634. Joan of Arc: Heroine in Chains (Part 3)

0:10I went to her lodging to see her and she sent for wine and she told me that we would soon drink wine in Paris. It seemed to me a gift from heaven that she was there and that I was seeing and hearing her. She left cells on Monday at the hour of Vespers alongside a great body of armed men. I saw her mount her horse, arrayed all in white armour, with only her head bare and holding a small axe. The great black charger was very restive at her door and would not let her mount. lead him she said to the cross which is in front of the church and there she mounted the horse standing still as if he had been bound then turning towards the church which was close by she said in a beautiful feminine voice you priests and people of the church make processions and prayers to God for us.

1:12Then turning to the road, forward, forward, she said. Her unfolded standard was carried by a page. She had her small axe in her hand and by her side rode a brother who had joined her eight days before. So that's a letter written on the 8th of June, 1429, by a soft, tender-hearted young nobleman Guy de Laval. He's writing to his mother and he is pumped. He is so full of excitement because he has just seen the heroine of the hour, Joan of Arc. And Dominic, how beautifully you conveyed her feminine voice there. Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed that. As though she'd been brought back to life. So a month has gone by since this extraordinary moment in the history of France and French military achievements at the liberation of orleans so to remind listeners orleans had been under siege for six months by the english should have been on the verge it seemed of surrender had the english taken it they would have been able to cross the river loire and advance deep into south central france but in the nick of time the siege had been broken the english had been driven back and the banner of the House of Valois, the ancient line of French kings, still flies over Orléans.

2:38So, Tom, various people have taken some credit for this achievement, and you can take us through them. But, of course, one above all is the subject of this podcast. Yes, so various French captains, as you said, had definitely played their part in this great drama. So there was Jean, the Bastard of Orléans, illegitimate half brother of the wretched Duke of Orléans who was languishing in the Tower of London had been there ever since the Battle of Agincourt where he'd been captured you know he is his team Orléans on the scene very battle-hardened very shrewd very well connected despite the fact he's illegitimate he's cousin to to the French king to Charles VII then there's Étienne de Vignol better known as Laire, the wrath of God, a man of very humble origins, had his legs crushed by a chimney of a pub falling on top of it, but still very feared, very charismatic, the great warlord of his day.

3:38And then there is this guy, Gilles de Ray, a Breton nobleman with a particular taste for guerrilla warfare. And Guy de Laval knew him very well because Guy's brother was married to the daughter of Gilles de Ray. Yeah. And there's another side to Gilles de Ray, isn't there? Which we perhaps won't go into immediately, but perhaps there's a shadow over his reputation. We may be coming to that in due course. Anyway, but at the time, there is no blot on the escutcheon of Gilles de Ray or any of the other French captains, because in the wake of the miracle of Orléans, they have come to think of themselves as brothers in arms.

4:17And they have an incredible glamour now. and this is why Guida Laval has joined them. He wants a bit of it himself. He wants to join this band of brothers. However, none of these warlords, none of these captains is the person who most glamorously, most stirringly embodies the miracle of Orléans. It's not the bastard. It's not Laire. It's not Gilles de Rey. It's a teenage girl. and the sense of her charisma is palpable in the spirit of devotion with which Guy de Laval has described this person to his mother. Yes, I saw her mount her horse arrayed all in white armour with only her head bare and holding a small axe.

5:05And you can sense here the influence of the kind of Arthurian chivalric romances that were so popular in the 15th century. I mean, she's effectively, it's as though one of the books that they love, one of the stories or the songs that troubadours sing has come to life, isn't it? Yeah. So this, of course, is Joan of Arc. And it's absolutely astonishing that only months before, you know, she'd been a peasant in a kind of homespun dress. And now she is like Sir Lancelot. She's transformed herself into a kind of flower of chivalry. And she's won the heart and the admiration of these very battle-hardened men.

5:45So, you know, the bastard, Laire, Gilles de Rey, you know, it's astonishing. And she'd done it because she was very courageous. She'd shown tremendous zeal. She'd shown enormous, a kind of a real sense of what it would take to defeat the English, to relieve the siege. But I think also she embodied something that is completely exceptional. because Joan of Arc, through the entire sweep of medieval history, is someone exceptional. And this is a kind of instinctive genius for display and image. She's kind of the medieval David Bowie on steroids. She understands how to project herself. But just on this, right?

6:35I mean, actually, you know, since this is a woman, a sort of Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga might be as good a parallel. But just on this, she is drawing not just on the religious iconography and whatnot, but she is very clearly drawing on the tradition of the chivalric romances. And she's playing a part. I mean, the point about performance, I think, is really important. She is consciously or unconsciously playing a part that people know will inspire knights and get them excited and all of this sort of stuff. I mean, there is a definite element of spectacle about the Joan of Arc phenomenon. Yeah. I mean, I suspect this isn't kind of, you know, calculation.

7:20It's expression of what is in her heart. But what is in her heart has been massively influenced, I think, by the romances that we know that she listened to when she was growing up. Yeah. And clearly she has dreams of chivalry. The mad thing is, is that she's not a young man. She's a young woman. She's not only dared to live these dreams out, but she has persuaded hard-bitten noblemen to share in them, to see her, a peasant girl, as a nobleman. And Marina Warner, whose book I've already cited, is brilliant on this. So Marina Warner writes, Joan was the personification of mobility. She accepted neither her peasant birth nor her female condition, none of the limitations society had provided for her circumscription.

8:02Instead, in an age of chivalry, she assumed its most successful guise and dressed her herself and comported herself like a knight born to the role. But the thing is, of course, she is not a knight. She's a woman. And I mean, this is the paradox of her, isn't it? That she's playing a male part, a traditionally male part, and she's surrounded by men. But I mean, she's not pretending to be a man, right? She doesn't cast off her feminine identity at all, but she actually draws on it. And it's the fact that she is – surely that's what gives her part of the sort of, as it were, supernatural or divine power, is the fact that she is setting herself outside the conventional gender norms.

8:44So people see her as a woman apart. Yeah. Or she's fusing the most potent expressions of what is male and female. So we've said how she buys into the show and the glamour of knighthood. But she also instinctively understands that there are deep reserves of spiritual power that women particularly are able to channel. So, you know, she is absolutely not trans. She does not want to change her sex. She never claims, she never pretends to be male. She always calls herself Jean La Pucelle, Joan the Maid. And what she's doing there is drawing on all the traditions that are associated with the body of a virgin girl.

9:32She's casting it as the very essence of her identity. And so she is male in the most martial way. It's possible to be male, but she is female in the holiest way it is possible to be female. And it's this fusion that is so unique and that makes Joan such a completely exceptional person in the sweep of medieval European history. So we compared her before a couple of times to another person we've done on the show, Catherine of Siena. Catherine of Siena draws almost exclusively on kind of female archetypes. Well, she's the bride of Christ, isn't she? Joan is a bit different And in the first episode You talked about her obsession with St.

10:15Michael The kind of, you know, a patron saint A warrior saint and so on The captain of heaven, all of that The leaders of the archangels And St. Michael I mean, you might say a very male figure But is he? Because he's a little bit amorphous, isn't he? Well, he's an angel and so he's sexless Right angels do not have sex in any sense right okay yeah oh that's a that's a very niche uh a very niche hobby and so he's neither male he's you know he's not female he is he is he's kind of more than that and michael as we said had become the emblem of french resistance and joan has now become the emblem of french resistance and although the comparison i don't think is ever overtly made by Joan's contemporaries, there is a hint of this kind of sexless character that they see her as possessing in the way that her companions in arms repeatedly speak of her as someone who is attractive, but who nevertheless never provokes sexual desire in them.

11:24So here is Jean Dolan, her squire, who wrote after she had died. Although she was a young girl, beautiful and shapely, and when helping to arm her or otherwise, I have often seen her breasts. And although sometimes when I was dressing her wounds, I have seen her legs quite bare and I have gone close to her many times. And I was strong, young and vigorous in those days. Never, despite any sight or contact I had with the maid, was my body moved to any carnal desire for her, nor were any of her soldiers or squired moved in this way. and I think it's important for Joan's comrades her male comrades to emphasize that she is a maid that her virginity is the marker of her holiness and that this holiness in turn is the evidence that she is what she says she is a messenger sent from God right and there's no sense that any of the captains are only on you know when she's berating them and all of that kind of thing when she is haranguing them about bad decisions and stuff, there's no sense that any of the captains doubt her and say, who is this flipping jumped up peasant girl who claims to be sent by God or any of the knights or any of these people?

12:34They collectively choose to believe. Do they? Or are there any sceptics? Of course there are sceptics. And of course it takes time for Joan to persuade them that what she represents is something that they should be buying into. But the proof is in the pudding. She prayed, the wind changed. She suggested that the English should be attacked. They attack the English. It works out. Oulian is liberated. The miracle stands for itself. She's done exactly what she said she would do. And this is why people like Guy de Laval, whose kind of enthusiastic description of Joan we began this show with, that's why they're buying into it.

13:11And there's this electric sense of excitement that everything she had said was true, that God is on the side of French arms, that everything that had seemed terrible has now been raised up and is kind of illumined by this splendor, this sense of glory, this sense of kind of wonder and the miraculous. And that's what Guy and loads of other people are buying into. I mean, it's interesting because effectively, Joan's liberation of Orléans is the only miracle that she has performed. So in that letter that you read, Guy describes how her horse is a bit frisky and Joan says, take it over to the cross and then the horse calms down.

13:55And so there's a hint of the miraculous there, but I mean, it's pretty feeble stuff. Joan herself, she repudiates all this. She always said, and this again is a massive point of difference between her and other female visionaries or indeed, you know, visionaries full stop. They're laying claim to all kinds of miracles. Joan doesn't do that. There are lots of people who want her to be a miracle worker, who want her to perform miraculous healings or whatever. She doesn't. Well, even the relief of Orléans. Yeah. I mean, it's not really a supernatural miracle. I mean, sieges are often relieved. I mean, sure, the French thought they were going to lose and actually they ended up winning and they're delighted by that.

14:30But you don't need to resort to supernatural explanations for why they were able to rout the English. I mean, that's... Well, Dominic, you don't. But that is the one miracle that Joan says that she has performed. And I guess you would say it was a miracle that the relief of Orléans was performed by a peasant girl. I mean, that does seem really stunning. And people buy into the fact that that is properly miraculous. But there isn't really anything else. Because Joan wants the focus to be entirely on the mission that she has been given by her voices. And that mission was to relieve Orléans. And that was the test.

15:03And she has passed it. And so her claim to have been sent from God is now widely accepted by basically everyone on the French side. Not least the man that she is serving, who is the Dauphin. So even Joan still calls him the Dauphin, don't they? Everybody calls him the Dauphin, the titular Charles VII, because he won't really become king or be accepted as king. So he's driven back the English and gone into Reims and been crowned. because Reims, 80 miles northeast of Paris in English-held territory, this is the place where for generations French kings have been crowned. Millennium. You need to get there.

15:42And Charles has been hanging around for seven years since the death of his father in 1422, hoping desperately he can get to Reims and be crowned, and there seems no prospect of it whatsoever. And Joan has promised him not only that she will relieve Orléans, but that she will crown him in Reims and drive out the English with him. So he must now be thinking, well, she's done number one. What about number two and number three? Yeah, absolutely. And in the weeks that follow the relief of Orléans, he kind of really sets his shoulder to the wheel in an attempt to try and help her fulfill these other two prophecies.

16:17So the relief force that had been sent to Orléans, that had been disbanded almost immediately after the relief of the city, basically because there aren't any funds left to keep it in the field. The Dauphin's treasury is empty. And that, again, is part of the miraculous quality of the relief of Orléans. It's come despite the fact that the Dauphin effectively is bankrupt. In the wake of the relief of Orléans, the Dauphin is now confident that men will answer his call and not expect to be paid. Because now they will do it because they are following a miraculous virgin. God, that really would be a miracle if they want to fight and not be paid.

16:57that is what turns out to be the case. Because by early June, some 5 ,000 men have assembled at Cels, which is this small town south of Loire, between Tours and Orléans. And among them, of course, was Guy de Laval. So he's kind of typical of, he's expressive of why these people are now ready to fight for the Dauphin in a way that they hadn't been before and not expect to be paid for it. And in fact, Guy de Laval, to fund this campaigning, he had been forced to sell lands. So not only is he not being paid, he's actually, you know, he's short of a few estates or two. Now, among the various nobles and captains of France, as we mentioned in the previous episode, there is one who, right from the beginning, has been a massive Joan fan.

17:44And this is the Duke of Alençon, Jean, who's only 20, but has been appointed by the Dauphin to serve as commander in chief of this expeditionary force that has been recruited. Joan herself, even though in her letters she described herself as a captain of men, she has no official rank, but she doesn't actually need one. And the Dauphin gives instructions to Alençon that he is to act in all matters by her advice. And as it turns out, the campaign is an amazing success. And Joan's advice, again, turns out to be incredibly effective. and just as they had been humiliated at Orléans, so now a succession of English commanders find themselves very much coming second best when they come up against Joan and her men.

18:36So let's, should we go through these campaigns? So first of all, there's a place called Jargo, and that's upriver from Orléans. It's a bridging point. The Duke of Suffolk is there, and he's there and his men are completely battered by French artillery, aren't they? The French have a bombard called the Shepherdess, which is named after Joan. And the artillery does its work. The keep collapses. And then Joan and co. storm the city walls. She's waving her banner. Fight hard and God will fight hard with you. God has doomed the English. And the English end up being taken prisoner, including the Duke of Suffolk.

19:13So that's a massive blow for the English. And the Duke of Suffolk behaves splendidly, doesn't he? He does. Sportingly. he knights the person who takes him prisoner, which I think is tremendous. Well, you might say snobbishly because he doesn't want to be captured by someone who's not a knight. Yeah, so that's the Duke of Suffolk taken prisoner. And he, of course, had been in command at Orléans. But one week later, there's an even more crushing blow for the English to endure because this time it's the turn of Talbot. So John Talbot, the great Lawrence Delaglio of the English to be taken prisoner.

19:47and he suffers a crushing defeat. Not in, you know, he's not defending a town. He's in the open. And this is a pitched battle of the kind that the English, ever since Agincourt, have pretty much taken for granted that they are bound to win. But now they lose. 2 ,000 Englishmen are killed. You know, this is a loss of manpower that they can't really afford. But of course, even more damagingly, perhaps, is the fact that they have lost this reputation for invincibility. And again, this redounds massively to Joan's credit. And she goes to the Dauphin and she says, look, we've had these twin victories.

20:29Two of your enemies are now prisoner, Suffolk and Talbot. God is clearly with you. Now we must seize the moment. We must advance beyond the safe zone of the Loire and we must go deep into enemy-held territory. And our target must be a place some 130 miles to the north of Loire, beyond Paris. And this is, of course, the holy city of France. And this is a really, really sort of dodgy undertaking for a couple of reasons. First of all, you know, it's 130 miles away. They're not going to have time to organize a supply train. They're going to have to move very fast for that reason. And because of that, because they're not going to be able to take supplies, they are not going to be able to take artillery either, which means they're not going to be able to lay a siege to an house.

21:20There can't be a protracted siege. But as always, Joan says, oh, God will provide. And the Dauphin believes her. And God does provide. Because on the 5th of July, the Dauphin, his army with Joan, they arrive before the walls of Troyes. And this is the principal city of Champagne. and of course it is where the Dauphin had been disinherited by his father by the terms of the peace treaty that the lunatic Charles VI had signed with Henry V and the Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of Burgundy exercises a very strong influence on the city the council is loyal to the Duke to Philip the Good and so when the Dauphin appears before the walls of the city the council refuses to surrender but joan is not daunted or put off by this at all and she tells the dauphin my voices have told me that within four days i will lead you into trois despite the fact as you mentioned dominic that the french have no artillery so how on earth is this going to happen so what joan does she she rides um on her horse round the walls of the city and she commands her men to fill the ditches that surround the walls with brushwood and the townsmen so not the members of the council the general you know the the kind of everyday people in the city they gather on the walls and they look down and they see joan and they see her men um blocking up the ditches and they get more and more nervous and to quote helen castor in her her book on joan after four days of fear and deepening uncertainty the sight of these preparations for an assault led by the miraculous made finally shattered the town's resistance.

23:01So even before Joan and her forces attack, the people of Toir are so spooked that they've decided to surrender and they force the council to do this. And so just as Joan had prophesied, the Dauphin rides into the city and Joan is there with him carrying her great silken white banner. So another tremendous victory. And if I can just pause the narrative for a second. So obviously, for understandable reasons, you want this to be as glamorous and exciting a story as possible. So you are kind of playing up the miraculous elements and amazing triumphs against the odds that are only explicable by Joan's extraordinary charisma and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

23:37However, a skeptic might say that you actually gave the game away, not in this series, but in the very first series we ever did about the Hundred Years' War, where you pointed out at great length and very convincingly that the English were always, you know, France is richer, more powerful, more populous, all of this. and in a way the English so-called triumphs in the Hundred Years' War were always illusory. And you could argue that the English were always massively overextended, that it was always – I mean, I remember in the old days when you used to diss Henry V, you used to say you thought he was a bad king because he hugely extended England in a campaign in France they couldn't possibly win in the long run, that one day eventually they would be driven back.

24:25And I suppose, in a way, you could say, of course, Joan is really important to this story. But even if you take her out of it, you could argue that this would have happened at some point anyway, that the English were never going to be able to hold on to all this territory. They're hugely outnumbered in terms of demography. France, one day France will get its act together under a charismatic leader of some kind. And that's what lies behind this story. The kind of geopolitical, the strategic realities of the Hundred Years' War. Okay, so just two points to that. The first is that what Joan is doing is turning the needle on French morale.

25:02A crucial part of English success, why they have been able to dominate certainly northern France, despite really not having that many men, is the mystique of Agincourt, the sense that they are invincible. And Joan effectively has destroyed that mystique. The second thing, the specific issue of Troyes and why they surrender, it's not the English who are the enemy in Troyes. It's the Duke of Burgundy. Burgundian, right. And the Dauphin is there as a representative of the bitter, bitter enemy of the Burgundians, the Armagnacs. So in that sense, the surrender really is, I think, extraordinary and a tribute certainly to the mystique of Joan.

25:46Yeah. And I think it would be churlish to discount the impact that she personally had in persuading the Burgundian elements within Troyes to surrender. The charismatic leader matters. But if you imagine it as a video game, as a board game, the French ultimately always have more cards. And when they finally work out how to play those cards, they will win. I mean, we're kind of slightly off-piste here, but I think that had Orléans fallen, had the English advanced into the south, had they captured Bourges, had the Dauphin fled, had they been able to establish a kind of very loose sovereignty over the whole of France, it would still have been impossible for them to hold France in the long run.

26:30France was just too preponderant, too strong relative to England for that ever to have happened. But I do think that the fact that Orléans is relieved and that Charles, his war captains and the men who have rallied to his banner find that when they go out deep into English and Burgundian held France, actually everything falls to pieces. The whole stack of cards falls to pieces. They wouldn't have done that without Joan. I mean, it may be that Joan is, I mean, she is effectively kind of calling her enemies bluff, but, you know, it took a peasant girl ignorant of war to do that. And that is an astonishing story.

27:11And it's not surprising, I think, that for her supporters, she is an incredibly potent and glamorous figure. And for her enemies, she is a figure of dread, someone who seems to have exercised witchcraft. So I've taken you slightly off the narrative. Let's get back to the narrative. So basically, with the fall of Troyes, the road to Grasse lies open, and the English and the Burgundians are never going to be able to organise themselves to get an army in the way in time. And this is tremendous news for the Dauphin. Well, just to pick up on that, in the wake of Orléans, the battle at Pate, English forces are depleted.

27:48They could send for more forces to come from England, and in due course they will. But for now, there aren't the forces to oppose the advance on Reims. And Joan would not have known that. She doesn't have the military sensibility to understand that. But I think that she has a kind of gut feeling. This is our moment. God is with us. And she turns out to be right, perhaps for the wrong reasons. Right. So let's get to the Dauphin and the narrative. So the Dauphin, by the 16th of July, he is 12 miles outside Reims. at a place called Cet-Saux, and all is looking good. So dignitaries from Reims arrive, and they offer their submission to him.

28:30And that afternoon, the 16th of July, the Archbishop of Reims, who has been exiled from the city for more than a decade, he goes into the city, and then that evening he is followed by the Dauphin, Joan at his side. What an amazing scene that must have been for French partisans to see the Dauphin and Joan arriving in the city at last after all this time. Yeah. And the sinister figure of Gilles de Rey, meanwhile, who's been riding with them, he has headed out to the Abbey of Saint-Rémy, the guy who had a baptised Clovis almost a thousand years before. And this was oil that had been brought down from heaven by a dove.

29:14And it was kept in the holy ampulla, which was a vial of Roman glass. And this is what you had to use to anoint the king. He gets it, comes back. So that's ready for the day. Unfortunately, the regalia of Charlemagne, so a sword, a crown and so on. This is in the Abbey of Saint-Denis just outside Paris. And that is still under English occupation. So they can't get that. But blacksmiths are sent to work. You know, a makeshift crown is produced. And so basically everything is ready to go. Needs must. The coronation can go ahead. And so it begins the following morning, nine o 'clock. It's the 17th of July, 1429.

29:54Charles, the Dauphin, approaches the high altar. The Duke of Alençon is waiting for him. The Duke of Alençon knights Charles. Charles is then presented to God. He's touched with oil, the holy oil that has been brought from the Abbey of Saint-Rémy. And he is then crowned by the Archbishop of Reims. And throughout the ceremony, Joan is by the side of the Dauphin, holding her beautiful white banner. And when the coronation has been completed, she falls to her knees before the Dauphin and she tells him, noble king, God's will is done. And then she breaks down in tears. Oh, a tear-jerking scene. And meanwhile, the new king, as I guess we should call him, Charles VII, he's granting all sorts of favours, isn't he?

30:39So fan favourite, Gilles de Rey, is made a Marshal of France. Guy de Laval, future Aristo, who we heard from at the beginning, he's a count. The Bastard of Orléans is there. That bloke, the Wrath of God is there. René of Anjou is there. All these characters. And actually, Joan's family are there too. So this is a signal honour for them. I mean, they basically, I mean, they were respectable peasants, but they were peasants nonetheless. And now here they are at the coronation of the king. And being put up at public expense. So yeah, it's incredible. Her father, her brothers, her godfather. And Charles is the king, as we'll call him from now on.