Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured (28 page)

“Terrible and very magnificent,” Enguerrand de Monstrelet said of the attack that began on the morning of Sunday, June 12. By dawn the French soldiers, having “placed themselves in the ditch with ladders and other tools necessary to make an assault, attacked marvelously those who were inside,” who, the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
reported,
“defended themselves most virtuously for a long time.”

Joan fought, as before, with her standard. And, as she had at Orléans, she charged forward with the army, climbed a siege ladder, and was knocked to the ground—this time from a blow to her head from above. Fifteenth-century paintings, such as those that constitute Auvergne’s
Vigiles du roi Charles VII
, painted c. 1470, depict the type of helmet Joan wore as a
capeline
; it had no visor attached to its domed crown, and its brim was longer in back, to protect the neck, as does a firefighter’s. On hitting her helmet, the stone fell to pieces like Saint Catherine’s wheel—in some accounts it’s the helmet that shatters—and Joan popped up from the ditch calling for more blood.
“Our Lord has doomed the English,” she exhorted her army. “At this very hour they are ours.” Reminded of the source of their commander’s fortitude, the French captains dismissed Suffolk’s second call for a meeting to establish terms of surrender, and the soldiers redoubled their efforts, and “at that moment,” Alençon testified, “the town of Jargeau was taken.”

Alençon, who had been enthralled by the Maid from the moment he’d met her, found himself that much more overawed when Joan made good on her promise to his wife.
“During the attack on the town of Jargeau, Joan told me at one moment to retire from the place where I was standing, for if I did not ‘that engine’—and she pointed to a piece of artillery in the town—‘will kill you.’ I fell back, and a little later on that very spot where I had been standing someone by the name of my lord de Lude was killed. That made me very much afraid, and I wondered greatly at Joan’s sayings after all these events.”

The French left Jargeau with a
“large garrison of their own soldiers on the bridge,” Jean Chartier explained, to keep the remaining enemy trapped within the city they no longer owned and thus prevent Scales and Talbot’s forces from joining with Fastolf’s four thousand, whenever they arrived. With the addition of twelve hundred troops from Charles, Joan and Alençon commanded an army of about six or seven thousand, recruitment no longer a problem as, according to the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
,
“lords, knights, squires, captains, and valiant men at arms,” many of whom had avoided battle until the raising of the siege, now clamored to join the crusade. Among the new captains was Arthur de Richemont, the constable of France and thus captain of them all, in name anyway. Raised for the most part in the ducal courts of Burgundy, Richemont was effectively orphaned before he turned ten, when his widowed mother married the English king Henry IV. Still, his fealty was not to the Burgundians, as his bosom boyhood friend was the Valois dauphin, Louis of Guyenne, who died of dysentery in 1415—the same year Richemont was taken prisoner at Agincourt and commenced a five-year exile in England. His mother’s marriage to the king granted him uncommon privileges for a hostage, one of these being his marriage to Margaret of Burgundy, the widow of his best friend, Louis, and daughter of John the Fearless. It would be hard to identify a noble whose loyalties were so thoroughly divided, granting him perpetual license to make war from either side. Richemont’s only allegiance was to active combat, and in 1424, when the Duke of Bedford refused to grant him command of an army, Yolande found it easy enough to seduce him across the channel. That he was the king of England’s stepson married to the daughter of John the Fearless didn’t present any ethical or emotional obstacle to his accepting the title constable of France. Upon his arrival at the French court, however, Richemont discovered that La Trémoille, whom he’d counted among his friends, was now an enemy. Yolande hadn’t poached France’s new constable from the other side to make peace. She’d been shopping for a warrior, and La Trémoille wanted to be rid of warriors once and for all and commit to a course of diplomacy—surrender, in Joan’s terms—in which he could control
Charles, easily exciting him to paranoia. By 1427, La Trémoille had convinced the dauphin to ban Richemont from court and, by extension, from joining forces with the army maintained by that court.

Alençon, necessarily loyal to his brother-in-law, the dauphin, testified that just as he told Joan he refused to fight in the same army as Richemont,
“news came that the English were approaching in great numbers … Then Joan said to me—for I was about to retire because of the lord constable’s arrival—that we had to help one another.”

It was June 17, 1429, and the dreaded Fastolf and his four thousand soldiers had arrived just outside Beaugency in the Beauce region. To retake the town, another with a strategically important bridge, Joan needed Richemont’s troops, and she was innately attracted to a commander as energetically hawkish as she was herself. As Alençon remembered, she introduced herself with what was, for her, admirable tact.

“Ah, my good constable, you have not come by my will, but now that you are here, you are welcome.” The two dismounted, and Joan, with her signature chivalric flourish, fell to her armored knees and embraced the captain’s.

Guillaume Gruel, Richemont’s personal chronicler, recorded the dialogue from his employer’s perspective with an evident taste for the dashing.
“Joan, it has been said that you wish to fight with me. I do not know if you are from God or not. If you are from God, I do not fear you because God knows my good will. If you are from the devil, I fear you even less.”

Though Joan couldn’t have known it, not yet, she had already begun to demonstrate the Faustian bargain she represented to the dauphin. It was hardly possible to regret the enemy’s flight, but the English hadn’t surrendered as a justly beaten enemy—not on mortal terms—and they made it clear to the French that they interpreted their change in fortune as having been accomplished by sorcery, which, as La Trémoille underscored, would invalidate any diplomatic overtures France’s improved position might encourage it to make. To enter into a friendly alliance with a powerful captain who had fallen out of Charles’s favor was neither wise nor avoidable, but whether or not she knew the cost of disobeying earthly kings, she served a higher liege. Joan needed Richemont’s soldiers, an estimated one thousand
to twelve hundred reinforcements collected and salaried by Yolande. Charles, whose irrational suspicions La Trémoille continued to cultivate as a matter of habit, regarded Richemont as a foe until 1433, two years after Joan was executed. Yolande, whose grandson the future Louis XI would describe as having
“a man’s heart inside a woman’s body,” had at last swept the fat spider away from the throne and out of the castle.

Fastolf arrived at Beaugency to find the French in battle formation—
“6,000 soldiers of which the leaders were Joan the Maid, the duke of Alençon, the Bastard of Orléans, the Marshal of La Fayette, La Hire, Ponton [de Xaintrailles], and other captains,” according to a Burgundian soldier, Jean de Wavrin.

“Many of the King’s men were frightened” of the battle that awaited them, Alençon testified, “and said that it would be a good thing to send for the horses,” but, “as I very well know, the English were routed and killed without great difficulty.

“The next day,” Alençon continued, “we took the Beaugency road, and in the fields we found more of the King’s soldiers, and there an attack was made on the English who held Beaugency. After this attack, the English stripped the city and went into the castle. And guards were placed in front of the castle to prevent their coming out. We were in front of the castle when news came to us that the lord constable was approaching with some soldiers.” At the prospect of being barricaded inside a tower until they became desperate enough to walk out into Richemont’s army, the English requested a treaty of surrender. In return for safe conduct and a promise not to engage in battle for ten days, the French gave them leave to retreat. Fastolf, whose failures in the face of Joan of Arc represent the single stain on an otherwise exemplary military career, would be remembered here for attacks that were
“poorly timed … incredibly ineffective … badly organized and completely unassisted by archery or gunpowder weapons.” Cannon was one thing, its weight challenging transport, but when the English archers hadn’t picked up their bows, whether out of fear or disorganization or mutiny, a profound shift had occurred.
It wasn’t fifteen years since their mastery of the swift and accurate longbow had determined the outcome of Agincourt, England salting French earth with French blood.

The troops whose command preceded Joan’s would have let the English go all the way back to Paris, but Joan, her single-minded focus fixed on Reims, wasn’t inclined to let an army she’d trounced, one town after another, escape without attempting to demoralize them even further, thus easing the journey to Reims that much more.
“In God’s name!” Joan exhorted any captain who hesitated chasing after the English. “We must fight them. If they were hanging in the clouds we should get them. For God has sent them to us for us to punish them. The gentle King shall have the greatest victory today that he has had for a long time. My Counsel tells me that they are all ours.”

Her captains might have hesitated, but Joan, the de facto constable of France, had their allegiance and, increasingly, their respect for her abilities. Several spoke of what struck them as the remarkable, even miraculous, rate at which she acquired the expertise of seasoned knights. Thibault d’Armagnac, who fought under Joan at Patay, testified that
“in the leading and drawing up of armies and in the conduct of war, in disposing an army for battle and haranguing the soldiers, she behaved like the most experienced captain in all the world, like one with a whole lifetime of experience.” Alençon, who had been convinced of Joan’s genius upon meeting her, echoed Thibault d’Armagnac.
“In the conduct of war she was most skillful, both in carrying a lance herself, in drawing up the army in battle order, and in placing the artillery. And everyone was astonished that she acted with such prudence and clear-sightedness in military matters, as cleverly as some great captain with twenty or thirty years’ experience; and especially in the placing of artillery, for in that she acquitted herself magnificently.”

What should they do? Alençon asked Joan.

“See that you all have good spurs!”

“When those present heard this,” Alençon testified, “they asked her, ‘What did you say? Are we to turn our backs on them then?’ ‘No,’ answered Joan, ‘it will be the English who will put up no defense. They will be beaten, and you will have to have good spurs to pursue them.’ ”

Joan ordered a line of march determined by the speed at which individual corps could travel, placing La Hire in the vanguard with the fastest of the cavalry. Along with Dunois, Alençon, Richemont, and Gilles de Rais, she rode with the main body of cavalry and infantry—in sum,
six thousand men, according to the
Journal du siège d’Orléans
, all of whom answered to Joan. The English had been marching resolutely north for nearly four hours and had stopped to rest just a few miles south of Patay when their army’s rear guard sighted the French cavalry coming up fast on their heels, Joan’s heralds galloping before it with a warning for Fastolf.

Perhaps, as a commander whose expertise was field—rather than siege—warfare, Fastolf felt an echo of his former confidence at the prospect of combat on terrain no different from the flat farmland on which he had trounced and humiliated the French just four months earlier. With Talbot under him, he commanded five thousand men, and he knew the military weaknesses of the French. He’d been at Agincourt, called
“one of the most lopsided killing orgies in military history … that epitomized the recurring pattern of almost all the battles of the Hundred Years War: English discipline and skill ruining mindless French valor.” At Agincourt, ten thousand of France’s twenty-four thousand soldiers were slaughtered, while England lost only a few hundred men from an army one-quarter the size of France’s.