The Last Days of Jeanne d'Arc Read online

  1415

  The English land in Normandy. Besiege Harfleur. King Henry’s personal names for the two largest cannons used for battering the city: ‘King’s Daughter’ and ‘London’. He pontificates: War without fire is bland like a sausage without sauce. English gunners bombard, conquer and march north. They take Calais. Their firepower surpasses the defenders’ expectations. Shocked by the speed and skill of the English aggression, French nobles reluctantly stop their quarrelling to fight the foreign invasion. Duke Charles of Orléans, son of the murdered Duke Louis, and Charles the Mad’s oldest son, the crown prince of France, lead the elite of French nobility under the Oriflamme, the heraldic banner of French knighthood. They gallop, intercept the English near a village, Azincourt to the French, Agincourt to the English.

  24 October

  Duke Charles signals for the fanfare. The howls of trumpets and armoured horses and riders encased in metal, couched lances, sharpened swords. The muddy ground quakes – muddy, since it had rained copiously the previous night. The stern English bowmen watch and wait. Their longbows ready to shoot arrows at two hundred feet per second, at a force of one hundred pounds per arrow. French horsemen roll towards the English position. Burdened by bulky steel suits of armour, their steeds’ hooves become bogged in the sludge of the battlefield. They curse and glance at the flags of the up-and-coming British Empire, the blood-red Cross of Saint George. King Henry lowers his fist and waves of arrows blacken the day. Steel breastplates and helmets of pompous French knights meet the medieval equivalent of machine-gun bullets. Five thousand of them shot dead. Prisoners have their throats slit and some are burnt alive. The French army is erased. King Henry is given the sobriquet ‘cutthroat’.

  1417

  With the most advanced siege engines and projectiles in Western Europe, the English sack the cities of western France in swift succession: Caen, Bayeux, Alençon and Cherbourg. They press on to the heart of the duchy of Normandy – Rouen. A city the size of London. King Henry decides on total siege: the city’s trade routes, food supplies, water conduits, blocked by the English. Hunger forces out the city’s poorest, about twelve thousand. The English open fire: filled with arrows, thousands of frayed civilians fall and fester. The surviving die of starvation and cold during the winter – one of the worst atrocities of the European Middle Ages. Possibly sixty thousand of Rouen’s seventy thousand population perish until its gates creak open to King Henry of England. Paris is now within his reach. There, in Europe’s greatest city, anxiety and horror. The English are coming. King Charles still mad, incapacitated. The queen, timid, needy and indecisive as ever. The Duke of Burgundy acts.

  1418

  To cleanse the French court of the rival faction of the Duke of Orléans, Burgundian militias – execution squads – storm the Louvre. The French royal family escape along the castle’s corridors. The city’s streets littered with five thousand hanged, beheaded, naked corpses. The Duke of Burgundy declares himself regent of France and Master of Paris. The young crown prince, Charles, lures the duke to a secret parley on a bridge over the Seine: the Burgundian warlord’s head is cut open with an axe. So, the formal commencement of civil war between the French crown prince and the powerful duchy of Burgundy. Burgundian emissaries are dispatched to start negotiations with the invading English in Normandy.

  1419

  The English are so pleased with their freedom and democracy, the Westminster system of government, the brilliant political model born of the Magna Carta, the curtailment of the sovereign’s power through a parliament. Their aim, they say: to liberate the oppressed French. But, of course, their own island lacks enough land for a growing population. English wool is to dominate the market. They have begun colonising Normandy and look forward to taking the rest of France. They start to name the French an inferior race – and soon, frogs. This precious terrain – and yes, its women’s valuable bodies – should be inhabited by intrepid, progressive Anglo-Saxons, not the lazy, conservative, Latinate Franks. The English storm through northern France. In Melun, monks executed without trial by King Henry. The governor of Meaux hanged from an elm by the supposedly benevolent conquerors. Thirty miles from Paris in Montereau, sixteen French prisoners are summarily beheaded by the English. King Henry’s army at the gates of Paris.

  December

  Philippe, the new Duke of Burgundy, meets with King Henry of England. He prostrates and proposes an alliance against the crown prince of France, his father’s murderer. Paris opens its gates to the English. Hordes of exhausted bowmen in round helmets and red surcoats. They enter the streets, crowd the taverns, and ogle, grope and assault the city’s women.

  1420

  The Treaty of Troyes between the king of England, the Duke of Burgundy and the terrified, bullied queen of France. French Princess Catherine given to the English king. It is decreed that their child will be the joint ruler of the kingdoms of England and France. Celebrations in London. Shame in Paris. King Henry burps, rubs his hands after an ale, then fucks the beautiful Catherine without interest. Without any of the courtship of Shakespeare’s Henry V. The peace treaty sanctions England’s annexation of France; brands the rightful heir to the French throne, Crown Prince Charles of Valois, a horrible, shocking criminal. A boy of seventeen, the youngest, only surviving son of his dying father, Charles the Mad. Young Charles is bookish, composed and rather ugly, a refugee in the south since the bloody capture of Paris by the Burgundians. Can he lead the resistance against the English? Will he reclaim his throne? And then, under Anglo-Burgundian pressure – perhaps threats – the queen declares him a bastard. She disinherits her own son from ruling the realm. France is given to the English.

  7

  1422

  King Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, the conqueror of half of France, dies abruptly. Dysentery. The legendary English king’s toughness, biceps and brutality are no match for an infected colon and a bleeding arsehole. Then Charles the Mad dies. Who will succeed them? King Henry and the French princess’s son, Henry VI, is a toddler. The dead English ruler’s brother, John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford, appointed as regent of the French half of the enlarged kingdom of England. But the recalcitrant crown prince of France, Charles, declares himself the rightful ruler and true heir in a lowly coronation ceremony. English parliament legislates new war taxes. Bands of knights and mercenaries loyal to Charles continue making sorties into occupied lands. English captains convene in occupied Paris. Sir John Fastolf believes in unconventional warfare, stifling the enemy by scorching and destroying all the lands, houses, farms, vine, grain, fruit trees, animals. Basically anything that could provide sustenance for their resistance.

  (A girl called Jeannette turns ten in the east of France.)

  Male farmers taken as slave labourers or killed; women and girls kidnapped and impelled into prostitution or forced marriage to English settlers. Surviving peasants, children and elders flee burnt fields to shelter in walled towns. Denied entry as undesirable refugees, they camp around polluted moats, die of starvation and pestilence. In Normandy a third of the civilian population disappears from the registers – the English invasion, historians will say, has a Hiroshima effect. A papal delegate reports: all the farmers between the Loire and the Seine have been either killed or removed. In the outskirts of Abbeville a peasant woman, found eating the salted corpse of a child. A poet writes in Lay de Guerre – Ballad of War – all women, young and old taken, violated and dishonoured. Eighty thousand of Paris’s three hundred thousand become beggars. Southern wall of the cloister of Cimetière des Innocents – Holy Innocents’ Cemetery – freshly painted with a fresco of Danse Macabre, the Dance of Death: the Grim Reaper leads a parade of figures allegorising the entire society – labourer, priest, physician, squire, lover and an infant – dancing a reel with the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse. France’s population of seventeen to twenty million reduced to ten million. The Black Death aside, a conservative estimate: two to three million men and women die as a result of the war.
/>   1424

  France’s Crown Prince Charles – who really wishes people would instead address him as king – can’t sleep at night. Goblets of hot milk and honey prove ineffective. Should he ignore his fanatical followers, concede defeat, let the English have what’s left of France, and retire to Scotland or Spain? He doesn’t convince as a resistance leader: he doesn’t direct attacks personally, always wary of kidnapping and assassination. Yet Charles’s existing army, an amalgam of French, Scottish and Italian loyalists and mercenaries, embarks on an attack into the English zones. A reckless attack. They meet ten thousand disciplined, practised English soldiers. At the Battle of Verneuil, of Charles’s warriors, seven thousand fall. Another historic defeat and another bloody proof: of the futility of the French armoured cavalry against the more modern, dreaded longbows.

  (Jeannette is a twelve-year-old girl in a faraway village.)

  A squabble and division between Charles’s disheartened supporters, his jumpy mother-in-law, Queen Yolande of Aragon, and his obese grand chamberlain, Georges de la Trémoille. On the verge of breakdown and bankruptcy, the 24-year-old leader receives upsetting news: Regent John of Bedford’s latest success in the English parliament. He has coerced the representatives to pass a bill for an enormous increase in war taxes for a final combat against the shameful Bastard Prince Charles. The regent deploys fifteen thousand English soldiers along the Loire to launch a strike to end Charles’s sad existence once and for all. An attack on the strategic, vital city of Orléans.

  August 1428

  An English force of four thousand advances towards the city of Orléans, the bridge on the Loire, the only French bastion to forestall the full-scale English invasion of what remains of France. Four thousand more English soldiers with trebuchets, cannons and catapults advance towards the city, besiege a town, force a starved population into eating horses, smash the gates, drown the guards. The English behead scores of non-combatants in Le Mans’s town square. Combined invasion armies march towards Orléans. They march west, take Beaugency, cross the Loire. Then they march east, circumvent Orléans, to capture Jargeau on 5 October, then Châteauneuf. They’ve isolated the great city from eastern, southern and western sides. They begin choking Orléans in a meticulous, total siege.

  (Jeannette has turned sixteen somewhere in the duchy of Bar.)

  Is Orléans prepared for the great English assault? Walls, ramparts, keeps, and outer churches and convents, fortified with palisades and barbicans. A standing garrison of 740 men-at-arms and 870 crossbowmen under the Duke of Orléans’s half-brother, Jean the Bastard.

  6 October

  Orléans’s priests, burgesses, nuns, merchants and children form a procession from the cathedral with sacred banners, chanting psalms, begging Jesus for succour. Citizens evacuate the southern outskirts. The English arrive and set up camp on the banks of the wide river.

  12 October

  English cannons roar, declare the beginning of the siege of Orléans by bombarding, razing the city’s water mills. Civilians crouch, absorb the blasts.

  17 October

  The English start firing into the city of thirty thousand people. One hundred and twenty-four English cannonballs fall on Orléans in one day.

  The self-proclaimed king of France, cynical, defeatist as he has become, cannot allow the English to take Orléans. It’s the only position protecting his flimsy authority in the south. Charles grimaces at the news of the first hand-to-hand combat of the siege: the city’s robust bridgehead fortress with its two massive bombard towers, les Tourelles – the Turrets – taken by the English with over two hundred of the city’s scarce defenders dead. The English quickly adapt the Turrets as their own headquarters. They build a ring of siege-work fortifications around the city: by November, ten English strongholds of stone walls and barricades squeeze the city on all sides.

  Early 1429

  The English strategy: a siege of attrition to isolate and starve the city into misery and subjugation. During the winter hundreds of civilians die of cold, many others are crushed by the sporadic blasts of English cannons. Finally on 5 January, the French king’s reinforcements for the besieged: five hundred men-at-arms cross the Loire, slip through the English blockade to enter the city with victuals, fuel and ammunition. Then another thousand under the Scottish knight William Stuart. The battered citizens gather in their Gothic cathedral, praise their patron, Saint Aignan who, they believe, saved Orléans during the ancient siege laid by Attila the Hun. The forces of the city, now numbering between two thousand and three thousand, ready to make a counterattack against the English.

  11 February

  French forces exit Orléans to intercept the convoys of foodstuff arriving to replenish the besiegers. French commanders quarrel. Finally the brazen Scottish knight hurls an obscenity, and attacks without consensus. Shattered by a blizzard of arrows unleashed from the longbows of fifteen hundred English soldiers escorting the food wagons. French and Scottish soldiers retreat into the city in disarray. Leaving behind a thousand dead and wounded, including the corpse of the Scottish captain. Jean the Bastard takes an arrow in the leg, hobbles after his routed comrades. French King Charles, outraged by the news of the Battle of Herring – named thus after the cargo of the English carts on the disastrous day. Is it not simply absurd to continue with this farce of a resistance? Charles wonders, alone in his library in an aged château perched upon a cliff in the southern town of Chinon.

  23 February

  And then, a knock on the door of his library. Something has arrived: a weighty letter from a remote province, in the hands of Charles’s herald, with the seal of the frontier region’s captain, Robert de Baudricourt. The tense royal dismisses the herald. Breaks the wax, squints as he reads the letter.

  Your Royal Highness king of France by the grace of God Charles de Valois the Sovereign…

  Charles scratches his head, skims over the words:

  I hold command over the garrisons loyal to Your Majesty in the town of…For years I have been fighting the English…Your Majesty’s treacherous Burgundian foes…It is my desire to be heard…I should hope that Your Majesty does not consider me presumptuous…I should hope that He will find my action of use and…His Royal Highness will look favourably…

  Charles sighs, suppresses the desire to scrunch up the letter.

  Your Highness. I must admit that I find it hard to explain in plain words the purpose of this letter. I therefore hope that You will forgive my lack of eloquence. This letter, Your Royal Highness, concerns one of the people who have delivered it. As You may have already been informed, one of the couriers of this letter is a woman. These words concern her.

  She is not a woman in complete truth but more of a child. An unmarried girl from commoner stock of one of the villages within my jurisdiction. You may be wondering why I have sent a young laywoman to the court, and why I perceived such a creature capable of riding across enemy territory and conducting such a journey safely. Her name is Jeannette although she prefers being called Jeanne. She is barely seventeen or eighteen years of age. She first came to my attention by somehow convincing my men to let her enter my fortress and she…

  Charles frowns, murmurs to himself: What the devil?! He finishes the letter, rereads it carefully, breathes deeply. And then, an abrupt childhood memory. Did his mother not tell him when he was a very little boy, when she had time for her son, before she disinherited him and he became a refugee, something about a prediction made by that famously malodorous court clairvoyant Marie d’Avignon? That France would endure many disasters before being rescued by a mysterious young woman, a maid?

  He concentrates. And isn’t there some folk prophecy, attributed to Saint Bede or to the wizard Merlin, about a shadowy messianic figure known as the Maid of Lorraine, France’s future saviour? He must have lost his mind. Going mad like his father? But why the hell not? Why not grant an audience to this eccentric country girl from, of all places, a village that borders the duchy of Lorraine? She who claims she has
been sent by Heaven to finally liberate France.

  8

  March 1429

  Short, skinny Jeanne, sharp bony face and large dark eyes, her black hair cropped like a pageboy’s. In complete masculine outfit: tunic, leggings, leather belt and boots. She enters history. Formally permitted to set her commoner’s foot in the audience hall of Château de Chinon after supper. Courtiers stare with amusement, some with shock. The cross-dressing newcomer and her strange, prominent eyes. She walks confidently. Recognises the king among the crowd, even though she has – to the best of the audience’s knowledge – never seen him before. He blushes, apparently breaks into tears as the girl kneels, kisses his hands, speaks sincerely, forcefully, and everyone hears her.

  My poor gentle prince. I’ve brought you help from Heaven.

  The spectators gasp. This (possibly rehearsed) recognition must be a miracle, a numinous sign of God’s realignment with the French after so much misery. Charles smiles, assigns the girl a room in a tower of the castle of Couldray. Then clears his throat, announces with unprecedented certitude that the young woman is a holy messenger, spoken to by an angel and, yes, a pure, innocent virgin. The wealthy, absolutely uncompromising Queen Yolande nods. Charles decides to immediately mobilise a new army for rescuing the city of Orléans from the gruesome English. And pauses before announcing that he shall place this sacrosanct female adolescent among the captains of the new force. Most nobles think Charles has indeed lost his mind. Yet they concur that the girl does beguile, and they listen as the court’s herald delivers a reading by the Italian astrologer Giovanni di Montalicinni: Virgo is in ascendant. Venus, Mercury and the sun are on the rise. Meaning: by a virgin shall the king of France be victorious. He shall chase the English out of France.