The Maid and the Queen (26 page)

The coronation of Charles VII at Reims.

As for Joan herself, the hours spent at the coronation ceremony were a source of great pride. She had accomplished the impossible, the miraculous; she understood that her place nearest the king signified the tangible acknowledgment of her achievement. When asked later by her inquisitors, “Why was your standard more carried in the church at Rheims at the consecration of the King than those of other captains?” she answered simply that, as “it had borne the burden, it was quite right that it receive the honor.”

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Capture
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Compiègne

Y ALMOST ANY MEASURE,
the coronation at Reims was a stunning political achievement. No longer was it possible for the English to sneer at Charles and dismiss his claims to the throne; afterward, as Joan had understood and predicted, the uncertainty regarding his legitimacy vanished and he was irrev ocably Charles VII, king of France. Consequently, the war was no longer about whether he or Henry VI was rightfully heir to the kingdom but was instead recast as a struggle by a native population and ruler against an occupying force.
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From seriously contemplating fleeing to Scotland, Charles now suddenly occupied a stronger position than he had in a decade, when he had so rashly decided to assassinate John the Fearless on the bridge of Montereau.

But wars are not won solely by symbolic gestures, however brilliant, and whatever political gains were achieved at Reims were more than offset by the impairment of the king’s military prospects caused by the interruption of hostilities. For no sooner had the duke of Bedford, hardly believing his luck, realized that the French army was not going to capitalize on its victory at Patay by immediately marching on Paris than he called urgently for reinforcements from England. A new army of some thirty-five hundred English knights and longbowmen, accompanied by their numerous attendant squires and foot soldiers, landed at Calais in early July, and by the day of Charles’s coronation were within a week’s march of Paris.

In this emergency, the attitude of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, toward the reinvigorated campaign by Charles was critical. If Philip could be induced to give up his English alliance, even if this meant his remaining neutral rather than openly embracing Charles’s cause, the military odds might once again shift in the king’s favor. The English could not expect to hold France without the support of the duke of Burgundy.

Philip knew this and exploited the opportunity to maximum advantage. Although a member of the French ruling dynasty by virtue of ancestry—his grandfather had, after all, been the brother of Charles’s grandfather—when it came to his political standing, Philip did not consider himself French. Rather, he saw himself as an independent sovereign entity, much like the kings of Aragon or Scotland, whose participation in the war was elective. “Most redoubted lord, I recommend myself to you in all humility. I imagine that you and your councilors remember that it was at your urgent request that I took part in your French war,” he would later write to Henry VI. Philip did, however, maintain strong feelings that he ought not to support the campaign of the man who had murdered his father—feelings he kept hidden in order to keep both sides bidding for his services.

Consequently, when, immediately following the ceremony in Reims, Charles made diplomatic overtures to him, Philip agreed to participate in talks. It is clear, however, that he had no intention of accepting the king’s terms, no matter how generous. Unbeknownst to Charles and his counselors, during the week just prior to the coronation Philip had entered into a secret agreement with the regency government to help defend Paris against an attack by the royal army. The duke of Bedford, who had gone to the
lengths of marrying Philip’s sister in order to keep the alliance, was by this time familiar with his new brother-in-law’s character and knew exactly which incentives to offer in order to secure his friendship. According to an eyewitness, he organized a solemn public ceremony at which he commemorated Philip’s father, John the Fearless, and denounced his treacherous murder by Charles and the Armagnacs, calling for “a show of hands from all men who would be loyal and true to the Regent and to the Duke of Burgundy.” At the same time, Philip the Good also received the munificent sum of 20,000 francs “by the command of my lord the regent of the kingdom of France [Bedford]… to spend and employ it in the payment of the men-at-arms and archers whom my said lord of Burgundy had the intention to bring into the parts of France from his country for the service of the king [Henry VI] against the enemies who at that time were advancing in force,” according to the official register of English accounts. This two-pronged approach of appealing to both Philip’s pride and his purse yielded the desired result. Together, the dukes of Burgundy and Bedford “promised… on their faith to defend the good town of Paris.”

Under the circumstances, it was very much in the duke of Burgundy’s interest to pretend to participate in diplomatic talks in order to ensure that Charles did nothing to further his offensive against Paris until such time as Philip and the duke of Bedford were prepared to move against him militarily. Here, he had a happy participant in the king. Charles positively excelled at doing nothing.

To encourage the promulgation of a peace treaty, Charles agreed immediately to a fifteen-day truce that specifically prevented him from marching on Paris. Georges de la Trémoïlle, whose brother, Jehan, was a high-ranking member of Philip the Good’s entourage, was put in charge of the king’s side in the negotiations, an appointment that more or less assured the complete subjugation of military considerations to the diplomatic process. In August, Charles’s ambassadors offered Philip magnanimous terms in exchange for reconciliation: the king promised to make reparations and undertake acts of penance for the murder of John the Fearless; he would compensate the duke of Burgundy personally for his alliance with a substantial allocation of gold (which unfortunately at that moment he did not have) and territories; and Philip would be excused from having to do homage to Charles, which the king understood would be repugnant to him. Even after the fifteen days of the truce had passed, the king refrained from moving farther into the duke of
Burgundy’s territory, “as much because some felt it strong in men-at-arms, as for the hope he had that a good treaty would be made between them,” wrote the chronicler Monstrelet. Although his overtures to Philip were no doubt sincere, Charles’s single-minded focus on these parleys also allowed him to mask his reluctance to pursue hostilities. In fact, the king had had enough of fighting. From Reims he simply wanted to retreat once again to the safety and comfort of Bourges and try to negotiate his way back to the throne.

This attitude put the king in opposition to Joan, who argued fervently in favor of marching on Paris at the earliest possible moment. Although Joan was aware that Charles’s envoys were seeking a diplomatic settlement with Philip the Good, and approved this plan—she even wrote to him herself, requiring Philip to “make good firm peace which will last long”—she was deliberately not informed of the particulars, especially about the truce prohibiting an attack on Paris. To put her off and stall for time while he awaited the result of the negotiations, the king, accompanied by his entourage and the royal army, instead left Reims and began a very slow, roundabout tour of the neighboring area, stopping at all of the small cities along the route in order to parade through the streets to cries of “Noël!” Within a month, he had made it only as far as Crépy, about fifty miles to the west.

The duke of Bedford, of course, made optimum use of this respite. The English army arrived at Paris in late July and the city was fortified against assault. Cannons and ammunition were secured to the walls; trenches were dug outside the gates and the moats put into repair. The supplementary army promised by the duke of Burgundy arrived in due course. Suitably reinforced, the regent felt strong enough to challenge the king to battle in a letter that he took pains to make as humiliating as possible. “We, John of Lancaster, regent of France and Duke of Bedford, make known to you Charles of Valois who call yourself Dauphin of Viennois and now without cause call yourself King…. You who cause to be abused the ignorant people and take to yourself the aid of people superstitious and reproved, as that of a woman disordered and defamed, being in man’s clothes and of dissolute conduct… choose in the country of Brie where you and we are, or in the Ile de France, some place in the fields… one day soon and fitting… at which day and place, if you would appear there in person with the aforesaid defamed and apostate woman, we, at Our Lord’s pleasure, will appear in person,” he wrote.

This letter, with its withering reference to Joan, would have stung Charles, but worse was the realization that the enemy had received substantial
reinforcements, a state of affairs that became clear on August 15 when the king and the royal army, still on their goodwill tour, ran into the approximately eighty-five hundred English and Burgundian men-at-arms whom the duke of Bedford had brought up from Paris and who were camped just outside of Senlis, blocking the way south. Although neither side gave battle, just the threat was enough to cause Charles to turn around and retreat north, first back to Crépy and then farther to Compiègne.

It took Joan an additional two weeks to convince the king to finally make an attempt on Paris, and in the end she did it only by persuading the duke of Alençon to take the initiative and bring an advance party of soldiers within striking distance. “On the Friday following the 26th day of August, the Maid, the duke of Alençon, and their company were lodged in the city of Saint-Denis. And when the king knew that they were lodged [there]… with great regret he came as far as the city of Senlis. And it seemed that he was counseled against the will of the Maid, of the duke of Alençon, and of their company,” observed a chronicler. Among this advance party of soldiers pressing Charles to listen to Joan and attack Paris was Yolande’s son, René of Anjou, who after the coronation had thrown off his mantle of anonymity and openly joined the royal army “well accompanied by soldiers.”