The Coronation Road

They left the Loire. The army that gathered at Gien in the last days of June was not the starved garrison-relief of April. It was a coronation army: Charles himself, Alençon, the captains of Orléans, the Maid, priests, baggage, and the uneasy presence of men who still thought Paris the proper prize. The road they took went east and north, toward Auxerre, then Troyes, then Châlons, then Reims — the old sacramental axis, not the English axis of Normandy.1

Auxerre, Burgundian in obedience, did not fight. It provisioned the army and kept its formalities. That is a kind of surrender medieval towns understood: not a change of soul, a change of calculation. Charles’s presence, the news of Patay, and the strange standard were a single argument. The argument would be tested at Troyes, which was a larger town, the very place where the treaty of 1420 had been sealed. To ride into Troyes with the disinherited son was to ride into the document and tear it.2

Troyes

Troyes closed its gates. The army sat. Powder was short. There were voices in council for turning back — the coronation road had always been, to some of them, a girl’s idea. Joan went around the walls, or had a letter sent in, calling the town to receive the true heir. The city sent a friar out to look at her: Brother Richard, a popular preacher already known in the Loire, a man whose later career would need a longer rope than this volume will give him. He approached her with the caution of someone who has heard of devils. She told him to come on, she would not fly away. He looked, and he believed, or he believed enough to tell the town that she was not a thing to be frightened of in that way.3

Belief of a friar does not open a gate. An assault prepared for the next morning does. Joan put the army to work on fascines and ladders, the visible mathematics of a storm. Overnight the mathematics reached the men inside. Troyes negotiated. On 9 July the town opened, and Charles went in, to the place where his father had signed him away. The Treaty of Troyes was not legally repealed by a gate. It was politically wounded. A treaty needs towns to remember it. This town now remembered a different king.4

Châlons and the last miles

Châlons-en-Champagne, whose bishop had reason to calculate, yielded in its turn. The count-bishop handed over keys that might have been withheld a month before. At Châlons, Joan saw people from her own country — men who had come forward from the Meuse now that the road was royal again. The war was knitting the frontier to the coronation. That knitting is easy to miss if one looks only at princes. A girl from Domrémy riding into Champagne with the king is a geographical sentence: the loyal island on the Meuse has become the center.5

Reims itself still had a garrison in theory and a chapter of canons in fact. Bedford could not relieve it. Burgundy did not. On 16 July the city opened. Charles entered the town where the kings of France were made. The oil was still there. The cathedral was still there. The English were not.

A word about ease. The coronation road looks, on a page, like a procession. It was a march through a country that had been living under the other obedience for years, with an army that could have been starved at Troyes if Troyes had held a week and if Bedford had moved. He did not move. The Duke of Bedford was a serious man; his failure to break the Reims march is one of the strategic facts of 1429. He had just lost the Loire army at Patay. He did not have another. Joan’s voices, in her account, had known that the towns would come. The captains, in theirs, had not been sure. The towns came.6

Tomorrow, Sunday, 17 July, they would go to the cathedral. She had said at Vaucouleurs, in a labourer’s daughter’s words, that she had been sent to take the dauphin to be anointed. The sentence was now a date.