The Maid and the Queen (40 page)

But neither could the king of France simply walk away from the possibility of a marriage alliance and allow Henry VI to choose his own bride—there was too much risk that one of Charles VII’s many enemies might use this device to try to amass power in order to challenge his rule. What was needed was the daughter of a nobleman upon whose loyalty the king of France could unquestionably rely; someone of very high rank who was nonetheless not a threat; someone who could perhaps be bullied into taking this on, as nobody really wanted to marry his child to Henry VI and send the girl over to live with the hated English. There was only one candidate who fit all of these requirements: René of Anjou’s daughter Margaret. “The marriage of Margaret was concluded… in the interest of Charles VII and at his demand,” René’s biographer stated flatly. Without his mother to support
him, René was in no position to deny the king this or, for that matter, any request. A short time after the signing of the Truce of Tours, Margaret’s engagement to the son of the count of Saint-Pol was officially broken, the Holy Roman Emperor’s advances were courteously but firmly denied, and Yolande of Aragon’s favorite granddaughter was affianced to the king of England.

And so fifteen-year-old Margaret of Anjou, descended from the line of remarkable Frenchwomen that included Marie of Blois and Isabelle of Lorraine, and a girl who had just spent three years in the home and under the watchful tutelage of perhaps the most astute and powerful politician in the kingdom, was launched at the unsuspecting English aristocracy and married to Henry VI, a monarch so unsuited to his position that he made Charles VII look like a tower of energy and strength by comparison. The lessons acquired at her grandmother’s side bore fruit almost immediately. Margaret was crowned queen on May 30, 1445, at Westminster, promised in a letter of December 17 of the same year to do all she could to retrieve Maine for France, and by December 22 Henry VI had officially renounced his rights to the entire duchy, including the capital city of Le Mans, in favor of his father-in-law, René.
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Even more provocatively, Margaret would later be credited by many with starting the infamous Wars of the Roses, a bitter civil conflict that would consume England for thirty years. Not quite retribution for Agincourt, of course—but close.

By the summer of 1444, when he was forced to accede to his daughter’s marriage, René’s position was especially vulnerable. The citizens of Metz, just north of Nancy in Lorraine, encouraged by the duke of Burgundy, had revolted against René’s authority, and some of its inhabitants had even had the temerity to steal his wife’s luggage when she had visited as part of a pilgrimage. Impecunious René had not the resources to strike back on his own, and needed to convince the king of France to lend him his army to help him subdue the town quickly lest the duke of Burgundy gain a foothold in the duchy. Also, he was hoping to induce the king to intervene on his behalf with Philip the Good to settle the outstanding debt associated with the payment of his ransom. Accordingly, René invited Charles VII and all
of his court to Nancy, where he feasted the king and introduced him to one of his wife Isabelle’s ladies-in-waiting, a notorious beauty by the name of Agnes Sorel, who would very quickly become the king’s mistress.

It was customary to present the visiting monarch with a memento on these occasions out of gratitude for the distinction conferred by the royal presence. René must have known that it would be helpful if he could give Charles something that would discreetly remind the king of everything that René and his family had done for him and the kingdom over the long course of the war. Being of an artistic nature, the duke of Lorraine ceremonially bestowed upon Charles VII a beautifully bound volume specially produced to commemorate the event. It cannot be by mere chance that, out of all the works of literature, history, and theology that were available, René elected to present Charles VII with a copy of
The Romance of Melusine.

The following year, Charles took his army to Metz and helped René bring the city back to obedience. Afterward, the king hosted a conference attended by the duchess of Burgundy, who was empowered to act for her husband, at which the payments owed on the final installments of René’s ransom were forgiven.

F
INALLY, IN 1449,
citing infringements of the truce, Charles VII, encouraged by the reacquisition of the duchy of Maine, sent three separate armies into Normandy in one last great push to rid the kingdom of the invader. Although the English still maintained an overall advantage in terms of superior numbers of soldiers and garrisons, their commanders were caught by surprise. The native French population was jubilant. The regency government had never been popular, and the local people welcomed Charles’s advancement, joined his units, and in many cases did not even wait for the king’s soldiers to arrive but rose up against the occupiers independently. From Beauvais in the north came forces commanded by the counts of Eu and Saint-Pol, which compelled the surrender of Lisieux on August 16; from Verneuil in the south swept the Bastard and the duke of Alençon and their soldiers, who, joining troops commanded by Charles himself at Louviers, fought their way east into the heart of Normandy, securing Argentan in October; and from the west out of Brittany came the constable, Arthur of Richemont, with enough men-at-arms to conquer every fortress between Coutances and Fougères, the last of which fell on November 5.

At length, on October 9, French forces fought their way to within a few miles of the English capital of Rouen, which was defended by a garrison of twelve hundred men under the command of the duke of Somerset and Captain Talbot. A week later, on October 16, the Bastard led a frontal assault but was pushed back by the English soldiers, and after that the population took matters into its own hands. There was rioting in the streets, the garrison was forced to take cover in the royal castle, and the gates were thrown open to the Bastard and his army. The French immediately surrounded the castle and prepared for a siege, but the duke of Somerset preferred to cut a deal: promising to pay a substantial fine and leaving poor Talbot behind as a hostage to his good intentions, he and the rest of the English garrison slunk out of the fortress and retreated to Caen, leaving the former capital of the regency government in the possession of the French.

A month later, on November 20, 1449, Charles VII ceremoniously entered the city of Rouen. And a mere three months after that, on February 15, 1450, one of his principal theological advisers, a man named Guillaume Bouillé, who was the dean of Noyon, received an assignment that came directly from the king:

“As heretofore Joan the Maid was taken and seized by our ancient enemies and adversaries the English… against whom they caused to take place a certain trial by certain persons… in the process of which they made and committed many falsifications and abuses, so much so that, by means of this trial and the great hatred that our enemies have against her, they caused her death iniquitously and against reason, very cruelly indeed,” Charles VII wrote. “For this reason we wish to know the truth of the aforesaid trial, and the manner according to which it was conducted and carried out. We command you, instruct you, and expressly enjoin you to inquire and inform yourself well and diligently on what was said; and that you bring before us and the men of our council the information that you have gathered on this event under a closed seal… for we give you power, commission and special instruction by these presents to carry this out.”

C
HAPTER
15

The Rehabilitation
of
Joan of Arc

HE SPEED WITH WHICH
the royal decree of Rouen was issued, and the vehemence of its language, would naturally seem to imply that the impetus for the inquiry had originated with the king himself; that Charles VII, overcome by emotion upon entering the city, or perhaps responding to eyewitness reports of the cruelty of Joan’s death, had at last remembered all the Maid had done for him, and had impulsively called for the seizure and subsequent reexamination of the records of her trial. But this explanation gives Charles far too much credit for self-reflection and gratitude. The driving force behind this investigation was not the king but the man charged with its prosecution: Guillaume Bouillé, Charles’s theological adviser. It was Bouillé who, over an unspecified period of time but certainly longer than three months, had finally convinced Charles to undertake this task, and his motive for doing so is not difficult to penetrate. So much of life is
fleeting, ephemeral: seasons change; civilizations rise and fall; people are born, they live a little, they die.

But faculty disagreements endure.

The renewal of the theological argument surrounding Joan had its genesis a full fourteen years earlier when Charles’s forces, under the leadership of Arthur of Richemont, the constable, had retaken Paris in 1436. Not simply the ordinary citizenry but all of the capital’s governmental and quasi-governmental institutions had abruptly transferred their allegiance from Henry VI to Charles, and this included the faculty of the University of Paris. Suddenly, the theory of the double monarchy and all of its proponents were out, and a new generation of doctors of theology who supported the rule of the French king and adhered to the old Armagnac views were in. The year after Charles made his grand entrance into Paris, the university had obligingly appointed a new rector to reflect the altered political climate, and this new rector was none other than Guillaume Bouillé.

Almost immediately, the scholastic discussion over the propriety of Joan’s assuming male dress had resumed with all its former intensity as if the long years of war, and even the victim’s own martyrdom, had not intervened. Bouillé, as rector, was in the thick of it. He could not let Pierre Cauchon’s logic stand; it was as important to him to clear Joan’s name so that his English and Burgundian colleagues’ theories would be refuted as it had once been for Cauchon to convict Joan in order to demonstrate the superiority of his own thinking versus that of the old Armagnac scholars. Bouillé would eventually pen a treatise in which he returned to the arguments first promulgated by the revered Armagnac theologian Jean Gerson, justifying a woman’s use of male dress if it was undertaken from the perspective of modesty when forced to live among soldiers. Bouillé’s defense of Joan went even further, however. Highlighting the reality of Charles VII’s now assured sovereignty, Bouillé contended that Joan had license to don male apparel if instructed to do so by divine revelation, and compared her to a number of similarly garbed female saints.

And therein lay Bouillé’s dilemma. So long as the Inquisition’s condemnation of Joan stood—so long as her voices were officially deemed heretical rather than divine by the Church, and she herself had acknowledged them to be so, as had been proclaimed by Cauchon and the English after her death—he could not win his argument. The only way to eclipse the old
theologians was to have the decision against Joan reversed, and for this he needed first the king, and then the pope.

And so Bouillé went to work on Charles VII just as Cauchon had once wheedled the duke of Bedford. Their arguments were mirror images of each other. Where Cauchon had pointed out how much more effective politically it would be for the English to demonstrate that Charles VII and the French populace had been taken in by a heretic before killing her, Bouillé stressed how important it was to reverse what was obviously a tainted decision—“an iniquitous, scandalous sentence which threatens his [the king’s] crown,” he called it—as a means of undermining the enemy’s position. Everything Joan had predicted had come true, Bouillé asserted: the English had been forced out of the kingdom, and by the grace of God, Charles VII was king. Hindsight demonstrated that the Maid had been telling the truth about her voices. How then could the sentence of heresy be allowed to stand? That would imply that Charles was king (heaven forbid!) by the work of Satan. No, no, it had been
the English
who had been deceived into doing the devil’s work, and their errors must now be acknowledged and corrected.