A Great and Glorious Adventure (41 page)

It was, of course, nothing of the sort. The English withdrew because they had bitten off far more than they could chew, they were running out of rations, the Burgundian contingent had gone,
money and reinforcements were slow in coming from England, and Bedford needed the army elsewhere. To suggest that Jeanne was a military commander who planned the movement of troops and led them
into battle, as some historians do (mainly French but some British ones too), is surely not believable. While the potential for leadership may be inborn, the execution of it requires training and
practice, and it is not remotely credible that a farmer’s daughter, however intelligent, with no involvement or previous
experience of war, could possibly have
acquired the skills needed to direct the activities of large bodies of troops. It was not Jeanne d’Arc who drove the English out of France but money, population, defecting allies and
political in-fighting at home. There can be little doubt, however, that Jeanne was an inspiration to the French troops, who had become accustomed to being beaten by smaller but far more
professional English armies. The French resurgence would have happened anyway, once the dauphin’s supporters stopped fighting among themselves and concentrated on raising the funds to
prosecute the war – and Valois France, which had not been fought over time and again, was potentially far richer than English France.

French forces under the duke of Alençon – a fervent believer in Jeanne – now began to try to recover English positions along the Loire, and, on 18 June 1429, 2,000 archers
under John Talbot, the forty-two-year-old first earl of Shrewsbury – another younger son who had made his name as a professional soldier – and a contingent of 1,000 Parisian militiamen
in English pay under Sir John Fastolf were surprised at Patay by an Armagnac army of perhaps 7,000. Talbot was forming up his archers when the French attacked in flank, dispersing them. The Paris
militia broke and ran, Talbot was captured, and only Fastolf with some archers got away. It was an embarrassment to the English for which Jeanne got all the credit, whereas in reality it was caused
by Talbot’s overconfidence. Now many Frenchmen were convinced that God, so long on the side of the English, had switched allegiance.

Mad King Charles VI having died in 1422, Jeanne’s next ploy was to suggest to the dauphin that he should be crowned in Rheims, the traditional coronation site of French kings, and by
carefully avoiding English armies and garrisons – and in spite of the fact that much of the necessary regalia was in Paris – the dauphin was duly crowned as Charles VII by the
archbishop of Rheims in July 1429. Militarily, this might have made no difference whatsoever, but it had an enormous propaganda effect and persuaded the duke of Burgundy to sign a truce with the
French. When the Armagnac army moved towards Paris, egged on by Jeanne, many towns opened their gates to them and they got as far as Saint-Denis before Bedford drove them back and Charles ordered
the army to disperse for the winter. Jeanne was furious and constantly urged the resumption of the war. She managed to persuade some of Alençon’s men to accompany her and a few minor
towns were taken and then lost again.

Jeanne’s usefulness to Charles VII had, however, now run its course. She had inspired French armies to great things, she had been the motivating spirit for the
march to Rheims and the coronation, and French soldiers had got almost to Paris with her name on their lips. But she was becoming an embarrassment; more and more she was excluded from council
meetings and her supposedly God-given advice ignored. When in May 1430 Burgundian troops were laying siege to Compiègne, despite the supposed truce, she was captured during a French retreat
back into the town from an unsuccessful sortie. It has been suggested that the French commander of the Compiègne garrison deliberately closed the gate in her face and allowed her to be
captured.

Jeanne was transferred between various Burgundian prisons – and made several attempts to escape – before the English bought her for 10,000 francs (£1,600) and put her on trial
in Rouen, the heart of English Normandy. The English had to destroy Jeanne’s reputation, and, while most Englishmen seemed to believe that she was a witch, it was not for that that she was
put on trial, but on the far more serious charge of heresy. There was some tolerance of witchcraft in England and in France, but not of heresy, which, if not abjured, carried the death penalty by
burning. It was vital that Jeanne be found guilty, for by association the inference could be drawn that Charles VII was a heretic too; and vital, too, that the churchmen who tried her were French
and not English. The first trial, before a French bishop, a French Dominican monk and a number of clerical assessors, opened in January 1431 and ended on 24 May. Jeanne conducted herself well, was
careful not to incriminate Charles VII, refused to relate any conversations they had had and, when faced with a difficult question, fell back on invoking the will of God. She denied all charges but
finally signed a disavowal of her voices and agreed to stop wearing men’s clothing. To the fury of the English, she was sentenced not to death but to life imprisonment. Four days later,
however, the English demanded the court take note that Jeanne had relapsed by once more cutting her hair short and wearing men’s clothing, and, on 30 May 1431, she was burned at the stake in
the Place du Vieux Marché in Rouen. Her last prophecy, which was probably invented in hindsight, was said to be that within seven years the English would suffer a greater loss than that of
Orléans and that they would eventually be driven out of France.

With the witch burned and the Valois resurgence only just held, the English had to do something to restore prestige and emphasize Bedford’s claim that he was the
rightful regent for the rightful king. So, in December of the same year, 1431, an English bishop crowned the ten-year-old Henry VI of England as Henri II of France in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
It was not lost on the populace that the crowning was carried out by an Englishman and that it was not in Rheims. There was now a military stalemate and once again both sides turned to negotiation,
overseen by representatives of the pope, who was now, following the ending of the schism in 1417, in Rome. In 1435, the interested parties gathered at Arras and the horse-trading began. It went on
for weeks but neither side would budge, and the only result of significance was that the duke of Burgundy formally withdrew from the Treaty of Troyes and renounced his allegiance to Henry as king
of France. This was seen by the English as a disgraceful act of betrayal – as indeed it was – and from now on Burgundy would either stay neutral or, if he fought at all, would do so on
the side of the French. Burgundy’s relations with Bedford had been difficult for some years, exacerbated by the death of Bedford’s childless wife, a sister of the duke’s, and his
somewhat rapid remarriage. It may be, too, that Burgundy realized that, once the magnates of Valois France stopped their internecine quarrelling, a far smaller and less rich England could not hold
the vast tracts of France to which she laid claim.

The negotiations abandoned, the campaigning went on and, in 1435, the French managed to recapture Harfleur and Dieppe. The loss of Harfleur was particularly serious for it meant that river
traffic to and from Rouen would have to run the blockade of French ships, and the loss of Paris the following year was not only a propaganda blow but also added weight to those who believed Jeanne
d’Arc’s prophecy of five years previously. A far greater blow than the loss of Harfleur, however, was the death of the duke of Bedford in Rouen on 14 September 1435, at the age of only
forty-six. We do not know how he died – the Brut Chronicle simply says that he took sick – but he was hugely overworked and could have fallen prey to any of a number of possible
diseases. With him went the last realistic hope of securing an English France: a consummate diplomat who was genuinely popular, particularly in Normandy, he understood and respected French culture,
was a sound
strategist, and managed to maintain reasonably civilized relationships with most factions, including those of his enemies.

Even had Bedford lived, the problem for the English was that their forces were vastly overstretched, trying to hold a frontier of 350 miles with Valois France south of the Loire, and another 170
or so miles along the eastern border of Aquitaine. Without allies and without sufficient funds to pay mercenaries, there were simply not enough English soldiers to provide the frontier garrisons to
guard against inroads. Mobile English expeditionary forces seeking out French armies and defeating them was one thing; holding the territory thus taken was a very different matter. Further
negotiations in 1439 failed, this time over the position of English settlers in Normandy whom England would not dispossess to restore their lands to the original owners, and, in 1441, Pontoise, the
last English stronghold in the Île de France, twenty miles north-west of Paris, fell. In 1444, a truce was agreed and the marriage of Henry VI and Henri II to the fourteen-year-old Margaret
of Anjou, whose aunt was the wife of Charles VII, was arranged. As it turned out, she was a far stronger character than her husband, who would eventually fall prey to the Valois madness inherited
from his mother, but even at this stage Henry was much more inclined to peace at (almost) any price than his great father would ever have been.

Henry VI as a child had been under the control of his uncles, but as he grew older he began to take more and more power into his own hands, as indeed he was entitled to do. A wise king, however,
would consult with his council and the great men of the realm, and, even if he need not always follow their advice, he should at least seek it. The problem was that Henry was kind, generous, pious
and abstemious; he hated bloodshed of any sort and only very reluctantly agreed to executions, frequently pardoning criminals from murderers to petty thieves; he desperately wanted peace with
France and would go to great lengths to get it. While all these qualities would have been excellent in a country parson, they were not the qualities of a king, and both the in-fighting that went on
in the English court as rival blocs jockeyed for power and the king’s own clumsy attempts to make peace under the Francophile urgings of his wife inevitably had an impact on the war.

At some stage during the dialogue prior to Henry VI’s marriage, Suffolk, now a duke and the chief negotiator, promised to restore Maine to
Charles VII, a pledge he
made with Henry’s knowledge but without telling the rest of his advisers. The result was the king’s government following one policy – sovereignty over all of France – and
the king following another. When the news got out, the London mob was furious, blaming Suffolk, and of course the precedent was now set: if the English would give up Maine without a fight, what
about the other territories? It took another three years for the French to get Maine, as the English garrisons held on regardless of what their king might have promised, but finally they had to be
surrendered. Normandy at least was thought to be secure: the population was genuinely loyal to their duke, the king of England, and a whole generation had grown up knowing nothing but English rule.
The military garrison was tiny, however, and made even tinier by long delays in paying the soldiers, which encouraged desertions, and, when Charles VII sent his army into Normandy in the summer of
1449, there was little to stop them swiftly capturing the cities and towns, including Rouen, where they captured Talbot (taken prisoner at Patay in 1429, he had been exchanged for a French nobleman
in 1433). Now only the Cotentin peninsula was held, and that was under immediate threat.

The French military revival came as an unpleasant shock in England. At long last, Charles VII had decided to be a king and had rooted out the incompetent and corrupt administrators and replaced
them with hard-faced accountants who were able to raise the taxes that had hitherto gone uncollected. With much of this money he created a new, professional army. At long last, the French were
beginning to learn the lessons of defeat by the English: instead of going to war with an army of well-bred nobles leading a half-trained rabble, there would be battalions of paid men-at-arms,
archers, crossbowmen and light infantry, who would not be disbanded at the end of every campaign but retained as a permanent force. In addition, he spent money on developing and greatly enlarging
the artillery arm. Now tiny bodies of English professionals would no longer find it so easy to beat far larger French armies: the era of English total military supremacy was coming to an end.
English soldiers were still better trained, better led and better equipped, but the margin was steadily decreasing and there were not nearly enough of them.

Something had to be done to redress the situation in Normandy and, in October 1449, Sir Thomas Kyriell was ordered to assemble an army at
Portsmouth to sail to France.
Kyriell, a Kentish man of fifty-three, a knight of the Garter and a knight banneret, had started his military career as a man-at-arms under Sir Gilbert d’Umfraville and had won ennoblement
and promotion by military prowess. There was no doubt of his abilities as a soldier and a commander, but there was always a cloud hanging over him. He had been suspected of corruption and of
fraudulent conversion of his soldiers’ pay, although this was never proved, and his personal conduct left much to be desired. In Portsmouth, he allowed his soldiers to run amok – they
even lynched the bishop of Chichester, who was bringing their pay – and the time it took to restore discipline, combined with an unfavourable wind, meant that he did not reach Cherbourg until
mid-March 1450, with around 1,500 archers and 500 men-at-arms. Instead of marching straight for English-held Bayeux, as he had been ordered to do, Kyriell decided instead to lay siege to Valognes,
a town of little strategic significance about ten miles south-east of Cherbourg, the only possible justification for this breach of instructions being that the garrison of Valognes might
conceivably have been able to cut off Kyriell’s supply route from the sea and his line of retreat. The delay allowed the French to bring up more troops, so, when Kyriell eventually marched
for Bayeux, reinforced by another 1,500 archers from the Cotentin garrisons, he found a French army of about the same size commanded by the count of Clermont advancing down the road towards him.
Kyriell did everything that he should have done. He formed his men-at-arms into line along a ridge near the village of Formigny, about ten miles north-west of Bayeux, where he had a stream to
protect his rear. He put his archers on the flanks with some in the centre, and ordered them to plant their stakes and dig anti-cavalry holes in front. It was a classic English tactical position
and Kyriell waited for the French to attack, confident that he could slaughter the lot.