior. “I had not fasted on the eve preceding that day” implies that this was something she thought she ought to have done; perhaps it was a fast day and she had forgotten or been too hungry to comply.
^*
This transgression would have weighed heavily on a girl as pious as Joan; interestingly, the voice takes the responsibility for not fasting away from her by promising to help her better govern her conduct in the future. Similarly, by vowing to keep her virginity “for as long as it should please God”—that is, until the voice tells her not to—Joan also relieved herself of the burden of having to judge the merits of an early marriage, or to be answerable for the disobedience to her family that would be involved in rejecting one. God or the angel acting for God would now make that decision for her.

And her family was, in fact, arranging such an alliance with a man from the nearby city of Toul. Later, when Joan’s inquisitors asked, “What made you cause a certain man at the city of Toul to be summoned for [breach of promise of] marriage?” she answered, “I did not have him summoned, it was he who had me summoned. And there I swore before the judge to speak the truth and in the end he roundly said that I had made the man no promise whatever.” To be called before a judge in this fashion was tantamount to an indictment; Joan might not have promised the man from Toul anything, but
someone
did, and this someone was surely one of her parents, as Joan also stated at this time that “I obeyed them [her parents] in all things save only in that lawsuit I had in the city of Toul in the matter of marriage.”

By the third time the voice spoke, Joan had identified it as belonging to Saint Michael. “The first time I had great doubt if it was Saint Michael who
came to me, and that first time I was very much afraid; and I saw him afterwards several times before knowing that it was Saint Michael,” she said. When her inquisitors pressed her: “How was it that you recognized Saint Michael rather on that occasion when you did believe [it to be him], than the first time he appeared to you?” Joan answered, “The first time I was a child and was afraid, and afterwards Saint Michael taught me and showed me and proved to me that I must believe firmly that it was him.”

Saint Michael the Archangel occupies a high place in the hierarchy of heaven. He is the princely leader of the angels and their commanding general in the struggle against Satan; his name is synonymous with the war of good against evil. The feats of Saint Michael, who disputed with the devil and battled a dragon, were sure to be repeated, and his aid prayed for, wherever Christian soldiers and men-at-arms were stationed, and there were quite a number of these stationed in the region surrounding Domrémy. In her early teenage years, these soldiers seemed to have exercised some sort of fascination for Joan, because her family remarked on it and worried about it. “When I was still in the house of my father and mother, I was several times told by my mother that my father had told her that he had dreamt that I, Joan, his daughter, would go away with some men-at-arms,” Joan remembered. “And much care did my father and mother have about it and they kept me close and in great subjection…. And I have heard my mother say that my father told my brothers, ‘Truly, if I knew that that must happen which I fear in the matter of my daughter, I had rather you drowned her. And if you did not do it, I would drown her myself.’”

The implication here is that Joan’s father was not afraid that his daughter would go away with men-at-arms in order that she might lead an army to expel the English from France—there would be no reason to drown her for that (not to mention that such a possibility was beyond comprehension)—but rather that she would run away with soldiers in the more conventionally immoral sense of engaging in relations outside the bonds of marriage. Although it is clear that he did not understand his daughter’s character, parental concerns of this sort are generally based on some degree of observed evidence, which means that Joan’s growing preoccupation with the military during this period was sufficiently obvious that it was heeded by her family.

Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, when events began to move rapidly, the voice continued to speak to Joan. Once she was no longer “a child and…  afraid,” as she had been when the voice first appeared—in other
words, as she got older and identified herself as an adult, probably around the age of sixteen—Joan came to trust that she was hearing the words of an angel. “I believed it quite quickly and I had the will to believe it,” she testified. It seems that over this transitional period, the voice of Saint Michael became more insistently political. “What doctrines did he teach you?” her inquisitors asked. “Before all things he told me to be a good child and that God would help me,” Joan replied. “And, among other things he told me to come to the help of the King of France…. And the Angel told me the pity [pitiful state] that was in the Kingdom of France.”

T
HE VOICE
that Joan identified as Saint Michael’s conveyed an all too accurate assessment of Charles’s woeful campaign against the English. From a timid, lonely, insecure boy, Charles had grown into a conflicted, anxious, and insecure adult, easily manipulated by those around him, and hopelessly, almost comically inconstant and indecisive.

For example, in the summer of 1425, Yolande finally succeeded in bringing the duke of Brittany’s brother, Arthur of Richemont, to Charles’s side as constable. However, no sooner had she achieved this diplomatic coup than Jean Louvet, an adviser of long standing jealous of Arthur’s promotion, convinced Charles to turn against his new constable. Arthur, who was in Brittany raising troops, found out about the intrigue against him and, furious, marched back with an army to occupy the royal court at Bourges, a discouragingly predictable reaction that led to Charles and Louvet’s raising an army of their own to fight against him.