Author: Will Durant
Category: Nonfiction
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Joan sent a letter to Talbot, the English commander, proposing that both armies should unite as brothers and proceed to Palestine to redeem the Holy Land from the Turks; Talbot thought that this exceeded his commission. Some days later a part of the garrison, without informing Dunois or Joan, issued beyond the walls and attacked one of the British bastions. The English fought well, the French retreated; but Dunois and Joan, having heard the commotion, rode up and bade their men renew the assault; it succeeded, and the English abandoned their position. On the morrow the French attacked two other forts and took them, the Maid being in the thick of the fight. In the second encounter an arrow pierced her shoulder; when the wound had been dressed she returned to the fray. Meanwhile the sturdy cannon of Guillaume Duisy hurled upon the English fortress of Les Tourelles balls weighing 120 pounds each. Joan was spared the sight of the victorious French slaughtering 500 Englishmen when that stronghold fell. Talbot concluded that his forces were inadequate for the siege, and withdrew them to the north (May 8). All France rejoiced, seeing in the “Maid of Orléans” the hand of God; but the English denounced her as a sorceress, and vowed to take her alive or dead.
On the day after her triumph Joan set out to meet the King, who was advancing from Chinon. He greeted her with a kiss, and accepted her plan to march through France to Reims, though this meant passing through hostile terrain. His army encountered English forces at Meung, Beaugency, and Patay, and won decisive victories, tarnished with vengeful massacres that horrified the Maid. Seeing a French soldier slay an English prisoner, she dismounted, held the dying man’s head in her hands, comforted him, and sent for a confessor. On July 15 the King entered Reims, and on the seventeenth he was anointed and crowned with awesome ceremonies in the majestic cathedral. Jacques d’Arc, coming up from Domrémy, saw his daughter, still in her male attire, riding in splendor through the religious capital of France. He did not neglect the occasion, but through her intercession secured a remission of taxes for his village. For a passing spell Joan considered her mission accomplished, and thought, “If it would please God that I might go and tend sheep with my sister and brother.” 65
But the fever of battle had entered her blood. Acclaimed as inspired and holy by half of France, she almost forgot now to be a saint, and became a warrior. She was strict with her soldiers, scolded them lovingly, and deprived them of the consolations that all soldiers hold as their due; and when she found two prostitutes accompanying them she drew her sword and struck one so manfully that the blade broke and the woman died.66 She followed the King and his army in an attack upon Paris, which was still held by the English; she was in the van in clearing the first foss; approaching the second, she was struck in the thigh by an arrow, but remained to cheer on the troops. Their assault failed, they suffered 1,500 casualties, and cursed her for thinking that a prayer could silence a gun; this had not been their experience. Some Frenchwomen, who had jealously waited for her first reverse, censured her for leading an assault on the feast of the Virgin’s birth (September 8, 1429). She retired with her detachment to Compiègne. Besieged there by Burgundians allied with the English, she bravely led a sally, which was repulsed; she was the last to retreat, and found the gates of the town closed before she could reach them. She was dragged from her horse, and was taken as a captive to John of Luxembourg (May 24, 1430). Sir John lodged her honorably in his castles at Beaulieu and Beaurevoir.
His good fortune brought him a dangerous dilemma. His sovereign, Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, demanded the precious prize; the English urged Sir John to surrender her to them, hoping that her ignominious execution would break the charm that had so heartened the French. Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, who had been driven from his diocese for supporting the English, was sent by them to Philip with powers and funds to negotiate the transfer of the Maid to British authority, and was promised the archbishopric of Rouen as the reward of his success. The Duke of Bedford, controlling the University of Paris, induced its pundits to advise Philip to hand over Joan, as a possible sorceress and heretic, to Cauchon as the ecclesiastical head of the region in which she had been captured. When these arguments were rejected, Cauchon offered to Philip and John a bribe of 10,000 gold crowns ($250,000?). This too proving inadequate, the English government laid an embargo on all exports to the Low Countries. Flanders, the richest source of the Duke’s revenue, faced bankruptcy. John, over the entreaties of his wife, and Philip, despite his Good name, finally accepted the bribe and surrendered the Maid to Cauchon, who took her to Rouen. There, though formally a prisoner of the Inquisition, she was placed under English guard in the tower of a castle held by the Earl of Warwick as the governor of Rouen. Shackles were put on her feet, and a chain was fastened around her waist and bound to a beam.
Her trial began on February 21,1431, and continued till May 30. Cauchon presided, one of his canons served as prosecutor, a Dominican monk represented the Inquisition, and some forty men learned in theology and law were added to the panel. The charge was heresy. To check the monstrous regiment of magic-mongers that infested Europe, the Church had made the claim to divine inspiration a heresy punishable with death. Witches were being burned for pretending to supernatural powers; and it was a common opinion, among churchmen and laymen, that those who made such claims might actually have received supernatural powers from the Devil. Some of Joan’s jurors seem to have believed this in her case. In their judgment her refusal to acknowledge that the authority of the Church, as the vicar of Christ on earth, could override that of her “voices” proved her a sorceress. This became the opinion of the majority of the court.67 Nevertheless they were moved by the guileless simplicity of her answers, by her evident piety and chastity; they were men, and seem at times to have felt a great pity for this girl of nineteen, so obviously the prey of English fear. “The king of England,” said Warwick, with soldierly candor, “has paid dearly for her; he would not on any consideration whatever have her die a natural death.” 68 Some jurors argued that the matter should be laid before the pope—which would free her and the court from English power. Joan expressed a desire to be sent to him, but drew a firm distinction that ruined her: she would acknowledge his supreme authority in matters of faith, but as concerned what she had done in obedience to her voices she would own no judge but God Himself. The judges agreed that this was heresy. Weakened by months of questioning, she was persuaded to sign a retraction; but when she found that this still left her condemned to lifelong imprisonment within English jurisdiction, she revoked her retraction. English soldiers surrounded the court, and threatened the lives of the judges if the Maid should escape burning. On May 31 a few of the judges convened, and sentenced her to death.
That very morning the faggots were piled high in the market place of Rouen. Two platforms were placed near by—one for Cardinal Winchester of England and his prelates, another for Cauchon and the judges; and 800 British troops stood on guard. The Maid was brought in on a cart, accompanied by an Augustinian monk, Isambart, who befriended her to the last, at peril to his life. She asked for a crucifix; an English soldier handed her one that he had fashioned from two sticks; she accepted it, but called also for a crucifix blessed by the Church; and Isambart prevailed upon the officials to bring her one from the church of Saint Sauveur. The soldiers grumbled at the delay, for it was now noon. “Do you intend us to dine here?” their captain asked. His men snatched her from the hands of the priests, and led her to the stake. Isambart held up a crucifix before her, and a Dominican monk mounted the pyre with her. The faggots were lighted, and the flames rose about her feet. Seeing the Dominican still beside her, she urged him to descend to safety. She invoked her voices, her saints, the Archangel Michael, and Christ, and was consumed in agony. A secretary to the English king anticipated the verdict of history: “We are lost,” he cried; “we have burned a saint.”
In 1455 Pope Calixtus III, at the behest of Charles VII, ordered a reexamination of the evidence upon which Joan had been condemned; and in 1456 (France being no
w victorious) the verdict of 1431 was, by the ecclesiastical court of review, declared unjust and void. In 1920 Benedict XV numbered the Maid of Orléans among the saints of the Church.
X. FRANCE SURVIVES: 1431–53
We must not exaggerate the military importance of Joan of Arc; probably Dunois and La Hire would have saved Orléans without her; her tactics of reckless assault won some battles and lost others; and England was feeling the cost of a Hundred Years’ War. In 1435 Philip of Burgundy, England’s ally, tired of the struggle and made a separate peace with France. His defection weakened the hold of the English on the conquered cities of the south; one by one these expelled their alien garrisons. In 1436 Paris itself, for seventeen years a captive, drove out the British, and Charles VII at last ruled in his capital.
Strange to tell, he who had for so long been a do-nothing shadow of a king, had learned by this time to govern—to choose competent ministers, to reorganize the army, to discipline turbulent barons, to do whatever was needed to make his country free. What had wrought this transformation? The inspiration of Joan had begun it, but how weak he still seemed when he raised not a finger to save her! His remarkable mother-in-law, Yolande of Anjou, had helped him with wise counsel, had encouraged him to receive and support the Maid. Now—if we may trust tradition—she gave her son-in-law the mistress who for ten years ruled the heart of the King.
Agnès Sorel was the daughter of a squire in Touraine. Orphaned in childhood, she had been brought up to good manners by Isabelle, Duchess of Lorraine. Isabelle took her, then twenty-three, to visit the court in Chinon (1432) in the year after Joan’s death. Snared in the girl’s chestnut tresses, and in love with her laughter, Charles marked her out as his own. Yolande found her tractable, hoped to use her in influencing the King, and persuaded Marie, her daughter, to accept this latest of her husband’s mistresses.69 Agnès remained till death faithful in this infidelity, and a later king, Francis I, after much experience in such matters, praised the “Lady of Beauty” as having served France better than any cloistered nun. Charles “relished wisdom from such lips”; he allowed Agnès to shame him out of indolence and cowardice into industry and resolution. He gathered about him able men like Constable Richemont, who led his armies, and Jacques Cœur, who restored the finances of the state, and Jean Bureau, whose artillery brought recalcitrant nobles to heel and sent the English scurrying to Calais.
Jacques Cœur was a condottiere of commerce; a man of no pedigree and little schooling, who, however, could count well; a Frenchman who dared to compete successfully with Venetians, Genoese, and Catalans in trade with the Moslem East. He owned and equipped seven merchant vessels, manned them by hiring convicts and snatching vagrants from the streets, and sailed his ships under the flag of the Mother of God. He amassed the greatest fortune of his time in France, some 27,000,000 francs, when a franc was worth some five dollars in the emaciated currency of our day. In 1436 Charles gave him charge of the mint, soon afterward of the revenues and expenditures of the government. A States-General of 1439, enthusiastically supporting Charles’s resolve to drive the English from French soil, empowered the King, by a famous succession of ordonnances (1443–47), to take the whole taille of France—i.e., all taxes hitherto paid by tenants to their feudal lords; the government’s revenue now rose to 1,800,000 crowns ($45,000,000?) a year. From that time onward the French monarchy, unlike the English, was independent of the Estates’ “power of the purse,” and could resist the growth of a middle-class democracy. This system of national taxation provided the funds for the victory of France over England; but as the King could raise the rate of assessment, it became a major tool of royal oppression, and shared in causing the Revolution of 1789. Jacques Cœur played a leading role in these fiscal developments, earning the admiration of many and the hatred of a powerful few. In 1451 he was arrested on a charge—never proved—of hiring agents to poison Agnès Sorel. He was condemned and banished, and all his property was confiscated to the state—an elegant method of exploitation by proxy. He fled to Rome, where he was made admiral of a papal fleet sent to the relief of Rhodes. He was taken ill at Chios, and died there in 1456, aged sixty-one.
Meanwhile Charles VII, guided by Cœur, had established an honest coinage, rebuilt the shattered villages, promoted industry and commerce, and restored the economic vitality of France. He compelled the disbandment of private companies of soldiers, and gathered these into his service to form the first standing army in Europe (1439). He decreed that in every parish some virile citizen, chosen by his fellows, should be freed from all taxation, should arm himself, practice the use of weapons, and be ready at any moment to join his like in the military service of the King. It was these francs-tireurs, or free bowmen, who drove the English from France.
By 1449 Charles was prepared to break the truce that had been signed in 1444. The English were surprised and shocked. They were weakened by internal quarrels, and found their fading empire in France relatively as expensive to maintain in the fifteenth century as India in the twentieth; in 1427 France cost England £68,000, brought her £57,000. The British fought bravely but not wisely; they relied too long on archers and stakes, and the tactics that had stopped the French cavalry at Crécy and Poitiers proved helpless at Formigny (1450) against the cannon of Bureau. In 1449 the English evacuated most of Normandy; in 1451 they abandoned its capital, Rouen. In 1453 great Talbot himself was defeated and killed at Castillon; Bordeaux surrendered; all Guienne was French again; the English kept only Calais. On October 19, 1453, the two nations signed the peace that ended the Hundred Years’ War.
CHAPTER IV
Gallia Phoenix
1453–1515
1. LOUIS XI: 1461–83
THE son of Charles VII was an exceptionally troublesome dauphin. Married against his will at thirteeen (1436) to Margaret of Scotland, aged eleven, he revenged himself by ignoring her and cultivating mistresses. Margaret, who lived on poetry, found peace in an early death (1444), saying, as she died, “Fie upon life! Speak to me no more of it.”1 Louis twice rebelled against his father, fled to Flanders after the second attempt, and waited fretfully for power. Charles accommodated him by starving himself to death (1461);2 and for twenty-two years France was ruled by one of her strangest and greatest kings.
He was now thirty-eight, thin and ungainly, homely and melancholy, with distrustful eyes and far-reaching nose. He looked like a peasant, dressed like an impoverished pilgrim in a rough gray gown and a shabby felt hat, prayed like a saint, and ruled as if he had read The Prince before Machiavelli was born. He scorned the pomp of feudalism, laughed at traditions and formalities, questioned his own legitimacy, and shocked all thrones with his simplicity. He lived in the gloomy palace Des Tournelles in Paris, or in the chateau of Plessis-les-Tours near Tours, usually like a bachelor, though a second time married; penurious though possessing France; keeping only the few attendants he had had in his exile, and eating such food as any peasant might afford. He looked not an iota, but would be every inch, a king.
He subordinated every element of character to his resolve that France should under his hammer be forged out of feudal fragmentation into monarchic unity and monolithic strength, and that this centralized monarchy should lift France out of the ashes of war to new life and power. To his political purpose he gave his thinking day and night, with a mind clear, cunning, inventive, restless, like Caesar counting nothing done if anything remained to do. “As for peace,” said Comines, “he could hardly endure the thought of it.” 3 However, he was unsuccessful in war, and preferred diplomacy, espionage, and bribery to force; he brought men around to his purposes by persuasion, flattery, or fear, and kept a large staff of spies in his service at home and abroad; he paid regular secret salaries to the ministers of England’s Edward IV.4 He could yield, bear insult, play at humility, wait his chance for victory or revenge. He made major blunders, but recovered from them with unscrupulous and disconcerting ingenuity. He attended to all deails of government, and forgot nothing. Yet he spared
time for literature and art, read avidly, collected manuscripts, recognized the revolution that printing presaged, and enjoyed the company of educated men, particularly if they were Bohemians in the Parisian sense. In his Flanders exile he had joined the Count of Charolais in forming an academy of scholars, who salted their pedantry with jolly Boccaccian tales; Antoine de la Salle gathered some of these in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. He was hard on the rich, careless of the poor, hostile to artisan guilds, favorable to the middle class as his strongest support, and in any class ruthless with those who opposed him. After a rebellion in Perpignan he ordered that any banished rebel who dared to return should have his testicles amputated.5 In his war with the nobles he had some special enemies or traitors imprisoned for years in iron cages eight by eight by seven feet; these were contrived by the bishop of Verdun, who later occupied one for fourteen years.6 At the same time Louis was much devoted to the Church, needing her aid against nobles and states. He had a rosary nearly always at hand, and repeated paternosters and Ave Marias with the assiduity of a dying nun. In 1472 he inaugurated the Angelus—a midday Ave Maria for the peace of the realm. He visited sacred shrines, conscripted relics, bribed the saints to his service, took the Virgin into partnership in his wars. When he died, he himself was represented as a saint on an abbey portal in Tours.