The Maid and the Queen (22 page)

Finally all was in place, and Joan left Tours for nearby Blois, where Charles’s army was massing and a convoy was being readied with food and other provisions to relieve the siege of Orléans. This was the force that Yolande of Aragon had fought and pushed and schemed for, the goal to which she had devoted all her diplomatic and political energies. To ensure that this critical military effort was given the optimum chance for success she had assumed the responsibility for financing the operation herself. So committed was she to this mission that she donated her own tableware to the expedition. By April, she had accumulated a great store of foodstuffs: “Laden in the town of Blois [were] many carts and small carts of wheat and were taken great plenty of beeves, sheep, cows, swine and other victuals,” wrote the chronicler Jean Chartier. But even more important than the provisions was the number of skilled and experienced captains—including Étienne de Vignolles, known as “La Hire,” a seasoned commander of great renown, who brought with him a company of war-hardened mercenaries—whom Yolande had convinced to participate in this last, desperate attempt against the English.

Like La Hire, it would seem that Joan too was in a strange way recruited by Yolande for this mission. The prophecies had had the desired effect and Joan was by no means the only visionary to heed the call. A French historian reported that in the year 1428 alone, some twenty people, most of them women, publicly claimed to have been chosen by God to deliver a message to the king, and this was just the number of recorded instances. None of these other would-be seers were able to gain an audience with Charles, however, mostly because what they had to say did not conform to what Yolande wanted to hear. Later, Joan would meet one of these competing clairvoyants, a prophetess named Catherine de la Rochelle. Catherine had visions of a woman “dressed in cloth-of-gold, telling her to go to the loyal towns, and that the king would give her heralds and trumpets to make proclamations.” Catherine had gone so far as to write to the king promising to unearth a golden treasure with which Charles could pay his soldiers. As Charles was desperately in need of money, this was a large point in Catherine’s favor. Like Joan, Catherine had also convinced the people of her town, including a local priest, Brother Richard, of the authenticity of her visions. Catherine’s rival prognostications were sufficiently disquieting that Joan made a point of warning Charles against her. “I answered this Catherine that she return to her husband and do her housework and feed her children…. And I wrote to my King telling him… that it was folly and nullity, this matter of Catherine,” said Joan. “They were very ill content with me, Brother Richard and this Catherine,” she admitted.

At the same time, despite her role in bringing Joan to Charles’s attention, the queen of Sicily, because of her own upbringing, most likely also genuinely believed the girl to be a messenger from God. After all, Yolande’s own prayers had been answered as much as Charles’s by the discovery of the prophetess—for the king had at last given the order to send the army to the relief of Orléans.

Now, in the final week of April 1429, Yolande witnessed the fruits of her efforts as the convoy of supplies she had assembled, accompanied by a strong contingent of men-at-arms, rolled slowly out of Blois and took the road to Orléans. With Joan’s participation, the religious nature of this enterprise was highly visible, giving the procession the ardent air of a crusade. “When Joan left Blois to go to Orléans,” reported her confessor, “she had all the priests gather around the standard, and the priests went before the army. They marched out on the side of the Sologne assembled in that fashion; they
sang
Veni creator spiritus
along with many antiphons, and they camped in the fields that night and the following day as well.” Joan forbade swearing and pillaging, and she drove away the prostitutes who inevitably followed in the wake of the soldiers; further, she insisted that the soldiers attend Mass and confess themselves in order to participate. Those who marched out of Blois beside her to do battle against the English felt keenly the difference between this army and those in which they had previously fought, and with this recognition there arose a hope that perhaps, this time, God would be on their side.

C
HAPTER
9

The Maid
of Orléans

RLéANS, A LARGE WALLED CITY,
one of the most heavily fortified in France, was situated on the north bank of the Loire about seventy-five miles south of Paris. The siege was in its sixth month by the time the convoy of supplies left Blois, and the situation was indeed dire. Because Orléans was almost completely surrounded by the English, only one of its five gates—the easternmost door, called the Burgundy Gate—could still be accessed by French partisans, which meant that foodstuffs trickled in only sporadically and in far too limited quantity to support the needs of a population that numbered over thirty thousand. On Tuesday, March 8, for
example, the town authorities managed to smuggle in a mere nine horses carrying wheat and other victuals. If Orléans was not resupplied quickly, its citizens faced the choice of surrender or starvation.

And yet militarily the situation was not without hope. Although the English had initially committed an army of six thousand men to the effort, in order to encircle Orléans effectively they had been required to subdue the surrounding territory. This meant leaving behind garrisons in a number of towns, thus reducing the size of the force available to conduct the actual siege. Additionally, because living conditions during the winter were so poor—it was difficult to maintain supply lines and the English men-at-arms were often as hungry and cold as those whom they had been assigned to blockade—desertion was a problem. By April 1429, the number of English troops participating in the siege had dwindled to somewhere between twenty-five hundred and four thousand.
^*

A few thousand soldiers were insufficient to surround a city protected to the south by a large river and that boasted a walled perimeter of two thousand yards supported by a significant number of guns, some of them capable of hurling stone cannonballs weighing nearly two hundred pounds a distance of half a mile. The English commander, the earl of Suffolk, had compensated by erecting a number of bastilles—a series of improvised, detached forts—to encircle the city. There were at least five to the north of Orléans and two on the southern bank of the Loire. Several hundred English soldiers manned each of these bastilles, which were equipped with cannons, although some of the forts had more cannons and soldiers than others.

The problem with this setup was that there was quite a bit of terrain between the bastilles, which meant that the soldiers of one fort could not easily come to the aid of another. Nor could the English fill in these gaps by building more bastilles without a fresh infusion of troops. “Really the
bastilles
were not to blame, but there were not enough of them, because the investing armies were numerically inadequate,” observed the eminent
historian Andrew Lang. “They [the English] had not soldiers enough to man twice the number of
bastilles
.” The success of this strategy was heavily dependent upon the French army and the population of the city itself remaining quiescent. To his credit, the duke of Bedford recognized the siege of Orléans for what it was: a bit of military hubris on the part of the English commanders that he as regent had been unable to prevent. “God knoweth by what advis [advice] the siege of the city of Orleans was taken in hand,” Bedford would later write grimly to Henry VI.

T
HE RESPONSIBILITY
for the defense of Orléans would ordinarily have fallen to its duke, but as this gentleman was still detained overseas as a prisoner of the English, the obligation fell to his half brother, Jean. Unlike Charles VII, who many assumed was the illegitimate son of Louis, duke of Orléans, Jean actually
was
Louis’s illegitimate son by his acknowledged mistress, Mariette of Enghien. For this reason, Jean was universally referred to as “the Bastard of Orléans,” a moniker that carried with it no hint of disparagement, being rather meant only to elucidate, in the most helpful way possible, the specifics of Jean’s lineage.

Orléans under siege and surrounded by the English bastilles, 1429

Jean was an experienced and highly skilled captain who had arrived in Orléans very soon after the siege had been laid and so had had ample time over the intervening months to observe the strength and layout of the enemy’s forces. It was he, and not Joan, who was in charge of the relief effort. There were only two routes by which to circumvent the English blockade. The first of these was to go north through the forest and around the system of bastilles in a wide, out-of- the-way circle before finally reaching the Burgundy Gate by ducking between the enemy’s two easternmost forts, which coincidentally were the least manned and the farthest away from each other. The second was to approach from the south, paralleling the Loire to the town of Chezy, about five miles upstream from Orléans. From Chezy, the supplies could be loaded onto barges and floated downstream to the Burgundy Gate. This second route “was rendered possible owing to the neglect of the earl of Suffolk to stretch a chain across the river—a laxity that would have horrified Henry V,” deplored the English military historian Alfred Higgins Burne. The river option was safer but problematic because the barges necessary to load the supplies were in Orléans, which meant that the wind had to be out of the west to get them upstream to Chezy. (It didn’t matter which way the wind blew on the way back, as the barges could just float downstream with the current.) The Bastard assessed the situation and ordered the army to come by way of the southern route.