VII. THE BETRAYAL OF THE KINGDOM…

VII. THE BETRAYAL OF THE KINGDOM

Fourteenth century France was the prey of Anarchy, of Civil War, of Foreign Invasion. When one considers the unhappy reigns of Philip of Valois and of John, the captivity of the king, the occupation of France by the English, the insanity of Charles VI, and the crimes of Isabella of Bavaria, one can explain why two centuries separated the literary epoch of France from that of Italy.--VILLEMAIN.[t]

[Sidenote: [1380-1422 A.D.]]

Charles V was but forty-three years of age when he died. His death was a great misfortune for the country, for his eldest son was only twelve years old, and intrusted to the care of his three uncles, the dukes of Anjou, Burgundy, and Berri, grasping men, each solely preoccupied with one subject--the first with the kingdom of Naples where Queen Joanna had proclaimed him her successor, the second with the great fief of Flanders which he would in time inherit, the third with his pleasures and his wealth. The young king, who came to the throne as Charles VI, and who, owing to his tender years, was quite at the mercy of his relatives, had, on his mother’s side, a fourth uncle, the duke de Bourbon, an excellent prince but wholly without influence; and a brother, the duke of Orleans.

During the late king’s last moments, his eldest brother, the duke of Anjou, who by virtue of his title would assume the regency, kept himself hidden in an adjacent chamber. Scarcely had Charles drawn his last breath than the duke seized the crown jewels, and by threatening the treasurer, Savoisy, with death, got hold of a number of gold and silver ingots which had been sealed up in the walls of the castle of Melun by masons who had immediately been got rid of. The year before, while governor of Languedoc, he had caused an insurrection by his rapacious acts, and in Montpellier alone condemned two hundred citizens to the stake, two hundred to the gallows, two hundred to the block, eighteen hundred to the loss of their property, and the rest of the town to a fine of 600,000 francs. The king modified these atrocious sentences and recalled the duke. Unfortunately the power of regency belonged to this prince. His brothers, like himself, filled their pockets; Burgundy allotted himself the government of Normandy and Picardy; Berri, who had already had Berri, Auvergne, and Poitou in appanage, took Languedoc and Aquitaine. Thus a third of the realm became a field for his rapacity.

[Sidenote: [1380-1382 A.D.]]

A new reign always brings a moment of hope. The abolition of certain taxes was demanded, and the duke promised to suppress all those which had been instituted since Philip the Fair. He might as well have promised to renounce the government of France; the regent did not know how to keep his word. One day a mounted crier appeared in the public square, and announced that the king’s silver plate had been stolen, promising a large reward to whoever recovered it. When a crowd had gathered to discuss the news, he cried that the next day a new tax would be levied on all merchandise sold, and galloped away at full speed.

The next day, in truth, which was the first of March, 1382, tax-gatherers appeared in the market-place and demanded a tax on a bit of cress which had just been sold by an old woman. A furious riot at once broke out. The rebels rushed to the Hôtel-de-Ville and the arsenal, and armed themselves with new mallets that had been stored up there in view of an attack from the English. These maillotins were, for the moment, masters of the situation; then, as in all popular riots of this time, fury gave way to terror and discouragement. The princes, who took the matter in hand, executed in secret the most seditious and imposed on others the most ruinous fines, with the proceeds of which the duke of Anjou departed for Italy. But the new tax was withdrawn and the leaders of the riot were punished secretly. The Parisian rising had meantime spread to Rouen, Rheims, Châlons, Troyes, and Orleans, where it formed the nucleus of two other revolutionary movements--one in the north in Flanders, the other in the south in Languedoc.

The duke of Berri had scarcely appeared in his province of Languedoc when trouble broke out. The pope interfered and put an end to it, but the pope could not stop the executions and cruelties of the governing prince. The peasants despoiled of everything by the soldiers commenced a sort of jacquerie (peasant revolt). They took refuge in the mountains, especially on the slopes of the Cévennes and thence, organised into armed bands, rushed down upon the nobles and wealthy inhabitants, giving no quarter to those whose hands were not callous with toil. They were called the tuchins. Affairs in Flanders were still more serious.

WAR IN FLANDERS: BATTLE OF ROOSEBEKE (1382 A.D.)

The Flemings had rebelled, in the preceding reign, against their French count who amused himself with violating the municipal franchises of the country. Peter Dubois and Philip van Artevelde, son of the famous brewer, had led with success the insurrection of the “chaperons blancs” (white-caps), and at the battle of Bruges (May 3rd, 1382) had overturned the last hopes of Count Louis. Philip van Artevelde pushed the insurrection with the same boldness and in the same manner as his father. Plenipotentiaries from Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges were sent to Richard II of England, offering to recognise him as king of France if he would come to their aid. For a quarter of a century the breath of revolt had been blowing over the middle classes throughout Europe--the enterprise of Rienzi at Rome, Wat Tyler in England, then Étienne Marcel and now the “Jacques,” the “maillotins,” the “tuchins,” and the “white-caps”! Insurrection, smothered in one place, broke out afresh in another, and it was to be feared, as Froissart[c] says, “that all nobility and refinement would be dead and lost in France as well as in many other countries.”

[Sidenote: [1382-1383 A.D.]]

One day while the dukes of Burgundy and Berri were discussing together the dangers of the situation and the necessity for intervention in Flanders, and of striking at the roots of the spirit of revolt and liberty, the young king entered, with a hawk on his fist. “Well, my dear uncles,” said he, “and what are you talking about in such solemn council?” “Ah, monseigneur,” replied Berri, “here is my brother of Burgundy who complains of the people in Flanders where the wretches have turned their lord and nobles out of their heritage. They have a leader who calls himself Artevelde, a true Englishman for courage, who has besieged a crowd of nobles in Oudenarde, and swears he will never leave and will have his will with those in the town unless your power relieve them.” “By my faith,” rejoined the king, “I have a great desire to help them. For God’s sake, let us go there. I want nothing more than to arm myself, for I have never yet been armed, and if I wish to reign with power and honour, must I not learn the use of arms?” And he was anxious to set out that day or the next.

A great army was soon ready. At its approach all the Flemish towns made submission and the people of Ghent had now no resource but to win a great battle by throwing themselves upon the enemy with the impetuosity of the boar, as they had done at Bruges and as they now tried to do at Roosebeke, November 27th, 1382. They were tied one to the other, so as to make it impossible to retreat, and advanced in a single battalion. This manœuvre had been successful at Bruges against a much smaller number. But this time the wings of the great French army folded upon them, and, assailed on its side, the battalion was helpless. The lances of the cavalry carried much farther than the short Flemish spears, and the latter could not reach the enemy which was attacking them. Disorder soon reigned supreme in the little cohort surrounded on all sides.

“The men-at-arms,” says Froissart,[c] “knocked down the Flemings with all their might. They had well-sharpened battle-axes, with which they cut through helmets and disbrained heads; others gave such blows with leaden maces that nothing could withstand them. Scarcely were the Flemings overthrown when pillagers advanced, who, mixing with the men-at-arms, made use of the large knives they carried, and finished slaying whoever fell into their hands, without more mercy than if they had been so many dogs. There was a large and high mound of the Flemings who were slain; and never was there so little blood spilt at so great a battle where such numbers were killed.” Twenty-six thousand dead remained upon the field and among them the whole battalion of Ghent, including Artevelde. Flanders was not laid low by this defeat, for Ghent held out for two years more. But the nobles had avenged the shame of their defeat at Courtrai; and to efface even the memory of it, on leaving the town which had lodged them for a fortnight but where they had found, hanging in the churches, the golden spurs of the knights killed in 1302, they gave it to the flames after ransacking it. On his own account the duke of Burgundy took down from the cathedral a magnificent clock with figures which he removed to Dijon and set up in the south transept of the church of Notre Dame. It is still there.

INSURRECTIONS IN PARIS AND ROUEN

The Paris riots, quite as much as the rising at Ghent, had been put down at Roosebeke. The Parisians realised that nothing more would be tolerated from them, but hoped nevertheless by showing their strength that nothing would be attempted. So they set out to meet the king to the number of twenty thousand armed men, who drew up in line of battle beneath the heights of Montmartre. At this sight the nobles said to themselves: “Look at the fine rabble and its insolence. Why didn’t they come with our army to serve the king in Flanders? They kept well out of it, and instead of ringing the bells to celebrate our victories, they dare to show themselves in arms before their lord.”

Heralds came forward who asked the Parisians: “Where are your leaders? Which of you are captains?” The Parisians replied, “We have none other than the king and his nobles.” The heralds then demanded whether the constable and four barons would be allowed to enter in safety. “Ah, you laugh at us,” returned the Parisians; “go, tell them that we are ready to receive their commands.” The constable then confronted them. “Well, men of Paris,” he said, “who has made you come out thus from the city? You look as though you would fight your lord the king.” “My lord,” they replied, “we have no such wish and we never had; we only wish to show the king the power of his fair city of Paris. He is very young and does not know what we could do for him should he ever need us.” “Well said,” retorted the constable, “but the king for this once does not wish to see you thus. If you would that he enters your city, go back to your homes and lay aside your arms.” They obeyed (1383).

The next day the king arrived. The gates were all wide open; but he wished to enter through a breach and had a section knocked out. Then he made his way through the streets, helmeted, lance in hand, with the most terrible air his young person could assume. Executions began at once; first those of the city’s liberties. They took away its franchises, its elective magistrates, provost, aldermen, clerk, syndic, centurions, and tithing-men; they suppressed the people’s masterships, corporations, and brotherhoods; they deprived them of their arms and of the chains that made the streets safe. Then followed executions of persons; they arrested, made summary investigation, and finished by killing. Three hundred of the richest bourgeoisie were drowned, hanged, or decapitated with scarcely a form of trial. Noteworthy were the deaths of Nicholas le Flamand, one of those who followed Étienne Marcel the day of the slaying of the two marshals, twenty-six years before, and of John Desmarets, avocat-général in the parliament, one of the negotiators of the Peace of Bretigny, and who was worn out in vain efforts between the two parties. His trial was iniquitous and his death touching. “When Desmarets,” says the monk of St. Denis,[d] “arrived at the place of execution, ‘Ask mercy of the king, Master John,’ the people cried, ‘that he may forgive your crimes.’ The old man turned to them and replied, ‘Loyally and well did I serve King Philip his great-grandfather, King John, and King Charles, his father; never had these kings anything to reproach me with; and this one would reproach me neither, had he the age and knowledge of a grown man. I do not believe him responsible in the least for this judgment. I have done nothing to ask mercy of him. It is God alone from whom I must ask it and I pray him to pardon my sins.’”

[Sidenote: [1383-1388 A.D.]]

The bourgeoisie were brought together and read a long list of their misdeeds, with the punishments they deserved. At the moment when terror was at its height the two uncles of the king threw themselves at his feet and begged for pity. He let himself be influenced, and announced through his chancellor that he would change the punishments into fines. “This was,” says Mézeray,[e] “the true reason for this coup de théâtre!” Paris did not get off on less than 400,000 francs, worth to-day about 20,000,000; at Rouen, Rheims, Troyes, Châlons, Orleans, Sens, in Auvergne and Languedoc, the same proceedings took place, especially the enormous fines. “And this all went,” says Froissart,[c] “to the profit of the duke of Berri and the duke of Burgundy, for the young king was in their power!” This blow fell upon the bourgeoisie more disastrously than that of 1359, because the government was then in the hands of an intelligent man who checked the feudal reaction; in 1383 the princes gave themselves a free hand. The upper middle class was decimated and ruined; and when, after thirty years, public grievances caused them to essay another revolution, they were in no condition to assume its control and left it to violent men, who drenched Paris with blood.

In 1384 the count of Flanders died and the duke of Burgundy, his son-in-law, inherited his vast dominions. In 1369 Charles V, in order to facilitate the marriage of his brother the duke of Burgundy with the heiress of the county of Flanders, had abandoned French Flanders to him. But at the same time the king exacted an agreement from his brother, that the donation would be restored on the death of the latter’s father-in-law, Louis de Mâle. But the count of Flanders survived the king, and Philip the Bold easily obtained from Charles VI the remission of his promise. Henceforth the house of Burgundy will turn all its affection towards these rich provinces, and as it finds means for aggrandisement in this direction at the expense of the petty German princes, it will forget little by little both the stock from which it came, and the France which began its greatness.

The following year was employed in immense preparations for an invasion of England. They collected, says Froissart, enough ships to make a bridge from Calais to Dover; there were fourteen hundred of them. They built a whole town of wood, which could be taken apart, piece by piece, in order to take an entrenched camp with them. But they let the proper moment for crossing over pass, and the project had to be given up, but not until enormous sums had been squandered. Another expedition against the duke of Gelderland who, for the price of a pension of £400 from England, bade defiance to the king of France, cost still more, and came to nothing (1388).

THE KING ASSUMES THE RULE (1388 A.D.)

The voice of public opinion was still very feeble, but it could be heard. On the return from the sad war in Germany, the king called a general council in the hall of the palace of the archbishop of Rheims, and demanded of those present, in virtue of the obedience they owed him, their advice on the conduct of public affairs. Peter de Montaigu, cardinal of Laon, took the floor, and praising the king’s good qualities, exhorted him to begin the exercise of his absolute power by taking under his own control and direction the ministry of war and his own household, taking counsel from no one. Others supported the cardinal’s advice; Charles declared himself determined to follow it and thanked his uncles for the good offices they had rendered him. The king had scarcely left Rheims when the cardinal of Laon died by poison.

[Sidenote: [1388-1389 A.D.]]

The former counsellors of Charles V, the “small fry,” the marmousets as the great lords dubbed them in disdain, Olivier de Clisson, Bureau de la Rivière, Le Bègue de Vilaines, John de Novian, and John de Montaigu, reassumed, as ministers of state, the direction of affairs. The new administration was wise and economical, and stood for internal order and foreign peace, but through it the king only became the more prodigal; having no longer the pleasures and distractions of war, those of the fête and tourney became necessary to him, and these diversions now never ceased.[b]

Prodigious sums were needed for the “incomparable” fêtes in which Charles VI gloried, and which attracted to Paris the flower of the knights and noble ladies of all Christendom. This vast concourse of strangers, the stir, the joyful tumult, the dazzling shows intoxicated the young nobility and even the people of Paris; the Parisians had their share of the rain of gold and recovered in one way what was taken from them in another. In the first days of May, 1389, the most magnificent tournament which had ever been seen was held at St. Denis on the occasion of the knighting of the two sons of the late duke Louis of Anjou, the eldest of whom, Louis II, duke of Anjou and count of Provence, was preparing to set out to assert his claims to the kingdom of Naples against the heir of Charles of Durazzo. Charles VI had endeavoured to realise the most brilliant descriptions of the romances and to present to the feudal world a complete type of chivalric splendours. The ceremonial of initiation to the “holy order of chivalry,” which had almost fallen into disuse since the adoption of the custom of conferring the order on the field of battle, was reproduced with scrupulous exactness.

In a neighbouring field the lists had been prepared, surrounded with wooden galleries for the ladies; and in the great court of the abbey a banquet hall had been constructed 192 feet long by 36 wide and hung throughout with tapestries of silk and gold. The first day of the tournament twenty-two knights in green and gold armour were conducted into the lists to the sound of music, by twenty-two fair ladies similarly attired and mounted on elegant palfreys; each gave her knight a ribbon of her own colours. The contests lasted all day; then the company proceeded from the enclosure to the festival hall and after the supper the ladies awarded the prize to the two who had done the best. The rest of the night was passed in dances and caroles[30] and in “pastimes” of a less innocent kind. The fête lasted three days and three nights--nights of orgy and delirium which rendered the venerable cloisters of St. Denis the witnesses of many voluptuous mysteries and which must have strangely scandalised the chaste shade of St. Louis in the depths of its tomb.

The jousts and balls were succeeded by a ceremony of a sterner character but equally sumptuous: the young king loved to vary his emotions and his shows. He had been seized with “a great love” for the memory of Bertrand du Guesclin, a feeling which was shared by the whole nation: although nine years had passed since the death of that great captain, and though Charles V had honoured him with a splendid funeral, Charles VI insisted on recelebrating the obsequies of Messire Bertrand in presence of all the French and foreign nobility whom the tournament had brought together.

The fêtes of St. Denis had not satiated Charles VI; he remembered that the queen his wife had not yet been crowned: this was a fine occasion to indulge in fresh magnificences. He resolved to have Isabella anointed at Paris, and to compensate himself for the paucity of ceremonial which had been accorded to the queen’s first entry into the capital. He notified his intention “to those of Paris,” in order that they might be prepared, and charged the old queen, Blanche of Navarre, widow of Philip of Valois, to arrange the ceremony. Accordingly Blanche ordered the Chronicles of St. Denis to be examined for everything which they reported concerning the anointing of queens in olden times. Froissart[c] and the monk of St. Denis[d] have vied with one another in describing the queen’s procession which arrived before St. Denis the 22nd of August, 1389, with all the princesses, some in painted and gilded litters, others on palfreys marvellously caparisoned. The king’s uncles, who sought every opportunity to approach the supreme power, had presented themselves at court with their families; the dukes and all the great nobles escorted the litters which entered Paris to the sound of a thousand instruments and between two rows of horsemen clad, some in scarlet silk, others in green silk: they were on the one side the members of the king’s household, on the other twelve hundred citizens of Paris led by the provost of the merchants. Across the whole of the rue St. Denis and the Grand Font (the Pont au Change) were hung draperies of silk, camlet, and cendal (taffetas), which “shut out the sky”; all the houses were hung with silks and tapestries of a high warp and the windows were crowded with women adorned with dresses of brilliant materials and with gold necklaces. Fountains of milk and perfumed wine flowed at the street corners, and beautiful young girls offered the passers-by to drink from golden goblets. At the Porte St. Denis, at the moûtier (monastery) of the Trinity, at the second Porte St. Denis or Painters’ Gate (Porte aux Peintres), at the church of St. Jacques de l’Hôpital, at the Grand Châtelet, platforms, wooden castles, and richly ornamented theatres had been erected; one represented God in his paradise and the starry heavens filled with angels who sang “very melodiously” and congratulated in rhyme “the lady enclosed amongst fleurs-de-lis”; another “showed” the king of France and his twelve peers, King Richard Cœur de Lion, and King Saladin with his Saracens. A rope had been stretched from one of the towers of Notre Dame to the Pont au Change: as the queen passed the bridge a man dressed as an angel, seated on this rope, descended from the towers of Notre Dame, passed through an opening in the awning which covered the bridge, placed “a beautiful wreath” on the queen’s head, and “was drawn up again through the said opening as if he were returning to heaven.”

The procession presented itself before Notre Dame, whence it returned to the Palais, and the next day the queen was anointed and crowned in the Sainte-Chapelle, by the archbishop of Rouen. The descriptions of the banquets which took place at the “marble table” in the great hall of the Palais, and of the jousts at the Hôtel St. Pol are to be found in Froissart.[c] The king had adopted a golden sun with rays as his device: he was one of the victors in the jousts. The rich presents of the city of Paris to the queen and the duchess of Touraine, the king’s sister-in-law, contributed to pay for the gaiety of the court; the Parisians offered the princesses gold and silver plate to the value of sixty thousand crowns: they doubtless calculated on being repaid for this munificence by a large diminution of the taxes; but their expectation was cruelly deceived. The king left Paris a few days later, and as a farewell to his people left an increase of the gabelle and an ordinance which prohibited, under pain of death, the use of silver coins of twelve and four deniers which had been in circulation since the reign of the late king.[f]

HATRED OF THE NOBLES FOR THE MINISTRY (1389-1392 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1389-1392 A.D.]]

The ministry attempted to combat this state of affairs or at least to extenuate its disastrous effects. It economised in state expenditure to make up for the king’s extravagance, and the state was the gainer by the arrangement.

The ministers gave Paris back its provost and conferred upon the bourgeoisie the right to acquire fiefs, as though they were nobles, and deprived the duke of Berri of his government in Languedoc, where four hundred thousand inhabitants had fled into Aragon. Not being able to inflict further punishment on Berri, they caused his treasurer Bétisac to be put to death. This Bétisac had merited the hate of all by his exactions. But they did not dare condemn him as an embezzler, since the duke of Berri had authorised all his acts and it was on the duke himself that the complaints of the people should have fallen. So they laid a trap for Bétisac, by advising him to declare heretical opinions, for which he would be summoned to ecclesiastical jurisdiction which would exculpate him. The accused man followed this advice and they burned him for a heretic instead of hanging him for a thief.

The “small fry” ruled the kingdom for four years. Four years in which the king’s uncles and the great nobles had to keep their hands off the management of affairs, and longed for an opportunity to get back into power. Finally an Angevin nobleman, Peter de Craon, mortal enemy of the leader of the marmousets, the constable Olivier de Clisson, placed his personal hatred at the service of the aristocracy’s political resentment.

On June 13th, 1392, at the close of a fête given at the Hôtel St. Pol, the constable lingered a little to take leave of the king and the duke of Orleans, and then with eight attendants, two carrying torches, made his way towards the rue Ste. Catherine. Here Peter de Craon was waiting for him, with forty mounted brigands, scarcely a half dozen of whom knew what was expected of them. When Clisson appeared, Craon’s men threw themselves on his attendants and extinguished their torches. Clisson at first thought it a joke of the duke of Orleans, whom he supposed to have followed him. “My lord,” he said, “you are young, we must pardon you. These are the pranks of youth.” But Peter de Craon cried, “Die, die, Clisson; here you shall die.” “Who art thou,” asked Clisson, “who speakest such words?” “I am Peter de Craon, your enemy. You have many times provoked me, and shall here pay for it. Forward,” he called to his men, “I have him whom I wanted and will have.” The constable tried to defend himself but was soon wounded and thrown from his horse. In falling, his head came against the unlatched door of a bake-shop, which gave way. This saved him. The assassins thought him dead; they had, moreover, recognised the constable, and fearful of having attacked so powerful a personage, they fled with Craon to his castle of Sablé in Maine.

The news of the outrage was brought to the king as he was preparing for bed. He called his guard, had torches lighted and went to the bake-shop where Clisson was beginning to recover consciousness. “Constable,” said the king, “how do you feel?” “Weak and poorly, sire.” “And who brought you to this pass?” “Peter de Craon, sire, and his accomplices, treacherously and with no warning.” “Constable, nothing will be paid more dearly or amends made for than this thing.”

Peter de Craon, who no longer felt himself safe in the castle of Sablé, sought refuge with the duke of Burgundy, who, called upon to deliver up the rascal, caused him to be hid and replied that he knew nothing whatever of him. Charles immediately collected an army, swearing to take no rest until he had punished this rebellion. The dukes of Burgundy and Berri endeavoured to block this enterprise. Their hatred towards Clisson had grown since they learned he possessed great wealth. The constable, believing himself about to die, had made his will, and besides his fiefs and heritage he had disposed of 1,700,000 francs’ worth of personal property. But the king paid no heed to the delays and bad will of his uncles and to the fears which his physicians expressed for his health. He led his army as far as Le Mans.

THE KING GOES MAD: THE PRINCES RETURN TO POWER (1392 A.D.)

It was the middle of summer, during the prolonged August heat. As the king was crossing the forest, a man dressed all in white seized his bridle and cried, “Stop, noble king, go no further, thou art betrayed.” This sudden apparition startled the king greatly; a little farther on the page who carried the royal lance nodded in the saddle. The lance fell and struck a shield a resounding blow. At the sound of arms the king trembled, drew his sword and cried, “Quick, quick, upon the traitors!” He thrust his naked sword at his brother the duke of Orleans, who barely avoided it. One of his knights finally had to seize him from behind. They disarmed him. He no longer knew anyone.

The king was mad. Some said it was sorcery, but the king himself was to blame. Possessor at twelve years of age of that unlimited power which is often the undoing of the strongest characters, he was at twenty-four worn out with every pleasure and emotion in the range of human experience from debauch to battle-field. His constitution was ruined, his mind shaken; a violent shock had deranged everything.

When it was hinted that the king was the victim of poison or sorcery, “No,” exclaimed the duke of Berri, “he is neither poisoned nor bewitched, except by bad advice.” These words sealed the fate of the marmousets. A few days later Clisson demanded of the duke of Burgundy the pay of the knights who had accompanied the king on his last expedition. The duke looked him through and through, and said, “Clisson, you need not trouble yourself about the affairs of the kingdom, for without your help it will be well governed. It was an evil day for the realm when you first meddled with it. How the devil have you got so much money, that you were recently able to will away 1,700,000 francs? Neither his majesty, my brother Berri, nor I with all our present power have been able to acquire so much. Leave my presence and let me never see you again, for were it not for my honour I would put your other eye out.” Clisson hastened to the safety of his castle in Brittany, while parliament declared him guilty of extortion, and banished him from the country, imposing a fine of 100,000 silver marks. The sire de Montaigu, warned by this experience, sought refuge at Avignon. Bureau de la Rivière, the sire de Novian, and Le Bègue de Vilaines were arrested and imprisoned in the Château St. Antoine (the Bastille).

[Sidenote: [1392-1396 A.D.]]

The king’s uncles came again into full possession of the government: what would they do? They signed a twenty-eight years’ truce with England in 1395 and gave King Richard II the infant princess Isabella, Charles VI’s daughter, in marriage. But four years later (1399) the English deposed and afterwards, it is said, strangled their king, and this valuable alliance was broken.[b]

The signing of the truce of 1395 was a real assurance of peace in France, even in Brittany, where Clisson, banished to his fiefs, had armed his vassals at once and attacked John de Montfort. But the duke of Burgundy appeared in person at Ancenis, mediated between the two parties, and made them in January, 1395, sign a reciprocal promise to lay down their arms. Shortly after this John IV attended the meeting of Charles VI and Richard II at Guines (where the truce was arranged) and obtained from the English the restitution of Brest which had only been pledged to them.

With peace thus restored France was now able to occupy herself more particularly with the great questions then agitating all Europe: that of the papal schism of which all Christendom was longing for the end, and that of the crusade--or rather the barrier which it was felt must be raised against the conquests of the Ottoman Turks in the European provinces of the Greek empire.[g]

Forty years before the Ottoman Turks had crossed the Bosporus, taken Adrianople and a portion of the Danube valley. Now they were threatening Hungary. A crusade was therefore resolved upon, and put under the direction of a young man of twenty-four, John, count of Nevers, who later became the famous duke of Burgundy (John the Fearless). Young and old, equally short-sighted, gaily descended the Danube, taking the whole matter as a pleasure excursion. When they arrived at Nicopolis, King Sigismund of Hungary advised them to meet the advance troops of the enemy with his Hungarian foot-soldiers and light cavalry, and to reserve the knights for the real Ottoman army which would appear afterwards. But no one was willing to forego the honour of striking the first blow. So all opposed themselves to the advance-guard, threw themselves upon the first enemy who appeared, and arrived exhausted and in disorder at the top of a hill where they were received by the redoubtable janissaries which Amura had just organised, and who made short work of the breathless, disordered troops. It was said that Bajazet put ten thousand captives[31] to death in his own presence, saving only from the massacre the count of Nevers and twenty-four nobles whom he ransomed (1396).[b] Consternation was universal throughout France, especially in Burgundy. Duke Philip strangely abused the obligations of feudalism which compelled vassals to ransom a captive lord or his son and raised as much from his vassals as from the royal treasury, more than double the 200,000 ducats which Bajazet demanded for the freedom of his captives.[f]

DOMESTIC TROUBLES AND SCANDALS

[Sidenote: [1396-1407 A.D.]]

The government of the aristocracy was not fortunate: its acts were discrediting it abroad; its quarrels were weakening it at home.

Isabella of Bavaria was but fifteen years old when she came from Germany to wed Charles VI. Without parents, without a guide in the midst of a corrupted court, she learned its morals quicker than she learned its tongue, and she lived solely for luxury and pleasure. Years did not render her conduct more circumspect, or her thoughts more serious. From pleasure she descended to debauchery. Charged after the king’s affliction with the keeping of his person, she used the authority obtained through the melancholy situation of her husband to satisfy her passions, her vices, and her vengeances. It will soon be seen how fatal this foreign queen was to France.

The duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, kept the sovereign authority until his death in 1404. His son, John the Fearless, wished to receive, with his heritage, his father’s influence in the government, but the duke of Orleans, the king’s brother, all powerful with the queen--master, through her, of the king and the dauphin; chief of the nobility, and brilliant knight himself--had no intention of renouncing the power to anyone. So there soon sprang up, between John the Fearless and Orleans, a rivalry that threatened to become civil war right in the midst of Paris. Each collected his arms and fortified his palace; they were about to fight when the aged duke of Berri interposed. He brought Burgundy to the bedside of Orleans who was lying ill and made the two men embrace and talk and take food together. This reconciliation took place November the 20th, 1407; on the 23rd Louis of Orleans fell, assassinated by John the Fearless.

For more than four months, the duke had been planning this murder. He had bought, in the city, a house for the ostensible purpose of storing wine, corn, and other provisions, but really concealed in it seventeen hired assassins. This house, situated in the rue Vieille du Temple, near the Porte Barbette, lay in the path of the duke of Orleans while returning from the king’s residence to his own palace. Wednesday, the 23rd of November, at eight in the evening, the duke of Orleans left the Hôtel Montaigu on muleback. The night was very dark, and he was accompanied only by two equerries mounted on one horse and four foot attendants carrying torches. Although it was not late, all the shops were closed. The duke, keeping a little behind his people, was singing softly to himself and toying with his glove when suddenly the assassins, concealed by the corner of a house, rushed upon him crying, “Die! Die!”

“I am the duke of Orleans,” the duke shouted. “Then we want you,” they replied, striking him. A page tried to cover the prince with his body and was killed. A woman who witnessed the affair from a window screamed murder. One of the assassins called to her, “Shut up, wretch.” Then by the light of the torches she saw come out of the duke of Burgundy’s recently bought house, a large man with a red hat over his eyes, who, with a lantern, looked to see that there had been no slip as in the case of the constable De Clisson. But this time the murderers had well earned their wage. The body was literally hacked to pieces; the right arm was cut in two, the severed left wrist was thrown to one side, the skull split from ear to ear, and the brains scattered on the pavement. At this the man in the red hat said to the others, “Put out your lights and let us go, he is dead.” They put their torches back into the house they had occupied, strewed caltrops behind them to prevent pursuit, and retired to the Hôtel d’Artois in the rue Mauconseil.

[Sidenote: [1407-1409 A.D.]]

The next day John the Fearless went, like all the princes, to see the corpse, and sprinkled it with holy water, at the church of the Blancs-Manteaux. “Never,” he said, at sight of the dead, “has so foul a murder been committed in this realm.” He wept at the funeral and held a corner of the pall. Some days later, however, when the provost of Paris announced in the council that he would make every effort to find the assassins if they would give him permission to search the palaces of the princes, John the Fearless became confused and grew pale. Then it was he drew aside the duke of Berri and the king of Sicily, “I did it,” he whispered, “the devil tempted me.” This state of mind soon passed, and the duke of Burgundy resolved to admit and justify his crime. In fact the next day he boldly appeared at the council of the princes, but his uncle Berri met him at the door and said, “My good nephew, don’t come in this time. I don’t want you here.” The thought came to the guilty man that perhaps they were going to arrest him, and he fled at once to his possessions in Flanders. From there he proclaimed, preached, and wrote to the world that he had but forestalled an ambush of the duke of Orleans. A Franciscan monk, the learned John Petit, was the following year charged with the proof in twelve arguments, in honour of the twelve Apostles, that if the duke was killed it was for the glory of God, since he was a heretic; for the good of the king, since he wished to usurp the throne, and for the public welfare, since the state was rid of a tyrant.

To this strange apology for the murder, from the pen of a monk, Burgundy added a bloody victory.[b] An insurrection of the people of Liège against their bishop, a creature of the duke, called the latter from Paris. His influence had caused John, a younger brother of the house of Bavaria, to be elected bishop; John took deacon’s orders to entitle him to assume the episcopal sovereignty, but he refused to be priested, preferring the helmet to the mitre. The Liègeois were discontented at having a profane knight in lieu of a bishop; they entreated and petitioned John to take upon him the sacerdotal character. He laughed at them. They rebelled and drove him out. Such was the crime of the Liègeois. The duke of Burgundy marched against them; a battle was fought at Hasbain, in which the burgesses of Liège were as unfortunate as those of Ghent had been at Roosebeke. It is said that twenty-six thousand dead were counted on the field of battle.[h]

This was the best argument in Burgundy’s defence; he returned to Paris promising the people an immediate abolition of taxes, and extracted from the king a letter of forgiveness, in which Charles VI declared that he cherished no resentment towards the author of his brother’s death (Peace of Chartres, March, 1409).

The duchess of Orleans, the beautiful and gentle Valentine Visconti, was at least spared this last shame. The death of her husband killed her. She had taken for her motto, “Rien ne m’est plus; plus ne m’est rien,” and “died in 1408” [says Juvénal des Ursins[i]] “in anger and grief.”

The duke of Orleans was not worth much regret. His administration had been as deplorable as his morals. He had declared war on England, and had not carried it out, and had used this pretext for an increase of taxes which he himself had appropriated. Burgundy had bitterly opposed this new burden, and to appease the people, and especially to lay his own hand on the rich spoil, he now sent the superintendent of finances to the scaffold (1408). Then he restored the Parisians their ancient free constitution, the rights to elect their provost and to organise a citizen militia under elective leaders, and even to hold noble fiefs with the privileges thereto attached. Besides this he was extremely popular, which state of affairs he increased by showing citizens, even the least important, such consideration as they had never before known. These were the market people who formed, in Paris, the strength of the Burgundian party. Feudalism never forgave John the Fearless for having sought such support, no more than it did for having compromised seignorial inviolability by slaying a prince of the blood, the king’s brother. A considerable faction of the nobility turned against him. The avengers of Orleans ranged themselves under the banner of the father-in-law of one of his sons, the count d’Armagnac, who gave the party its name (1410). Thus, with the king mad, the queen ignored and incapable, the dauphin threatened by his excesses with his father’s end, the first prince of the blood stained with an infamous murder, there was no government--only armed factions, and war at home and abroad. Such was the state of France; nothing but disaster could come of it.

CIVIL WAR

From 1410 to 1412 the two factions attacked each other twice, and twice came to a settlement (Peace of Bicêtre, November, 1410; Peace of Bourges, July, 1412). Both sides made advances to the English to win over the country’s enemy.[b] The Gascon soldiers, preferring a plundering life in the midst of France to their own rude and poor homes, were constant to their banners. The duke of Burgundy, on the other hand, could not get his Flemings to quit their families and crafts for more than forty days; he was therefore obliged to call in the English. Henry IV sent a body of archers to his aid, with whom he drove his enemies from the north of the capital (February, 1410). In May we find Henry in league with the Orleans party, who were to restore to the English, in recompense, all their ancient possessions in France. The emissary who bore this treaty was seized at Boulogne; its contents were made public, and great odium was in consequence excited against the Armagnacs. The hapless monarch, Charles, recovering for a moment from his frenzy, joined in this indignation; he called an army, displayed the oriflamme, and marched with the Burgundians to besiege Bourges. The campaign, as usual, ended without an action, in a kind of treaty. Both parties felt the thirst of pillage and of blood; both wanted the courage to decide their differences in a general combat. No period of history manifests such an utter want of talent; no prowess was shown except in tournaments; no statesmanship save in the planning of a murder. Although the passions of men possessed of power and means were excited to the utmost, yet not a decisive blow was struck in policy or in arms. The fortune of the struggling parties was left to events--to chance. Success and reverse, the former at least, if not both, unearned, alternately ensued; conquerors and conquered pursued and fled, rolling like destructive waves over the necks of a prostrate and ruined people. Civil wars in general, destructive as they are of peace and prosperity, beget at least the virtue of courage; yet it was not so in France. The peasantry were crushed and trodden down; the nobles and knights feared to trust them with arms. The Bretons and the Gascons, natives of distant provinces, were the only foot-soldiers, the sole infantry of France at this time; and a handful of English sufficed in these quarrels to give the advantage to either party.[h]

[Sidenote: [1410-1413 A.D.]]

In this condition of affairs there was much to recall the worst days of king John, and to better them the bourgeoisie took the initiative, parliament, as in 1356, holding back. The University of Paris was very proud of having recently accomplished the deposition of two anti-popes, the election of Alexander V, a former doctor of the Sorbonne, and the convocation of a general council for the consideration of reforms within the church; and the bourgeoisie thought it could pacify the state as it hoped to have pacified Christianity. It obtained from Charles VI, in one of his lucid moments, a decree ordering all the princes back to their provinces and forbidding them to leave. But in a few months the war recommenced. The Armagnacs committed a thousand atrocities, telling their victims to seek vengeance from the “poor mad king.” The body of citizens asked, in the king’s council, that the defence of Paris might be committed to a friend of Burgundy’s, the count of Saint-Pol, and the latter, not very sure of the upper middle classes, wished to overcome them by means of the populace. He took refuge in the great and rich corporation of the butchers which he authorised to raise five hundred men for the municipal defence. The butchers armed their servants and all the men employed about the slaughter-houses. This violent mob, accustomed to the sight of blood and killing, and who made a slaughterer named Caboche their chief, let themselves be led for a time by their masters and the learned men of the University of Paris. Then Paris presented the most singular and terrible spectacle. One day the mob presented itself at the dauphin’s palace, forced him to appear on a balcony and through their spokesman, the old surgeon, John de Troyes, made him listen to their demands. He must send away his evil companions; lead a more regular life in every way; and take care of his health, and of his soul. The butchers charged themselves with superintending this change of morals which would bring with it, according to their ideas, the reformation of the kingdom. They set a watch around the Hôtel St. Pol for the safety of the king and monseigneur the duke of Guienne, and if they heard the sound of instruments and dancing in the night they entered boldly to put a stop to it, and preserve decency and order. But these rough and violent natures were not always content with words. If they had compassion on “that good fellow, the dauphin,” they broke out against those who were corrupting him and removed them violently from the palace and dragged them before the parliament for justice, even sometimes administering it on the way to those who had displeased them the most.

However, the able members of the party drew up, for the repression of abuses, the ordinance of 1413, known as the Cabochian ordinance, whose application would have been successful, if in making elections universal it had not made its administration impossible (May 25th). “But,” says Augustin Thierry, “men were found to conceive that great reform charter, joint work of the citizens and the university, while none could be found to execute and maintain it. Wise men and those accustomed to affairs had at this time neither will power nor political energy. They kept themselves apart, and all action rested upon fanatics and the unruly who precipitated, through their intolerable excesses, a reaction which brought about their fall and put a stop to all reform.”

[Sidenote: [1413-1415 A.D.]]

What the bourgeoisie respected, the mob outraged. It proscribed not only vice and immorality, but wealth, and mingled pillage and murder with its reforms; it disgraced finally those who had employed it and who, blushing at the association, now preferred the Armagnacs to the Cabochians. Called upon by all men of moderation the Armagnacs put a stop to the mob’s excesses, but at the same time overthrew the reform measures of the bourgeoisie (September 5th, 1413). John the Fearless fled again to his Flemish provinces.[b] Charles VI marched in person against him at the head of the Armagnacs, besieged and took Soissons, of which the inhabitants of every age and sex were inhumanly massacred. Arras was next invested,[32] but the Armagnacs becoming disgusted at the tediousness of the siege, as the Burgundians had been the previous year at that of Bourges, an accommodation ensued, the duke of Burgundy making verbal submissions, and promising never to show himself in Paris again. (Treaty of Arras, September, 1414.)

HENRY V INVADES FRANCE--A FRENCH VIEW

[Sidenote: [1415 A.D.]]

Whilst France was thus occupied and torn by civil contests, Henry V had succeeded, in 1413, to the throne of England.[h] He now judged the time come to interfere in the French mêlée. He stood, moreover, in need of a foreign war to settle himself on the throne his father had usurped. Since the great campaigns of the preceding century, the idea of a war with France had ever been popular in England. Therefore, when Henry proposed a serious expedition, he obtained easily from parliament six thousand men-at-arms and twenty-four thousand archers, with whom he debarked at Harfleur on the 14th of August, 1415. After a heroic defence which lasted a whole month, Harfleur, unsuccoured, was compelled to give up. But Henry V had lost fifteen thousand men (two thousand men-at-arms, thirteen thousand archers)--the half of his army. Too feeble now for any great undertaking, he resolved to march across country to Calais, and to throw the French knighthood a new and insolent defiance.

The English left Harfleur on the 8th of October, traversing the Pays de Caux, not without some resistance, although they took nothing but food and wine from the towns for fear of arousing the inhabitants. On the 13th they arrived at Abbeville intending to cross the Somme there, but they found the ford at Blanquetaque so well defended this time that they were obliged to ascend the stream as far as Amiens.

Near Nesle a peasant pointed out a ford that could be reached across a marsh. It was a difficult and dangerous passage; they would be lost if attacked. But the French army was still far away. Besides, the nobles would not have wished a combat in this swamp; they were seeking a fine battle in open field and to this end asked king Henry for a day and place for a fight. To which the Englishman replied that it was not necessary to name either day or place, since every day would find him on the field.

In spite of this answer, they feared, in the French army, that the enemy would escape; and to make sure they should not, the princes took up a position between the villages of Tramecourt and Agincourt [French Azincourt], where the English must necessarily pass, on a narrow plain, newly ploughed and all sodden with rain.[b]

On Thursday, the 24th of October, the English having passed Blangy learned that the French were close at hand, and thought they were about to attack them. The men-at-arms dismounted from horseback, and all of them kneeling down, and lifting up their hands to heaven, prayed to God to take them into his keeping. Nothing, however, took place as yet, the constable not having reached the French army. The English proceeded to quarter themselves at Maisoncelle, still nearer to Agincourt. Henry V disencumbered himself of his prisoners, saying to them, “If your masters survive, you will present yourself again at Calais.”

At last, they discovered the huge French army, its fires and its banners. There were, according to the estimate of the eye-witness, Lefebvre de St. Rémy,[j] fourteen thousand men-at-arms, in all perhaps fifty thousand men; thrice the number of the English. The latter had eleven or twelve thousand men remaining of the fifteen thousand that had marched from Harfleur, ten thousand of them at least being archers.

The Welshman, David Gam, the first who brought word to the king of the enemy’s presence, being asked how many men the French might have, is said to have replied, “Enough to be killed, enough to be taken prisoners, enough to fly.” An Englishman, Sir Walter Hungerford, could not forbear from observing that it would not have been amiss to have brought ten thousand more stout archers; there were as many in England who would have desired no better. But the king replied peremptorily, “Now in our Lord’s name, I would not have one man more. The number we have is that which he has willed; these folks place their confidence in their multitude, and I in him who so often gave victory to Judas Maccabæus.”

The English having still a night at their disposal, employed it usefully in making their preparations, and providing as well as possible for both body and soul. First, they rolled up the banners for fear of the rain, and took off and folded up the handsome coats of arms they had put on for the fight. Then in order to pass the cold October night in comfort, they opened their baggage and laid straw under them, which they procured from the neighbouring villages. The men-at-arms fitted the rivets of their armour, the archers applied fresh strings to their bows. They had for several days employed themselves in cutting and sharpening the stakes which they usually planted before them to stop the advance of cavalry. Amidst all their preparations for victory, these brave men did not forget their souls’ weal, but set their accounts in order with God and their consciences. They confessed hastily, those at least whom the priests could attend, and all this was done without noise, in whispers. The king had commanded silence, under penalty of forfeiture of their horses for the gentlemen, and of loss of the right ear for those of lower degree.

It was otherwise on the French side, where the time was spent in making knights. In every direction there were great fires which showed everything to the enemy; a confused din of people shouting and calling to each other; a bustling mob of valets and pages. Many gentlemen passed the night on horseback in their heavy armour, no doubt to avoid soiling it in the deep mud, which with the cold rain chilled them to the bones.

MICHELET’S ACCOUNT OF THE BATTLE OF AGINCOURT (OCTOBER 25TH, 1415)

On the morning of St. Crispin and St. Crispinian’s day, October 25th, 1415, the king of England heard three masses, bareheaded, but otherwise in full armour. “For it was his custom,” says John de Vaurin,[k] “to hear three masses each day, one after the other.” He then put on a magnificent helmet with an imperial gold crown. He rode without spurs on a gray palfrey, and made his men advance over a field of green corn, where the ground was less spoiled by the rain, the whole army forming one body, with the few lances he had in the centre, flanked by bodies of archers. He then rode slowly along the line, speaking a few brief sentences: “You have a good cause; I am come but to demand my right. Remember that you belong to old England; that your kindred, your wives and children are awaiting you there; see that you return to them with good cheer. The kings of England have always fared well in France. Look to the honour of the crown; look to yourselves. The French say they will cut off three fingers from each archer’s hand.”

The ground was in so bad a condition that no one was disposed to attack. The king of England parleyed with the French, offering to renounce the title of king of France, and to surrender back Harfleur, provided he were given Guienne, with some few convenient additions, Ponthieu, a daughter of the king, and 800,000 crowns. While this parleying between the two armies was going on the English archers were securing their stakes.

The two armies formed a strange mutual contrast. On the French side were three enormous squadrons, like so many forests of lances, following each other in lengthened file through the narrow plain; at their head the constable, the princes, the dukes of Orleans, Bar, and Alençon, the counts of Nevers, Eu, Richemont, and Vendôme, a multitude of lords, a dazzling iris of enamelled armour, escutcheons, banners, the horses fantastically disguised in steel and gold. The French, too, had archers, men of the commonalty; but where were they to be placed? Every post was numbered, and no one would give up his own; these men would have been a blot upon so noble an assemblage. There were cannon, but it does not appear that they were made use of; probably there was no place for them either.

The English army did not look handsome. The archers had no armour, often no shoes; for headpieces they had sorry caps of boiled leather, or even of willow with a crosspiece of iron; the axes and hatchets stuck in their belts gave them the appearance of carpenters. Many of these good workmen had taken off their breeches, in order to be at their ease and to work the better. It is a strange, incredible, and yet certain fact, that the French army really could not stir either to fight or to fly. The rear alone escaped.

At the decisive moment, when old Thomas of Erpingham, having drawn up the English army, threw his truncheon into the air, crying out, “Now strike!” and when the English had replied with a shout from ten thousand throats, the French army, to their great astonishment, still remained motionless. Horses and riders, all appeared enchanted, or dead in their steel cases. The fact was that the big war horses, loaded with their heavy riders and their steel caparisons, had sunk deep in the stiff soil, had become firmly fixed there, and only struggled out to advance slowly a few paces. Such is the acknowledgment of the English chroniclers; a modest acknowledgment, which does honour to their probity.

Lefebvre,[j] John de Vaurin[k] and Walsingham[m] expressly say that the field was nothing but viscid mud. “The place was soft and cut up by the horses, so that it was with great difficulty they could drag their feet out of the ground. The French were so loaded with harness that they could not advance. They had long and very weighty coats of mail, hanging below the knees; below these they had leg harness, and above them plate harness, and, moreover, helmets of proof. They were so much crowded together that they could not lift their arms to strike an enemy, except some of them in the front.”

Another historian of the English side, Titus Livy,[l] informs us that the French were drawn up thirty-two deep, whilst the English were ranged in but four ranks. This enormous depth of the French served no purpose; their thirty-two ranks consisted wholly, or almost so, of cavalry; the majority of whom, far from being able to act, did not even see the engagement; whereas every man of the English was efficient. Of the fifty thousand French, two or three thousand only could fight against the eleven thousand English, or at least might have done so if their horses could have extricated themselves from the mud.

To rouse those inert masses, the English archers discharged volleys of ten thousand arrows with extreme rapidity and pertinacity at their faces. The iron-clad horsemen stooped their heads, otherwise the arrows would have entered through their visors. Then, from the two wings of Tramecourt and Agincourt, two French squadrons began with much spurring to execute a clumsy charge, led by two excellent men-at-arms, Messire Clignet de Brabant and Messire William de Saveuse. The first squadron, advancing from Tramecourt, was unexpectedly taken in flank by a body of archers concealed in the woods; neither squadron reached the enemy.

Of twelve hundred men who began this charge, there remained not more than 120 when they came up with the English palisades. Most of them had fallen in the mud by the way, men and horses. Would to God that all had so fallen; but the others, whose horses were wounded, could no longer control the frantic animals, which rushed desperately back on the French ranks. The vanguard, far from being able to open and let them pass, was, as we have seen, so closely packed together that not a man could move. We may imagine the frightful accidents that took place in that dense mass, the horses wild with terror, backing and smothering each other, flinging off their riders, or crushing them under their armour as the iron masses clashed together. Then came the English to complete the havoc. Coming out from their line of stakes, and throwing down their bows and arrows, they advanced quite at their ease with axes, hatchets, heavy swords, and leaded clubs, to demolish that confused mountain of men and horses. In process of time they succeeded in clearing away the vanguard, and made their way, with the king at their head, to the second line of battle.

It was perhaps at this moment that eighteen French gentlemen made a dash at the king of England. They had made a vow, it was said, to die or bring down his crown; one of them struck off a point from it; all perished in the attempt. This on dit is not enough for the historians, who further adorn the tale, and convert it into a Homeric scene, in which the king fights over the body of his wounded brother, like Achilles over that of Patroclus. Then it is the duke of Alençon, commander of the French army, who kills the duke of York and cleaves the king’s crown. Being speedily surrounded, he yields; Henry holds out his hand to him; but he was already slain.[33] What is more certain is that the duke of Brabant arrived in haste at the second stage of the engagement. He was the duke of Burgundy’s own brother, and seems to have sought the field to clear the honour of his family. He arrived very late, but time enough to die. The brave prince had left all his men behind him, and had not even put on his coat of arms: instead of which he took his banner, made a hole in it, passed his head through it, and charged the English, who slew him instantly.

There remained but the rearguard, which soon dispersed. A great number of cavaliers, dismounted, but raised up again by their servants, had made their way out of the throng of battle and surrendered to the English. At this moment, word was brought the king that a French corps was pillaging his baggage; and at the same time he saw some Bretons or Gascons in the French rear, that seemed about to return to the charge against him. He was alarmed for the moment, especially as he saw his men embarrassed with so many prisoners, and instantly ordered every man to kill his captive. Not one obeyed; those soldiers without shoes or breeches, who held the greatest lords of France in their hands, and thought they had made their fortunes, were now ordered to ruin themselves. As they refused to comply, the king appointed two hundred men to act as executioners. “It was a sad spectacle,” says Lefebvre,[j] “to see those poor disarmed wretches, who had just received promise of quarter, slaughtered in cold blood, cut and hewed, head and face!” The alarm was groundless. It was only some pillagers of the neighbourhood, people of Agincourt, who, in spite of their master, the duke of Burgundy, had taken advantage of the opportunity. The battle being ended, the archers made haste to strip the slain, whilst they were yet warm. Many were dragged forth alive from beneath the corpses; among others, the duke of Orleans. Next day the victor, on his departure, killed, or made prisoners, all that remained alive.[34] “It was a piteous sight to see the great nobles who had there been slain, and who were already stark naked, like those who were born of men of no account.” An English priest was not less affected by the spectacle. “If this sight,” he says, “excited pity and compunction in us, who were strangers, and but passed through the country, how great was the sorrow for the native inhabitants. Oh, may the French nation come to peace and union with the English, and depart from its iniquities and its evil ways!” Sternness then prevails over compassion, and he subjoins: “Meanwhile, let his grief be turned upon his head.”

The English lost 1,600 men; the French 10,000, almost all gentlemen, 120 lords having banners. The list fills six large pages in Monstrelet, beginning with seven princes (Brabant, Nevers, D’Albret, Alençon, the three De Bar); then come lords without number, Dampierre, Vaudemont, Marle, Roussy, Salm, Dammartin, etc., the bailiffs of Vermandois, Mâcon, Sens, Senlis, Caen, and Meaux, and Montaigu, the brave archbishop of Sens, who fought like a lion.[35]

The duke of Burgundy’s son bestowed the charity of a grave on all the dead that lay naked on the field of battle. Twenty-five square rods of ground were measured out, and in that huge pit were laid all the bodies that had not been carried away, fifty-eight hundred men by the tale. The ground was consecrated, and a thick thorn hedge was planted round it, for fear of the wolves. There were but fifteen hundred prisoners, including the dukes of Orleans and Bourbon, the counts d’Eu, de Vendôme, and de Richelieu, the marshal de Boucicaut, Messire James d’Harcourt, Messire John de Craon, etc.[p]

MASSACRE OF THE ARMAGNACS IN PARIS (1418 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1415-1418 A.D.]]

With this rich capture, Henry hastened to re-embark at Calais. His army, reduced to ten thousand men, was unable to consider any further enterprise. The duke of Burgundy had taken no part whatever in the battle of Agincourt;[36] it was his enemies that brought about that shameful defeat. If he had made haste, he might have entered Paris as its master. D’Armagnac, the new constable and successor of D’Albret, showed more promptitude; he took possession of the capital, of the king and the dauphin his son, who was still a minor; that is to say, of the entire government. To recall a little popularity to the side of the party he showed a praiseworthy activity, borrowing ships from the Genoese, raising troops in France, and besieging Harfleur (1416). But funds were lacking and he fell back on the great resource of the times, debasement of money and false loans.

John the Fearless was always the patron of the poor. Paris murmured, and John the Fearless, to increase the fermentation, prevented the arrival of provisions in the city. He succeeded in carrying off Queen Isabella from Tours and having her declared regent. He forbade the cities, in his name, to pay the taxes imposed by D’Armagnac, and he entered into negotiations with the English (1417).

The latter had now returned. Henry V had taken Caen (1417), and like a conqueror who is sure of himself had divided his army into four divisions, the more quickly to accomplish his purpose. What, in fact, did he have to fear? The dukes of Brittany, Anjou, and Burgundy had signed treaties of neutrality with him. D’Armagnac could do nothing, for he was reduced to “borrowing from the saints,” in melting their shrines, with the people of his party fast abandoning him because they were not paid enough; it was necessary to protect Paris with the Parisians who hated and betrayed him.

One Perrinet Leclerc, iron merchant on the Petit Pont, had charge of the small gate at St. Germain. “His son,” says Monstrelet, “and some reckless young companions, who formerly had been punished for their escapades,” plotted to deliver the city over to the Burgundians. On the night of May 29th, 1418, Perrinet entered his father’s chamber while the old man slept and stole the keys from under the pillow. The sire de l’Isle-Adam informed in advance, was on the other side of the moat. He entered with eight hundred men, and the former partisans of the faction, the butchers, the slaughterers--all the people of the market flocked around him. Some Armagnacs tried to escape, taking the dauphin with them; but the greater part including the constable were thrown into prison, where their lives were soon in peril. The mob, which in 1413 had made its first appearance, reappeared on the scene in 1418 exasperated and furious with misery and uneasiness. Provisions failed and Paris was threatened with famine at the same time that ugly rumours circulated in the crowd; the Armagnacs were coming to assail such a gate, such a faubourg; the English, another. The cause of these misfortunes, they cried on every side, were those Armagnacs they had in their keeping. Vengeance must be had upon them and an end put to their schemes.

Sunday the 12th of June, 1418, the mob got under way and rushed to the prisons, Hôtel-de-Ville, Temple, St. Éloi, St. Magloire, St. Martin, and the Grand and Petit Châtelet, to murder indiscriminately everyone they found there. Armagnacs or not, by Monday morning sixteen hundred people had perished, killed in the prisons and streets. Their bodies were left there and “bad children played with them and dragged them about.” With that of the constable they amused themselves by raising a large strip of skin “to represent the white scarf of Armagnac.”

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY MASTER OF PARIS (1418 A.D.)

These dreadful occurrences had just taken place when John the Fearless returned with the queen to Paris, amidst the enthusiastic acclaims of the crowd, who believed he brought peace and abundance with him. Vain hope! Neither one nor the other was to come from the duke of Burgundy, but on the contrary to all preceding misfortunes there was added an epidemic which carried off in Paris and its environs fifty thousand persons. Again the fury of the mob became uncontrollable and wrought its vengeance on the wretched beings that had been overlooked in the prisons or sent there since June. The 31st of August an immense assemblage formed itself under the orders of the hangman Capeluche, and set out for the prisons. The duke of Burgundy hastened after them imploringly, and even went so far as to press the hand of Capeluche, but in vain. A new massacre took place. Some days after the duke sent the bloodthirsty mob after some Armagnacs, shut up, as he said, in Montlhéry, and as soon as they were gone he shut the gates of Paris behind them and had Capeluche beheaded.[b]

In becoming master of Paris, the duke of Burgundy had succeeded to all the embarrassments of the constable D’Armagnac. He had now in his turn to rule the great city, victual and maintain it, which could only be done by keeping the Armagnacs and the English at a distance--that is to say, by making war, re-establishing the taxes he had suppressed, and losing his popularity.

The equivocal part he had so long played, accusing others of treachery, while he himself was betraying his country, was now to come to a close. As the English were ascending the Seine and menacing Paris, he had no alternative but to forego his hold on the capital, or to give them battle. But by his eternal tergiversation and duplicity, he had enervated his own party, and was now powerless alike for peace or war.

The people of Rouen and Paris, who had chosen him for their leader, were Burgundians, indeed, and foes to the Armagnacs, but still more foes to the English. They were astonished, in their simplicity, to see that their good duke did nothing against the enemy of the kingdom. His warmest partisans began to say, as the Bourgeois de Paris[q] relates, that “he was, in all his proceedings, the slowest man that could be found.” The Armagnacs possessed the whole centre, Sens, Moret, Crécy, Compiègne, Montlhéry, a girdle of towns round Paris, Meaux, and Melun; that is to say, Marne and Haute Seine. The duke sent to Rouen all the forces he could spare without leaving Paris unprotected, namely, four thousand horse.

It had long been foreseen that Rouen would be invested. Henry V had approached it with extreme slowness. Not content with having two great English colonies in his rear, Harfleur and Caen, he had completed the conquest of lower Normandy by the capture of Falaise, Vire, St. Lô, Constance, and Évreux. He kept possession of the Seine, not only by Harfleur, but also by Pont de l’Arche. He had already re-established some degree of order, reassured the clergy, and invited the absentees to return, promising them support in case of their compliance, and declaring that otherwise he would dispose of their lands or their benefices. He reopened the exchequer and the other tribunals, and appointed his grand treasurer of Normandy supreme president over them. He reduced the tax on salt to almost nothing, “in honour,” says Rymer,[r] “of the Holy Virgin.”

SIEGE OF ROUEN (1418-1419 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1418-1419 A.D.]]

There were in Rouen fifteen thousand foot-soldiers and four thousand horse, in all, perhaps, sixty thousand souls--a whole people to feed. Henry, knowing he had nothing to fear, either from the dispersed Armagnacs, or from the duke of Burgundy, who had just besought of him another truce for Flanders, did not hesitate to divide his army into eight or nine bodies, so as to embrace the vast compass of Rouen. These bodies communicated with each other by means of trenches, which protected them from shot; whilst in the direction of the open country they were defended from a surprise by deep ditches set with thorns. He was prepared for an obstinate resistance, but his anticipation was surpassed. There was a strong Cabochian leaven in Rouen. Alain Blanchard, the chief of the arblast men, and the other Rouennese leaders, seem to have been connected with the Carmelite Pavilly, the Parisian orator of 1413. The Pavilly of Rouen was the canon Delivet. These men defended Rouen for seven months.

The king of England, thinking to terrify the inhabitants, had gibbets erected all round the town, and hanged the prisoners on them. He barred the Seine, too, with a wooden bridge, chains, and barges, so that nothing could pass. The Rouennese seemed reduced to extremities at an early period of the siege, and yet they held out six months longer; it was a miracle. They ate up the horses, dogs, and cats. When these were gone, those who could anywhere find a morsel of food, however filthy, took good care not to let it be seen; a thousand greedy wretches would otherwise have seized upon it. The most horrible necessity that befell the town was that of expelling all who could not fight, twelve thousand old men, women, and children. The piteous crowd presented themselves before the English intrenchments, and were received at the sword’s point. Repulsed alike by their friends and their enemies, they remained between the camp and the town, in the ditch, without any other food than the weeds they plucked. There they passed the whole winter, with nothing between them and the sky.

Meanwhile, the duke of Burgundy was beginning to put himself in motion. First, he went to Paris from St. Denis, where he made the king go through the solemn mockery of displaying the oriflamme, to remain a long while at Pontoise, and again a long while at Beauvais. There he received another message from Rouen by a man who had risked his life to convey it. It was the voice of an expiring town, and said merely that fifty thousand men had died of famine in Rouen and its environs. The duke of Burgundy was touched by this sad tale, and promised succour; then having got rid of the messenger, and feeling assured that he should hear no more of Rouen, he turned his back on Normandy, and took the king to Provins.

A surrender was then inevitable; but the king of England, desirous of making an example on account of so long a resistance, wished to have the inhabitants at his mercy. The Rouennese, who well knew what was the mercy of Henry V, resolved to undermine a wall, and to pass out that way by night with arms in their hands, trusting in God’s grace. The king and the bishops reconsidered the matter, and the archbishop of Canterbury personally offered the besieged the following terms of capitulation: (1) their lives to be spared, five men excepted (those of the five who were rich, or churchmen, got themselves out of the difficulty, and Alain Blanchard paid for all; the English were bent on an execution, in order to ratify the principle that the resistance had been rebellion against the lawful king); (2) for the same reason, Henry insured to the town all the privileges which the kings of France, his ancestors, had granted to it, “before the usurpation of Philip of Valois”; (3) it had to pay a tremendous fine--300,000 gold crowns--one-half before the end of January (it was already the 19th of that month), the other half in February, 1419. To squeeze all that from a depopulated, ruined town was no easy matter.

HENRY AND JOHN THE FEARLESS (1419 A.D.)

The king of England being occupied with the task of organising the country he had conquered, granted a truce to the two French parties, the Burgundians and the Armagnacs. He felt it necessary to refit his army; and, above all, to collect money and discharge his debts to the bishops, who had lent him funds for his long expedition.

Henry was so far from apprehending danger from the dauphin, that he was not afraid to displease the duke of Burgundy. The latter sought an interview with him, and proposed to him a marriage with a daughter of Charles VI, with Guienne and Normandy for a dower; but Henry required also Brittany as a dependence of Normandy, besides Maine, Anjou, and Touraine.

But the duke of Burgundy had about him persons who besought him to treat with them. They were followers of the dauphin, Barbazan, and Tannegui Duchâtel, the commanders of his troops. It was full time France should become self-reconciled, when her ruin was so imminent. The parliament of Paris, and that of Poitiers, laboured equally to that end; so, too, did the queen, who talked, wept, and found means to move his hardened soul.

On the 11th of July was beheld, at the bridge of Pouilly, this singular spectacle: the duke of Burgundy surrounded by the old servants of the duke of Orleans, and by the brothers and kinsmen of the Agincourt prisoners, and of the victims butchered in Paris. Of his own accord he knelt before the dauphin. A treaty of amity and mutual aid was signed and submitted to by both parties. But on the 29th of July, less than three weeks after the signing of the treaty, the Burgundian garrison of Pontoise, near Paris, suffered themselves to be surprised by the English; the inhabitants fled to Paris, which they filled with consternation, and this augmented when, on the 30th, the duke of Burgundy, carrying away the king from Paris to Troyes, passed beneath the walls of the capital, without making any other provision for the defence of the distracted Parisians than naming his nephew, a boy of fifteen, captain of the town.

[Sidenote: [1419-1420 A.D.]]

Seeing all this, the dauphin’s followers believed, rightly or wrongly, that the duke had a secret understanding with the English, and his servants told him, it is alleged, that he would perish in an interview which the dauphin sought with him. The dauphin’s people had set about erecting on the bridge of Montereau the gallery in which it was to take place; a long, tortuous wooden gallery, without any barrier in the middle, contrary to the custom always observed in that suspicious age. In spite of all this he persisted in his resolution to meet the dauphin; such was the wish of Dame de Giac, who never quitted him.

As the duke did not come in time, Tannegui Duchâtel went to fetch him. The duke hesitated no longer, but slapped him on the shoulder, saying: “Here is the man I trust in.” Duchâtel made him hasten his pace, for the dauphin, he said, was waiting. In this way he separated him from his suite, so that he entered the gallery along with none but the sire de Noailles, brother of the captal de Buch, who was in the service of the English, and had just taken Pontoise. Neither of them came out alive (September 10th, 1419).

The altercation which took place is variously related. Tannegui Duchâtel, however, averred that he had not struck the duke. Others boasted that they had done so. One of them, Le Bouteiller, said: “I said to the duke of Burgundy: ‘Thou didst cut off the hand of the duke of Orleans, my master; I am going to cut off thine.’” However little worthy of regret was the duke of Burgundy, his death did the dauphin immense mischief. John the Fearless and his party had both fallen very low, and in a little time there would have been no more avowed Burgundians. Everyone was beginning to despise and hate him; but from the moment he was killed all were again Burgundians.

THE TREATY OF TROYES (1420 A.D.)

We must not suppose that Paris easily admitted the foreigner, but extreme lassitude and inexpressible suffering made everyone only too happy to find a pretext for a settlement with Henry. Each man exaggerated to himself his feelings of pity and indignation. The shame of calling in the stranger was veiled by a fair show of just vengeance; but the real fact was that Paris yielded, because it was perishing of hunger. The queen yielded, because, after all, if her son was not to be king, her daughter, at least, would be queen. The duke of Burgundy’s son, Philip the Good, was the only person who acted sincerely; he had his father’s death to avenge. But he, too, doubtless, thought to find his advantage in the new order of things; the Burgundy branch would thrive by the ruin of the elder branch, by placing on the throne a stranger, who would never have more than one foot on the continent, and who, if he were wise, would govern France through the duke of Burgundy.

Paris then left the Burgundians, who again possessed full authority in the town, to do as they thought fit. Young Saint-Pol, nephew to the duke of Burgundy, and captain of Paris, was sent, in November, to the king of England, with Maître Eustace Aloy, “in the name of the city, the clergy, and the commune.” He received them extremely well, declaring that he desired nothing but the independent possession of what he had conquered, and the hand of the princess Catherine; and he said graciously: “Am I not myself of the blood royal of France? If I become the king’s son-in-law, I will defend him against all men living.” He obtained more than he demanded. His ambassadors, encouraged by the inclinations of the new duke of Burgundy, asserted their master’s right to the crown of France, and that right the duke acknowledged. The king of England had spent three years in conquering Normandy; the death of John the Fearless seemed to give him France in one day.

The treaty concluded at Troyes, May 20th, 1420, in the name of Charles VI, secured to the king of England the hand of the daughter of the king of France, and the reversion of the kingdom: “It is agreed that immediately after our decease the crown and realm of France shall remain and be perpetually to our said son King Henry and his heirs. The faculty and exercise of governing and ordering the public affairs of the said realm shall be and remain, during our life, to our said son King Henry, with the counsel of the nobles and sages of the said realm. During our life the letters pertaining to matters of justice shall be written and shall proceed under our name and seal; nevertheless, for as much as extraordinary cases may occur, it shall be competent to our son to write his letters to our subjects, wherein he shall order, prohibit, and command, on our behalf, and on his own, as regent.” After this, was not the subsequent article a mockery? “All conquests which shall be made by our said son king, over the disobedient, shall be and shall be made to our profit.”

This monstrous treaty concluded worthily with these lines, in which the king proclaimed the dishonour of his family, the father proscribed his son: “Considering the enormous crimes and misdemeanours perpetrated upon the said realm of France by Charles, styling himself (soi-disant) dauphin of Viennois, it is agreed that we, our said son the king, and also our very dear son Philip, duke of Burgundy, will in no wise treat concerning peace or concord with the said Charles, nor will we treat by ourselves or others, except with the consent and counsel of all and each of us three, and of the three estates of the two realms aforesaid.”

The mother received prompt payment for the shameful phrase, soi-disant dauphin. Isabella immediately had 2,000 francs a month assigned to her, payable out of the mint at Troyes. For this price she denied her son, and gave up her daughter. The English took from the king of France, at one stroke, both his kingdom and his child. The poor girl was forced to wed a master, and brought him for dower her brother’s ruin.[p]

HENRY’S STRUGGLE WITH THE DAUPHIN (1420-1422 A.D.)

Such was the tenor of the Treaty of Troyes, so glorious to Henry, yet so impracticable of accomplishment, that it must be doubted whether there was any sincerity in the French signers of it. To be avenged of the dauphin, and to crush him by the assistance of England, was evidently the foremost thought, the first desire. But it is scarcely credible that the duke of Burgundy looked forward to continuing, after the accomplishment of his vengeance, the faithful vassal of the house of Lancaster. The arrangement of one king governing the two countries was plainly impracticable. And that Henry himself could have entertained it only shows how the most vigorous intellects may allow their perspicacity and sense to be clouded by success and superstition. He was well aware that his new position could only be preserved by force of arms. On the occasion of his marriage with the princess Catherine, which took place on June 2nd, the knights of both countries were for celebrating the event by a tournament. But he forbade the rival combat, and told those who proposed it to join him in the siege of Sens, where they might exercise their prowess against the Armagnacs. Sens made but a trifling resistance.[h] Next, this implacable hunter of men hurried to Montereau, and not being able to reduce the castle, he had his prisoners hanged by the ditch sides.

With all his impetuosity he was forced to have patience before Melun, where the brave Barbazan detained him many months. The king of England, employing all the means of which he could avail himself, took Charles VI and the two queens to the siege, presenting himself as the son-in-law of the king of France, speaking in his father-in-law’s name, and using his wife as a bait and a snare. All these clever devices were ineffectual. The besieged resisted valiantly; obstinate conflicts took place round the walls, and beneath them, in the mines and countermines, and Henry did not spare his own person. At last, however, provisions failed, and the garrison were constrained to surrender. Henry, according to his custom, accepted the capitulation, and put to death several citizens, all the Scotchmen who were in the place, and even two monks.

During the siege he had got the Burgundians to deliver up to him Paris and the four fortresses, Vincennes, the Bastille, the Louvre, and the Tour de Nesle. He made his entry in December, riding between the king of France and the duke of Burgundy. The latter was dressed in mourning, in token of grief and vengeance, perhaps also from a feeling of shame for the unworthy part he played in thus introducing the foreigner. The king of England was accompanied by his brothers, the dukes of Clarence and Bedford, the duke of Exeter, the earl of Warwick, and all his lords. The king of England was well received in Paris. He entered into formal possession as regent of France, by assembling the estates on the 6th of December, 1420, and making them sanction the Treaty of Troyes.

[Sidenote: [1420-1421 A.D.]]

That the son-in-law might be sure of inheriting, it was necessary that the son should be proscribed. The duke of Burgundy and his mother presented themselves before the king of France, sitting as judge in the Hôtel St. Pol, to make “great plaint and clamour of the piteous death of the late duke John of Burgundy.” The king of England was seated on the same bench as the king of France. Messire Nicholas Raulin demanded in the name of the duke of Burgundy and his mother that Charles, styling himself dauphin, Tannegui Duchâtel, and all the murderers of the duke of Burgundy, should be carted through the streets, with torches in their hands, to make amende honorable. The king’s advocate spoke to the same effect, and the university supported the demand. The king authorised the prosecution, and Charles was cried and cited at the Marble Table, to appear within three days before the parliament. He did not put in an appearance and was condemned by default, sentenced to banishment, and stripped of all right to the crown of France (January 3rd, 1421).

The cumbrous and devouring army which Henry brought with him was but too necessary to him. His brother Clarence was defeated and killed, with two or three thousand English, in Anjou (battle of Baugé, March 23rd, 1421). In the north even the count d’Harcourt had taken up arms against the English, and was overrunning Picardy. Saintrailles and La Hire were advancing by forced marches to combine with him. All the men of family were gradually going over to the side of Charles VII, to the party that made bold expeditions and adventurous forays. The peasants, it is true, who were the sufferers by these pillaging exploits, would in the long run declare for a master who could and would protect them.

The ferocity of the old Armagnac marauders was of service to Henry’s cause. He did a popular thing in besieging Meaux, the captain of which town, the bastard De Vaurus, a sort of ogre, had filled the country round with indescribable terror. But as the bastard and his men expected no mercy, they defended themselves with desperate determination. They detained the English the whole winter, eight long months, before Meaux, till cold, want, and pestilence consumed that fine army. The siege began on the 6th of October, and on the 18th of December, Henry, who already saw his forces diminishing, wrote urgently for fresh soldiers to Germany and Portugal. Englishmen were probably more costly to him than those foreigners. To induce the German mercenaries to take service with him rather than with the dauphin, he caused them to be told, among other things, that he would pay them in better coin.

He could not reckon on the duke of Burgundy. That prince appeared for a short while at the siege of Meaux, but soon withdrew, under pretence of going into Burgundy, and obliging the towns in his duchy to accept the Treaty of Troyes. Henry had good reason to believe that the duke himself had secretly instigated their resistance to a treaty which annulled the contingent rights of the house of Burgundy to the crown, as well as those of the dauphin, the duke of Orleans, and all the French princes. And why had young Philip made such a sacrifice to the friendship of the English? Because he thought he needed their aid to avenge his father and beat his enemy. But it was much rather they who had need of him. Fortune had forsaken them. Whilst the duke of Clarence was getting himself beaten in Anjou, the duke of Burgundy had been brilliantly successful in Picardy, where he had come up with the dauphin’s partisans, Saintrailles and Gamaches, before they could form a junction with d’Harcourt, and had defeated and made them prisoners.

[Sidenote: [1421-1422 A.D.]]

During that interminable siege of Meaux, whilst Henry was seeing his fine army dissolving away around him, word was brought him that the queen had been delivered of a boy at Windsor Castle. He evinced no joy, and comparing his own destiny with that of the child, he said, with prophetic sadness: “Henry of Monmouth will have had a short reign and will have conquered much; Henry of Windsor will reign long and will lose all. God’s will be done!”

Henry was still young, but he had toiled much in this world, his time for rest was come; he had never had any since his birth. He was attacked, after his winter campaign, with an acute irritation of the bowels, a malady very common in those days. Being warned by the physicians that his end was at hand, he commended his son to his brothers, and gave them two wise counsels; first, to conciliate the duke of Burgundy, and secondly, in any treaty that might be made, to manage always so as to keep Normandy.

He died at Vincennes on the 31st of August, 1422; Charles VI followed him on the 21st of October. The people of Paris shed tears for their poor mad king as freely as the English for their victorious Henry V. “The whole people,” says the Bourgeois de Paris,[q] “were in the streets weeping and crying, as if each had lost the friend he most loved. Truly, their lamentations were like those of the prophet, ‘Quomodô sedet sola civitas plena populo!’ The petty folk of Paris cried, ‘Oh, most dear prince, never shall we have one so good! Never shall we see thee more! Cursed be death! We shall never have aught but war since thou hast left us. Thou art gone to rest; we remain in tribulation and sorrow.’”

Charles VI was carried to St. Denis, “poorly accompanied for a king of France. There were only his chamberlain, his chancellor, his confessor, and some subordinate officers.” One prince only attended the funeral, and that was the duke of Bedford. When the corpse was lowered into the grave, the ushers-at-arms broke their wands and threw them into the grave, and reversed their maces. Then Berri, king-at-arms of France, cried out, over the grave, “May it please God to have mercy on the soul of the very high and very excellent prince Charles, king of France, sixth of the name, our natural and sovereign lord.”[p] And then he added, “God grant long life to Henry, by the grace of God, king of France and of England, our sovereign lord.” About the same time at Mehun-sur-Yèvre, in Berri, some French knights unfurled the royal banner, crying, “Long live King Charles, seventh of the name, by the grace of God, king of France.”[b]

WOES OF THE PEOPLE--THE DANSE MACABRE

[Sidenote: [1418-1424 A.D.]]

After having spoken of the death of the king, we must mention that of the people. From 1418 to 1422, the depopulation was frightful. The history of those dismal years runs in a murderous circle; war leads to famine, famine to pestilence, and pestilence again brings round famine. It is like that night of the Exodus, in which the angel passes and repasses, touching each house with the sword.

When men have come to that pass they weep no more; there is an end to tears, or there mingle even with tears gleams of hellish joy and savage laughter. It was the most tragical characteristic of the times that in the gloomiest moments there were alternations of frantic gaiety. The beginning of that long series of evils, “of that woeful dance,” as the Bourgeois de Paris[q] says, was the madness of Charles VI, and contemporaneously therewith the too famous masquerade of the satyrs, the piously burlesque mysteries, and the basoche farces.[37]

The year in which the duke of Orleans was murdered was distinguished by the organisation of the corporation of minstrels. That corporation, quite indispensable of course in so joyous a period, became important and respected. Treaties of peace were cried through the streets with a mighty strumming of violins; hardly any six months passed in which a peace was not cried and sung. The eldest son of Charles VI, the first dauphin, was an indefatigable player on the harp and the spinet. He had a great staff of musicians; and in addition to these, he used to call in the aid of the choir-boys of Notre Dame. He sang, danced, and “balled” (balait), night and day, and that even in the year of the Cabochians, whilst they were killing his friends. He killed himself, too, by dint of singing and dancing.

It seems an ascertained fact that in the fourteenth century dancing became involuntary and maniacal in many countries. The violent processions of the Flagellants set the first example. The great epidemics, and the terrible and lasting shock they gave to the nerves of the survivors, easily gave occasion to St. Vitus’ dance. These phenomena are, as we know, contagious. The spectacle of the convulsions acted with so much the more force, as there was nothing in men’s souls but convulsion and vertigo; and then the sick and the hale danced together promiscuously. They would catch each other violently by the hand, in the streets and the churches, and foot it round in a ring. Many a one who at first laughed at this sight, or looked on coldly, became at last bewildered, his head reeled, and he, too, reeled and danced with the rest. The rings went on multiplying, interlacing; they became bigger and bigger, more and more heady, fast, and furious, as though they were huge coiling reptiles, that momently swelled to view. There was no stopping the monster, but its joints might be lopped; the electric chain was broken by one falling with feet and fists on some one of the dancers. The rude dissonance interrupting the harmony, they found themselves free, otherwise they would have gone on reeling until utterly exhausted, and have danced themselves to death.

This phenomenon of the fourteenth century does not occur again in the fifteenth; but in the latter we find, in England, France, and Germany, a strange amusement, which reminds us of those great popular dances of the sick and dying. It was called the dance of the dead, or danse macabre. It was a great favourite with the English, who introduced it into France.

The spectacle of the dance of the dead was enacted in Paris in 1424, in the cemetery of the Innocents. That narrow space in which the enormous city for so many ages accumulated the remains of almost all its inhabitants had been at first both a cemetery and a laystall, haunted at night by robbers, and in the evening by wantons, who plied their trade among the tombs. Philip Augustus enclosed it with walls, and to purify it dedicated it to St. Innocent, a child crucified by the Jews. In the fourteenth century the churches were already very full, and it became the fashion among the good citizens to bury their dead in the cemetery. Such was the suitable theatre of the danse macabre. It was begun in September, 1424, when the heat had diminished, and the first rain had rendered the smell of the place less offensive. The performances lasted many months.

Whatever disgust both the place and the spectacle might inspire, it was matter suggestive of much thought to see in that fatal period, in a town so frequently and so cruelly visited by death, the hungry, sickly, scarce living multitude, merrily making death itself a matter of spectacle, attending with insatiable avidity to its moralising buffooneries, and enjoying them so heartily as to tread heedlessly upon the bones of their fathers, and on the gaping graves they were themselves about to fill.[p]

THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS AND THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE

[Sidenote: [1414-1424 A.D.]]

A very different phase of life which demands at least a passing notice is that which clustered about the wonderful University of Paris.[a] As early as the thirteenth century, the university shone in all its glory. Born in the shadow of the cloister of the bishopric, and primarily confounded with the ancient cathedral college of the town, it had obtained, little by little, immunities and privileges by favour of which it had grown and had reached a point where it was dependent upon no one but the court of Rome. Among the popes who conferred the most important privileges may be cited Alexander III, Innocent III, and his successor Honorius III, all promoters of the progress of knowledge, all jealously seeking to retain for the church that superiority of studies and learning to which its power was bound. The University of Paris rose rapidly above the universities of Italy, the only ones with which it was then in serious rivalry. It became the most important ecclesiastical and scientific college of Europe, the school whence the high clergy of France was recruited, as well as that of a large part of Christianity. It belonged to the church by its creation, by its studies in which theology predominated, and by its object, which was to prepare the learned candidates for the obtention of livings. For all its rights it depended on the holy see, which subjected it to visits and regulations. Meanwhile it formed in the bosom of the church itself a vast corporation (universitas), governing itself by its own laws with an extended liberty.

It was divided into four faculties: arts or philosophy which comprised nearly all the known sciences; theology; decree or canonical law; and medicine. The faculty of arts had a particular celebrity; it is to it that the capital of France owes its appellation of the Modern Athens. The faculty of theology was not less celebrated after the lectures of Roscellinus and Abelard. That of law was incomplete, since civil law, which restored to honour the work of the great Italian jurists, was taught in Paris only subsidiarily. It even ceased to exist at the beginning of the year 1220, although the laws of Justinian had found able interpreters in France as well as in Italy. The decree of the pope, Honorius III, to suppress its instruction in Paris, had probably its entire concentration in the college of Boulogne for an object. In any case, that suppression was only for a time, and a little later at Orleans a special university was founded, called the University of Law. As to the study and profession of medicine, it is well known that in the Middle Ages it was a prerogative of the religious orders almost exclusively.

Each faculty held special assemblies, in which the masters and graduates had deliberative voice. The four faculties met once a year to elect their rector, the formulæ of which elections, determined with infinite care, in order to guarantee liberty of vote and prevent intrigue, presented a great analogy to the election of a pope. Thus the University of Paris possessed a liberal government, with a regular hierarchy, where degrees conferred powers, and where superior intelligence ruled.

The pope gave it its highest protection. He made the rules of study, intervened in disputes with the civil authorities. The principal ecclesiastical privilege of the University of Paris was that of being dependent on no bishop, and having its own jurisdiction. Its members could not be excommunicated except by the court of Rome.[g]

It is one of the strangest contrasts of history that while France was at the lowest ebb of its national history, the University of Paris was attempting to carry out one of the greatest revolutions in the history of Europe. The conciliar movement in the church, which produced such great international gatherings as the councils of Constance and of Bâle, and which aimed to limit papal absolutism by something like a parliamentary system, was due to the work of men like Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, and Pierre D’Ailly, scholar and prelate. It was universally admitted that abuses had crept into the administration of the church. There was evidently something wrong when, while Frenchmen were perishing from famine, and France was on the verge of ruin, the papal court at Avignon luxuriated on a revenue that was more than royal, and a pope (John XXII) could accumulate a treasure of eighteen millions of gold florins, and jewels and vestments estimated at seven millions more.

But the evils which date from the residence at Avignon were increased twofold during the schism. All Christendom was in doubt how this would end. For the civil war in the church had divided the countries under rival obediences. France, Scotland, and Spain adhered to the pope at Avignon; and England, Germany, and Italy obeyed the Italian pope.

At first they tried to induce the rivals to resign; and Pedro de Luna, who was elected pope at Avignon as Benedict XIII, won the high office by declaring that he would resign as easily as take off his hat. But the wily prelate, after his election, declared that no earthly power could dethrone him, and for more than a decade defied the attempts of reformers to achieve union. It was then that in the University of Paris the theologians began agitation for a universal council, as supreme over the pope. It is said that a German doctor began the movement, but the credit has gone to France. First at Pisa and then at Constance, the great parliaments of the church took in hand the reformation.

In the later council (1414-1418) union was achieved by the deposition of opposing popes and the election of Martin V (see volume on The Papacy), but the decree Frequens which demanded regular meeting of councils in the future, was gradually lost sight of in the following pontificates, and the great experiment of a constitutional church was a failure. That such an attempt should be made while France was in the throes of this great Hundred Years’ War, and that mostly by Frenchmen, shows that alongside of the story of carnage, crime, and superstition, there were signs of intellectual life and earnest effort of reformers, which are suggestive in the age of Wycliffe and Huss.

A strange page of history is opened here. Sigismund, emperor of Germany, who presided at the council of Constance, was anxious to play a great part in the world’s affairs. He took advantage of the great international assemblage in his dominions to attempt to put himself at the head of a European confederacy to fight the Turks, who were advancing along the Danube.

To accomplish this he made a journey into France and England to try to prevent the war. His visit took place just before the fatal invasion of Henry V which brought the victory of Agincourt.[38] To raise the money for that journey Sigismund made over the mark of Brandenburg to Frederick of Hohenzollern, burggraf of Nuremberg, and thus founded the power of the Hohenzollern.

Henry V, was willing to accede to Sigismund’s plans, but although he even offered the succession of Hungary as a bribe, the court of France refused to make the peace he desired, and Sigismund’s great effort at European concord resulted in only one thing--the foundation of the great dynasty which rules in Germany to-day. France and England went their own way, bringing mutual disaster for another generation.[a]

FOOTNOTES

[30] [This old French word denoted either a song or a particular kind of dance.]

[31] Doubtless a monkish exaggeration.

[32] [At the siege of Arras the harquebus was used for the first time.]

[33] This embellishment is of Monstrelet’s[n] contrivance. He places it apart from the account of the battle after the long list of the killed. Lefebvre, an eye-witness, could not make up his mind to copy Monstrelet in this place.

[34] Lefebvre[j] and Monstrelet[n] are the authorities for this statement. De Barante[o] says without naming his source, “Henry V put a stop to the carnage and caused the wounded to receive relief.” [Tyler,[s] after reviewing the evidence, declares that “Henry did not stain his victory by any act of cruelty. His character comes out of the investigation untarnished by a suspicion of his having wantonly shed the blood of a single fellow-creature.”]

[35] [For other views of the battle of Agincourt see our history of England.]

[36] [But neither for that matter had, in person, the count d’Armagnac. The princes had refused the aid of any civic corps, and as Burgundy could command but the town folk of Flanders and Picardy, his offers of help were rejected. The responsibility of the battle lay therefore entirely with the Armagnacs; but, as Crowe[h] says, “to the honour of the Burgundian party, more of its princes, than of the Armagnacs, fell on the field of Agincourt.”]

[37] [In 1402 letters-patent were issued by the king permitting the bourgeois of Paris to constitute themselves into a religious fraternity for the representation of the “Mystery of the Passion.” This is the origin of the modern tragic theatre. The “morality plays,” or comedies, were created by the clerks of the basoche--the corporation formed by the clerks of the procureurs of the parliament of Paris. This body exercised extensive jurisdiction over its members--its head bore the title of “king.” In the reign of Charles VI playing-cards were perfected, and about 1420 Jan van Eyck, called Jean of Bruges, discovered a drying oil, which has caused him to be regarded as the inventor of oil painting. Hitherto men had used distemper, fresco, gum, paste, or white of egg.[b]]

[38] [It was Sigismund’s grandfather, the blind King John of Bohemia, whose death at Crécy gave the famous motto, Ich dien, to the prince of Wales.]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VIII. THE RESCUE OF THE REALM

No longer on St. Denis will we cry, But Joan la Pucelle shall be France’s saint.

--SHAKESPEARE.

[Sidenote: [1422-1427 A.D.]]

The king proclaimed at St. Denis was an infant of ten months, grandson, on his mother’s side, of Charles VI. His two uncles ruled in his name,--one the duke of Bedford in France; the other the duke of Gloucester in England. This child was recognised as sovereign of the kingdom of France by parliament, by the university, by the first prince of the blood, Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, and by the dowager queen, Isabella of Bavaria. Paris, Île-de-France, Picardy, Artois, Flanders, Champagne, and Normandy--that is to say, almost all the country north of the Loire--and Guienne, south of that river, obeyed him.

The king proclaimed in Berri, sole surviving son of Charles VI, was a youth of nineteen years, graceful bearing, but weak in body, pale of figure, of small courage, and ever in fear of violent death; and besides, adds Chastelain,[d] “a good Latinist, a fine raconteur, and most wise in council.” Such indeed he was later on; but for the present and for many years to come he showed spirit only for his own pleasures and a sort of dull apathy in matters of state and in the face of peril. His authority was recognised only in Touraine, Orleans, Berri, Bourbonnais, Auvergne, Languedoc, Dauphiné, and Lyonnais. Indifferent to disaster, he was resigned to hearing himself called derisively “the king of Bourges.” To Poitiers he transported his council, his parliament, and his university. But Bourges and Poitiers were still great towns in his eyes; he dragged his little court from castle to castle, completely submissive to the sire de Giac, to Le Camus de Beaulieu, to the sire de la Trémouille, and willingly enduring the all-powerful influence of his mother-in-law Yolande of Anjou.[b]

The young king, brought up by the Armagnacs, found in them his chief support, and so shared their unpopularity. These Gascons were the most veteran soldiers in France, but the greatest and most cruel plunderers. The hatred they inspired in the north would have been sufficient to create there a Burgundian and English party. The brigands of the south seemed more of foreigners than the foreigners.

Charles VII next made trial of the foreigners themselves, of those who had gained experience in the English wars. He called the Scotch to his aid. These were the most mortal enemies of England, and their hatred might be relied on as much as their courage. The greatest hopes were built on these auxiliaries. A Scotchman was made constable of France; another, count of Touraine. Notwithstanding, however, their incontestable bravery, they had often been beaten in England. They were not only beaten in France, at Crevant and Verneuil (1423, 1424), but destroyed: the English took care that none of them escaped. It was asserted that the Gascons, out of jealousy against the Scotch, had not supported them.

The English narrowly escaped giving Charles VII an ally far more useful and important than the Scotch--the duke of Burgundy. So little concert was there between the two brothers, that at the selfsame time Bedford married the duke of Burgundy’s sister, and Gloucester was commencing war against him. A word as to this romantic story.

The duke of Burgundy, count of Flanders, never thought himself secure of his Flanders until he should have flanked it with Holland and Hainault. These two counties had fallen into the hands of a girl, the countess Jacqueline, widow of the dauphin John. The duke of Burgundy married her to a cousin of his own, a sickly boy. Jacqueline, who was a handsome young woman, did not resign herself to so irksome a fate, but left her sorry mate, nimbly crossed the Straits, and herself proposed marriage to the duke of Gloucester. Gloucester committed the folly of accepting the proposal (1423). He espoused Jacqueline’s cause, thus beginning against the duke of Burgundy, the indispensable ally of England, a war which, for the latter, was a question of actual existence, a war without treaty, in which the sovereign of Flanders would risk his last man. The incensed duke of Burgundy concluded a secret alliance with the duke of Brittany, and then he made pecuniary demands on Bedford. What could Bedford do? He had no money; instead of it, he offered an inestimable possession worth more than any sum of money--his whole barrier on the north (September, 1423). The bands of Charles VII came and lodged themselves in the very heart of English France, in Normandy; a pitched battle was fought before they could be expelled. It took place on the 17th of August, 1424, at Verneuil. In June, Bedford had regained the good will of the duke of Burgundy by an enormous concession, having pledged his eastern frontier to him, Bar-sur-Seine, Auxerre, and Mâcon.

All northern France was greatly in danger of thus falling bit by bit into the duke of Burgundy’s hand; but suddenly the wind shifted. The sapient Gloucester, in the midst of this war begun for Jacqueline, forgets that he has married her, forgets that at that very moment she is besieged in Bergues, and weds another, a fair English woman. This new folly had the effect of an act of wisdom. The duke of Burgundy consented to be reconciled to the English, and made a show of believing all Bedford told him; the essential thing for him was to be able to despoil Jacqueline, and occupy Hainault, Holland, and afterwards Brabant, the succession to which could not but soon be opened.

Charles VII, therefore, derived little advantage from this event which seemed likely to be so profitable to him. The only benefit that accrued to him from it was that the count de Foix, governor of Languedoc, comprehended that the duke of Burgundy would sooner or later turn against the English, and declared that his conscience obliged him to recognise Charles VII as legitimate king. He placed Languedoc in subjection to him, with the clear understanding that the king should draw from it neither money nor troops, and should not in any wise interfere with the little royalty which the count de Foix had contrived for himself in that province. The friendship of the houses of Anjou and Lorraine seemed to promise more direct advantage to the party of Charles VII. The head of the house of Anjou was then a woman, Queen Yolande, relict of Louis II, duke of Anjou, count of Provence, and pretender to the throne of Naples; she was the daughter of the king of Aragon, by a lady of Lorraine, of the house of Bar. The English having committed the egregious mistake of troubling the houses of Anjou and Aragon, as regarded their pretensions to the throne of Naples, Yolande formed against them an alliance of Anjou and Lorraine with Charles VII. She married her daughter to the young king, and her son René to the only daughter of the duke of Lorraine. Yolande was of service to her son-in-law. By her sage counsels she removed the old Armagnacs from about him; she had the address to win the Bretons back to him, and caused the constable’s sword to be conferred on the count of Richemont, brother of the duke of Brittany.

Charles VII, combining together the Bretons, Gascons, and Dauphinois, had thenceforth the real military strength of France on his side. Spain sent him Aragonese, Italy Lombards. But the war sped feebly for all that; money was wanting, and union still more so. The king’s favourites frustrated Richemont’s first enterprises; not, indeed, with impunity, for the stern Breton put to death two of them within six months, without form of trial. Since a favourite was necessary to the king, he gave him one of his own choosing, young La Trémouille, and the first use the latter made of his ascendency was to dismiss Richemont. The king, strange to say, forbade his constable to fight for him; the king’s men and Richemont’s were on the point of drawing their swords against each other. Thus Charles VII found his cause less advanced than ever.[c]

Meanwhile the towns were resisting the foreign domination. La Ferté-Bernard underwent in 1422 a four months’ siege and only yielded to the earl of Salisbury in the last extremity. In 1427 the English, in order to get closer to the Loire, sent three thousand men-at-arms to besiege Montargis on the Loing. The town had only a small garrison under the brave La Faille, but the inhabitants supported him well.[b]

MONSTRELET DESCRIBES THE SIEGE OF MONTARGIS (1427 A.D.)

Shortly after their arrival the English built some bridges and passages over the river. This being done, they began to approach the town and fortress of Montargis, and attacked and destroyed several engines of war. But despite this, the besieged defended themselves valiantly, and kept the besiegers thus employed for the space of about two months. During this time tidings were carried to King Charles of France, which informed him that, if he did not shortly send succour to the besieged, they must needs yield to their adversaries. This news came to the knowledge of King Charles, and it is said that king summoned a council, where it was concluded and determined to send help to Montargis, or, at least, to reinforce it with men and provisions. The charge of the relief was bestowed upon the bastard John of Orleans and Étienne de Vignolles, known as La Hire.

[Sidenote: [1427-1428 A.D.]]

They, with about sixteen hundred fighting men and skilful soldiers, took the road with much display, with the intention of victualling the said town of Montargis, and raising the siege. When they had come within half a league, as secretly as they could, they took counsel together and determined to make an attack upon some of the camps of the English, on both sides of the town. They had with them some of the garrison of the said town of Montargis who would direct them. They attacked the camps of the English with much violence (which attack the English had not guarded against), crying, “Montjoie St. Denis!” and began to fire a number of the camps, and killed and captured several of the English. Such was the spirit they put into their work, that the camp of Sir John de la Pole was overthrown in a short space of time; but the same lord and about eight others escaped in a small boat. The water was so high at that time that the bridges the English had made were covered, so that when they attempted to escape they fell beside these bridges and were drowned.

Whilst this was going on, the bastard of Orleans was on the other side of the town, attacking on foot the camp of Henry Basset, and there being much to do, the others, when they had overthrown the first camp, came to his assistance. The English, perceiving that the victory was not to them, began to retreat to the camp of the earl of Warwick, and crossed a bridge so hastily and in such numbers that the bridge gave way beneath them, and there perished miserably very many; for besides this the inhabitants of Montargis, who had sallied forth boldly to the help of their own people, slaughtered and captured many, and did not spare them.

Meanwhile, the earl of Warwick assembled his men as quickly as he could. But when he learned the great loss and pitiable defeat of his host, of which from a thousand to fifteen hundred men were either killed or captured, he departed and went his way, with the remainder of his men of which the greater number were on foot. They retreated to the castle of Landou in Nemours, and to other places under their suzerainty.[e] This was the first time that the bastard of Orleans was intrusted with a command of any importance, and he did not fail to justify his brilliant début.[f]

THE SIEGE OF ORLEANS (1428-1429 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1428-1429 A.D.]]

The following year (1428) Bedford resolved to push military operations vigorously and to force the barrier of the Loire. In the month of June the earl of Salisbury debarked at Calais with six thousand of the best soldiers England ever had in France; Bedford joined him there with four thousand men drawn from garrisons in Normandy, and their army took Jargeau, Janville, Meung-sur-Loire, Thoury, Beaugency, Marchenoir, and La Ferté-Hubert, thus approaching Orleans step by step.

Orleans was the gate to Berri, the Bourbonnais and Poitou. This taken, the “king of Bourges” would become the king of Dauphiné and Languedoc. October 12th, 1428, the English appeared before its ramparts and at once formed around the place a series of bastilles, each of which was commanded by one of the first lords of England--by William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk; the “English Achilles,” Lord Talbot; and William Glasdale, who had sworn to kill everyone in Orleans. Salisbury was commander-in-chief. The Orléanais, who had been expecting the siege, had fortified the heart of their town by burning the suburbs. Their captain was the sire de Gaucourt whom the English had held captive for thirteen years, because he had persisted in defending Harfleur against them. The garrison did not number more than five hundred at the most, but they were all hardened warriors. Moreover, the bourgeois were looking out for themselves. They had formed thirty-four companies--and each undertook the defence of one of the thirty-four towers of the wall.

Artillery was beginning to play a great rôle in battles and sieges. That of the besiegers was badly handled, and the bourgeois laughed at the unskilful English cannoneers who threw eighty-pound balls into the town and killed no one.[39] The Orléanais artillery was very different. It was composed of seventy pieces, aimed by twelve master cannoneers, expert at firing. Each cannon had its name and its own particular duty. The good cannon Riflard (Clean Sweep) killed its man at every shot.[b] Another one, too, was the celebrated culverin of a skilful Lorrainian cannoneer, Maître Jean; the two, man and culverin, made the finest hits. The English came at last to know this Maître Jean; he never ceased killing them except to make game of them: from time to time he would drop down and pretend to be dead; his body was carried off into the town; the English were in ecstasy when--behold! back he would come, alive and merry, and fire upon them worse than ever.[c]

But the luckiest shot of all was fired by a child [according to Grafton, the son of a gunner who had gone to dinner]. This schoolboy came across a fully loaded piece on the rampart. He lit the fuse and ran away. The ball went straight into the face of the earl of Salisbury, who was standing on one of the bastilles and to whom, at that very instant, William Glasdale was saying, “My lord, behold your town.”

The English commander was dead; and the next day the bastard of Orleans, the handsome, brave Dunois, entered the town with the best knights of the time--La Hire, Saintrailles, Marshal de Broussac, and six or seven hundred soldiers. Others followed until little by little seven thousand were gathered in Orleans.[b]

The “Battle of the Herrings” (1429 A.D.)

The siege continued with various success to the 12th of February, 1429, with sundry episodes in the way of sorties, feigned attacks, conflicts about provision entering the town, and even duels, to amuse the two parties and try their respective mettle. They went on slowly completing their fortifications, and it was to be foreseen that the town would be at last almost entirely shut in.

However careless the king might appear about saving the appenage of the duke of Orleans, it was clear that, once that city had fallen, the English would advance unhindered into Poitou, Berri, and the Bourbonnais, would live at the expense of those provinces, and ruin the south after having ruined the north. The duke de Bourbon sent his eldest son, the count de Clermont, under whom some Scotch forces and some lords of Touraine, Poitou, and Auvergne were to succour Orleans, cast provisions into it, and even hinder the arrival of provisions in the English camp. The duke of Bedford sent a supply from Paris under the conduct of the brave Sir John Fastolf; and he had availed himself of the old Cabochian enmity of Paris to Orleans, to add to his English detachment a considerable number of Parisian arblast men, and the provost of Paris himself. They took with them three hundred wagon-loads of provisions, particularly herrings, an article indispensable in Lent. Troops and wagons all marched in narrow file, and nothing could have been easier than to break their line and destroy them. The Gascon La Hire, who was in advance of the French, burned with impatience to fall upon them, but received express orders not to do so, from the prince, who was advancing slowly with the main body of his force.

Meanwhile, the English had taken the alarm, and Fastolf had drawn his men together under cover of the wagons and a line of sharp stakes which these provident English always carried with them. The English archers were posted on the right, the Parisian arblast men on the left. In spite of all the count de Clermont could say, his men were carried away by their impetuous rancour; the Scotch leaped from their saddles to fight the English on foot, and the Armagnac Gascons rushed upon their old enemies the Parisians; but the latter stood their ground. The Scotch and Gascons having thus broken their ranks, the English issued from behind their temporary ramparts, pursued them, and killed three or four hundred. The count de Clermont remained immovable. La Hire was so furious that he turned back upon the English who dispersed in the pursuit, and killed some of them. The count’s party had to return to Orleans after this unlucky engagement, to which the Orléanais, always satirical, gave the name of the “battle of the Herrings”; in fact, the balls had burst the barrels; and the field was strewn with herrings more than with the slain.

Slight as was this check, it discouraged everyone. The most knowing hastened to quit a town that seemed lost. The young count de Clermont had the weakness to withdraw with his two thousand men; the admiral and the chancellor of France thought it would be a sad thing if the king’s great officers should be taken by the English, and they too departed. As the men-at-arms no longer hoped for human aid, and the priests did not reckon very confidently on divine succour, the archbishop of Rheims took himself off, and even the bishop of Orleans left his flock to defend themselves as they could.

They all went away on the 18th of February, assuring the citizens that they would soon return in strength. Nothing could stay them. The bastard of Orleans, who with equal skill and valour defended the appenage of his house, had in vain been telling them since the 12th that a miraculous succour should be looked for, that a daughter of God, who promised to save the town, was coming from the marches of Lorraine. The archbishop, an ex-secretary of the pope, and an old diplomatist, paid little heed to this talk about miracles. Dunois himself did not reckon so exclusively on aid from on high as to neglect employing a very human and very politic means against the English. He sent Saintrailles to the duke of Burgundy, to beg him, as a relative of the duke of Orleans, to take the latter’s town into his keeping. He was now asked to accept the grand and important possession of the centre of France, and he did not refuse the offer. He went straight to Paris, and told the affair to Bedford, who answered dryly that he had not toiled for the duke of Burgundy’s behoof. The latter, much offended, recalled all the troops he had at the siege of Orleans.

Supplies arriving with difficulty, discontent began in the town; many no doubt were of opinion that the town had made quite enough sacrifices for the sake of its lord, and that it was better Orleans should become English than cease to be. Things did not stop there. It was discovered that a hole had been made in the wall of the town; treachery was manifestly at work. Besides all this, Dunois could expect no help from Charles VII. The estates, assembled in 1428, had voted money and summoned the tenants of fiefs to fulfil their feudal duties. Neither money nor men had arrived.

We are not well acquainted with the intrigues that divided the little court of Charles. The divisions in it had naturally augmented in this its extreme distress. The old Armagnac advisers, whom Richemont and the king’s mother-in-law had for a while removed, were in the way to regain their credit. That southern party would have been well pleased to have a king of the south holding his court at Grenoble. The duchess of Anjou, the king’s mother-in-law, on the contrary, could not preserve Anjou if the English definitively passed the Loire. So far there was a community of interests between her and the house of Orleans. But the house of Anjou had so many other interests, so various and divergent, that she thought it expedient always to keep on fair terms with the English, and to negotiate perpetually. When the defence of Orleans appeared to be desperate (May, 1429), the old cardinal De Bar hastened to treat with Bedford, in the name of his nephew, René of Anjou, lest he should lose the inheritance of Lorraine, calculating that René could disavow his proceedings, should the affairs of Charles VII at any future time assume another aspect.

The impending ruin of Orleans had frightened the other towns of the Loire. The nearest, Angers, Tours, and Bourges, sent provisions to the besieged; Poitiers and La Rochelle, money; then, when the alarm increased, the Bourbonnais, Auvergne, and even Languedoc sent the Orléanais saltpetre, sulphur, and steel. Gradually all France became interested in the fate of one town, and moved with sympathy for the brave resistance of the men of Orleans and their fidelity to their lord. Orleans was pitied; so too was its duke. The captive Charles of Orleans could not defend his town.[40]

The English had one thing in their favour, namely, that their young king, Henry VI, was certainly a Frenchman by the mother’s side, and grandson of Charles VI, whom he resembled but too much as regarded the weakness of his mind. The legitimacy of Charles VII, on the other hand, was very doubtful; he was born in 1403, in the high tide of his mother’s intimacy with the duke of Orleans; and she herself had acquiesced in the acts in which he was called soi-disant dauphin. Henry VI had not yet been crowned at Rheims, but neither had Charles VII. The people in those days recognised a king but by two things, royal birth and the crown placed on his head with the church’s solemn sanction. Charles VII was not king according to religion, nor was he sure that he was so according to nature. This question, of no moment for politicians of that class who decide after their own interests, was everything for the people, who are willing to obey only the right. A woman had obscured this great question of right, and by a woman it was cleared up. This second woman bore the name Jeanne Darc. She was soon to be famous as the Maid of Orleans.

THE MAID OF ORLEANS (LA PUCELLE) (1429 A.D.)

The originality of the Maid of Orleans, and what determined her success, was not so much her valour or her visions as her good sense. Through all her enthusiasm, this daughter of the people saw the question clearly, and was able to solve it. She cut the knot which the politic and the men of little faith could not untie. She declared, in God’s name, that Charles VII was the true heir, and she set him at ease as to his legitimacy, of which he himself had doubts. That legitimacy she sanctified, taking her king straight to Rheims, and gaining over the English, by the celerity of her movements, the decisive advantage of the coronation.

It was at Domrémy, just between Lorraine of the Vosges and that of the plain, between Lorraine and Champagne, that the beautiful and brave girl was born, who was to wield the sword of France so well.

Joan or Jeanne was the third daughter of a peasant, Jacques Darc,[41] and of Isabella of Romée. She had two godmothers, one of whom was named Jeanne, the other Sibylle. The eldest son having been named James (Jacques), another Peter (Pierre), the pious parents gave one of their daughters the more exalted name of St. John (Jean). Whilst the other children accompanied their father in his field work or tended cattle, the mother kept Joan at home for sewing or spinning. She did not learn to read or write, but she knew all her mother could teach her of sacred things. She acquired religion, not as a lesson or a ceremony, but in the homely popular form of a winter night’s tale, as the simple faith of a mother.

Everybody knew her charity and her piety. They saw clearly she was the best girl in the village. What they did not know was that in her the life from above always absorbed the other life, and suppressed all vulgar development. Hers was the divine gift to remain a child in soul and body. She grew up, became strong and comely, but never knew the physical miseries of her sex. They were spared her, to the advantage of her mental growth and religious inspiration.

Joan had her share in the romantic adventures of those restless times. She saw poor fugitives arrive in the hamlet, and the kind-hearted girl assisted towards their reception, gave up her bed to them, and lay down in the hayloft. Her kindred, too, were once obliged to save themselves by flight. Then, when the inundation of brigands had passed off, the family returned and found the village sacked, the house devastated, and the church burned down. Thus she knew what war meant. She understood that anti-Christian state of things, and abhorred that reign of the devil, in which every man died in mortal sin. If, as everyone said, the ruin of the kingdom was the work of a woman, an unnatural mother, it might be that its salvation should proceed from a girl. This very fact was foretold in one of Merlin’s prophecies, a prophecy which, variously enriched and modified in the several provinces, had become thoroughly Lorrainian in the country of Joan of Arc. It was a girl of the marches of Lorraine that was to save the realm. The prophecy had probably received this embellishment, in consequence of the recent marriage of René of Anjou with the heiress of the duchy of Lorraine, which was in reality a very fortunate event for France.

One summer’s day, a fast day, Joan, being in the garden at noon with her father, close by the church, saw a dazzling light in that direction, and heard a voice saying, “Be a good child, Joan, and go often to church.” The poor girl was greatly frightened. Another time she again heard the voice and saw the light; but now she discerned it in noble figures, one of which had wings and seemed a sage counsellor. He said to her, “Joan, go to the aid of the king of France, and thou wilt restore him to his kingdom.” She answered, trembling all over, “My Lord, I am but a poor girl; I cannot ride the war-horse, or lead men-at-arms.” The voice replied: “Thou shalt go to M. de Baudricourt, captain of Vaucouleurs, and he will take thee before the king. St. Catherine and St. Margaret will be with thee to help thee.” She remained stupefied and in tears, as if she had already beheld her whole future destiny.

The sage counsellor was none other than St. Michael, the stern archangel of judgment and battle. He returned again, cheered her courage, “and related to her the pity there was in the realm of France.” Then came the white figures of female saints, surrounded with innumerable lights, their heads adorned with rich crowns, their voices sweet and melting even to tears. But Joan wept above all when the saints and angels left her. “I should have been very glad,” she said, “if the angels had taken me away with them.” Joan has told us nothing of the first inward conflict she sustained; but it is evident it took place, and endured a long while, since five years elapsed between her first vision and her departure from the home of her parents.

She encountered not only resistance but temptation in her own family. They tried to marry her, in the hope of bringing her back to a more rational way of thinking. A young man of the village alleged that she had promised him marriage when she was still a child; and as she denied the fact, he cited her before the ecclesiastical judge at Toul. It was supposed she would make no defence, but would submit to be cast by the court and married; but to everyone’s great astonishment, she went to Toul, appeared in court, and spoke--she who had always held her peace.

To enable her to escape from the control of her family, it was necessary she should find in her family itself someone to believe her; this was a most difficult problem. Failing to persuade her father, she made a convert of her uncle, who took her away with him, under the pretext of her nursing his wife in her lying-in. She prevailed on him to go to the sire de Baudricourt, captain of Vaucouleurs, and ask his support for her; but the man of war gave the peasant a very bad reception, and told him the only thing to be done was “to slap her well,” and take her home to her father. She was not cast down by the rebuff, but determined to depart, and her uncle was constrained to accompany her. The decisive moment was come; she quitted her family and her native village forever; she embraced her friends, especially her dear little friend Mengette, whom she commended to God’s keeping; but as for Haumette, the friend she loved above all others, she preferred to depart without seeing her.

She arrived then in the town of Vaucouleurs, dressed in her clumsy red peasant garments, and went along with her uncle to lodge with the wife of a wheelwright who took a liking to her. She had herself taken into Baudricourt’s presence, and said to him boldly that “she came to him on the part of our Lord to bid him tell the dauphin to keep his ground steadily, and not give battle to his enemies; for our Lord would grant him succour in mid-Lent. The kingdom did not belong to the dauphin but to our Lord; nevertheless, it was our Lord’s will that the dauphin should become king, and that he should hold the kingdom in trust.” She went on to say that, in spite of the dauphin’s enemies, he would be king, and she would take him to be crowned. The captain was amazed, and suspecting there was some deviltry at work, he consulted the parish priest, who apparently entertained the same doubts. Joan had not spoken of her visions to any churchman. The priest, therefore, accompanied the captain to the wheelwright’s house with his stole on, and adjured Joan to depart if she was sent by the evil spirit.

But the people did not doubt; their admiration was extreme; persons flocked from all parts to see her. It appears that Baudricourt sent to ask leave of the king. Meanwhile, he conducted Joan to the duke of Lorraine, who was ill and wished to consult her. He got nothing from her but advice to appease God’s anger by becoming reconciled with his wife. He gave her encouragement notwithstanding. On her return to Vaucouleurs, she found a messenger from the king, who brought the permission she desired. The disaster of the battle of the Herrings disposed the king to accept every means of which he could avail himself. Joan had predicted the battle on the very day when it took place. The people of Vaucouleurs, entertaining no doubt of her mission, clubbed together to buy her a horse. The captain gave her only a sword.

It was a rough and very perilous journey she was about to make. The whole country was overrun by armed bands belonging to either party. There was now neither road nor bridge; the rivers were swollen; it was the month of February, 1429.

Joan at the Court

The court of Charles VII was far from being unanimous in the Maid’s favour. That inspired girl, just come from Lorraine, and patronised by the duke of Lorraine, could not fail to strengthen with the king the party of the queen and her mother, the Lorraine and Anjou party. An ambush was laid for Joan at some distance from Chinon, and she escaped from it only by miracle.

So strong was the opposition against her that, after she was actually arrived, the council continued for two days to discuss the question whether or not the king should see her. Her enemies thought to postpone the matter indefinitely, by having it decided that inquiries should be made respecting her in her native place. Fortunately, she had friends also--the two queens, no doubt, and above all, the duke of Alençon, who, having recently come out of the hands of the English, was very impatient to carry the war into the north, and recover his duchy. The inhabitants of Orleans, to whom Dunois had been promising this marvellous aid since the 12th of February, sent to the king and claimed the Maid’s presence.

The king received her at last, surrounded with the greatest pomp; which, in all probability, was adopted with the hope of disconcerting her. She presented herself humbly “as a poor shepherd wench,” distinguished the king at the first glance from the crowd of lords among whom he had purposely mingled; and though he insisted, at first, he was not the king, she embraced his knees. But as he was not yet crowned, she styled him only dauphin: “Gentle dauphin,” she said, “my name is Jehanne la Pucelle. The King of heaven sends you word by me that you shall be anointed and crowned in the town of Rheims, and you shall be lieutenant of the King of heaven, who is King of France.”

The archbishop of Rheims, chancellor of France, and president of the king’s council, summoned doctors and professors of theology, some of them priests, others monks, and ordered them to examine the Maid. The doctors being introduced and seated in a hall, Joan sat down on the end of the bench, and replied to their questions. She recounted the apparitions and the words of the angels, with dignified simplicity. A Dominican met her with a single objection, but it was one of weight: “Jehanne, thou sayest it is God’s will to deliver the people of France; if such is his will he has no need of men-at-arms.” The observation did not confound her. “Ah! mon Dieu,” said she, “the men-at-arms will do battle, and God will give the victory.” Another person was not so easily satisfied. This was Friar Séguin, a Limousin, professor of theology in the university of Poitiers, “a very sour man,” says the chronicle. He asked her, in his Limousin French, “What language did the celestial voice speak?” Joan answered with rather too much sharpness, “A better one than yours.” “Dost thou believe in God?” said the enraged doctor; “well then, God will not have us put faith in thy words unless thou show a sign.” She answered, “I am not come to Poitiers to perform signs or miracles; my sign shall be to raise the siege of Orleans. Let me have men-at-arms, few or many, and I will go.”

The question of her inspiration was made to depend on the test of her virginity. The duchess of Anjou, the king’s mother-in-law, accomplished the ridiculous examination, with the aid of some ladies, to the honour of the Maid. Some Franciscans who had been sent to her native place to collect information, brought back the most satisfactory accounts. There was no more time to be lost. Orleans was crying out for help; Dunois was sending message upon message. The Maid was equipped, and a sort of establishment was formed for her. First of all they gave her for squire John Daulon, a brave knight of mature years, who belonged to the count de Dunois, and was the most respectable among his followers. She had also a noble page, two heralds-at-arms, a seneschal, and two valets; her brother, Pierre Darc, had also joined her suite. John Pasquerel, a friar, hermit of the order of St. Augustin, was assigned her for confessor.

The Deliverance of Orleans (1429 A.D.)

[Sidenote: [1429 A.D.]]

When we read the list of the captains who threw themselves into Orleans with Joan of Arc--La Hire, Saintrailles, Gaucourt, Culan, Coaraze, Armagnac; when we see that, independently of the Bretons under Marshal de Retz, and Marshal de St. Sévère’s Gascons, Florent d’Illiers, captain of Châteaudun, had brought all the nobles of the vicinity to take part in this short expedition, the deliverance of Orleans seems less miraculous. One thing, however, was by all means wanting to enable these great forces to act with advantage, an essential, indispensable thing--unity of action. Dunois might have created this, had no more been requisite to that end than address and intelligence; but this was not enough. An authority was requisite, one surpassing that of the crown; the king’s captains were not habituated to obey the king.

War had changed men into wild beasts, and these beasts required to be turned again to men, Christians, docile subjects. A great and difficult change! Some of these Armagnac captains were perhaps the most furious men that ever existed. It was a ludicrous and touching thing to see the sudden conversion of the old Armagnac brigands. They did not stop short halfway in their amendment. La Hire no longer ventured to utter an oath; but the Maid, compassionating the violence he did himself, allowed him to swear, “by his staff.” The devils had all at once been transformed into little saints.

She had begun by insisting that they should renounce their wanton women, and should confess. Then in the course of her march along the Loire, she had an altar erected in the open air, at which she took the communion, and so did they. The first night they bivouacked, she lay down in full armour, as there were no women about her; but she was not yet habituated to such hardships, and she was ill in consequence. As for danger, she knew not what it meant. She wanted to cross over to the north side of the river, and march along the English bank and between the bastilles of the invaders, who, she asserted, would not stir. Her followers would not listen to her advice, but marched along the left bank, so as to pass two leagues above Orleans. Dunois came out to meet her: “I bring you,” she said, “the best succour ever sent to anyone, the succour of the King of heaven. It comes not from me, but from God himself, who, at the entreaty of St. Louis and St. Charlemagne, has had pity on the town of Orleans, and will not suffer that the enemy should have both the duke’s body and his town at once.”

She entered the city slowly at eight in the evening (April 29th), the crowd scarcely allowing her to advance. Everyone strove eagerly to touch at least her horse. They gazed on her “as if they saw God.” Talking gently to the people all the while, she proceeded to the church, and then to the houses of the duke of Orleans’ treasurer, an honourable man, whose wife and daughter gave her welcome. She slept with Charlotte, one of the daughters.

She had entered the town along with the provisions, but the army marched down-stream again, to cross at Blois. She would, nevertheless, have had an immediate attack made on the English bastilles; but as she could not effect this, she sent a second peremptory message to those on the north side, and then proceeded to repeat her summons to those on the south. Glasdale, the captain, abused her in the coarsest terms, calling her cow-girl and ribald. In their hearts they believed her to be a witch, and were greatly afraid of her. They kept her herald, and were thinking of burning him, in hopes that this would, perhaps, break the charm.

The army not arriving, Dunois ventured forth in search of it. The archbishop of Rheims, chancellor of Charles VII, had detained the little army at Blois. The old politician was far from conceiving the existence of such an irresistible enthusiasm, or perhaps he feared it. It was, therefore, much against his will that he came to Orleans. The maid went out to meet him, with the people and the priests singing hymns. The procession passed and repassed before the English bastilles; and the army entered the town, protected by some priests and a girl (May 4th, 1429).

Joan, who, in the midst of her enthusiasm and her inspiration, had much shrewdness of apprehension, very clearly discerned the hostile temper of the new comers. She was right in surmising that there was a design to act without her. As she lay by Charlotte’s side, she suddenly started up, exclaiming, “My God! the blood of our people is running on the ground. It was ill done! Why was I not wakened? Quick! my arms, my horse!” She was armed in a moment, galloped off at full speed, and met men already wounded, whom they were carrying back from the field. The fugitives faced round on her arrival. Dunois, who had also not been called, arrived on the ground at the same time. The bastille (one of those on the north side) was attacked again. Talbot strove to succour it; but fresh forces issued from Orleans; the Maid put herself at their head, and Talbot withdrew his men. The bastille was carried. This was her first victory, the first time she looked on a field of slaughter. She sought confession for herself and her followers; and declared that she would take the communion on the morrow, being the feast of the Ascension, and pass the day in prayer.

Advantage was taken of this resolution to hold a council without her, wherein it was determined that this time the besiegers should cross the Loire and attack St. Jean le Blanc, the bastille which most impeded the introduction of provisions into the town, and that a false attack should be made at the same time on the other side. The English then did what they ought to have done before. They concentrated their strength. With their own hands burning the bastille which was to have been attacked, they retired upon the other two on the south side, the Augustins and the Tournelles. The former was instantly attacked and carried, the success in this instance again being partly due to the Maid. The French were seized for a while with a panic, and rushed back towards the floating bridge; but the Maid and La Hire disentangled themselves from the throng, threw themselves into boats, and took the English in flank.

There remained the Tournelles. The victors passed the night before it; but they obliged the Maid, who had eaten nothing all day (it was Friday), to recross the Loire. Meanwhile the council had assembled. The Maid was told in the evening that it had been unanimously resolved that, since the town was now fully victualled, they should wait for a fresh reinforcement to attack the Tournelles. It is difficult to believe that such could have been the real intention of the leaders, for delay was extremely dangerous, since the English might at any moment be succoured by Fastolf. Probably the intention was to deceive the Maid and deprive her of the honour of the triumph she had so powerfully contributed towards securing. She disappointed them.

In the morning she rode to the Burgundy gate with a multitude of men-at-arms and citizens; but the sire de Gaucourt, grand-master of the king’s household, kept it shut. The crowd opened the gate, and forced another near it. The sun was rising on the Loire when the whole concourse threw themselves into the boats. On arriving, however, at the Tournelles, they felt that they wanted artillery, and they sent for some to the town. At last they attacked the outward rampart which protected the bastille. The English defended themselves valiantly. The Maid, perceiving that the assailants were beginning to show signs of weakness, jumped into the ditch, seized a ladder, and was in the act of applying it to the wall, when an arrow struck her between the neck and the shoulder. The English sallied out to seize her, but she was carried off by her own party. She only allowed a little oil to be poured on the wound, and confessed.

Meanwhile no progress was made, and night was at hand. Dunois himself gave orders to sound a retreat. A Basque had taken out of the hands of the Maid’s squire that standard of hers which struck such dismay into the enemy. “When the standard touches the wall,” said she, “you will be able to enter.” “It is touching it.” “In then! all is your own.” And just as she had predicted, the assailants in a frenzy of enthusiasm climbed the wall “as though by one step.” The English were at this moment attacked on two sides at once.

Meanwhile the men of Orleans, who watched the fight from the other side of the Loire, could contain themselves no longer. They threw open their gates and rushed to the bridge, but there was an arch broken; they pushed a rickety plank across the opening, and a knight of St. John ventured to pass over the frail spar in full armour. The bridge was hastily repaired, and the whole multitude hurried to the other side. The English, seeing such a human sea rushing upon them, thought the whole world had come together against them. Their senses grew bewildered; some of them beheld St. Aignan, the patron of the town, others the archangel Michael. Glasdale endeavoured to retreat from the rampart to the bastille, across a small bridge; but it was shattered by a shot, and the Englishman fell into the water and was drowned, before the eyes of the maid he had so vilified. There were five hundred men in the bastille, all of whom were put to the sword.

Not one Englishman remained south of the Loire. Next day, Sunday, the besiegers on the northern side abandoned their bastilles, their artillery, their prisoners, and their wounded comrades. Talbot and Suffolk conducted the retreat steadily and in good order. The Maid would not allow them to be pursued, since they retired of their own accord; but before they withdrew out of sight of the town, she had an altar erected on a plain, at which mass was celebrated, and the people returned thanks to God in the presence of the enemy (Sunday, May 8th). The effect of the deliverance of Orleans was prodigious; everyone beheld in it the agency of supernatural power. Many attributed it to the devil, but the majority to God; it began to be generally believed that Charles had right on his side.[c]

Joan of Arc leads the King to Rheims

However discomfited and paralysed by the panic of their soldiers, as well as by the great diminution of their numbers in the siege, the English generals would not retreat from the Loire, but withdrew, Suffolk to Jargeau, up the stream of the river, Talbot to Meung, lower down its current. They were unmolested for a month. The French were lost in jubilation. Joan left Orleans on the 13th of May, and hurried back to the court at Tours to press the king for an army to proceed to Rheims.[g]

To be crowned at Rheims would have been a decisive victory for Charles over his young competitor Henry VI. It would have made him a real king of France. But once again the politicians believed themselves the wiser, and the coronation was not to be thought of until the English were driven from the Loire.[b]

Early in June, however, Joan was able to muster eight thousand combatants, of whom twelve hundred were knights, most of them townsmen of Orleans.[g] Suffolk, who had thrown himself into Jargeau, was besieged and the place stormed. Beaugency, too, was taken before Lord Talbot could receive the succours which Sir John Fastolf was bringing him from the regent. The constable De Richemont, who had long kept aloof within his own estates, came, in spite of the king and the Maid, to lend his aid to the victorious army.

A battle was imminent; Richemont came to share the honour it might afford. Talbot and Fastolf had formed a junction of their forces; but it is a curious fact, illustrative both of the condition of the country and of the fortuitous character of the war, that no one knew where to find the English army in the wilderness of La Beauce, which was then covered with coppices and thickets, until they were discovered by a stag, which, being pursued by the French vanguard, rushed into the ranks of the English.

The latter were on their march, and had not set up their defensive line of stakes as usual. Talbot alone was for fighting, furious as he was, since the defeat at Orleans, at having shown his back to the French. Fastolf, on the contrary, who had gained the battle of the Herrings, had no need of an engagement to retrieve his reputation, and said, like a sensible man, that with a disheartened army it was better to remain on the defensive. The French men-at-arms did not wait for the end of the discussion, but charged headlong, and met with no great resistance. Talbot fought with desperate obstinacy, hoping perhaps to be killed, and succeeded only in getting himself made prisoner. The pursuit was murderous; the bodies of two thousand English were strewed over the plain.

After this battle of Patay (28th or 29th of June), it was now or never the time to venture on the expedition to Rheims. The politicians wanted to remain still on the Loire, and make sure of Cosne and La Charité. This time they talked in vain; no timid counsels could now be listened to. Every day brought people flocking in from all the provinces, attracted by the fame of the Maid’s miracles, and believing only in her, and in her purpose forthwith to convey the king to Rheims. There was an irresistible outburst of the pilgrim and crusading spirit. The indolent young king himself at last yielded to the popular flood, and suffered himself to be borne along by that vast tide that set in towards the north; and off they started all together, willingly or perforce--the king, courtiers, the politic and the enthusiastic, the madmen and the sages. They were twelve thousand when they began their march, but their numbers augmented continually as they advanced; every hour brought them additional strength; and those who had no armour followed the holy expedition in plain doublets, as archers or sword-and-buckler men, even though they were of gentle blood.

The army marched from Gien on the 28th of June without attempting to enter it, that town being in the hands of the duke of Burgundy, whom there were reasons for treating with favour. Troyes had a mixed garrison of Burgundians and English, who ventured to make a sortie on the first appearance of the royal army. There seemed small chance of storming a large town so well guarded, and that too without artillery. There was only one old Armagnac councillor, the president Mâcon, who was of a contrary opinion, well knowing that in such an enterprise prudence was on the side of enthusiasm, and that men must not reason in a popular crusade. “When the king undertook this march,” said he, “he did so not by reason of the great armed force or the abundance of money he possessed, nor because the achievement seemed to him possible; he undertook it because Joan told him to advance and be crowned at Rheims, and that he would encounter little resistance by the way, such being the good pleasure of God.” The Maid then presented herself at the door of the council-room, and assured them they would be able to enter the town in three days. “We would willingly wait six,” said the chancellor, “if we were sure what you say is true.” “Six? You shall enter to-morrow!”

She seized her standard; the whole army followed her to the ditch, and they threw into it all they could lay their hands on, fagots, doors, tables, rafters, with such rapidity that the townspeople thought the ditches would very soon disappear altogether. The English began to be dazzled and bewildered as at Orleans, and fancied they saw a cloud of white butterflies fluttering round the magic standard. The citizens on their part were in great dread, recollecting that it was in Troyes the treaty had been concluded which disinherited Charles VII, and fearing that an example would be made of their town. Already they were taking refuge in the churches, and crying out that the town must surrender. The fighting men, who desired nothing better, parleyed and obtained leave to depart with what they had.

What they had was chiefly prisoners, Frenchmen. Charles VII’s councillors, who had drawn up the capitulation, had stipulated nothing with respect to those unfortunate persons. The Maid alone thought of them. When the English marched out with their prisoners in irons, she stood at the gates and cried out, “In God’s name, they shall not carry them off!” She stopped them, in fact, and the king paid their ransom.[c]

Charles simply passed through Troyes, neither did he stop at Châlons, which opened its gates with alacrity; and, on July 13th, he arrived before Rheims. Two Burgundian nobles, the sires of Châtillon and of Saveuse, were in command, but they had no men. They assembled the townsmen, and asked them to hold out for six weeks only; at the end of that time they guaranteed that the dukes of Burgundy and of Bedford would arrive with so powerful an army that it would easily raise the siege. The townsfolk refused to run the risk, persuaded the two captains to retire, and sent a deputation to the chancellor of France who was at the same time archbishop of Rheims, begging him to enter his episcopal town. On July 17th Charles was at last crowned in accordance with the usual ritual, anointed with oil from the holy ampulla of Saint-Rémy and lifted up to his seat by the ecclesiastical peers.

Joan defeated at Paris (1429 A.D.)

Joan had done the two great things which her ‘voices’ told her to do: she had delivered Orleans, and had caused the king to be crowned; she now wished to return to her village. “On her entrance into Rheims,” says the Chronique de la Pucelle[h] “seeing how all the poor people of the country cried ‘Noel!’ and wept from joy and gladness, and how they came to the king singing Te Deum laudamus without response or anthem, she said to the chancellor of France and to Dunois: ‘In God’s name this is a good and pious people, and when it shall be my time to die, I should like it to be in this country.’

“Then the said count Dunois asked her: ‘Joan, do you know when you will die and in what place?’ She answered that that was as God willed; and said moreover to the said lord: ‘I have fulfilled what my Lord commanded me, and I wish that he would send me back to my father and mother to keep their sheep and cattle.’”

But her rôle was not ended, for the English still held a large part of the kingdom. Joan, with the same firmness which had made her go to Orleans and to Rheims, asked to be allowed to march to Paris. The king’s counsellors could not accustom themselves to these heroic deeds of daring which, at certain moments, are more estimable than prudence; they decided first to take the small towns on the road to Paris. These opened their gates of their own free will. The royal army entered Laon, Soissons, Coulommiers, Provins, Senlis, and St. Denis without trouble. But when they came to Paris the opportunity had passed.[b] Bedford had sent for the duke of Burgundy to secure Paris, and he came at the invitation, but almost alone; all the use the regent could make of him was to have him figure in an assembly of notables, where he harangued, and repeated once more the lamentable history of his father’s death. This being done, he took himself off, leaving Bedford, by way of aid, only some Picard men-at-arms; and even for this slight assistance, he required to have the town of Meux given to him in pledge.

There was no hope save in Beaufort. That priest was king in England. His nephew, Gloucester, the protector, had ruined himself by his own follies. In order to uplift the cardinal’s power to the highest pitch, it was necessary that Bedford should be brought as low in France as Gloucester was in England; that he should be reduced to such exigency as to call for Beaufort’s presence, and that the latter should come at the head of an army to crown Henry VI. That army Beaufort had in readiness. With it he was to secure Paris, convey young Henry thither, and crown him.

It was not until July 25th, nine days after Charles VII had been duly anointed and crowned, that the cardinal entered Paris with his army. Bedford did not lose a moment, but set out with these troops to observe Charles VII. Twice they were in presence of each other, and some skirmishes took place. Bedford, fearing for Normandy, kept watch over it, and during this time the king marched against Paris (August). This was contrary to the wish of the Maid, whose voices told her not to advance beyond St. Denis.

It was an imprudent enterprise; the French nevertheless carried a rampart. The Maid went down into the first ditch, and crossed the shelving bank between it and the second, and found the latter full of water, up to the foot of the wall. Heedless of the arrows, that fell like hail about her, she shouted to her men to bring fascines, and meanwhile sounded the depth of the water with her lance. She was almost alone, a mark for every arrow, and one passed through her thigh. She strove to bear up against the pain, and remained on the spot to encourage the troops to mount to the assault. At last, having lost much blood, she retired to the cover of the outer ditch, and it was not until ten or eleven at night she could be prevailed on to return to her quarters. She seemed to feel that this decisive check under the very walls of Paris would ruin her beyond recovery.

[Sidenote: [1429-1430 A.D.]]

Fifteen hundred men were wounded in this attack, which she was wrongfully accused of having advised. She was now vilified by her own party as well as by the enemy. She had not scrupled to make the attack on the day of our Lady’s Nativity (September 8th), to the great scandal of the pious town of Paris. The court of Charles VII was still more shocked at this irreverent deed. The libertines, the politic ones, the blind worshippers of the letter and sworn foes to the spirit, all declared bravely against the spirit the moment it showed signs of weakness. Negotiations were resolved on, contrary to the Maid’s advice, at the instigation of the archbishop of Rheims, chancellor of France, who had never been cordially in her favour. He proceeded to St. Denis, to ask for a truce; perhaps he had secret hopes of prevailing with the duke of Burgundy, who was then in Paris.

Regarded with ill will, and badly supported, the Maid carried on the sieges of St. Pierre le Moûtier and La Charité during the winter. Though almost abandoned before the former, she nevertheless stormed and took it. The siege of La Charité proceeded slowly and languidly; a panic broke out among the besiegers, and they dispersed.

Capture of Joan of Arc (1430 A.D.)

Meanwhile the English had induced the duke of Burgundy to give them effectual aid. The weaker they were, the more hope he had of being able to retain the strongholds he might take in Picardy. The English, who had just lost Louviers, offered him his own terms, and he, the richest prince in Christendom, no longer hesitated to stake men and money in a war, the profit of which he hoped to appropriate. A bribe to the governor put him in possession of Soissons. Then he laid siege to Compiègne, the governor of which was also a man of very questionable integrity; but the inhabitants were too strongly committed to the cause of Charles VII to let their town be given up. The Maid threw herself into it, and on the very same day made a sortie in which she nearly surprised the besiegers. But the latter rallied in a moment, and pressed hotly upon the besieged, up to the rampart and the bridge. The Maid, having remained in the rear to cover the retreat, was not able to get within the walls in time--whether it was that the bridge was blocked up by the crowd, or that the gates were already closed. Being identified by her costume, she was soon surrounded, seized, and dragged from her horse. Her capturer, a Picard archer, brought her to his master, the bastard of Wandomme, who sold her to John of Ligny, who belonged to the illustrious house of Luxemburg and was the duke of Burgundy’s vassal.[c]

Now this John of Luxemburg had need of the duke of Burgundy in order to inherit peacefully the domains of Ligny and St. Pol, to the detriment of his elder brother. The duke of Burgundy, in order not to be disturbed when seizing Brabant, Brussels, and Louvain, in spite of the rights of his aunt Margaret, needed the assistance of the English. The English were inclined to allow anything provided Joan of Arc was given up to them.[b] It was absolutely necessary to get her out of the hands of the Burgundians. She had been taken on the 23rd of May; on the 26th a message was sent from Rouen in the name of the vicar of the Inquisition summoning John of Ligny to give up the woman, she being suspected of witchcraft.[c] A violent tempered man, a Burgundian, who was willing to do anything in the hope of obtaining the archbishopric of Rouen, Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, undertook to prove it by a trial in due form.[b]

[Sidenote: [1430-1431 A.D.]]

The university stepped forward, and wrote to the duke of Burgundy and to John of Ligny (July 14th). Cauchon, in his exceeding zeal making himself the agent and courier of the English, carried the letter with his own hands to the two dukes. At the same time he summoned them as a bishop to deliver over to him a prisoner over whom he had jurisdiction. In this strange proceeding, we find him pass from the part of a judge to that of a negotiator, and make offers of money; though the woman in question cannot be considered a prisoner of war, the king of England will give John of Ligny and the bastard of Wandomme 200 or 300 livres’ yearly rent, and a sum of 6,000 livres to those in whose keeping she is. Towards the end of the letter he advances as far as 10,000 livres, “as much,” he says, “as would be given for a king or a prince according to the custom of France.”

Thus on all sides that world of interest and covetousness was opposed to the Maid, or at least indifferent as to her fate. The good Charles VII did nothing for her, the good Duke Philip gave her up to her mortal foes. It was in vain John of Ligny’s wife threw herself at his feet, and implored him not to dishonour himself.[42] He was not free; he had already received English money, and he gave up Joan, not directly indeed to the English, but to the duke of Burgundy, who took her to Arras, and then to the keep of Crotoy.

Compiègne was delivered on the 1st of November. The duke of Burgundy had advanced as far as Noyon, as though it were to meet the disgraceful blow more nearly and in person. He was again defeated shortly afterwards at Germigny (November 20th). At Péronne Saintrailles offered him battle, but he durst not accept it. These humiliations no doubt confirmed the duke in his alliance with the English, and fixed his determination to give up the Maid to them.

At the moment when the English had the Maid at last in their hands,[43] and could begin her trial, their affairs were in a very bad condition. Far from having recovered Louviers, they had lost Château Gaillard; La Hire, who took it by escalade, found Barbazan a prisoner there, and let loose that redoubtable captain. The towns were going over of their own accord to the side of Charles VII, and the citizens were driving out the English. The men of Melun, so close to Paris, ejected their garrison.

The rapid downhill course of English affairs was only to be checked by some strong machinery, and such had Beaufort ready in the trial and the coronation of Henry VI. The latter entered Paris on the 2nd of December. The university had been made to write on the 21st of November to Cauchon, accusing him of tardiness, and requesting the king to begin the trial. Cauchon was in no hurry, thinking it hard, apparently, to begin the work, whilst the payment was as yet uncertain. It was not until a month later that he obtained authority from the chapter of Rouen to proceed in that diocese. He opened the proceedings at Rouen, on the 9th of January, 1431.[c]

Trial of Joan of Arc

[Sidenote: [1431 A.D.]]

He based the accusation on the four following points: infringement of the laws of the church, by making use of magic practices; by taking up arms, contrary to her parents’ wishes; by wearing clothes which were not those of her sex; and lastly, by announcing revelations which were not sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority. Thus a poor girl of nineteen was alone, without protection against judges who were sold to her enemies, who arbitrarily suppressed every proof of her innocence, who prevented her appealing to the pope or to the council, who sought to embarrass her by absurd and misleading questions or by extremely delicate ones, and who were often disconcerted by her heroic replies.

The maid was finally brought before her judges on the 21st of February. “Joan,” they asked her, “do you believe you have found salvation?” “If I have not, may God grant it me; if I have, may God preserve me in it!” “Did you not say that standards made by the soldiers in imitation of yours would bring them good luck?” “No; I only said, ‘advance boldly among the English,’ and I advanced also.” But she declared that she had never killed anyone. “Why was her standard carried to the church at Rheims at the coronation, more than those of the other captains?” “It had borne the burden, it was only just that it should receive the honour.” “What was the idea of those people who kissed your hands, your feet, your clothes?” “The poor people came to me gladly, because I did them no ill; I supported them and defended them to the best of my power.” “Do you think you were right to leave without permission from your mother and father? Ought one not to honour one’s father and mother?” “They have forgiven me.” “Did you not think you were sinning in acting in this manner?” “God commanded it; if I had had one hundred fathers and one hundred mothers I should have gone.” “Do you think your king did right in killing or having killed Monseigneur of Burgundy?” “It was a great pity for the kingdom of France. But, whatever may have been between them, God sent me to help the king of France.” “Do St. Catherine and St. Margaret hate the English?” “They love what our Lord loves, and hate what he hates.” “Does God hate the English?” “I know nothing of the love or hatred which God has for the English; but I know well that they will be driven from France, except those who perish here.” “Is it not a mortal sin to admit a man to ransom and then put him to death?” “I have not done so.”

The judges laid stress on the man’s clothing which Joan had assumed contrary to the laws of the church, which she was still wearing, and which she would not relinquish. The wretches affected not to understand what the poor girl did not dare to tell them--that in camp, even in prison, this dress had been, and still was, her protection.[b]

The Twelve Articles

Between the 2nd and 4th of April the judges, on the advice of the members of the university, caused the seventy points of accusation brought forward by the prosecutor to be summed up in twelve articles. There were two doctors of Paris, Nicholas Midi and Jacques de Touraine, who worked on this--one on the plan, the other on the final form. The twelve articles reviewed the trial in a spirit very hostile to Joan, while it eliminated the prosecutor’s accusation of impostures and brutalities. On the 12th of April twenty-two doctors and licentiates deliberated together on the twelve articles. They left the question hanging between a matter of human invention and an inspiration of Satan.[f]

We give herewith these twelve articles and follow them with the findings of the faculty, as they are given in the report of the trial, edited by M. Quicherat.[i]

I. And in the first place, a certain woman states and affirms that, when she was thirteen years of age or thereabouts, she herself saw, with her own corporeal eyes, St. Michael consoling her, and sometimes St. Gabriel appearing in bodily form; sometimes, also, she saw a great multitude of angels: and afterwards, SS. Catherine and Margaret showed themselves visible in bodily form to the same woman, and she also sees them daily and hears their voices, and has embraced them at times, and kissed them, touching them sensibly and corporeally. She truly saw the heads of the said angels and saints, but concerning their other parts or their garments she was unwilling to say anything. And that the aforesaid SS. Catherine and Margaret sometimes spoke to her at a certain spring near a large tree, commonly called “the fairies’ tree,”[44] concerning which spring and tree there was a common report that the “fates of the ladies” frequent there, and that many fever-stricken persons go to the said spring and tree for the sake of recovering health, although they are situated in a profane place. These she frequently worshipped there and elsewhere and paid them reverence.

She says, moreover, that the aforesaid SS. Catherine and Margaret appear and show themselves to her crowned with very beautiful and costly crowns, and from the aforesaid time and ofttimes subsequently spoke to the same woman concerning the command of God, that it behoved her to go to a certain secular prince promising that by the help of the same woman and by her labours the said prince would recover by force of arms great temporal dominion and worldly honour, would obtain victory over his enemies, and that the same prince would receive the said woman and would bestow on her arms together with an army of soldiers for the carrying out of what was promised. Furthermore, the said SS. Catherine and Margaret instructed the same woman concerning the command of God, that she should assume and wear male attire, which she has worn and still wears in persevering obedience to this kind of command insomuch that the woman herself has said that she would rather die than abandon this kind of dress, saying this simply at different times, and occasionally “unless it were the command of God.” She even chose rather not to be present at the offices of mass and to go without the holy communion of the Eucharist at times ordained by the church for receiving the sacrament, than to resume female and put off male attire. They were also protectors of the said woman in this matter that, without the knowledge and against the will of her parents, when she was seventeen years of age or thereabouts, she left her father’s house and associated with a number of soldiers, frequenting with them by day and by night, never or rarely having another woman with her. And many other things did the said saints tell and teach the same woman, by reason of which she says that she has been sent by the God of heaven and by the victorious church of the saints now enjoying beatitude to whom she commits all her good deeds.

She declines, however, and refuses to submit her deeds and words to the church militant, having been ofttimes required and admonished concerning this; saying that it is impossible for the same woman to act contrary to those things which she affirmed in her process, that she had acted by the command of God, nor would she render account concerning these things to the conclusion or judgment of anyone living, but only to the judgment of God; and that they revealed to the same woman that she herself will be saved in the glory of the blessed ones and she would attain the salvation of her soul if she should keep her virginity, which she vowed to them on the first occasion when she saw and heard them. By the occasion of which revelation she asserts that she is as certain of her own salvation in the kingdom of heaven as if it were already a present fact.

II. Further, the said woman declares that the sign which the prince had to whom she was sent, and by which he was influenced to believe her concerning her revelations and to receive her for the purpose of carrying on war, was that St. Michael came to the same prince accompanied by a multitude of angels of whom some had crowns and others had wings, with whom were SS. Catherine and Margaret. This angel and the woman were walking above the earth along a way like unto steps and an arch stretching a great way, other angels and the aforesaid saints accompanying them; and a certain angel delivered to the same prince a very costly crown of purest gold and the said angel bowed himself before the said prince showing him reverence. On one occasion she said that, when her prince had the sign given him, she herself thought that he was then alone although several others were near enough at hand; and on another occasion that, as she believes, one archbishop received that sign of a crown and delivered it to the aforesaid prince, several temporal lords being present, witnessing it.

III. Further, the aforesaid woman knew and was assured that he who visits her is St. Michael, by the good advice, comfort, and good doctrine which the aforesaid St. Michael gave and made for the same woman; and in that he named himself, saying that he himself was Michael. And similarly she knows St. Catherine and St. Margaret distinctly from each other through this--that they name themselves and salute her. On account of which things, concerning the appearance of St. Michael to her, she believes that he is St. Michael himself, and she believes that the words and deeds of that Michael are true and good as firmly as she believes that our Lord Jesus suffered and died for our redemption.

IV. Further, the said woman declares and affirms that she herself is certain concerning certain future things that are wholly coming to pass, and will happen, just as she is certain about those things which she indeed sees done before her; and boasts that she has and has had information concerning certain hidden things by means of revelations as far as the meaning of the word extends through the voices of St. Catherine and St. Margaret--namely, that she will be liberated from prison and that the French will do a fairer deed in her company than was ever done for the whole of Christianity; that, furthermore, she has recognised by means of revelation, as she says, some men whom she had never seen before without anyone pointing them out to her, and that she has revealed and discovered a certain sword which was hidden in the earth.

V. Further, the said woman declares and affirms that according to the command of God and that which is well pleasing to him she has assumed and worn and continually wears and clothes herself with a dress after the fashion of a man. And further, she declares that from the time that she held it to be the command of God to take male dress, it behoved her to get a short tunic, a hood, a jerkin, breeches, and boots with many tags, the hair of her head being cut off round over the tops of her ears, leaving nothing upon her body which represented or pointed out the feminine sex beyond those things which nature conferred on the same woman for the distinction of the feminine sex. And that she ofttimes received the Eucharist when wearing the aforesaid dress. She neither has wished nor does she wish to resume feminine attire. Having been ofttimes lovingly questioned and admonished about this, she has said that she would rather die than leave off male attire, sometimes simply saying so, and sometimes, “unless it were by God’s command.” And that if she were in male attire among those for whose sake she at other times armed herself and did as she used to do before her capture and detention, this would be one of the greatest benefits which could happen for the whole kingdom of France; adding that for nothing in the world would she take an oath of not wearing male attire and not arming herself, and in all aforesaid she declares that she has done and does do well in obeying God and his commands.

VI. Further, the said woman confesses and asserts that she has caused to be written many letters in some of which on the one hand these names, Jesus Maria, were added together with the sign of the cross, and at times she superadded a cross, and then she was unwilling that that should be done which she ordered to be done in her letters. In other letters, on the other hand, she caused to be written that she herself would have those put to death who were not obedient to her letters or her counsels and that “it will immediately be seen who has the greater authority from the God of heaven”; and she frequently declares that she has done nothing except by the revelation and commandment of God.

VII. Further, the said woman declares and confesses that when she was seventeen years of age or thereabouts, she went of her own accord and by revelation according as she says to a certain esquire whom she had never seen, before leaving her father’s house against the wish of her parents; who, as soon as they were aware of her departure, were almost out of their mind. The said woman requested indeed this esquire that he should lead her or cause her to be led to the prince of whom it has been before spoken. And then the said gentleman, a captain, delivered to the said woman a man’s dress together with a sword at the request of the woman herself, and deputed and ordered one soldier, one esquire, and four serving men to conduct her; who when they had come to the aforesaid prince the said woman said to the same prince that she herself wished to head the war against his enemies, promising that she would place him in great power and would overcome his enemies; and that she had been sent for this purpose by the God of heaven, saying that in the aforesaid she did well by the command of God and by revelation.

VIII. Further, the said woman declares and confesses that she, no one forcing or compelling her, threw herself down from a certain very lofty tower, preferring rather to die than to be delivered into the hands of her enemies, or than to live after the destruction of the city of Compendium (Compiègne); she declares too that she could not avoid this kind of fall and yet that the aforesaid SS. Catherine and Margaret prevented her from casting herself down, to offend whom she declares is a great sin. Yet she knows well that this kind of sin has been forgiven her after she has made confession of it. And concerning this she declares that she has had a revelation.

IX. Further, the said woman declares that the aforesaid SS. Catherine and Margaret promised her that they themselves would lead her into paradise if she kept well the virginity which she vowed to them both in body and in soul. And concerning this she declares she is as certain as if she were already in the glory of the blessed ones. Nor does she think she has committed works of mortal sin; for if she were in mortal sin, it seems to her that the aforesaid SS. Catherine and Margaret would not visit her as they daily do visit her.

X. Further, the said woman declares and affirms that God loves certain men determined and named hitherto travellers, and loves them more than he does the same woman. And she knows this through the revelation of the SS. Catherine and Margaret who speak to her frequently in French, and not in English, since they are not on their side. And since she has known by revelation that their voices were on behalf of the prince above mentioned, she has not loved the Burgundians.

XI. Further, the said woman declares and affirms that she has ofttimes shown reverence to the aforesaid voices and spirits whom she calls Michael, Gabriel, Catherine, and Margaret, by uncovering the head, bending her knee, kissing the earth over which they walked, and by vowing to them virginity and at times by embracing and kissing the same Catherine and Margaret; and that she has touched them corporeally and sensibly, and has besought of them counsel and help by invoking them at times, although they frequently visit her when not invoked, and she acquiesces in and obeys their counsels and commands and has acquiesced from the beginning without seeking advice from anyone, for example, from father or mother, curate, or prelate, or any other ecclesiastic. And nevertheless she firmly believes that the voices and revelations which she has had through male and female saints of this sort come from God and by his ordering, and she believes this as firmly as she believes the Christian faith and that our Lord Jesus Christ suffered death for us; adding that if an evil spirit appeared to her, who pretended that he was St. Michael, she would know well how to distinguish whether he were St. Michael or not. The same woman also declares that at her own request, no other person compelling or requiring it of her, she swore to the SS. Catherine and Margaret, who appeared to her, that she would not reveal the sign of the crown which was to be given to the prince to whom she was sent. And in conclusion she said that “unless she had license to reveal it.”

XII. Further, the said woman declares and confesses that if the church should wish that she should do anything contrary to the command which she declares has been given her by God she would not do that for anything, affirming that she knows well that those things which are contained in her process come by the commandment of God, and that it were impossible for her to do anything contrary to them. Nor was she willing to refer, concerning these things, to the judgment of the church militant or to any man in the world, but to one Lord God alone, whose commands she will always do; especially as to the subject-matter of the revelations and those things which she declares she has done by revelation. And she declares that she has not made this answer and other answers of herself alone, but she has made and given these answers by command of the voices and revelations made to her; although the article of faith, “one holy Catholic church,” was ofttimes explained to the said woman by judges and others there present, explaining to her that every faithful pilgrim is bound to obey and to submit his deeds and words to the church militant, especially in the matter of faith and that which touches holy doctrine and ecclesiastical sanctions.

The Findings of the Faculty

I. And in the first place as to the first article, the faculty declares by means of doctrine that the manner and matter of the revelations, the quality of the person and place, together with other circumstances, having been finally considered, they are either fictitious lies, seductive and pernicious, or the aforesaid apparitions and revelations are superstitions, proceeding from malignant and diabolical spirits, Belial, Satan, and Behemoth.

II. Further, as to the second article, that that which it contains does not seem true; yea, the latter is a presumptuous lie, seductive, pernicious, fictitious, and derogatory to the dignity of angels.

III. Further, as to the third article, that the signs contained in it are not sufficient and the said woman believes lightly and asserts easily. Furthermore in the statement which she makes she believes wrongly, and errs in the faith.

IV. Further, as to the fourth article, that in it is contained a superstition, a soothsaying and presumptuous assertion, together with empty boasting.

V. Further, as to the fifth article, that the said woman is blasphemous towards God and a despiser of God in his sacraments; a prevaricator of divine law and holy doctrine and of ecclesiastical sanctions; of evil wisdom, she errs from the faith and is an empty boaster, and is to be held suspected of idolatry and the curse of herself and of her garments by imitating the custom of the Gentiles.

VI. Further, as to the sixth article, that the said woman is a traitress, crafty, cruel, and thirsting after the shedding of human blood, seditious and provoking to tyranny; a blasphemer of God in his commands and revelations.

VII. Further, as to the seventh article, that the said woman is undutiful to her parents, a prevaricator of the precept concerning honouring parents; scandalous, blasphemous towards God, and errs in the faith and makes a rash and presumptuous promise.

VIII. Further, that in the eighth article is contained weakness of mind tending to despair, that is to say, to suicide and to presumptuous and rash assertion concerning the pardon of sin held out; and that the said woman has an evil opinion of the freedom of human judgment.

IX. Further, that in the ninth article is contained a presumptuous and rash assertion and a pernicious lie, and she contradicts herself in the preceding article and has an ill knowledge of the faith.

X. Further, that in the tenth article is contained a presumptuous and rash assertion, superstitious divination, blasphemy against SS. Catherine and Margaret, and transgression of the precept concerning the love of your neighbour.

XI. Further, as to the eleventh article, that the said woman, supposing that she had the revelations and apparitions of which she boasts with certain beings according to the first article, is an idolatress, an invoker of demons, and errs in the faith, asserts rashly, and has made an unlawful oath.

XII. Further, as to the twelfth article, that the said woman is a schismatic, having an evil opinion of the unity and authority of the church; an apostate and hitherto errs obstinately in the faith.

Here follows a deliberation and determination by manner of doctrine of the Venerable Faculty of degrees in the University of Paris upon the twelve articles concerning the words and deeds of Joan, commonly called La Pucelle, above annotated and described; which deliberation and determination the said faculty submits to the order and judgment of the great pontiff of the holy apostolic seat and of the holy general council. If the said woman being of right mind obstinately affirm the propositions declared in the above written twelve articles and in performance abide by the deeds contained in the same, it seems to the faculty of degrees, having diligently examined the aforesaid propositions, speaking in love by manner of council or doctrine:

I. That the said woman has become schismatic, since schism is unlawful division, through her disobedience from the unity of the church, and separates herself from the obedience of the church militant, in that she says, etc.

II. Further, that the woman herself errs in the faith: contradicts the article of faith contained in the lesser symbol “one holy Catholic church”; and, as says St. Jerome, by contradicting this article she acknowledges herself not only unskilful, malevolent, and uncatholic, but heretical.

III. Further, that the woman herself is also even apostate, both because with an evil purpose she caused to be cut off from her the hair which God gave her for a covering; and also because, for the same purpose having given up female dress, she imitated the dress of men.

IV. Further, that the woman herself is a liar and a soothsayer when she says that she was sent by God and spoke with the angels and saints and did not make it known by the operation of a miracle or special witness of Scripture; as when the Lord wished to send Moses into Egypt to the children of Israel, in order that they might believe that he was sent by him he gave them a sign that he should turn his rod into a serpent and the serpent into a rod again; that John the Baptist also should reform them, he brought forward a special testimony of his mission from Scripture, saying: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness; make straight the way of the Lord, as saith the prophet Esaias.”

V. Further, that the same woman, by her presumption of authority, and concerning right, errs in the faith both firstly, since she herself is anathema by canonical authority and has continued in the same state for a long time; and secondly, because she says she would rather not receive the body of Christ and not make her confession at the time appointed by the church than put off her male attire and resume the dress of women; she is therefore most vehemently suspected of heresy, and is to be diligently examined concerning the articles of faith.

VI. Further, the same woman also errs in that she says that she is as certain that she will be led into paradise as if she were already in the glory of the blessed ones; since, in this journey, whether the traveller be worthy of praise or tribulation is unknown but is recognised by the supreme Judge alone. Wherefore, if the aforesaid woman be charitably exhorted and duly admonished by a competent judge to return of her own will to the unity of the Catholic faith and publicly to abjure her errors at the will of the aforesaid judge, and be unwilling to show suitable satisfaction, she is to be abandoned to the power of the secular judge under obligation to receive vengeance in proportion to the quality of her crime.[i]

The Sentence and its Execution

Her condemnation was decided beforehand; but they wanted to obtain from her some words implicating Charles VII, and they employed all means for this purpose; they sent for the executioner to come to the prison; then they said that all was ready for the torture. She was very ill during holy week. Threats had little effect on this heroic mind; they resorted to promises, to the most pernicious for her--that of being taken from the hands of her English gaolers and given over to men of the church. She yielded, and signed the recantation which was presented to her, without even knowing what it contained: and then, out of mercy and moderation, she was only condemned to spend the rest of her days in prison, on the bread of affliction and water of sorrow, to weep over her sins.[b]

She was admitted by the ecclesiastical judge to do penance, nowhere else of course than in the church prisons. The ecclesiastical in pace, hard as it was, would at least take her out of the hands of the English, protect her from their insults, and save her honour. What were her surprise and horror when the bishop said coldly, “Take her back to the place whence you brought her!”

Nothing was done; thus deceived, she could not fail to retract her retraction. But even had she been willing to persist in it, the rage of the English would not have allowed her. They had come to St. Ouen, where the sentence had been delivered, in hopes at last to burn the witch; they waited in breathless expectation; and were they now to be sent off in this way, with nothing for their pains but a scrap of parchment, a signature, and a grimace? At the moment when the bishop suspended the reading of the sentence, stones flew about the platforms without respect for the cardinal. The doctors were in danger of their lives when they set foot on the ground; bare swords were everywhere pointed at their throats; the most moderate of the English confined themselves to insulting words: “Priest, you do not earn the king’s money.” The trembling doctors, shuffling away as fast as they could, said, “Be not uneasy, we shall surely catch her again.” It was not merely the common soldiers, the English mob, that showed this thirst for blood. The respectable people and the lords were not less rancorous. The king’s man and his tutor, Lord Warwick, said, like the soldiers, “The king fares badly; the girl will not be burned” (May 23rd, 1431).

The poor girl, exposed to such danger, had hitherto possessed no other defence than her male attire; but strange to say, no one had ever chosen to understand why she wore it. Her friends and her enemies were alike shocked at her doing so. In the beginning she had been obliged to explain herself to the women of Poitiers. After her capture, when she was in the custody of the ladies of Luxemburg,[45] those good dames begged her to dress as became a decent girl. If the women understood nothing of this female question, how much less did the priests! They quoted the text of a council of the fourth century, which anathematises this exchange of garments. They did not perceive that this prohibition applied especially to an epoch which had scarcely emerged from pagan impurity.

On Friday and Saturday the unfortunate prisoner, deprived of her male attire, had much to fear. According to the statement of her confessor, to whom she revealed the fact, an Englishman, not a soldier, but a gentleman, a lord, bravely undertook to violate a chained girl and, failing in the attempt, loaded her with blows.

“When the morning of Trinity Sunday was come, and it was time for her to rise (as she has related to him who speaks) she said to the English, her guards, ‘Un-iron me that I may rise.’ One of them took off the woman’s garments that were on her, emptied the bag in which was the male dress, and said to her, ‘Get up.’ ‘Sirs,’ said she, ‘you know it is forbidden me; certainly I will not take it.’ This dispute lasted until noon, and at last, by reason of bodily necessity, she was obliged to go out and take that dress. On her return, they would not give her any other, notwithstanding all her supplications.”

In reality, it was not for the interest of the English that she should resume the garb of a man, and thus annul the retractation so laboriously obtained; but at that moment their rage knew no bounds. Saintrailles had just made a bold attempt on Rouen. It would have been a fine exploit to seize the judges on their bench, and carry off Beaufort and Bedford to Poitiers. The latter had another narrow escape of being captured on his return between Rouen and Paris. There was no safety for the English so long as that infernal girl lived, who was doubtless continuing her diabolical arts in prison. It was necessary she should die.

The assessors being instantly sent for to the castle to see the change of dress, found in the courtyard some hundred English, who stopped their way. Thinking that if these doctors entered, they might spoil all, they brandished axes and swords in their faces, and drove them out, calling them Armagnac traitors. Cauchon, getting in with great difficulty, assumed a gay air to please Warwick, and said, laughing, “She is caught.” On Monday he returned with the inquisitor and eight assessors to interrogate the Maid, and ask her why she had resumed that garb. She offered no excuse, but bravely accepting her danger said that this dress suited her better so long as she should be guarded by men; that moreover, word had not been kept with her. Her saints had said to her that it was great pity to have abjured to save her life. At the same time she did not refuse to put on female garments again. “Let me be consigned to a mild and safe prison,” she said, “I will be good and do all the church shall desire.”

On Tuesday the judges got together, at the archiepiscopal palace, some sort of an assemblage of assessors, some of whom had been present only at the first sittings, and the rest at none; they were men of every kind--priests, lawyers, and three were even physicians. The judges reported to them what had taken place, and asked their opinions. The opinion they gave, very different from what was expected, was that the prisoner ought to be brought again into court and have her act of abjuration read again to her. It is doubtful that this was within the power of the judges. Judge or judgment was in fact no longer a thing possible amidst naked swords and raging soldiers. Bloodshed was inevitable; the judges perhaps were not far from seeing their own spilt. They drew up a hasty citation to be served the next morning at eight; her next appearance was only to be for the purpose of being burned.

In the morning, Cauchon sent her a confessor, Brother Martin l’Advenu, “to announce death to her and induce her to penitence. And when he announced to the poor girl the death she was to die that day, she began to cry out woefully, sinking with faintness, and tearing her hair. ‘Alas! am I to be treated so horribly and cruelly, and must my body, whole and entire, which was never corrupted, be now consumed and reduced to ashes? Oh! oh! I would rather be beheaded seven times than be thus burned! Oh! I appeal to God, the great Judge of the wrongs and grievances they do me!’”

At nine she was dressed in women’s clothes and placed on a car, with Friar Martin l’Advenu on one side of her, and the huissier Massieu on the other. Isambart, the Augustine monk, who had already displayed so much charity and courage, would not quit her. The Maid had never despaired until now. Even whilst saying, as she did at times, “the English will put me to death,” she did not in reality believe it. She did not imagine she could ever be forsaken. She had faith in her king, and in the good people of France. She had said expressly, “There will be in the prison or at the condemnation some tumult by which I shall be delivered--delivered with great victory!” But though the king and the people should fail her, she had another aid, far more potent and sure--that of her friends on high, the good and precious saints. What then were her thoughts when she saw that she was really to die--when, mounted on the cart, she passed along through the trembling crowd, guarded by eight hundred Englishmen armed with lances and swords? She wept and bewailed her fate, but never accused either her king or her saints. But one phrase escaped her lips, “O Rouen, Rouen, must I die here!”

The end of this dismal journey was the Vieux Marché, the fish market. Three platforms had been erected there. On one was the episcopal and royal chair, the throne of the cardinal of England, surrounded by the seats of his prelates; the other was destined for the performers in this melancholy drama, the preacher, the judges, and the bailiff, and lastly the culprit. Some way off from these was seen a great platform in plaster filled and heaped with wood; materials had not been spared upon the pile: it struck terror by its height. This was done not merely for the purpose of rendering the execution more solemn; there was another intention--namely, that the great height of the pile should make it inaccessible to the executioner except from below, where he was to light it, and thus prevent him from abridging the sufferer’s agony and despatching her, as usual, before the flames reached her. There was no thought here of defrauding justice and giving a dead body to the fire; it was meant that she should be literally and truly burned alive, and that placed on the summit of that mound of wood she should be visible above the circle of lances and swords to every spectator on the ground. Burning slowly before the eyes of a gaping multitude there was reason to expect that she would at last yield to some weakness, and utter something that might be given out as a recantation; at the very least it was probable that some incoherent words would escape her, which might be interpreted as her judges desired; perhaps that in womanly terror and despair she would descend to ignoble prayers and cries for mercy.

The hideous ceremony began with a sermon. Master Nicholas Midi, one of the lights of the University of Paris, preached from this edifying text: “When a member of the church is sick the whole church is sick.” That poor church could only be cured by cutting off a limb. He concluded with the formal phrase: “Joan, go in peace; the church can no longer defend thee.”

Then the ecclesiastical judge, the bishop of Beauvais, benignly exhorted her to think of her soul and to recollect all her misdeeds, that she might be moved to contrition. The assessors had decided that it was incumbent in law to read her abjuration to her again; but the bishop did not do so, fearing that she would contradict and remonstrate. But the poor girl had no thought of thus battling with lawyers’ subtleties for her life; her mind was far differently engaged. Before even she had been exhorted to contrition she was on her knees invoking God, the Virgin, St. Michael, and St. Catherine, pardoning all and asking pardon, and saying to the by-standers, “Pray for me.” She particularly requested each of the priests to say a mass for her soul; and all this she did in a manner so pious, humble, and affecting, that the emotion spread from man to man, and none present could restrain their feelings; the bishop of Beauvais wept, the bishop of Boulogne sobbed, and at last the English themselves shed tears, and Beaufort as well as the rest.

The judges soon recovered from their momentary fit of humanity, and the bishop of Beauvais, wiping his eyes, began to read the sentence. He recapitulated to the culprit all her crimes, schism, idolatry, invocation of fiends, and set forth how she had been admitted to repentance, and how, “seduced by the prince of lies, she had relapsed, O grief! as a dog returns to his vomit. Therefore we pronounce you a rotten member, and as such cut off from the church. We give you over to the secular power, entreating it at the same time to moderate its sentence, and to spare you the pain of death and mutilation of your limbs.”[46]

Thus abandoned by the church she cast herself in full confidence on God. She asked for the cross. An Englishman handed her a wooden cross which he had made out of a stick; she received it not the less piously, kissed it, and put that rough emblem of salvation under her clothes next her skin. But she would rather have had the church cross to keep before her eyes until death. The good huissier Massieu and Brother Isambart exerted themselves to fulfil her wishes, and the cross was brought her from the parish of St. Sauveur. While she was embracing it, and Isambart was exhorting her, the English began to think the business very tedious; it was noon at least; the soldiers grumbled, and the captains called out, “Holla, priest! are you going to keep us here to dinner?” Then losing patience and not waiting for the order of the bailiff, though he alone had authority to send her to death, they sent up two sergeants to take her out of the hands of the priests. She was seized at the foot of the tribunal by the soldiers, who dragged her to the executioner, and said to him, “Do thy office.” This fury of the soldiery excited horror; many of the by-standers, and even of the judges, rushed from the ground to avoid seeing any more of it.

When she was on the ground among those English who laid hands on her, nature gave way and the flesh was troubled. Again she cried, “O Rouen, thou art then to be my last abode!” She said no more and sinned not with her lips, even in that awful moment. She accused not her king or her saints. But when she was on the top of the pile, and saw that great town and that motionless and silent multitude, she could not help saying, “Ah, Rouen, Rouen, I fear me much thou wilt have to suffer for my death!” Wonderful gentleness of soul! she who had saved the people, and whom the people forsook, expressed but compassion for them in her dying moments.

She was bound beneath the infamous inscription, and on her head was placed a mitre, on which was written: “Heretic, relapsed, apostate, idolator.” Then the executioner applied the fire. She saw it from above and shrieked. The monk who was exhorting her did not pay attention to the flames; and she, forgetting herself, became alarmed for him and made him go down. What plainly proves that until then she had retracted nothing expressly is that the wretched Cauchon was obliged (doubtless by the imperious Satanic will of him that presided) to approach the foot of the pile, obliged to look his victim in the face, and try to elicit something from her. She repeated to him mildly what she had already said: “Bishop, I die by you. Had you placed me in the church prisons this would not have happened.” Of course it had been expected that, thinking herself abandoned by her king, she would at last accuse him and speak against him; but she defended him still: “Whether I have done well or done ill, my king is in no wise implicated therein: it was not he who advised me.”

Meanwhile, the flames were ascending. At the moment they reached her the poor creature started and called out for holy water; this apparently was a cry of terror. But immediately collecting herself she uttered no names but those of God, her angels, and her saints. She testified her faith in them: “Yes, my voices were of God; my voices have not deceived me!” That grand expression of hers is attested by the compulsory and sworn witness of her death, the Dominican who ascended the pile with her, whom she sent down from that dangerous post, but who continued speaking with her from below, listened to her words, and held up the cross to her sight.

We have yet another witness of this holy death, a witness of very grave character, who was himself doubtless a saint. This man, whose name history ought to preserve, was the Augustine monk already mentioned, Brother Isambart de la Pierre. He was near perishing in the course of the prosecution for having given counsel to the Maid, and yet though so conspicuously obnoxious to the English, he voluntarily ascended the cart with her, procured her the parish cross, and stood by her in the midst of the furious crowd, both on the platform and at the stake. Twenty years after the event the two venerable men, humble monks, devoted to poverty and with nothing to gain or to fear in this world, depose as follows: “We heard her in the fire invoking her saints and her archangel; she repeated the Saviour’s name. At last, dropping her head, she cried aloud, ‘Jesus.’”

“Ten thousand men wept.” Some English alone laughed or tried to laugh. One of the most violent among them had sworn to fling a fagot on the pile; she was expiring at the moment he deposited it, and he was taken ill. His comrades carried him off to a tavern to revive his spirits with drink, but he could not recover his equanimity. “I saw,” he cried distractedly, “I saw a dove escape from her mouth with her last sigh.” Others had read in the flames the word Jesus which she repeated. The executioner went that evening in utter dismay to Brother Isambart, and confessed, but could not believe that God would ever forgive him. One of the king of England’s secretaries said openly as he returned from the horrid scene, “We are undone; we have burned a saint!”[c]

THE REHABILITATION OF JOAN OF ARC (1456 A.D.)

For a long time the people refused to believe in Joan’s death.[47] The memory of her who had been both the heroine and victim of patriotic and national sentiment became more and more popular, and several years after the English had been driven from France and her predictions accomplished, there arose a desire that her memory should be avenged.

When Charles VII entered Rouen in 1450 he had ordered the revision of the trial. Cardinal Estouteville, archbishop of Rouen and papal legate, began investigation in the name of the church. But for political reasons, and so as not to irritate the English, it was judged better to have the request for rehabilitation come from Joan’s own family, as a private matter. Two doctors designated by the court of Rome examined the request, declared it founded on the most serious motives, and concluded if the church must hesitate to pronounce on Joan’s visions, it could not charge them with crime. Upon these conclusions Pope Calixtus III appointed three prelates and an inquisitor to form a court of revision over which the archbishop of Rheims presided.

The new judges began their labour. All the witnesses still living who had known Joan appeared before them. Military leaders who had fought with her--as Alençon and Dunois--gave testimony to her memory. Three clerks who had exercised their office at the trial in Rouen furnished proof of irregularities that had been committed. No defender of the former proceedings appeared. Thereupon the court, giving the most simple explanation of all that had determined the former judges, found a hundred and one reasons for nullity. In consequence the new judges quashed, in 1456, the decree of their predecessors--as stained with illegality, fraud, violence, and manifest partiality. They declared the twelve articles of the condemnation false, calumnious, and full of fraud--while recognising that the manner in which they had been drawn up might easily have deceived the good faith of those that acted upon them. They declared the trial iniquitous--that Joan had been judged by her enemies. The church thus restored that which an ecclesiastical tribunal had struck down. The sentence of rehabilitation was published in every town of France; Orleans raised on a bridge over the Loire a statue to her liberator. Rouen held expiation processions in honour of her victim.[k]

A BRITISH ESTIMATE OF JOAN’S SERVICES

Those writers who consider Joan of Arc not merely as a female Mohammed, but as a heaven-sent saviour, do not enhance the virtue or the beauty of her own natural character, whilst they exaggerate the depression, and derogate from the martial spirit of the French, by representing them as only to be saved at the time by an avatar. It does not appear that France was in such imminent danger, or was likely to be conquered, even had Orleans fallen by a handful of English, very unequal to the subjugation of the country.

If the starting up a great prince or warrior, like Henry V, on the throne of England had brought disaster upon France, his premature death, with the consequent abstraction of English aid and English vigour from the duke of Bedford, was a greater blow to English ascendency than any supposed mission of Joan of Arc. If the French were defeated at Agincourt and Verneuil, this was mainly owing to the yeoman middle classes, which formed the strength of the English army, whilst a similar class in France was kept out of the ranks of the national defence. But the sieges of Rouen and of Orleans had restored to the French peasant and the French townsman the right and the habit of wielding a sword by the side of the gentleman. What Joan of Arc did was to restore their confidence; this was her good fortune or her mission. The disinherited and degraded middle and lower classes rose to defend and save the monarchy, which counts and barons had allowed to fall with themselves into the mire. This was the revolution, this the new spirit that saved France from the English, and not the trumped-up miracle of La Pucelle. It was the red right arm of French manhood which did that act, and not the prophecies of Merlin, the visions of saints, or the embroidered banner of the virgin of Domrémy.[g]

FOOTNOTES

[39] [It was positively asserted that a ball had taken off a man’s shoe without hurting his foot.]

[40] [The duke of Orleans had been a captive in England since the battle of Agincourt.]

[41] [The family name was Darc, and the name of the Maid of Orleans was therefore, properly, Jeanne Darc, not Jeanne d’Arc as commonly written; but the latter has the sanction of general usage.]

[42] [His aunt, the saintly Joan of Luxemburg, was also most energetic in her efforts to have Joan released.]

[43] [The count of Ligny received the money before October. The duke of Burgundy handed Joan over to the English on the 21st of November.]

[44] [From the door of her father’s dwelling she looked on an old oak wood. The fairies haunted that wood; their favourite spot was a certain spring near a great ash called the “fairies’ tree.” The children used to hang garlands on it and sing to it. These somewhile ladies and mistresses of the forest could no longer, it was said, assemble at the spring; they had been excluded from it for their sins. The church, however, always retained a jealous fear of the old local divinities, and the curé used to go once every year, and read a mass at the spring, in order to drive them away.[c]]

[45] [The mother and aunt of the count of Ligny, who took a tender interest in the Maid while she was in his keeping.]

[46] [The regular formula for the sentence of giving over a heretic to the secular arm.]

[47] [In 1436 rumour spread through France that it was not La Pucelle that the English had burned at Rouen. In fact, a woman whose resemblance to Joan was astonishing had presented herself to her two brothers and was acknowledged by them. In 1438 and 1439 this “false Joan” headed a body of armed men and was enthusiastically received by the people of Orleans. Brought before the king, she admitted the imposture, was imprisoned, afterwards released and came, according to report, to a bad and shameful end.]

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