A Kingdom Cut in Two

Joan of Arc was born into a country that had already, in all but name, been legally extinguished.

On 25 October 1415 an English army under Henry V destroyed the flower of French chivalry in the mud at Agincourt. The dead included constables, princes, and the military aristocracy of the north. Charles VI, the reigning king of France, had been periodically mad since 1392; his uncles and then his cousins had spent a generation converting that madness into civil war. The Armagnacs — the party of the Orléans line and, after 1418, of the dauphin Charles — fought the Burgundians, who under John the Fearless and then Philip the Good made common cause with England when it suited them. In 1418 Burgundy seized Paris. The dauphin, still a teenager, fled south of the Loire.1

Henry V did not stop at Agincourt. He took Harfleur, then Normandy town by town, and in 1420 he imposed the Treaty of Troyes. By that instrument Charles VI disinherited his own son, married his daughter Catherine to Henry, and settled the crown of France, at his death, on Henry and Henry’s heirs. The two kingdoms were to be joined. The dauphin was branded the so-called Charles, a man whose mother’s reputation — Isabeau of Bavaria had been accused, in the poison of Paris politics, of adultery — was used to throw his very blood into doubt. Whether Charles himself believed the slander is one of the private questions of this history. He was twenty-one when his father died.2

Henry V died first, in August 1422, at Vincennes, of the camp disease that ate armies. Charles VI died two months later. The infant Henry VI of England, ten months old, was proclaimed king of France in Paris. John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, brother of the dead conqueror, became regent in France. He was a competent soldier and a careful politician. He married a sister of Philip the Good. The Anglo-Burgundian machine now held Paris, Rouen, and the north; it held Bordeaux in the southwest by older title; and it had a legal document, sealed by a king of France, that said the boy in England was the rightful heir.3

South of the Loire, at Bourges and later at Chinon and Tours, the disinherited son kept a court that his enemies called the kingdom of Bourges. He was Charles, by the grace of God king of France, in his own letters — and he was the dauphin to half the realm, a man who had not been anointed at Reims. Reims, where Clovis had been baptized and where the holy oil of the Sainte-Ampoule was kept, lay in enemy country. Without that oil, in the political theology of the time, a Valois prince was a claimant. With it, he was a king. Bedford understood this. So, later, did a girl from the Meuse.4

The war Joan grew up in

The war was not a tournament. It was a chevauchée of burned villages, unpaid garrisons, and companies that changed sides for wages. In the east, along the Meuse, the frontier between Valois loyalty and Burgundian obedience ran through parish after parish. A village could be “the king’s” and the next village “the duke’s,” and the difference was which captain’s men stole the cattle. Henri d’Orly, a Burgundian captain, raided Domrémy’s herds in the mid-1420s; the lady of the place made him give them back. That is the scale at which the Hundred Years’ War arrived in a child’s life: not Agincourt, but a stolen cow, a burned roof, a night in another town.5

Orléans was the lock on the Loire. The city belonged to Charles, Duke of Orléans, who had been a prisoner in England since Agincourt and could not come home. His bastard brother, Jean, later Count of Dunois, held the practical command of the family’s interest. If Orléans fell, the English could cross the Loire in force and roll up the remnant of Valois France. In October 1428 the Earl of Salisbury brought an army to the southern bank and began a proper siege. Salisbury was killed by a cannon-stone from the city, looking out from a window; the Earl of Suffolk and then Lords Talbot and Scales continued the work. They built a ring of bastides, palisaded forts, around the walls, and they took the Tourelles, the fortress at the southern end of the bridge. By the winter of 1428–29 the city was hungry, and the court at Chinon was out of money, out of credit, and out of a plan.6

It is worth being exact about despair, because later piety has a habit of making the rescue look inevitable. It was not. Charles’s council was split between those who wanted to fight and those who wanted terms. Georges de La Trémoille, the favorite, was not a man who thought God sent peasant girls. The great captains — La Hire, Poton de Xaintrailles, the young Duke of Alençon, just ransomed from English captivity — could win a skirmish. They could not raise a siege of that size without a field army, and they did not have one. Yolande of Aragon, the dauphin’s mother-in-law, Queen of Sicily, was the political mind most willing to try unusual instruments. She will matter.7

On 12 February 1429 an English supply convoy under Sir John Fastolf, moving herring and other Lenten food toward the siege, met a French and Scottish blocking force at Rouvray. The French charged a laager of wagons and were shot to pieces. The day was afterwards called the Day of the Herrings. It was a small battle. It was also a verdict: the siege would not be starved out from the outside by the armies Charles presently had.8

Somewhere to the east, in the same weeks, a girl who had already been turned away once from the captain at Vaucouleurs was saying that she had to see the king, that Orléans would be relieved, and that Charles would be anointed at Reims. Nobody at Chinon was waiting for her. The kingdom she proposed to save had, on paper, already been signed away.

Two churches, one crown

One more fracture, because Joan will be tried as a heretic and not as a soldier. The Western Schism had ended only in 1417, at Constance, with the election of Martin V. France had spent decades in the obedience of Avignon popes. The University of Paris, now in English-Burgundian Paris, was a power in theology and a political actor. When a girl in man’s clothes later claimed immediate revelation, she would not be heard in a vacuum. She would be heard by men who had just survived a schism, who feared Hussites in Bohemia, and who knew that prophecy was a tool of faction. The Church had rules for the discernment of spirits. They were not designed to make a peasant’s voices easy to accept. They were designed to keep the faith from being hijacked by every vision in a time of wreck.9

That is the country. A child-king in England with a legal treaty. A disinherited prince south of the Loire without an anointing. A Burgundian duke who held the balance. A city on the Loire closing like a fist. And, in a village the maps barely marked, a girl who had already, she said, been spoken to.