632. Joan of Arc: Warrior Maid (Part 1)

20:48Dominic Sandbrook:Crikey, this is a twist. So the result of this basically is that things are looking terrible for the French because the Burgundians and the English have joined forces. And so the following May, basically the French, they kind of have to yield to the inevitable, don't they?

21:04Tom Holland:Well, the king does. So Charles VI, who is by this point kind of a race-like spectre, completely mad. And so therefore essentially a puppet of the Duke of Burgundy. He is in the city of Troyes in Champagne, which is kind of southeast of Paris. Henry V joins Philip and Charles VI there, and they draw up a treaty. And by the terms of this treaty, Charles VI remains on the French throne until he dies. Henry will rule as his regent, and he will marry Charles VI's daughter, Catherine. On the death of Charles VI, the French crown will pass to Henry and his heirs. So Henry of Lancaster, so to the House of Lancaster.

21:47Tom Holland:And the House of Lancaster will take the place on the French throne of Charles VI's own dynasty, the House of Valois. And once England and France have come under the rule of the House of Lancaster, they will be separate kingdoms, but they will be joined under one crown and there will be peace and amity and all will be well. And this is the plan.

22:10Dominic Sandbrook:This is one of the questions we're asked most often at live shows and bonus episodes of the Rest is History Club. What would have happened if Henry V had lived? Would England and France have become one kingdom? And in a way, I think this series answers that question.

22:24Tom Holland:Yeah, I think it does. But in the meanwhile, obviously for the Dauphin, Charles VI's son, who's now just been disinherited, this is terrible news because he's been publicly condemned by his own father as a murderer. You know, he's been bumped off the line of inheritance. And he has no prospect really of defeating Henry V, partly because Henry V is the greatest warrior of the age, but also because the Dauphin can't risk himself in battle because without him, the house of Valois really would be extinct. There is no one else to keep the Valois line going. And then things get even worse because on the 6th of December, 1421, Henry and his new bride, so the sister of the Dauphin Catherine Catherine gives Henry V not just a child but a son whom they'd call with great originality Henry the future Henry VI and so this means that the House of Lancaster now has an heir

23:23Dominic Sandbrook:and so a lot of people in France it's important if we stop the clock there December 1421 France is in anarchy the English have taken advantage taken Paris, all of this Henry is the regent now. He expects to be king. He has a son ready. If you're sitting there in France, you look at this and you say, well, this is how it's going to be. And this is God's plan. This is obviously what God wants. And so when people work with Henry, they're not doing so because they're, you know, proto-marshal paint hands or something. It's not a question of sort of cowardly collaboration. It's because they genuinely look at the situation.

24:00Dominic Sandbrook:They say, this is all part of the divine workings out of, you know, of God's intention for the world.

24:05Tom Holland:I think also there's a certain grudging respect for Henry V. He's a serious person. This is a guy who could kind of lick a crumbling kingdom into shape. But also, I think for lots of people in France who decide to back the House of Lancaster, it's not really about the English at all. It's about what your identity is in the civil war. So if you back the Armagnacs, you're never going to accept this. But if you are a Burgundian sympathiser, then you absolutely are. So in a sense, it's simultaneously the Hundred Years' War and the civil war between the Burgundians and the Arminacs have become interfused.

24:45Tom Holland:And this explains why so many people in France are willing to accept the House of Lancaster as a legitimate replacement for the House of Valois.

24:54Dominic Sandbrook:And Theo has actually made a good point in the chat, which is that the English and French ruling classes are so similar. you know, in their devotion to the ideals of chivalry, in their devotion to kind of the stuff about courtly love, you know, the use of French, all of that stuff, that it doesn't necessarily feel like you're accepting the rule of kind of foreign barbarians, right?

25:18Tom Holland:I'm not sure that is entirely true because this is the first century really in which the English aristocracy are not speaking French as their native language. Ah, interesting. So it is noted as something exceptional when an English aristocrat speaks very good French, as we will see. Here's a quick question then. In other words, if this had happened a century or two earlier, the outcome might have been different. It might indeed. But as it is, there are obviously lots of very distinguished, very clear thinking Frenchmen who are prepared to accept the House of Lancaster. And just, you know, plucking at random an example.

25:56Tom Holland:Let's look at one. So he is a very distinguished churchman, and he goes by the name of Pierre Cochon. He'd been born in Reims, a city to the north of Paris, where by ancient tradition, the kings of France were always crowned. This is where Clovis, the very first king of the Franks to accept Christianity, had been baptized. Cochon had then gone to Paris to study at the university there, which is the greatest center for theology in the whole of Europe. and there as a student he had become a very enthusiastic partisan of the Burgundian cause hates the Armagnacs he's appointed the Bishop of Beauvais which is a city in Champagne about 50 miles northwest of Paris so his center of gravity is very much that kind of region Paris and the region between Paris and the low countries where Burgundy you know has it has his center of gravity And Cauchon is very, very devoutly convinced that only the Anglo-Burgundian alliance has any prospect of stabilizing France.

27:00Tom Holland:And so he goes full in. And I think it is unfair to think, you know, you mentioned Marshall Pétain. This is not a viciist policy. I think in the context of the time, it's entirely understandable.

27:12Dominic Sandbrook:A quick note for listeners. they should remember this bloke Pierre Cauchon and his support for this alliance and his role in this story just keep him in your heads as you listen to this series because he will play a very

27:24Tom Holland:very significant role in the way that if you're reading a detective story and it's mentioned in chapter two that there's a gun on the mantelpiece you can be fairly confident that gun is going to go off at some point he's gonna go off so Cauchon is kind of representative of those who side with the House of Lancaster. Obviously, there are lots in France who think this is appalling, a disgrace, a humiliation. And one of them is Christine de Pizan, very loyal to the royal family. She'd been raised in the court. And she is so upset by what has happened that this incredibly articulate, prolific poet just falls silent.

28:02Tom Holland:And in 1418, she retires to an abbey where her daughter was a nun and she never she doesn't write anything else so there are lots of other people who are recording the horrors of the age so the you know the hunger the brutality the wolves padding through the outskirts of Paris all this kind of stuff but Christine is so appalled it's like she's gone into a kind of catatonic shop

28:25Dominic Sandbrook:doesn't speak at all but then Tom there's there are more twists in this very George R.R. Martin style story so first of all August 1422, Henry V dies unexpectedly young. Yes, so he never sits on the French throne. And then the guy who is on the French throne, this sort of mad puppet, Charles VI, he dies two months after that. So now they're out of the equation. The new king of France, according to the treaty, will be Henry V's infant son, Henri II of France or Henry VI of England. But he's a baby. So what now for the English?

29:10Tom Holland:Well, they're not going to give up on Henry V's dream. And there is a deep personal sense of obligation to Henry V. All the hard men in the English government had fought with him, had been at Agincourt or Normandy. they are absolutely committed to basically to fulfilling this treaty that Henry had done so much to draw up. And this is where the Duke of Bedford, who we have already mentioned before, comes in, John of Lancaster, the Duke of Bedford. He is Henry V's younger brother. He is therefore the uncle of Henry VI. And in France, he is going to serve the infant Henry VI as regent. So effectively, in France, he is now the head of this kind of Anglo-Burgundian alliance.

29:59Dominic Sandbrook:And he is a proper person, right? He's not some, I mean, he is, people may be anticipating because they know the English are going to lose. He's a waste of space. Not at all. He is an experienced captain. He's a sensible guy. He's scary. He ticks every box.

30:16Tom Holland:Yeah, so there's a churchman in Rouen, which, along with Paris, is one of the two major centers of English power in France. And this churchman says of Bedford, wise and generous, at once feared and loved. And there's a brilliant observation by Jonathan Sumption in the last of his enormous volumes on the Hundred Years' War. And he says that Bedford maintained a standing army in France, to quote Sumption, something which England would not have again until the time of Oliver Cromwell. And there is something slightly of Cromwell, I think, about Bedford. He's very robust. He's also a very civilized man.

30:53Tom Holland:So it's noted that he speaks good French. He's a great patron of French churches, of French artists. He's married to the sister of Philip the Good Anne, so he has a French wife. So he is absolutely able to keep the French administration on side, because even though most of the military are English, the civilian government is French. And the fact that Bedford is so impressive, this is why people like Cochon are so happy to serve him. It's the best rule of France ever had, Tom. Meanwhile, what of the Dauphin? Or in fact, Charles VII, as he now properly is, if you're backing the House of Valois. But the thing is, nobody is calling him Charles VII.

31:34Tom Holland:They're all still calling him the Dauphin because he seems an insubstantial figure still. And so I think the Dauphin, recognising this, has been doing his best to try and balance that out. So he's got himself a queen. So he has married a girl called Marie, and she is the daughter of a very, very impressive woman. She's called Yolande, and she is the Dowager Duchess of Anjou. So the Angevins, I mean, they're a very serious dynasty. And she's probably the most formidable woman in the kingdom. So she's described by one fan as the wisest and most beautiful princess in Christendom. She's seen all the other princesses.

32:11Tom Holland:Well, I think, I mean, I think she clearly is a very smart woman and she is, but she's famously gorgeous. And she's a very keen supporter of the Armagnacs. And so that's why she has swung behind the Dauphin, given the Dauphin, her daughter to be his wife. and in July 1423 she is absolutely delighted when her daughter gives the Dauphin a son who is called Louis and now Yolande is all in I mean she really wants to see her grandson king of all France and so you have you know the you've got the infant Henry VI you've got the infant Louis as as Charles VII's son the House of Lancaster the House of Valois both have everything to play for

32:55Dominic Sandbrook:So let's fast forward a few years, because this doesn't change straight away. So if we go forward seven years, right? So to 1429, so at the end of the 1420s. So the Dauphin is still very much on the outside, isn't he? So he's still called the Dauphin because he basically doesn't, he's not really the king of France. He hasn't been crowned because Reims.

33:19Tom Holland:Well, he hasn't been crowned in Reims. He's miles away in English held territory. There's no prospect of getting there. And the English very much seem to have the upper hand, don't they? Yeah. And crucially, the English have maintained their reputation for military invincibility. So the Dauphin had actually gone north of the Loire, which effectively constitutes the frontier between Lancastrian France and Valois-held France. And he had tried to wrest Normandy, which is the central territory under English rule, back from Bedford. But it all goes disastrously wrong. so the English and the French meet outside a town called Vernay and 8 ,000 of the Dauphin's men are either killed or captured by the Duke of Bedford and his army and among those who are captured is the young son of the Duke of Alençon who had died at Agincourt this little boy he's grown up he's now 15 it's his first battle and immediately he's been taken captive and so this is terrible But what's even worse is that Bedford now officially confiscates his duchy and Bedford himself becomes the Duke of Alonso.

34:28Tom Holland:And so effectively, I mean, this is terrible for Alonso because he's captive. You know, he needs to raise money for ransom and all his land is gone. So he's in desperate straits.

34:38Dominic Sandbrook:So most of France now, north of the River Loire, so we're talking about sort of north-central France, is now controlled by either the Duke of Bedford, for the English, or Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy, right? And the English are now thinking, do we drive south of the Loire? And actually, the Duke of Bedford says to his captains, right, the next stage of the war is we will force our way across the Loire and we will take the fight to the Dauphin, his sort of fly-bitten, two-bit capital of Borge, and we'll finish this. Yes.

35:12Tom Holland:And the key to essentially breaching the Loire, which at this point is much broader than it is today. I mean, it's a serious barrier. so they essentially need to secure a really really strategically significant crossing point and the obvious place is Orléans which is the northernmost settlement so the Loire kind of curves northwards. Orléans is at the northernmost point of this curve and therefore nearest to Paris which is under English control and if the English can capture Orléans then the road south will be open and they can follow it into the bowels of the kingdom of Borg. And effectively, Bedford hopes that would then be game over for the Dauphin.

35:56Tom Holland:So preparations are made. Summer of 1428, a huge English army disembarks at Calais. Evidence of the ability of the English state to kind of raise forces, something vastly in excess of anything that the Dauphin can do. And by November, English forces have constructed siege walls and fortifications around Orléans with the goal of starving the city into submission. And the English commander is a guy called William de la Pole, who is the Earl of Suffolk. And he had been one of Henry's key commanders in the conquest of Normandy. Another serious and formidable person. Absolutely. And with a particular talent for capturing cities, because that was the main focus of the conquest of normandy they had to capture it you know places like rouen and so on um he has two lieutenants one of them is the hard man of uh early 15th century england a guy called john talbot who's an absolute animal i mean he's he's played by ray winston is he not yeah he's he's played by ray winston or the most kind of terrifying rugby player that you can imagine

37:05Dominic Sandbrook:Vinnie Jones. There's a part for Vinnie Jones.

37:08Tom Holland:Vinnie Jones. That's who he is. Well, he's not Vinnie Jones, actually, because he is very aristocratic. So I think rugby is slightly better. He's kind of posh, but, you know, he'll rip your arm off. He's played by Lawrence Delaglio. Exactly. He's Lawrence Delaglio. And he has a younger partner in the command. It's a guy called Lord Scales. He's only 23. He's also a very, very hard man. I mean, he's killed a lot of his enemies already by this point. He's played by Maro Etoge. Yeah, I guess. I guess. Yeah, on the BBC. Yeah, exactly. So these are serious men. Orléans is in serious straits. And by early 1429, basically everyone in Europe is thinking the English have got this.

37:53Tom Holland:So we have the record of a Venetian merchant in Burgundy. And he writes to a family member in Venice. If the English take Orléans, they will have no difficulty in making themselves lords of all France and sending the Dauphin packing to beg his bread at almshouses. And it looks like the city will fall because every French attempt to relieve the siege has been beaten off kind of almost disdainfully. The Dauphin has exhausted his reserves both of cash and of men. and as a result people who previously had been backing him in the Loire Valley are starting to you know they sense where the wind is blowing and they're starting to kind of go over to the English meanwhile around Orléans week by week day by day ever more siege lines are going up the city seems doomed there seems no prospect of relieving it in any way and so effectively if all is going to be saved for the house of Valois, it is going to take a miracle.

38:56Tom Holland:But Dominic, from where could such a miracle possibly come?

39:03Dominic Sandbrook:I don't think we've ever had a more exciting cliffhanger. Come back after the break and we will find out. So good, so good, so good. Spring styles are at Nordstrom Rack stores now and they're up to 60 % off. Stock up and save on Rag & Bone, Madewell, Vince, all scenes and more of your favorites. How did I not know Rack has Adidas? Why do we Rack? For the hottest deals. There's so many good brands. Join the Nordiclub to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack.

39:38Tom Holland:Hi, everyone. I'm Charlie Cox. Join us on Disney Plus as we talk with the cast and crew of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again.

39:45Dominic Sandbrook:What haven't you gotten to do as Daredevil? Being the Avengers. Charlie and Vincent came to play. I get emotional when I think about it. One of the great finales of any episode we've ever done. We are going to play Truth or Daredevil. What? Oh, boy. Fantastic. You guys go hard, man. Daredevil Born Again, official podcast, Tuesdays. And stream season two of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again on Disney+.

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40:42Dominic Sandbrook:In my own village, they call me Jeannette. Since I came into France, I have been called Jeanne. Of my third name, I know nothing. I was born in the village of Dom Rémy. So that is the deposition given by the woman that we call Joan of Arc. And she gave that on the 21st of February, 1431, at her trial in Rouen on charges of heresy. And we can tell a lot from the records of that trial. And also a second inquiry, which was staged by the French themselves in 1456, because that was trying to overturn the completely legitimate verdict of that first trial and to rehabilitate Joan. The records are very detailed, aren't they, Tom?

41:31Dominic Sandbrook:And they have a sort of, they have an immediacy and a humanity that really brings her alive as a character.

41:36Tom Holland:Yeah, I mean, you've got to give all kinds of caveats and everybody who writes about Joan of Arc always does. So Joan's words in these records are rendered into Latin by the clerks who are recording them. And obviously she is on trial for her life. And she's an uneducated girl being pressed by very educated men who, let's face it, want to kill her. And even the witnesses at her rehabilitation, they also have their own agenda. Lots of incentives to kind of tailor what they're reporting. So all of those caveats have to be borne in mind. But that said, we know about Joan and we can hear her in her own words in a way that is incredibly unusual for people from

42:22Dominic Sandbrook:the Middle Ages, full stop. Well, especially young women from peasant background. You never hear from them. Absolutely.

42:29Tom Holland:Because that is what's really extraordinary. You know, we're not hearing a Duke or an abbot or a king talking. We are hearing a young peasant girl. And when you read the records of the trial, her personality completely shines through. I'm going to lay my cards on the table. Dominic, you may disagree. But she is witty. She is courageous. She's incredibly charismatic. And it's these records, I think, that have really burnished her story in the modern period. She's up there with Emma Hamilton and Unity Mitford in your pantheon. So she's not an aristocrat like Unity Mitford. She's not a courtesan like Emma Hamilton.

43:16Tom Holland:And she's kind of unique. So there's a brilliant book that I read when I was at a very impressionable age by Marina Warner. I think it came out in the early 80s called Joan of Arc, The Image of Female Heroism. and in in her introduction marina warner says of joan that you know what she's not a queen she's not a courtesan she's not a beauty not a mother not an artist of one kind or another nor until the extremely recent date of 1920 when she was canonized a saint to reiterate she is a female teenage peasant girl and when we hear her speak i think what we're also hearing all the more loudly is the silence of all those kind of numberless peasants from medieval Christendom, whose words no one ever thought to record.

44:00Tom Holland:Tom, this is very moving from you. I do find it a moving story. I find it a powerful story. And I find the fact that we can hear her words, it is a crucial part of what makes this story so fascinating, I think.

44:13Dominic Sandbrook:So let me just pledge to the listeners that I will suspend my natural scepticism and cynicism for at least the next 30 seconds. Let's talk about her family. Well, I mean, you are going to have lots to be skeptical about.

44:25Tom Holland:I mean, there is no question about that.

44:26Dominic Sandbrook:Okay, brilliant. Love it. So let's talk about what we know. Let us start with her family. So we know that her father was called Jacques d 'Arc, Jacques of Arc. Yeah, and so that's where the name Jeanne d 'Arc comes from. Her mother is Isabel. We know that her mother must have been pious because Joan says, from my mother, I learned my Lord's Prayer, my Hail Mary, and my Creed. and we know that she had a sister and three brothers, two of whom will feature in this story. And we've described them as peasants, but they're not the underclass. They're not the lowest of the low, are they? They are. And she's actually, it's often said she's a shepherd girl.

45:03Dominic Sandbrook:I mean, that's one of the most common things that people say about her, but she wasn't. They were more respectable than that, right? No.

45:09Tom Holland:And I think the idea that she's a shepherd, And there are kind of biblical echoes there. That's why it suited people who were praising her to say it. But Joan herself was having none of it. She regarded shepherdesses with a great deal of snobbery. Oh no, she's Virginia Woolf. So in her trial, she said, I learned to spin and to sew. And she challenged the women of Rouen to spin and sew better than her. And she does this because to be a seamstress, to be a spinner, a spinster, you're on a higher level than a shepherdess.

45:41Dominic Sandbrook:So she's from Domremy. And the location of this place is interesting and really important because it is, dare I say, liminal. It's on the frontier between two different places, Champagne and Lorraine. The river Meuse runs through it. And the fact that it's on a frontier is important because it's basically drawn into the civil war by definition. Because the village is pro-Dauphin, but the next village is pro-Burgundian. and the villagers fight each other quite often don't they and people are badly wounded or even

46:12Tom Holland:killed in the fighting between these two villages yeah and also domoimi is on the front line of the english attempt to annex the region and pacify it completely so as joan is is growing up there are more and more english raiding parties who are starting you can see them on the horizon And they are fighting with rival companies who are loyal to the Dauphin. And this notion of free companies, something we've talked about throughout our series on the Hundred Years' War, these are kind of semi-freelance bodies of men, lots of whom are pretty criminal. And so it's very, very frightening. It's kind of a Wild West situation.

46:59Tom Holland:The bad guys galloping into town. And we know that this does happen to Domremy and to other villages around. So when Joan was 11, her cousin was killed by a cannonball that was fired into the church of a neighboring village where he'd taken refuge. And then the church in Domremy itself is burnt down and most of the village with it at least once. And so for Joan, the ringing of church bells, which are sounded when danger is threatening, you know this would have been something with which she was very very familiar so in the summer of 1428 so this is the same year that the english are landing um to to head down for the siege of an anglo-burgundian army embarks on the systematic conquest of the region um all the dauphinist strongholds fall all except one and this is a fortress called vocouler which is very formidable has a large garrison and it's under the command of a nobleman from Lorraine by the name of Robert de Baudricourt.

48:01Tom Holland:And de Baudricourt has very good connections at the French court and specifically with the house of Anjou. So that is Yolande and her dynasty. And de Baudricourt is very brave, but he's also brutal and unscrupulous. And you have to assume that basically you have to be brutal and unscrupulous if you're going to hold a fortress against the onslaught of the English and the Burgundians.

48:23Dominic Sandbrook:All right, so that's the background. So Joan has been growing up in Dormerimi in this very violent, frightening, dangerous, divided landscape. And how does that shape her character, would you say?

48:39Tom Holland:Well, I think that it leads her to identify the Dauphin as the kind of the ultimate guarantor of France's stability. I think she comes to have a sense that... If only the Dauphin could be put on his throne and crowned and the English could be driven out, then everything would be fine. And Marina Warner is brilliant on this in her book. Talking of Joan, she had a natural inclination for clear-cut situations with identifiable centres of authority. The king's supreme position and her magnetic attraction for it bear witness to this taste. She'd like to unity, organisation, rallied groups. So she's basically a kind of working class Tory.

49:19Tom Holland:That's, you know, that's what she wants. She wants order and she wants royal rule. But she's also intensely pious. And again, you can see why. You know, you're growing up surrounded by this violence. And the sounding of the bells is what alerts you to danger coming. So I guess just subliminally, you would come to associate bells with the hope of safety, with the prospect that warnings may be coming. And so bells seem to have been very, very important to her, have played a very, very strong role in her emotional and spiritual life. And so we know from the court records that because a friend of hers recorded it at her rehabilitation trial, that once the sacristan forgot to ring the bells for Compline and Joan told him off and said, go and ring them.

50:07Tom Holland:And if she was out in the fields and she heard the bells ringing, she would always kneel. They have an immense significance for her. And I think that you said she's pious i mean she clearly is but i think what the bells when she hears the bells she is being reminded and reassured that amid all the violence of the age there is a link to god and his saints and that they are close to her they care for her and that her prayers will be heard

50:34Dominic Sandbrook:okay and she can't she can't read and write she's illiterate but you mentioned um god and his saints she's pretty obsessed with some of these saints, isn't she? And she regards them. I mean, we did an episode a long time ago about Catherine of Siena, about another teenage girl whose proximity, who had this almost obsessive, this totally transcendent and dominating fixation with being the bride of Christ and all this kind of thing. And sometimes I think about Joan, there's something similar. again a teenage girl a sort of fixation on this case on the on the the personalities of three

51:16Tom Holland:saints in particular there are certainly similarities uh and we'll maybe come to them later in the series with catherine sienna but i think there are also differences and the key one is that joan unlike catherine as we've said is illiterate and therefore she is dependent on both stories and images and we know she loves stories she loves chivalric romances for instance She's very familiar with these, but she also loves stories of the saints. And I don't think she's unusual in her familiarity with them. The leading saints, the most famous saints, are as familiar to children growing up in medieval Europe this time as kind of singers or sports stars would be to teenagers today.

51:56Tom Holland:But there are three, it seems, who are the particular focus of her devotion. And the first of these is really unsurprising. It's St. Michael, who is the great warrior archangel, the captain of heaven, who in the book of Revelation throws down Satan. And for the French, he is the great emblem of their resistance. So we've said how Henry V conquered all of Normandy. That's not quite true, because playing the role of Asterix's village in this scenario is Mont Saint-Michel, the mount of St. Michael, the great monastery there on this island. And that is holding out against the English. And so the fact that it is dedicated to St.

52:35Tom Holland:Michael, it emphasizes the way in which this warrior archangel is presumed by the French to be fighting on their side. And so the Dauphin commissions two great standards, both of which show St. Michael trampling down the serpent, trampling down Satan. And more specifically, and one of the reasons why Joan is definitely familiar with him, he's the patron saint of the region in which she is growing up. So St. Michael, very significant.

52:59Dominic Sandbrook:So you can see that. And then there's two female saints. And you can see why they would appeal to a teenage girl who perhaps, well, these are saints who are noted for their resistance, for their courage. Also, I found being harsh a little bit for their victimhood or their martyrdom, right?

53:18Tom Holland:They're martyred rather than surrender their virginity. So I guess to Joan, they are emblems of courage and independence. And one of them, St. Catherine of Alexandria. Again, it's not just Joan who's devoted to her. She's probably the best loved saint of the age. And actually, Joan's sister, who died while she was still a girl, had been called Catherine.

53:37Dominic Sandbrook:Right. And so Catherine Alexandria, she was meant to be married to a pagan Roman emperor or something. She's broken on a wheel, hence the Catherine wheel, the firework. And everyone thinks she's brilliant. And then the other one is, I have to admit, I'm not familiar with her work. And that is Margaret of Antioch.

53:51Tom Holland:Well, I'm very familiar with her because she was swallowed by a dragon and then regurgitated. Crikey. She's become the patron saint of midwives. And Sadie, my wife, of course, is a midwife. So very big news here. But she's another saint who is martyred for refusing to surrender her virginity. So that's clearly something that Joan is alert to. But also, there is a story of St. Margaret. She's so desperate to learn the scriptures and so on, that she enters a monastery disguised as a man.

54:20Dominic Sandbrook:Oh, a telling detail. Very telling detail. So just on this thing about the saints, I think this is massively important for listeners who are not super familiar with the world of medieval Christendom. to get into their heads. The point of the saints for somebody like Joan, who is, as you said, illiterate, is that they occupy a space between the concrete, physical, very violent and brutal and dangerous world of 15th century Europe and the transcendent world, the purity, the order of heaven. They basically mediate between those two things, don't they? And that's why, for someone like her, they have such...

55:02Dominic Sandbrook:cosmic immediate presence yeah and significance they live in her heart as much as they do in her

55:08Tom Holland:mind presumably yeah i think that the closeness of the heavenly order the supernatural order is something that joan as she is growing up completely takes for granted other people take

55:19Dominic Sandbrook:it for granted too but she is i mean by the fact the stuff about her kneeling when she hears the bells she is peculiarly pious do you think even before her first supernatural um um visitation

55:31Tom Holland:Peculiarly pious, peculiarly impressionable, peculiarly imaginative, peculiarly self-confident as well, I think. Okay. So I think a very distinctive little girl, probably.

55:45Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah. I mean, you're not really selling her, to be honest, as a playmate. But actually, the people she's playing with are very different from the other puzzled children, right? Because when she's 13 years old, actually tellingly, when she's basically entering adolescence, I think, 1425 something happens so tell us what happens well she she described it herself in her trial

56:08Tom Holland:the voice first came at noon on a summer's day in my father's garden and she specified that this voice came from the direction of the village church so that's where the bells would be rung from and that it was bathed in light and joan insisted to inquisitors who were very skeptical about it, that right from the beginning, she had understood this voice to be good and worthy, and that it was a voice sent from God to guide her. And she never let go of that assertion of that conviction. And in time, she came to understand it as the voice, not of God himself, but of an angel. But she did not, to begin with, I think, identify it with St.

56:54Tom Holland:Michael specifically, nor with um catherine nor with margaret although in the long run she would to begin with i don't think she had a sense well we we will see because the question of what these voices are and what jane thought the voices are is a complex and fascinating one and it will evolve i think over the course of her life but what is absolutely clear is that she experiences it as real and she essentially has conversations with this initially it's a voice then it becomes voice multiple voices but she has conversations with these voices in the way that she has conversations with everyone else namely in a kind of very forthright um and kind of firm manner so if if the voices tell her something that she doesn't agree with she tells them that okay that that is

57:40Dominic Sandbrook:unusual because most people who hear who hear voices um i mean actually madly the last person we talked about hearing voices was one of the suspects in the jack the ripper case but when When people hear voices, they then do what the voice tells them.

57:54Tom Holland:They don't argue back with the voices. And this is a contrast, as we'll come to, between Joan and other female mystics of the age. For Joan, these are kind of like voices that you might hear through headphones or something. It's not entirely a mystic experience from her description of it. It's literally like you listening to Theo. Quite like, well, yes, the messages that we get from Theo. And these voices, to begin with, they offer her spiritual guidance, but then increasingly they start to give her a political mission. And over the course of the months and then the years, this mission comes to be clarified.

58:34Tom Holland:So to begin with, the voices are giving her a kind of vague instruction that she should go to the Dauphin and ride in front of him and drive the English out of France. then it becomes more precise she should lead the dauphin to rince and have him crowned there and then late in 1428 by which time the news of the siege at orleans will have reached domremy she's told by the voices to ride to orleans and to break the english siege and the voices i mean these are mad things to tell a teenage girl but the voices say well don't worry um you know we will guide you We will support you throughout this mission that we've given you.

59:15Tom Holland:And if you do as instructed, then in the long run, the whole of France will indeed be liberated from the English. And this liberation will be the ultimate proof in the eyes of the world that you are indeed on a mission from God.

59:31Dominic Sandbrook:And you mentioned that Joan, you know, she answers back to the voices, but she never doubts their veracity, right? She never questions whether the voices might be demons or she might be misled. Because they're good. She has a sense of them as good. She has total confidence in what the voices are telling her. And she actually, again, I think it's interesting that she's just entered her teens. She takes a vow of chastity. So she's going to protect her virginity. Her parents have lined up her fiancé for her. She says, you're out. I'm not interested in you. And then we get to late 1428. so you know the things are looking very dicey for the dauphin the french cause and this is the point when she decides right i'm going to do what the voice is telling me i'm going to get stuck in and begin the work of driving out the english yeah but how do you begin you're a peasant girl

1:00:18Tom Holland:you know on the edge of things where are you going to go there's only one place she really can go and that is voculeux which is the the one fortress in the region that is still holding out for the Dauphin under the command of Robert de Beaudricourt. And she tells her father, this is what I'm going to go and do. Her father is appalled. I mean, he's already outraged that she's turned down the man that her father has chosen for her to marry. And also he's been having these nightmares in which he sees Joan running away with men at arms. And the implication of that is that essentially he's worried that she is going to start misbehaving sexually, that she's going to run away with a soldier.

1:01:00Dominic Sandbrook:So she's now 16, what? She's about 16 years old. I mean, any father, you know, your 16 year old daughter comes to you and says, I'm basically going to run off and like join the army.

1:01:09Tom Holland:Well, I'm going to go, I'm going to go to a fortress full of men and, you know, and come up, tell them some cock and bull story. You'd be very, very worried. You'd be perturbed. So the thing is, Joan is a runaway. You know, she, she deliberately ignores her father's orders and runs away to Vaucouleur, full of violent soldiers and men. And she goes to Baudricourt, who's a quite unscrupulous person, we've already said. So kind of quite a dangerous man. She goes to him and she explains her mission. And he, first time he says, you're mad, go away. Second time, you're mad, go away. She's still hanging around in Vaucouleur.

1:01:46Tom Holland:She's ignoring what de Baudricourt has said. So in January 1429, de Baudricourt comes to the house in Vaucouleur, where Joan has been staying, and he has brought the local priest with him. And he tells the priest, this girl is possessed by an evil spirit, exorcised the evil spirit. But Joan just kneels in front of the priest and reproaches the priest and says, what are you doing? You've heard my confession. You know that I am literally on the side of the angels. And so the priest says, well, she's not possessed. There's nothing I can do here. And so Joan stands up and she turns to de Baudricourt.

1:02:22Tom Holland:And a third time, she says, take me to the Dauphin. And this time, de Baudricourt relents. And this might be on his own initiative, or it might be that he has received word from his two regional overlords. And these are a guy called Charles, the Duke of Lorraine, and René of Anjou. And René of Anjou is the second son of Yolande, the mother-in-law of the Dauphin.

1:02:49Dominic Sandbrook:So why do these two guys, who are serious people, aristocratic people, power brokers, why on earth would they be encouraging what clearly de Baudricourt himself, another serious person, thinks is a sort of loony girl who's just got mad crackpot ideas? Why do they indulge this?

1:03:11Tom Holland:Well, Charles of Lorraine is very ill at the time, and he's been brought word that there's this girl claiming a mission from God. And this isn't massively unusual. Every so often, it's usually girls, but sometimes boys as well, will appear claiming that they've got messages from God. And they are often capable of performing incredible miracles. And so I think that Charles Lorraine hopes that perhaps Joan will heal him. But Joan says, no, I'm not going to do that. I can't heal anyone. And in this, again, she's unusual. The only thing she does miraculous is, is her mission. She's not going around healing the sick or anything like that.

1:03:49Dominic Sandbrook:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:03:49Tom Holland:And she dismisses it as nonsense. Why would I be able to heal anyone? Let's not what I can do. And Charles is not offended by this. In fact, he's rather impressed. And he gives her some money and he gives her a horse, because of course, she's going to need a horse if she's going to ride all the way to the Dauphin, who's in Chalons, just south of the Loire, which is about 300 miles away. As for René of Vanjou, we've said he's the brother of the Dauphin's queen, he really has a stake in ensuring that the Dauphin stays in the fight. And he may well think, as Yolande may well have thought, well, you know, I mean, let's try.

1:04:24Dominic Sandbrook:What have we got to lose? I suppose. And there's probably also, do you think it's a slight element of like, come on, let's just get rid of her. Tell her to go.

1:04:31Tom Holland:No, I don't think so. You don't think so? You think they believe in it? I think they actively think we've got nothing to lose. She may be what she says she is. I think they are very, very interested in what Joan has to say, because I think they're desperate. De Baudricourt definitely still has reservations, because what happens now is a very controversial development in Joan's story. Joan says, OK, I'm going on this mission. I need male clothing if I'm going to go. Right. And de Baudricourt gives her male clothing, but we know from later source, which describes his reaction to it, that he handed this male clothing over only with the utmost repugnance, to quote the court records.

1:05:13Tom Holland:And this isn't surprising because the 15th century, it's fair to say, is not a trans-friendly era. So cross-dressing is seen as being an abomination unto God. And that is because it is specifically condemned in the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament. The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man. so we've said that joan is very pious but when she wants to she's perfectly capable of ignoring

1:05:45Dominic Sandbrook:a direct biblical dictate so i don't want to plunge into my skeptical amateur psychology too much straight away but to say she's entered her teens she's taken a vow of chastity protecting her virginity is incredibly important to her and she now says she wants to dress as a man there are you know implications for this maybe let's say secular secular minded listeners might draw implications from this about what is actually nagging at her we should wait until we've told her

1:06:14Tom Holland:whole story and listen to what she actually has to say at the trial before kind of trying to work out what might have been going on here but i hear you dominic i hear you anyway so she she has her her outfit of male clothes um she has her hair cropped into the kind of the you know the nightly pudding bowl that anyone who's seen the painting of Henry V will recognise. She's got her horse. She's been given a sword, which anyone with knightly pretensions needs. And de Baudricourt has given her two pages and, intriguingly, four men at arms. So her father's dream has come true. Oh no, her father must be gutted.

1:06:50Tom Holland:And of course, they are there to guard her because they are going to be riding across what is effectively bandit territory. And this also is, you could say, well, it's a sensible or precaution for any girl who is going to ride 300 odd miles through a war zone to disguise the fact that she is female. Although it has to be said that at no point does Joan ever justify her cross-dressing in those terms. And the clear implication, which in time she will make explicit, is that her voice has told her to dress in male clothes. That it's not a question of practicality and pragmatism. She never says that.

1:07:28Tom Holland:She never says that. And the male clothing, as we will see in our next episode, serves for her. Well, we will tease out what it means to her, but it is clearly something very, very spiritually, psychologically, symbolically significant to her. But why? What does it have to do with her mission? What are her voices? These are all questions that we will explore, perhaps, or we'll start exploring in our next episode when Joan arrives at the court of the Dauphin and reveals to the Dauphin the mission that she has been given by God.

1:08:09Dominic Sandbrook:Very exciting. And actually, I have to say, an absolutely fascinating story. I remember when you were researching this, Tom, you were saying to me, This is one of the most intriguing stories to have done on the Rest is History and it's certainly panning out that way. So if you want to find out what happens when Joan arrives at the Dauphin's court, whether she succeeds in saving Orléans from the English, we're going to be telling the whole story in the next three episodes. And if you're a member of the Rest is History Club, you can hear those episodes straight away. If you would like to start the new year on an inspiring and exciting note, then do join the Rest is History Club at therestishistory.com because we are planning all kinds of exciting benefits for you this year.

1:08:50Dominic Sandbrook:Not just the usual ad-free listening and early access to series, but all sorts of thrilling bonus series to come for club members only. However, the key thing is Joan of Arc and what will happen next in her story. And that is what we will be investigating next time. Au revoir. Au revoir.

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