The Maid and the Queen (37 page)

Three days later in Paris, the once notorious queen of France, Isabeau of Bavaria, who for her own comfort had engineered the disinheritance of her last surviving son so that the English might advance into the capital and thereby take possession of the kingdom, died alone and penniless, of an illness brought on by sharp poverty and distress, in the Hôtel Saint-Pol, at the age of sixty-five. She lived just long enough to see her life’s work undone by the Treaty of Arras.

T
HE NEWS
that the duke of Burgundy had signed a separate peace agreement with Charles VII fell like a stone cannonball on the court of Henry VI. Philip the Good himself sent messengers and high-level ambassadors to En gland, armed with letters explaining this action, which were read aloud at a council meeting. “All persons were very much surprised,” wrote Enguerrand de Monstrelet, “and the young king Henry was so much hurt at their
contents, that his eyes were filled with tears, which ran down his cheeks. He said to some of the privy counselors nearest to him, that he plainly perceived since the duke of Burgundy had acted thus disloyally toward him, and was reconciled to his enemy king Charles, that his dominions in France would fare the worse for it.” Astonishment turned to vexation, and vexation to anger. Violence broke out in London against people whose only crime was that they were identified with Flanders, Brabant, or Hainaut, and several were murdered before the king put a stop to it. The royal council determined to fight for its possessions in France, and preparations were made not only to retake territory lost to Charles VII but to declare war on Philip the Good as well.

But it would take time to raise the necessary reinforcements, and in the interim Charles’s forces struck. “When the French or Armagnacs realized that they could not reach an agreement [with England at Arras], they began to make war again more strongly than ever,” wrote the anonymous Bourgeois of Paris. “They entered Normandy in force and soon captured some of its best seaports, Montivilliers, Dieppe, Harfleur, and a number of other good towns and castelries. Then they came nearer Paris and took Corbeil, Bois de Vincennes, Beauté, Pontoise… and other towns and castles near Paris. Thus nothing could come into Paris from Normandy or anywhere else, so that in Lent all goods were very dear, especially pickled herring.” By April, five thousand troops led by Arthur of Richemont and the Bastard of Orléans had surrounded the capital. To forestall a prolonged siege, the constable approached the gate at Saint-Jacques at the head of his force and advised those who guarded the city to open the doors and “let us into Paris peacefully, or you will all die of famine.” Joan had issued much the same appeal when she had assaulted these very same walls at the head of an army seven years before, but that was when the duke of Burgundy still stood with England. This time, those addressed “looked over the walls and saw so many armed men that they would not have thought all King Charles’ resources could have paid for even half the troops they could see; frightened at this and fearing an outbreak of violence, they agreed to let them into the town,” the Parisian chronicler reported. Some of the inhabitants loyal to Charles supplied ladders suitable for scaling, and the Bastard of Orléans, with a few of his men, climbed over the walls and opened the gate, allowing the French army to pour into the city. The English garrison, whose numbers had already been severely weakened by desertions, was so obviously
outnumbered that its soldiers were allowed to leave the capital unharmed, provided they did so peacefully. The men formed into three companies and marched out of the city to the hoots and taunts of the Parisians, never to return.

And then something unprecedented happened. The constable, acting on behalf of Charles,
issued immunity to all Parisians, even those who had supported the regency government, and forbade all acts of retribution
. “My good friends,” he was reported to have said, “the good King Charles gives you a hundred thousand thanks, and so do I on his behalf, for having so peaceably returned the chief city of the kingdom to him. If anyone of any rank, present or absent, had done any wrong to our lord the King, it is entirely forgiven him.” For the first time in three decades, the government of Paris changed hands without the massacre of a single citizen, Burgundian or Armagnac; and in that one act of enlightened statesmanship, the civil war was at long last resolved and Charles truly became king of France. “The Parisians loved them for this and before the day was out every man in Paris would have risked his life and goods to destroy the English,” the anonymous Bourgeois of Paris, a confirmed Burgundian who had reviled the Armagnacs for decades, wrote happily, obviously including himself in the general euphoria.

It took several more months to thoroughly secure the surrounding area, but on November 12 of the following year, after being so long denied the city, Charles VII was finally able to enter Paris safely. To mark the solemnity of the occasion, he arrived in great state at the head of a long procession, and was met outside the walls by a large delegation of townspeople, who presented him with the keys to the city. Following this ceremony, a canopy of azure silk, embroidered all over with fleurs-de-lis in gold thread, which had been specially made for the occasion, was raised over his head and the king was formally escorted into the city proper. Present with Charles for this important occasion were his eldest son, Louis, now dauphin of Vienne, and all the most eminent noblemen of the kingdom, the men who had fought for this moment, their names now familiar to all—Arthur of Richemont, the count of Vendôme, the Bastard of Orléans. Even La Hire “in very grand state” rode with Charles at the head of the procession. In one of those pinpoint turnabouts of fealty at which medieval societies were so practiced, the king was celebrated with a degree of warmth that utterly belied the events of the recent past; no one viewing the scene who did not know the circumstances would ever have guessed that this reception was the result of the
most savage conflict of the age. “Thus nobly accompanied, did the king make his entry into the city of Paris by the gate of St. Denis,” Enguerrand de Monstrelet recorded. “Three angels supported a shield bearing the arms of France over the gate… and underneath was written in large characters,

The procession proceeded into the city to noisy acclaim; prayers were said, and then Charles and all his company paraded through the capital to his father’s palace, the Hôtel Saint-Pol. “The crowd of common people was so great that it was difficult to walk the streets; and they sang carols in all the squares, and other places, as loud as they could, for the welcome return of their natural lord and king, with his son, the dauphin. Many even wept for joy at this happy event,” the chronicler enthused.

Charles VII parades triumphantly into Paris.

The entrance of Charles VII into Paris, while an important milestone, was largely ceremonial. The military conflict was far from over—the En glish were still firmly entrenched in Maine and Normandy, where they remained a significant threat to the rest of the kingdom—but to have retaken Paris was an undeniable accomplishment that cemented Charles’s rule and added greatly to his luster. The king himself recognized the moment as such, and that was why he had taken such pains, prior to his entrance, to surround himself in procession with those of the nobility to whom he felt an obligation, as a reward for services rendered. And so on that historic day in November 1437, every person of consequence in Charles’s regime was present to savor the king’s triumph at Paris—except, of course, the two women who had put him there: Joan of Arc and Yolande of Aragon.

C
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14

The Road
to
Rouen

ITH THE
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and the surrender of Paris, the first of the three conditions necessary to establish Joan of Arc’s place in history was achieved. In a stunning reversal of English interests, Charles was now not only the acknowledged sovereign of France, but for the first time during his reign actually in possession of three-quarters of his kingdom. Henry VI might still call himself king of France, but barring a string of further military successes, this was an empty title. For this reason, England clung to its holdings on the continent, and particularly Normandy, with a ferocity that made clear its government’s intentions to stay and fight for the legacy left by Henry V. And in the heart of Normandy lay the capital city of Rouen, in which the damning evidence of Joan’s trial was locked away. Without those records nothing could be done to rehabilitate her image.

Not that Charles at this point demonstrated any particular interest in reviving Joan’s memory. The king’s overriding aspiration was to put the war behind him, either by defeating the English in battle or by bribing them to leave, two alternatives at which, in the years following his dramatic entrance into Paris, and despite Charles’s having finally matured into a much more effective ruler, he was remarkably unsuccessful. It would fall once again to Yolande of Aragon and her family, and in particular the hapless René, to help him to finish the war and, in so doing, reclaim the Maid for posterity.

• • •

T
HE QUEEN OF SICILY’S
second son certainly made for an unlikely hero. In the years following his defeat at Bulgnéville and subsequent imprisonment by the duke of Burgundy, René’s career bore an unfortunate resemblance to the sort of fairy tale generally associated with the Brothers Grimm. The most deplorable luck dogged his heels even as the greatest of honors were showered on his head; he, who would help usher the Renaissance into France, was the recipient, often simultaneously, of the best and the worst the medieval world had to offer. Here was a man who by nature and inclination reveled in music, painting, and literature, but whose advancement lay in the mastering of the martial and political arts, a personal combination that resulted in disaster with an almost staggering consistency.

It was therefore entirely symptomatic of René’s lot in life that, having done so much to advance his own cause by furthering the peace negotiations between Charles and Philip the Good, he would see his bargaining position with the duke of Burgundy suddenly deteriorate in an alarming fashion by virtue of an unlooked-for promotion. On November 12, 1434, just before the reconciliation talks at Nevers, while René still languished in his prison cell in Dijon, his older brother Louis III died unexpectedly of fever in Ca labria, at the southern tip of the kingdom of Naples. Poor Louis had lived in Italy for over a decade, with only brief excursions home to France to see family and friends, while he waited impatiently for the reigning queen of Naples, Joanna II, to die and pass along his inheritance. Unfortunately for Yolande’s eldest son, his benefactor outlived him by three months, and as Louis died childless, Joanna II instead named René as her successor. So when she too passed away on February 2, 1435, all of Louis III’s many titles and appendages fell to his younger brother, and Philip the Good suddenly found himself in possession not simply of René, duke of Bar and Lorraine, but of René, king of Sicily, duke of Anjou and Maine, and count of Provence—a transformation that represented, in the rank-sensitive hierarchy of medieval prisoners, a stunning upgrade to a
much
more valuable hostage. Moreover, the duke of Burgundy knew, as everyone did, that Joanna II’s will would be contested by the king of Aragon, and that René could be assured of this fabulous inheritance only by raising an army and going to Naples as soon as possible in order to claim his kingdom and defend his rights. That meant that every day René spent in Philip’s prison cell would make him that much more desperate to get out, and the more desperate René became, the duke
of Burgundy reasoned with undeniable logic, the more his captive would be willing to pay for his freedom.