The Maid and the Queen (27 page)

There followed a week or so of skirmishing, as the royal army looked for weaknesses in the Parisian defenses and tried to pinpoint the best location from which to launch an offensive. The duke of Bedford was so confident that he could hold Paris that he had left Philip the Good’s forces alone to defend the capital and taken the English army to Le Mans, in Yolande’s home county of Maine, to deflect an independent sortie led by Arthur of Richemont. (The constable was still in such disfavor with Charles that he had not been allowed to participate in the coronation, and so had struck off on his own to fight the enemy.) Finally, on Thursday, September 8, 1429, a little before noon, the royal army assembled in battle formation just outside the walls of Paris close to the Saint-Honoré gate. This time, no priests went praying and singing before the soldiers; no effort was made to evoke a crusade or holy war. The assault appeared to be just what it was: a full-scale attack by a secular, partisan military force.

Paris was the largest city in western Europe. A sprawling metropolis by medieval standards, home to some 200,000 people and heavily fortified, it represented a vastly more difficult target than anything Joan or the duke of Alençon had attempted before. Although the capital had in the past yielded
to an invading army, this was generally achieved only with help from supporters within the city who could be counted on to unlock one or more of the heavy gates, saving the necessity of scaling the walls. While there were no doubt a substantial number of Parisians who favored Charles’s cause over that of Henry VI, these people had been out of power for over a decade. Some effort seems to have been made to reach out to them, but they were not in a position to undertake so risky an enterprise as to steal the keys to the portals. Moreover, most of the citizens of Paris—or at least those in control of the city—were staunch Burgundians. To them, coronation or no coronation, Charles was just another incarnation of the old Armagnac party, which even after all this time they associated with government corruption, greed, and higher taxes. Further, taking history as a model, these people understood that if the royal army did succeed in entering the city they would all be hunted down and slaughtered. So, unlike at Orléans, where the citizens had rejoiced at the coming of the royal army and done everything they could to help, a majority of the Parisians scorned and loathed Joan and her forces. They had every incentive to fight against her, and they did.

The battle lasted all day and followed the by now familiar course. The king’s forces arrived accompanied by heavy artillery and many wagons carrying wood and branches that the soldiers hoped to use to dam the moats protecting the capital and thus provide a makeshift bridge to the walls. For hours, the royal army energetically assailed the city, firing its weapons while torrents of arrows and stone cannonballs rained down from the Burgundian men-at-arms and the citizen infantry stationed on high. “The assault, which was very cruel on both sides, lasted until four in the evening without it being known who would get the better,” reported an eyewitness. As the afternoon wore on and night threatened without a definitive victory, the French soldiers began once again to tire and to think in terms of retreat, and Joan did what she always did when her troops’ spirits flagged. With great courage, she moved to stand at the head of their ranks and held her standard high to signal a fresh assault, at the same time calling out in a loud voice to the Parisians on the wall, “Yield to us quickly, for Jesus’ sake, for if you yield not before night, we shall enter by force whether you will or no, and you will all be put to death without mercy.”

But this time the enemy forces did not fall back and tremble at her approach, thinking her a witch, as the outnumbered English men-at-arms had at Orléans. The citizens of Paris were not afraid of Joan; to them she was
just a low, unpleasant, probably deranged Armagnac peasant woman from somewhere in the provinces. So when she planted her standard and called to them to surrender they simply answered her in kind. “Here’s for you!” a Burgundian crossbowman shouted back. “Cackling bawd!” And he shot her in the leg. When Joan cried out and fell, her page grabbed her standard and bravely planted it again, at which point another crossbowman shot
him
in the leg. Then, as the page was lifting his visor so he could see to remove the arrow from his wound, a third archer shot him in the face and killed him, and in that instant Charles’s chances of retaking the city of Paris died too.

Although Joan continued to try to rally her troops to press the attack, she was unable to rise because of pain, and seeing her down was a blow. The king’s soldiers lost faith in themselves just as their enemies, noting her vulnerability, increased theirs. “A little after four o’clock the Parisians took heart and overwhelmed their adversaries with so many cannon balls and arrows that the latter were forced to retreat, to abandon the assault, and go away,” wrote the same observer. Later, under cover of darkness, the injured Joan was retrieved from the moat into which she had fallen. Curiously, of all the knights who fought beside her that day, including those who had been with her from the beginning at Orléans, it was René who picked her up and carried her from the battlefield to the safety of his own quarters.

The next day, although both Joan and the duke of Alençon pressed to return to Paris to continue the onslaught, wiser heads prevailed and the army was ordered to fall back on Senlis, where Charles held court. A week later, with Paris still firmly in English and Burgundian hands, the king disbanded his army and retreated to the safety of his home base south of the Loire. “In September,” wrote a Burgundian chronicler, “the Armagnacs came and assailed the walls of Paris which they hoped to take, but won there only grief, shame and misfortune. Many among them were wounded for the remainder of their lives who, before the assault, were in good health. But a fool fears nothing so long as he is successful. I say this for them who sweated ill-luck and bad faith… on the word of a creature in the form of a woman who accompanied them—who was it? God knows.”

T
HE FIASCO AT PARIS
—and it
was
a fiasco; only a disciplined, well-planned, sustained siege of the type Charles had no intention of engaging in could have taken the city—betrayed the precariousness of Joan’s relationship
to the king. Charles was not the sort of person to shrug off humiliation lightly. Insults rankled; he nursed grudges; worse, he was extremely sensitive and suspicious of possible slurs against his dignity. The chronicler Georges Chastellain summed up the king’s principal character traits as “changeability, defiance, and above all, envy.” Up until the coronation at Reims, Charles, surrounded by advisers who believed in Joan’s godliness, had been protected by a cocoon of reassurance, but the scorn that had permeated the duke of Bedford’s letter of challenge showed him only too clearly how his patronage of and reliance on the Maid were regarded by those outside his own circle. Charles had managed to shrug this off at first, but after the dismal sortie against Paris the English regent’s barbs resonated with the king. Messengers from God were not supposed to lose.

To save himself further embarrassment, Charles separated Joan from the army. The duke of Alençon was sent home to his wife, while Joan was escorted to Bourges under the stewardship of Georges de la Trémoïlle’s half brother, the duke of Albret. With the decline in Joan’s fortunes came a corresponding reduction in the influence of Yolande’s party as well. La Trémoïlle was once again firmly in control at court, and he made it his business to see that the Maid of Orléans did not have an opportunity to regain her former glory. When later that year the duke of Alençon put together another force with the intent of evicting the English from Maine and Normandy, he wrote specifically to the king asking Charles to please send him Joan as he would be able to recruit far more soldiers were she present to lead the troops. But “Messire Regnault de Chartres, [and] the lord de la Trémoïlle… who at that time governed the King’s council and matters of war, would never consent, nor permit, nor suffer the Maid and the Duke of Alençon be together, and since then he has not been able to recover her,” wrote Perceval de Cagny, the duke of Alençon’s chronicler.

To distract Joan, in November 1429 La Trémoïlle sent her instead to besiege the town of La Charité-sur-Loire, about twenty miles east of Bourges, which had been captured by a local mercenary who had sided with the English (and who had, coincidentally, previously extorted a hefty ransom of 14,000 écus from La Trémoïlle). Joan was likely set up to fail; another chronicler reported that “the sire de la Trémoïlle sent Joan… in the depths of winter… with very few men, before the town of La Charité, and there they were for about a month and withdrew themselves shamefully without aid coming to them from inside and there lost bombards and artilleries.”
Perceval de Cagny also commented on this aborted mission to La Charité. “When Joan had been there a space of time, because the King made no diligence to send her victuals nor money to maintain her company, she was obliged to raise her siege and depart from it in great displeasure,” he wrote.

The failure to accomplish even this small objective destroyed whatever lingering credibility Joan might have retained at court as a true prophetess. To save face—both hers and his own—in December, Charles ennobled Joan and her family, and rewarded her for her contribution to the crown. She was given an additional five couriers and six horses for her stable along with a generous donation for the maintenance of a suitably aristocratic household. The wretched duke of Orléans, still a prisoner in London—he had spent nearly half his life, fifteen years, in captivity and the English still refused to ransom him—also displayed his gratitude for her efforts at this time by sending her a very expensive, exquisite ruby red gown adorned with the finest lace from Brussels. As a result, she was no longer the simple shepherdess Jeannette from Domrémy, nor the Maid of Orléans, but Joan of Arc, a lady of position and means. It was clearly hoped by both the king and those around him like La Trémoïlle that this bribe would be sufficient to induce Joan to hang up her armor once and for all, put on her pretty dress, and go away.

But Joan did not want to go away; Joan wanted to fight. Although her voices were no longer leading her—when asked later by her inquisitors if she had attacked Paris at the command of her angels, she replied, “It was at the request of the men of war that was made a valiance in arms against Paris and also against La Charité at the request of my King”—Joan was nonetheless determined to evict the English from France. Unaware that she had lost her influence, she chafed at the king’s inaction, expressed her unhappiness openly, and continued to press Charles to send her with an army into those parts of the kingdom still occupied by England or allied to the duke of Burgundy. There is no question that despite her public popularity (which was considerable) she was during this period kept at arm’s length and regarded as a nuisance and a potential liability by those in power at court. Later, Re gnault de Chartres would write that Joan “did not wish to pay attention to any counsel and did everything at her own pleasure.”

Matters came to a head in the spring of 1430. By March it was reasonably clear, even to Charles (although he would not admit it publicly for another two months), that Philip the Good was not really all that interested in making
peace and had been prolonging negotiations only as a means of augmenting his power and territory. The duke of Burgundy had recently accepted the title of lieutenant general of France from the English, which put him second in command of the kingdom after his brother-in-law the duke of Bedford, and had also received the counties of Champagne and Brie from Henry VI’s government. Yet another reinforcement English army, this one comprising two thousand men-at-arms, had landed at Calais, intending to retake Reims in preparation for the coronation of eight-year-old Henry VI, and a joint battle plan was drawn up between the dukes of Burgundy and Bedford. Intelligence reported that one of their first targets would be Compiègne, which, ironically, was one of the towns Charles himself had given Philip in order to entice him to sign a treaty, but whose citizens, inspired by Joan and the coronation at Reims, had refused to surrender to the Burgundians.

Joan met with the king at the beginning of March 1430, when he moved his court to Sully-sur-Loire, near Orléans, where she had been staying under the more or less watchful eye of La Trémoïlle at one of his family’s castles. It seems to have been the first time in months that she had been allowed into Charles’s presence, or participated in a meeting of the royal council. Predictably, she was unhappy with the endless discussions and lack of response to the military threat from the English. Finding herself unable to move the king as she had in the past, however, she instead determined to strike out on her own. “The King being in the town of Sully-sur-Loire, the Maid, who had seen and heard all the matter and manner which the King and his council held for the recovery of his kingdom, very ill content with that, found means to separate herself from them and, unknown to the King and without taking leave of him, she pretended to go about some business and, without returning, went away to the town of Lagny-sur-Marne because they of that place were making good war on the English of Paris and elsewhere,” wrote Perceval de Cagny. Joan left with her remaining page, her brother, and a small band of some two hundred mercenaries led by an Italian bandit—a far cry from the previous year’s royally sanctioned, well-manned Orléans expedition. Although Perceval de Cagny claimed that she slipped away by stratagem, it is likely that the court was aware of her movements but made no attempt to go after her, a sign that she had been officially cut loose. This way, if she succeeded in repelling the English, the king could take credit for her victory, but if she failed, as was more likely, she could be disavowed as having acted on her own initiative and against her sovereign’s wishes.

Joan and her band of soldiers headed north to Compiègne, but it took them nearly two months to get there because they stopped to skirmish with whatever English and Burgundian resistance they met with along the way. At least two of these encounters were successful: in April, Joan managed to liberate the town of Melun from its small English garrison and soon afterward put to rout a platoon of Burgundians, capturing their captain outside of Senlis. However, by the time she arrived in Compiègne on May 14, 1430, the duke of Burgundy, bankrolled by his English brother-in-law, had managed to put together a substantial army and had already taken the small town of Choisy-au-Bac, just outside the city.