The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (7 page)

The message was clear: Henry VI was king of France because of who he was, not what his father’s armies had done. A claim staked out in blood was more permanent and sacred, and Henry’s emergence at the end of a lineage begun with the holy figure of St Louis implied that his very being was a source of unity rather than division. He was the true heir of France’s holiest ruler; his destiny to be the restorer of a divided house. And all of this was done not by conquest, but by rightful inheritance. The tidiness and symmetry of the genealogy and the historical story it told gave the poster an intrinsic, satisfying beauty.
11

Posters like this were usually accompanied by a poem composed
by one of Bedford’s clerks, Lawrence Calot, which outlined the claim in more detail.
12
In England the poem was translated by the court poet John Lydgate, its content very little changed. To quote Lydgate’s version, the poem praised ‘Henry the sext, of age ny five yere renne, / Borne to be king of worthie reamys two’. It then made direct reference to the genealogy it accompanied, and proclaimed at great length Henry VI to be:

Like the dynastic diagram it commented upon, the poem – both Calot’s version and Lydgate’s translation – was rather elegant. It was also a total deception: fudging numerous genealogical facts and pointedly ignoring the French principle of Salic law, which dictated that the crown could never pass through a female. In a limited sense this did not matter: as punishment for his act of vandalism the clerk from Reims was forced to pay for two new copies of Henry’s doctored family tree. But in the broader scheme of politics, it mattered very much. It was not bloodstock that would decide who triumphed in France, but blood spilled on the battlefield.

Although the duke of Bedford was forced to split his attention between England and France in order to keep order between
his brother and his cousin, in the aftermath of Verneuil the war effort continued broadly successfully, so that by September 1428 the dauphin’s forces had been pushed back almost wholly beyond the river Loire. That month, English forces began a siege of the town of Orléans. It ought to have been a straightforward matter, but it proved to be the point from which the whole English position started to deflate, thanks to the improbable intervention of a young woman called Jehanne d’Arc (usually anglicised to Joan of Arc), nicknamed the Pucelle, or the Maid. The political confidence and propaganda value she offered the dauphin and his allies would prove to be worth more to the French cause than any number of dynastic handbills.

The army that besieged Orléans was commanded directly by Salisbury, with an authority that stood largely independent of Bedford’s. This arrangement had been made in England by the duke of Gloucester, who envisioned a much more aggressive foreign policy than most of the rest of the council, particularly Bedford and Beaufort. Bedford’s conservative strategy was to attack the relatively lightly defended town of Angers, but this advice was ignored as Salisbury and his large, well-equipped and handsomely paid-for army instead marched 150 miles further up the Loire to attack the far more difficult and prestigious target of Orléans.

Orléans was a large city, stoutly defended both by the geography of the Loire and a series of massive walls, gates and towers. Salisbury stormed the nearby countryside, cutting off Orléans from the neighbouring settlements of Jargeau, Meung and Beaugency. Then he besieged the town, firing on its walls with cannon and instructing his miners to dig below its fortifications. All seemed promising until, as a long siege through the winter months beckoned, disaster struck. Salisbury was surveying the town’s defences on 27 October when he was hit by debris thrown up by a stone cannonball fired across the river from the turrets of
Orléans. Shards of flying masonry tore off half the flesh from his face: a mortal injury from which he took a full agonising week to die.

Salisbury’s death was a disaster. ‘[He] was a noble lord and a worthy warrior among all Christian men,’ wrote the author of the Brut Chronicle.
13
The English were from this point committed to a lengthy siege, but had lost the only commander in their ranks who was capable of winning it. Salisbury was replaced by William de la Pole, the thirty-two-year-old earl of Suffolk – a valiant and experienced soldier, but not of the same stature as the man he replaced. The English attempted to rally under Suffolk, battering the walls of Orléans with guns and fortifying the countryside where they could to make it as inhospitable and dangerous as possible to any who might think of coming to the aid of the citizens. But there remained a basic shortage of men. The English could not storm the heavily defended city; indeed, they remained unable even to surround its entire circumference. Inside Orléans the townsmen settled in for a long winter siege. The English beyond the walls did what they could to prevent anyone passing in or out. The winter months ground by in a long, tedious and uncomfortable stalemate.

Then, at the end of February, Joan of Arc appeared. The seventeen-year-old, illiterate peasant girl had travelled from Domrémy in south-east France to the dauphin’s court at Chinon, disguised beneath drab, grey male clothes and a pudding-bowl haircut. She had been driven, she later said, by divine voices that had been guiding her actions since the age of thirteen.
14
She believed it was her mission to raise an army, relieve the siege of Orléans and escort the dauphin to Reims in order to have him crowned king of France. At Chinon and Poitiers she was repeatedly interrogated by Charles’s clerics, who were puzzled by this curious, intrepid and determined countryside maid. In the end, they decided that there was little to be lost by testing her out. Joan
was granted her wish. In late April she dressed in male armour and rode to Orléans aboard a white horse. Behind her was an army several thousand strong, with a group of priests by her side and armed with an ancient sword, later rumoured to be that of Charles Martel, the legendary eighth-century king of the Franks. They reached the city on 29 April and found the besieging forces’ lines weak and undersupplied.

When the English first heard about Joan they scoffed and screwed up their faces in disgust. A woman riding in male armour, with her hair cropped short, was nothing short of abominable: cross-dressing was forbidden by biblical law, and Joan’s appearance seemed to be yet another sign of the decadence and godlessness of the French. Joan had dictated letters to the English from the dauphin’s court some weeks before her arrival at Orléans, in which she warned Suffolk and his men to clear out of the occupied lands or lose their heads by her hand. At the time this had been treated as an absurdity, and Joan was dismissed as nothing more than an Armagnac whore. Yet now, here she was: armed to the teeth, bursting with godly zeal and backed by a substantial body of troops with which she aimed to drive the English away from the walls of Orléans and relieve the long and miserable siege.

On her arrival, Joan wasted little time. Her men attacked the English where their thinly spread lines were feeblest: to the east of the city, where a single small fortification was easily overwhelmed by a concerted French assault. With almost astonishing ease a hole was punched in the siege lines, and it remained open long enough for the radiant Joan to gallop into an overjoyed city, waving a white flag and resembling – to the citizens at least – a vision sent from heaven. She was given a townhouse for her lodgings and then, remarkably, began to direct relief operations from behind Orléans’s long-battered walls.

With Joan inside the town, and her army outside led by Jean
count of Dunois – a man better known by his sobriquet ‘the bastard of Orléans’ – operations to relieve the town began in earnest. On 4 May the French army began to raid and burn English siege fortifications, starting at the weakest point in the east, the same spot where Joan had been spirited in behind the walls. In one day’s fighting, the bastard of Orléans’s men did enough damage to open a permanent route in and out of the town. This was a serious blow to Suffolk’s siege effort: six months of numbing boredom, during which the English had tried to starve their opponents into submission, was ended in twenty-four hours. The next day, Joan sent another message to the enemy to warn them that this was only the beginning. ‘You men of England, who have no right in this kingdom of France, the King of Heaven orders and commands you through me, Joan the Pucelle, to abandon your strongholds and go back to your own country,’ announced a note fired into the English camp by an archer on 5 May. ‘If not, I will make a war cry that will be remembered forever.’ Once again, the English laughed. But this time their laughter was decidedly less assured.

At dawn on 6 May, another Armagnac assault began, driven by a new zeal, which seemed almost visibly to radiate from the person of the Pucelle. As the English siege positions came under fierce attack, she rode around in the centre of the fighting, her white standard fluttering as blood sprayed up around her. At one point the blood was her own: an arrow fired from an English-held tower sliced through the flesh of one of her shoulders. God, however, was smiling upon his appointed agent, and Joan staggered on, almost oblivious to her wound, spurring the Frenchmen forward. Relieving troops and liberated citizens alike swarmed over the English positions, capturing them one by one, slaughtering enemies and sending waves of sheer panic through the living. At night, bells of celebration clanged and jangled from the churches of Orléans, rung with glee by men and women who knew that
they were winning their freedom. Within three days the French had fully relieved Orléans, and the English were retreating up the Loire at such speed they were forced to abandon their cannon and heavy weaponry as they went.

The loss of Orléans began a serious collapse in the English position. Reinforcements were sent, but more strongholds began to fall along the Loire. On 18 June 1429 the confused English army was drawn into a battle at Patay, just north of Orléans, for which they were totally unprepared. They were annihilated by the French vanguard: more than two thousand men were killed and every captain save Fastolf was captured. In a matter of months, fortunes in occupied France had been dramatically reversed. The dauphin’s forces marched through Anglo-Burgundian territory, towns falling before them without a fight. On 16 July the dauphin entered Reims, and the following day he was anointed with holy oil and crowned King Charles VII, with Joan of Arc standing proudly by the altar. All the genealogical propaganda in the world could not obscure the fact that France now had a ceremonially anointed king – and that he was not called Henry.

The dreadful news from France was described in the minutes of the English privy council as ‘diverse great and grievous adversities’. It demanded an urgent response.
15
There was one obvious course of action. In the first week of November 1429, after a period of very hasty preparation, London and Westminster welcomed the young king, still only seven years old, to his English coronation.

The ceremony by which kings were crowned was one of the most important spectacles in English political life, and it had become increasingly elaborate over the centuries since the Norman Conquest. In 1423 a book outlining the order of service for crowning French kings had come into the duke of Bedford’s
hands, and the English ceremonial had been upgraded once again to give it Frankish pomp. Events took place over several days. The first stage was Henry’s formal entry to the capital. ‘The Friday, the third of November, the King with his lords … rode from Kingston over London Bridge,’ wrote the author of the Brut Chronicle. ‘And the Mayor and the Aldermen, all in scarlet hoods, rode to meet the King.’ The citizens accompanied him to the Tower of London where, the next evening, Henry sat in splendour to receive thirty-two young noblemen, who were ritually washed and dubbed knights of the Order of the Bath. On Sunday he proceeded out of the Tower to parade before his subjects, and to make his way to Westminster Abbey for the coronation proper. He rode bareheaded through the cramped streets of the city accompanied by his great lords, who were dressed for the most part in gold. Inside Westminster Abbey a great scaffold had been erected, to allow a good view to the congregation. Henry’s mother Catherine and her ladies sat in pride of place near the altar, near the king’s cousin Pedro, prince of Portugal, who had returned in haste to the country he had visited earlier in the decade, in order to attend the ceremony.
16

The earl of Warwick carried Henry into the church, then led him up the scaffold to his seat in the centre, from where he surveyed the crowds around him, according to Gregory’s chronicle, ‘sadly and wisely’. Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury, addressed the assembled realm, telling them Henry had come before God and the Holy Church, ‘asking the crown of this realm by right and descent of heritage’. The congregation gave a roar, throwing their hands in the air and crying ‘ye, ye’, while young Henry walked before the great altar and prostrated himself for a long time before it.

What followed took hours. Throughout the ceremony bishops gave readings and sang anthems over the king’s body, while he was made to lie down, stand up, lie down and stand up again,
as well as being undressed, redressed and paraded around in the most elaborate costumes: first girded with the spurs and swords of a warrior, then in a bishop’s robes and sandals, before finally being arrayed in gleaming cloth of gold, with Richard II’s crown placed on his head since the traditional crown of Edward the Confessor was deemed too weighty for a seven-year-old. At the heart of the ceremony was the anointing: the most mysterious and permanent part of kingship, a rite that could never be undone. Henry stood in his undershirt while his little body was touched systematically with a miraculous oil said once to have been given by the Virgin Mary to St Thomas Becket. Holy oil was poured from a golden eagle-shaped ampulla onto Henry’s breast ‘and the midst of his back, and his head, all across his two shoulders, his two elbows [and] his palms of his hands’.
17
These were then dabbed with a soft white cotton cloth, while a white silken coif was placed on his head. It was to be worn for eight days, at the end of which a group of bishops would ceremonially clean Henry’s head with lukewarm white wine. (This was one of the least comfortable aspects of the coronation: Henry’s grandfather, Henry IV, had developed head lice after he was crowned in 1399.) After many hours of such solemn proceedings, capped by the celebration of the mass, the newly crowned king processed from the abbey to Westminster Hall for a feast in which every dish carried messages about the splendour of Henry’s dual kingship. The first course featured (edible) fritters decorated with
fleurs-de
-lis and a decorative ‘subtlety’ showing Henry being carried by St Edward the Confessor of England and St Louis of France – his two holiest royal ancestors. The second course saw more tarts dusted with fleurs-de-lis. The subtlety brought out with the third course featured Henry presented to the Virgin and Child by St George and St Denis. A poem accompanied its presentation, praising the young king, ‘Born by descent and title of right / Justly to reign in England and in France’. Then, as soon as the
festivities at Westminster were over, preparations began to take the young king to his much-advertised second kingdom.