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

I went to her lodging to see her, and she sent for wine, and she told me that we would soon drink wine in Paris. It seemed to me a gift from heaven that she was there and that I was seeing and hearing her. She left Celles on Monday at the hour of Vespers, alongside a great body of armed men. I saw her mount her horse, arrayed all in white armor, with only her head bare and holding a small ax. The great black charger was very restive at her door and would not let her mount. Lead him, she said, to the cross which is in front of the church. And there she mounted, the horse standing still as if he had been bound. Then, turning Turning towards the church which was close by, she said in a beautiful feminine voice, You priests and people of the church, make processions and prayers to God for us. Then, turning to the road, forward, forward, she said. Her unfolded standard was carried by a page. She had her small ax in her hand, and by her side rode a brother who had joined her eight days before. Before. That's a letter written on the eighth of June, 1429, by a soft, tender-hearted young nobleman, Guy de La Vall.

He's writing to his mother, and he is pumped. He is so full of excitement because he has just seen the heroine of the hour, Joan of Arc.

Dominic, how beautifully you conveyed her feminine voice there.

Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed that.

It's as though she'd been brought back to life.

A month has gone by since this extraordinary extraordinary moments in the history of France and French military achievements at the liberation of Orléans. To remind listeners, Orléans had been under siege for six months by the English, had been on the verge, it seemed, of surrender. Had the English taken it, they would have been able to cross the River Loire and advance deep into south central France. But in the nick of time, the siege had been broken, the English had been driven back, and the banner of the house of Valois, the ancient line of French Kings, still flies over Orléans. Tom, various people have taken some credit for this achievement, and you can take us through them. But of course, one above all is the subject of this podcast.

Yes. So various French captains, as you said, had definitely played their part in this great drama. So there was Jean, the bastard of Orléans, illegitimate half brother of the Richard Duke of Orléans, who was languishing in the Tower of London, had been there ever since the Battle of Agencourt, where he'd been captured. He's team Orléans on the scene, very battle-hardened, very shrewd, very well connected despite the fact he's illegitimate. He's cousin to the French king, to Charles VII. Then there's Étienne de Vignol, better known as La Hire, the Wroth of God, man of very humble origins, had crushed by a chimney of a pub falling on top of it, but still very feared, very charismatic, the great warlord of his day. And then there is this guy, Gilles de Ré, a Breton nobleman with a particular taste for guerrilla warfare. And Guy de La Val knew him very well because Guy's brother was married to the daughter of Gilles De Ré.

Yeah. And there's another side to Gilles de Ré, isn't there? Which we perhaps won't go into immediately, but perhaps it's shadow over his reputation.

We may be coming to that in due course. Anyway, but at the time, there is no blot on the description of Gilles de Ré or any of the other French captains, because in the wake of the miracle of Orléans, they have come to think of themselves as brothers in arms, and they have an incredible glamor now. This is why Guida Laval has joined them. He wants a bit of it himself. He wants to join this band of brothers. However, none of these warlords, none of these captains is the person who most glamourously, most stirringly embodies the miracle of Orléans. It's not the bastard, it's not La'Ere, it's not Gilles DeRay, it's a teenage girl, and the sense of her charisma is palpable in the spirit of devotion with which Guida Laval has described this person to his mother.

Yes, I saw her mount her horse, arrayed all in white armor, with only her head bare and holding a small ax. You can sense here the influence of the Arthurian chivalric romances that were so popular in the 15th century. I mean, it's effectively, it's as though one of the books that they love one of the stories or the songs that troubadors sing has come to life, isn't it?

Yeah. So this, of course, is Joan of Argue. And it's absolutely astonishing that only months before, she'd been a peasant in a homespun dress. And now she is like Solancelot. She's transformed herself into a flower of chivalry. And she's won the heart and the admiration of these very battle-hardened men. So the bastard, La Ere, Gilles DeRay. It's astonishing. She'd done it because she was very courageous. She'd shown tremendous zeal. She'd shown enormous A real sense of what it would take to defeat the English, to relieve the siege. But I think also she embodied something that is completely exceptional because Joan of Arc, through the entire sweep of medieval history, is someone exceptional. And this is a instinctive genius for display an image. She's the medieval David Bowie on steroids. She understands how to project herself.

But just on this, right? I mean, actually, since she's a woman, Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga might be as good a parallel. But just on this, she is drawing not just on the religious iconography and whatnot, but she is very clearly drawing on the tradition of the chivalric romance. She's playing a part. I mean, the point about performance, I think, is really important. She is consciously or unconsciously, playing a part that people know will inspire nights and get them excited and all of this stuff. I mean, there is a definite element of spectacle about the Joan of Arc phenomenon.

Yeah. I mean, I suspect this isn't calculation. It's the expression of what is in her heart. But what is in her heart has been massively influenced, I think, by the romances that we know that she listened to when she was growing up. Clearly, she has dreams of chivalry. The mad thing is that she's not a young man, she's a young woman. She's not only dared to live these dreams out, but she has persuaded hard-bitten noblemen to share in them, to see her, a peasant girl, as a nobleman. And Marina Warner, whose book I've already cited, is brilliant on this. Marina Warner writes, Joan was the personification of mobility. She accepted neither her peasant birth nor her female condition. None of the limitations society had provided for her circumscription. Instead, in an age of chivalry, she assumed its most successful guise and dressed herself and comported herself like a night born to the role.

But the thing is, of course, she's not a night. She's a woman. And this is the paradox of her, isn't it? That she's playing a male part, a traditionally male part, and she's surrounded by men. But she's not pretending to be a man, right? She doesn't cast off her feminine identity at all. But she actually draws on it. And it's the fact that she is… Surely that's what gives her part of the, as I were, supernatural or divine power, is the fact that she is setting herself outside the conventional gender norms. No? People see her as a woman apart.

Yeah, or she's fusing the most potent expressions of what is male and female. We said how she buys into the show and the glamor of nighthood. But she also instinctively understands understands that there are deep reserves of spiritual power that women, particularly, are able to channel. She is absolutely not trans. She does not want to change her sex. She never claims, she never pretends to be male. She always calls herself Jean la Pucelle, Joan the maid. What she's doing there is drawing on all the traditions that are associated with the body of a virgin girl. She's casting it as the very essence of her identity. She is male in the most martial way it's possible to be male, but she is female in the holiest way it is possible to be female. It's this fusion that is so unique and that makes Joan such a completely exceptional person in the sweep of medieval European history.

We compared her before a couple of times to another person we've done on the show, Catherine of Siena. Catherine of Siena draws almost exclusively on female archetypes.

She's the bride of Christ, isn't she?

Joan is a bit different. In the first episode, you talked about her obsession with St. Michael, a patron saint, a warrior saint, and so on, the captain of heaven, all of that, the leaders of the Archangels. St. Michael, you might say a very male figure, but is Because he's a little bit amorphous, isn't he?

Well, he's an angel, and so he's sexless. Angels do not have sex in any sense. That's a very niche hobby. He's neither male, he's not female. He's more than that. Michael, as we said, had become the emblem of French resistance, and Joan has now become the emblem of French resistance. Although comparison, I don't think, is ever overtly made by Joan's contempories, there is a hint of this sexless character that they see her as possessing in the way that her companions in arms repeat entheatedly speak of her as someone who is attractive, but who nevertheless never provokes sexual desire in them. Here is Jean Doulon, her squire, who wrote after she had died. Although she was a young girl, beautiful and Shapely, and when helping to arm her or otherwise, I have often seen her breasts. And although sometimes when I was dressing her wounds, I have seen her legs quite bare, and I have gone close to her many times, and I was strong, young, and vigorous in those days, never, despite any sight or contact I had with the maid, was my body moved to any carnal desire for her, nor were any of her soldiers or squired moved in this way.

I think it's important for Joan's her male comrade, to emphasize that she is a maid, that her virginity is the marker of her Holiness, and that this Holiness in turn is the evidence that she is what she says she is, a messenger sent from God.

Right. And there's no sense that any of the captains at Orléans, when she's berating them and all of that thing, when she is haranguing them about bad decisions and stuff, there's no sense that any of the captains doubt her and say, who is this flippin jumped up peasant girl who claims to be sent by God, or any of the knights, or any of these people. They collectively choose to believe. Do they? Or are there any skeptics?

Of course, there are skeptics. And of course, it takes time for Joan to persuade them that what she represents is something that they should be buying into. But the proof is in the pudding. She prayed, the wind changed. She suggested that the English should be attacked. They attacked the English. It works out. All in all, is liberated. The miracle stands for herself. She's done exactly what she said she would do. This is why people like Guy De Laval, who's enthusiastic description of Joan we began this show with, that's why they're buying into it. There's this electric sense of excitement that everything she had said was true, that God is on the side of French arms, that everything that had seemed terrible has now been raised up in this illumined by this splendor, this sense of this sense of wonder and the miraculous. That's what Guy and loads of other people are buying into. It's interesting because effectively, Jones's liberation of Orléans is the only miracle that she has performed. In that letter that you read, Guy describes how her horse is a bit frisky, and Joan says, take it over to the cross, and then the horse calms down, as though there's a hint of the miraculous there.

But it's pretty feeble stuff. Joan herself, she repudiates all this. She always said, and this, again, is a massive point of difference between her and other female visionaries, or indeed, visionaries, full stop. They're laying claim to all kinds of miracles. Joan doesn't do that. There are lots of people who want her to be a miracle worker who want her to perform miraculous healings or whatever. She doesn't.

Well, even the relief of Orléans. The relief of Orléans, it's not really a supernatural miracle. Seages are often relieved. Sure, the French thought they were going to lose, and actually they ended up winning, and they're delighted by that. But you don't need to resort to supernatural explanations for why they were able to route the English.

Well, Dominic, you don't. But that is the one miracle that Joan says that she has performed. And I guess you would say it was a miracle that the relief of Orléans was performed by a peasant girl. I mean, that does seem really stunning, and people buy into the fact that that is properly miraculous. But there isn't really anything else, because Joan wants the focus to be entirely on the mission that she has been given by her voices. And That mission was to relieve Orléans, and that was the test, and she has passed it. So her claim to have been sent from God is now widely accepted by basically everyone on the French side.

Not least, the man that she is serving, who is the Dauphin. Even Joan still calls him the Dauphin, don't they? Everybody calls him the Dauphin, the titular Charles VII, because he won't really become king or be accepted as king. So he's driven back the English and gone into Reims and being crowned because Reims, 80 miles northeast of Paris, in English-held territory, this is the place where for generations, French kings have been crowned. Millenium. You need to get there. Charles has been hanging around for seven years It's the death of his father in 1422, hoping desperately he can get to Reims and be crowned, and it seems no prospect of it whatsoever. Joan has promised him not only that she will relieve Orléans, but that she will crown him in Reims and drive out the English with him. So he must now be thinking, Well, she's done number one. What about number two and number three?

Yeah, absolutely. And in the weeks that follow the relief of Orléans, he really sets his shoulder to the wheel in an attempt to try and help her fulfill kill these other two prophecies. So the relief force that had been sent to Aulior, that had been disbanded almost immediately after the relief of the city, basically because there aren't any funds left to keep it in the field. The Dauphine's treasury is empty. And that, again, is part of the miraculous quality of the relief of Orléans. It's come despite the fact that the Dauphine effectively is bankrupt. In the wake of the relief of Orléans, the Dauphin is now confident that men will answer his call and not expect to be paid because now they will do it because they are following a miraculous virgin.

God, that really would be a miracle if they want to fight and not be paid.

That is what turns out to be the case. Because by early June, some 5,000 men have assembled at cells, which is this small town south of Loire between Tau and Orléans. And among them, of course, was Guy de La Val. So he's typical of... He's expressive of why these people are now ready to fight for the dauphin in a way that they hadn't been before and not expect to be paid for it. And in fact, Guy de La Val, to fund this campaigning, he had been forced to sell lands. So not only is he not being paid, he's actually short of a few estates or two. Now, among the various nobles and captains of France, as we mentioned in the previous episode, there is one who, right from the beginning, has been a massive Joan fan. This is the Duke of Alonso, Jean, who's only 20, but has been appointed by the Dauphat to serve as Commander-in-Chief of this expeditionary force that has been recruited. Joan herself, even though in her letter, she as a captain of men, she has no official rank, but she doesn't actually need one. The Dauphat gives instructions to Alonso that he is to act in all matters by her advice.

As it turns out, the campaign is an amazing success. Jones' advice, again, turns out to be incredibly effective. Just as they had been humiliated at Orléans, so now, a succession of English commanders find themselves very much coming second best when they come up against Joan and her men.

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

He does.

Sportingly, he ignites the person who takes him prisoner, which I think is tremendous.

Or you might say snobbishly because he doesn't want to be captured by someone who's not a night. Yeah. So that's the Duke of Suffolk taken prisoner. And he, of course, had been in command at all. But one week later, there's an even more crushing blow for the English to endure, because this time it's the turn of Talbot, so John Talbot, the great Lawrence Delaleo, of the English to be taken prisoner. And he suffers a crushing defeat. He's not defending a town. He's in the open. And this is a pitch battle of the kind that the English, ever since as Agencourt, have pretty much taken for granted that they are bound to win. But now they lose. 2000 Englishmen are killed. This is a loss of manpower that they can't really afford. But of course, even more damagingly, perhaps, is the fact that they have lost this reputation for invincible. Again, this redounds massively to Joan's credit. She goes to the Dauphine and she says, Look, we've had these twin victories, two Two of your enemies are now prisoner, Suffolk and Talbot. God is clearly with you. Now, we must seize the moment. We must advance beyond the safe zone of the Loire, and we must go deep into enemy-held territory Our target must be a place some 130 miles to the north of the Loire, beyond Paris.

And this is, of course, the Holy City of Rance.

And this is a really, really dodgy undertaking for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's 130 miles away. They're not going to have time to organize a supply train. They're going to have to move very fast for that reason. And because of that, because they're not going to be able to take supplies, they are going Not going to be able to take artillery either, which means they're not going to be able to lay a siege to house. There can't be a protracted siege. But as always, Jones says, Oh, God will provide, and the Dauphine believes her.

God does provide. Because on the fifth of July, the Dauphine, his army, with Joan, they arrived before the walls of Troyes. This is the principal city of Champagne. And of course, it is where the Dauphine had been disinherited by his father by the terms of the peace treaty that the lunatic Charles VI had signed with Henry V and the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke of Burgundy exercises a very strong influence on the city. The council is loyal to the Duke, to Philip the Good. When When the Dauphin appears before the walls of the city, the council refuses to surrender. But Joan is not daunted or put off by this at all. She tells the Dauphin, My voices have told me that within four days, I will lead you into Troyes, despite the fact, as you mentioned, Dominic, that the French have no artillery. So how on earth is this going to happen? What Joan does, she rides on her horse round the walls of the city, and she commands her men to fill the ditches that surround the walls with brushwood, and the townsmen, so not the members of the council, the everyday people in the city, they gather on the walls and they look down and they see Joan, and they see her men blocking up the ditches, and they get more and more nervous.

To quote Helen Castor in her book on Joan, After four days of fear and deepening uncertainty, the sight of these preparations for an assault led by the miraculous maid finally the town's resistance. So even before Joan and her forces attack, the people of Troie are so spuked that they've decided to surrender, and they forced the council to do this. Just as Joan had prophesied, the dofair rise into the city, and Joan is there with him, carrying her great silken-white banner.

So another tremendous victory. If I can just pause the narrative for a second. So obviously, for understandable reasons, you want this to be as glamorous and exciting as story as possible. So you are playing the miraculous elements and amazing triumphs against the odds that are only explicable by Joan's extraordinary charisma and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah where you pointed out a great length and very convincingly that the English were always... France is richer, more powerful, more populous, all of this. In a way, the English so-called triumphs in the Hundred Years War were always a losery. You could argue that the English were always massively over extended, that it was always... I remember in the old days when you used to diss Henry IV, you used to say you thought he was a bad king because he hugely extended the England in a campaign in France they couldn't possibly win in the long run, that one day eventually they would be driven back. I suppose in a way, you could say, of course, Joan is really important to this story, but even if you take her out of it, you could argue that this would have happened at some point anyway, that the English were never going to be able to hold on to all this territory.

They're hugely outnumbered in terms of demography. One day, France will get its act together under a charismatic leader of some kind, and that that's what lies behind this story, the geopolitical, the strategic realities of the Hundred Years War.

Okay, so just two points to that. The first is that what Joan is doing is turning the needle on French morale. A crucial part of English success, why they have been able to dominate certainly Northern France, despite really not having that many men, is the mystique of Agencourt, the sense that they are invincible. And Joan effectively has destroyed that mystique. The second thing, the specific issue of toi and why they surrender, it's not the English who are the enemy in toi. It's the duke of Burgundy The Burgundian, right. The Dauphat is there as a representative of the bitter, bitter enemy of the Burgundians, the Armagnacs. So in that sense, the surrender really is, I think, extraordinary and a tribute certainly to the mystique of Joan. I think it would be churlish to discount the impact that she personally had in persuading the Burgundian elements within within trois to surrender.

The charismatic leader matters. But if you imagine it as a video game, as a board game, the French ultimately always have more cards. When they finally work out how to play those cards, they will win.

We're slightly off here. But I think that had all in or fallen, had the English advanced into the south, had they captured Bourges, had the Dauphins fled, had they been able to establish a very loose sovereignty over the whole of France, it would still have been impossible for them to hold France. In the long run France was just too preponderant, too strong, relative to England for that ever to have happened. But I do think that the fact that all in is relieved and that Charles, his war captains, and the men who have rallied to his banner find that when they go out deep into English and Burgundian-held France, actually everything falls to pieces. The whole stack of cards falls to pieces. They wouldn't have done that without Joan. It may be that Joan is, I mean, she is effectively calling her enemy's bluff. But it took a peasant girl, ignorant of war, to do that. And that is an astonishing story. And it's not surprising, I think, that for her supporters, she is an incredibly potent and glamorous figure. And for her enemy, she is a figure of dread, someone who seems to have exercised witchcraft.

So I've taken you slightly off the narrative. Let's get back to the narrative. So basically, with the fall of the road to Reims lies open, and the English and the Burgundians are never going to be able to organize themselves to get an army in the way in time. And this is tremendous news for the dauphin.

Well, just to pick up on that, in the wake of all your, the battle at Pate, English forces are depleted. They could send for more forces to come from England, and in due course, they will. But for now, there aren't the forces to oppose the advance on Reims. Joan would not have She doesn't have the military sensibility to understand that. But I think that she has a gut feeling, this is our moment, God is with us, and she turns out to be right, perhaps for the wrong reasons. Right.

Let's get to the Dauphin and the narrative. So the Dauphin, by the 16th of July, he is 12 miles outside Reims, at a place called Sett Su, and all is looking good. So dignitures from Reims arrive, and they offer their submission to him. And that afternoon, the 16th of July, the Archbishop of Reims, who has been exiled from the city for more than a decade, he goes into the city, and then that evening, he is followed by the Dauphin, Joan at his side. What an amazing scene that must have been incredible for French partisans to see the Dauphat and Joan arriving in the city at last after all this time.

The sinister figure of Gilles Tere, meanwhile, who's been riding with them, he He has headed out to the Abbey of Saint-Rémy, the guy who had a baptized Clovis almost a thousand years before. This was oil that had been brought down from heaven by a dove, and it was kept in the Holy Ampula, which was a vial of Roman glass. This is what you had to use to anoint the king. He gets it, comes back, so that's ready for the day. Unfortunately, the regalia of Charlemagne, a sword, a crown, and so on, this is in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, and that is still under English occupation, so they can't get that. But blacksmiths are sent to work, a makeshift crown is produced. Basically, everything is ready to go. Needs must. The coronation can go ahead. It begins the following morning, 9: 00. It's the 17th of July, 1429. Charles, the dauphin, approaches the high altar. The Duke of Alençon is waiting for him. The Duke of Alençon nights Charles. Charles is then presented to God. He's touched with oil, the Holy oil that has been brought from the Abbey of Saint-Rémy, and he is then crowned by the Archbishop of Rance.

Throughout the ceremony, Joan is by the side of the dauphin, holding her beautiful white banner. When the coronation has been completed, she falls to her knees before the dauphin, and she tells him, noble king, God's will is done, and then she breaks down in tears.

Oh, a tear-jerking scene. And meanwhile, the new, the King, I guess we should call him Charles VII, he's granting all sorts of favors, isn't he? So fan favorite, Gilles de Ré, is made a Marshal of France. Guy de La Val, a future Aristot, who we heard from at the beginning. He's a count. The Bastard of Orléans is there. That Bloke, the Roth of God is there. René Avenjou is there, all these characters. Actually, Jones family are there, too. So this is a signal honor for them. They were respectable peasants, but they were peasants nonetheless. And now here they are at the coronation of the king.

And being put up at public expense. So it's incredible. Her father, her brothers, her godfather. Charles is the King, as we call him from now on. He is very keen to show them marks of favor. At the end of July, he announces that Jones village, Domrémy, will be exempt in perpetuity from taxes. Wow. Then a few months after that, in December, incredibly, he announces the ennoblement of Joan, her family, all the descendants of her family. Again, this is something that in perpetuity, it will last right the way up to the French Revolution. They return their nobility. You would have to say, I think maybe even you, Dominic, that these honors are very worthily given, that the coronation of Charles VII simply wouldn't have happened without Joan, and that it proves, as Joan had always said it would, it proves to be an event of colossal significance in the history of the Hundred Years War, because Charles' legitimacy has now essentially been claimed to the world. The stain of that crime at the Bridge of Montereau, the murder of the Duke of Burgundy, it's effectively been washed clean. Now all of Christendom is holding its breath to see how the English, how the Burgundians, servants of a rival king of France, Henry of Lancaster, how are they going to respond?

Conny, we will find out after the break. I am mighty Prince, Duke of Burgundy. Joan the maid calls upon you by the King of heaven, my rightful and sovereign Lord, that you and the King of France should make a good and lasting peace. Forgive one another entirely in good faith, as loyal Christians should do. And if you wish to make war, then do so against the Sarrasons. Joan of Art there totally lets herself down and throws away all the goodwill that she's built up in two and a half episodes by this absolute... She wants to attack the Middle East. That's poor. Theo would not approve of that.

But also she also wants to attack the Hussites, so she wants to have a crack at the Chex.

Come Come on. Come on. This is absolutely shocking.

Yeah. But Dominic, of course, what she's doing there is trying to patch things up between Charles VII and the greatest peer in France, the Duke of Burgundy. And she writes that letter on the very day of Charles VII's coronation in Rance. This is because she finds it puzzling and frustrating that Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy, the most senior of all the peers in France, hadn't opted to come to the ceremony. Because he's a French noblemen of the blood royal. Why is he not there? Why is he not rallying to the French cause? Why is he busy fighting other Frenchmen?

Hold on. Does she genuinely not know? I mean, surely she must know that there's the Ammonak, Burgundian Civil War.

I do not think that she is entirely inhabiting the dimension of conventional geopolitics. I think she feels that God's hand is evident in everything that's happened and that, therefore, the Duke of Burgundy accept that and should knuckle down and should repent of all his previous errors. I think that's her feeling.

The Duke of Burgundy is a smart guy, right? Philip the Good. And I mean, now that he sees that the tide is turning in the war-He's a mercurial man. Yeah, he would be an absolute dope if he didn't start thinking, Maybe the English aren't going to win this after all, and I could think about changing sides?

Well, I think he'd certainly been thinking that before Charles launched his his march towards a rouse. In fact, that was one of the reasons why many of his advisors said, Look, don't go for it, because we've got a real chance here of patching things up with the Duke of Burgundy. If we invade all his territories and seized towns that are loyal to him, then we'll really crash that opportunity. Actually, that is what happens because Philip is very alarmed by the fact that Charles VII is now in Rance and has taken toire and all this thing. One week before Before Charles' coronation in Rance, Philip had traveled to Paris, where the Duke of Bedford, the regent for Henry of Lancaster, was installed. And there they renew the peace treaty between England and Burgundy. Now, it is true, as you said, Philip's a very smart and shrewd operator. So even as he is signing that, renewing that treaty with the English, he is also sending an envoy to Charles, who arrives in the wake of the coronation, saying, Well, should we at least have negotiations? And they do. But ultimately, Philip just cannot bring himself to let bygones be bygones.

He sees Charles VII as the guy who had sponsored the murder of his father.

Yeah, it's not wrong.

Yeah, and he just can't bring himself to do it. And so despite the coronation of Charles VII at Razz, the Anglo-Bergundian pact hold, Philip's alliance with Bedford remains secure. Here.

Okay, so let's go to the Duke of Bedford. So the Duke of Bedford, we've described him. He's the main English commander in France. He's basically the person that Henry V has given power. After Henry V's death, he is the person who holds the reins of power. And he's a very serious person. And he's looking at this situation. Basically, in the course of what, three months? Yeah. His position in France has begun very swiftly to erode. He thought he was going to breach the Loire and prosecute the war into South Central France. Now he's lost Orléans. Two of his key captains, Suffolk and Talbot, have been taken prisoner. Champagne has been lost. So that's the Eastern flank of Paris. And this business in Reims is a disaster for the English cause because the dofa has been crowned, and the English claimant to the throne of France, Henry of Lancaster, Henry VI, is still only a very little boy and a very dreamy and pious little boy at that, not martial at all. What does the Duke of Bedford do now? I guess, first of all, he has to try and work out what on Earth has gone wrong.

Yeah, well, he needs to find someone to blame. Bedford himself has no doubt who to blame, and that is Joan because he feels that she is a witch and that she has deployed sorcery to undermine his administration. He sees her as as a harlot, as a whore. People who listened to our previous episode may remember that whore was the word that was constantly being used by the English when they addressed Joan. This is a girl who dresses herself as a man and has run away with men at arms. It's in the middle of a huge army. So clearly she is a whore, in their opinion, and yet she has the nerve to call herself the Pucelle, the virgin, the maid. So clearly she's a witch. And that being so, it is vital that she is captured and that her witchcraft is demonstrated to the satisfaction of chrishendom as a whole. Because if that happens, then the right of Henry of Lancaster to the French throne will be spectacularly reinvigorated. And just as domainely, the claim of Charles VII to the throne will be, hopefully, knee-capped fatally, because you can't rule if you depend on your coronation on a witch.

Yeah, of course. So this is the plan. Bedford is not alone in his conviction. Basically, everyone in the English regime and in the Court of Burgundy pretty much hold to this opinion.

And they don't do it cynically. They genuinely think she's a witch, right?

Yeah, I think they genuinely think it.

This isn't just policy. Yeah.

Yeah. And what they're doing there is that they, like Charles VII and the people who admire Joan, are paying acknowledgement to the sheer weirdness and improbability of everything that she's done. So to quote Marina Warner, The English side believed in Joan, the maid, more than the French. And they had to because if it's not the fault of Joan, then there are systemic problems with their regime that they don't really want to face up to.

Yeah. Well, the problems that we talked about earlier on, the over-extension and the fact that basically victory is probably beyond them, whatever they do. And no one wants to admit that. So it becomes easier to blame it all on witchcraft, right?

Right. But also, it is a tribute to the renown of Joan. This is taken very seriously. That if they can capture her, then everything will be put back on a straight course.

Now, the Good news for Bedford and for a patriotic listeners to this podcast is that it's at precisely this point in the wake of Charles's coronation that Jones's star, which has been very high and as high as it could possibly be, you get the first science that is just beginning to dim, don't you?

Yeah. Up to this point, everything that she has said she will do, she has done. But by early September, so that's a month or so after the coronation in Razz, she and the Duke of Alasor, who her biggest fan among the ranks of the French captains, they arrive before the gates of Paris. In the opinion of Joan, Paris is ripe for the plucking. She says, I have been assured by my voices that if we attack it in a full-throated the city will fall. The reason for this is that it's pretty isolated. Champagne has effectively, at least the major cities in Champagne, have been conquered by Charles VII. Among them is a city called Beauvais, dominated by a tower and cathedral, but only half-finished. For one man in the circle of the Duke of Bedford, this is a particular humiliation. This man is a guy we've we already met. We met him in the first episode. He is called Pierre Cauchon, and he's the Bishop of Beauvais.

He's the guy who thought the English are going to win, and he thrown his lot in with the English, and he thought, They're going to win, and that's God's will.

Now he has lost the city that is probably his sea, to the French, and more specifically to this fiend in female form, this sorcerous, this witch. He, like Bedford, has particular cause now to view Joan in a very dark light. And he, no less than Bedford, is desperate for her to be captured and hopefully to have her wickedness exposed.

And actually events start to play into his hands, don't they?

They do.

Because what is it? The eighth of September, Joan launches this great attack on Paris. Now, some listeners may be thinking, the relief of all in is very famous. How come the liberation of Paris isn't so famous? Well, there's an answer, isn't there? Because this does not go according to plan for Joan.

It does not. She attacks with a very small number of men. Charles VII is very skeptical that she can take Paris and has refused basically to join her. And so it all goes wrong. The end of the assault, 500 of her men are left dead or dying before the walls of the city. The man carrying her standard is hit in the eye by a crossbow bolt. So it's very Harold at the Battle of Hastings. And Joan herself has to be stretched from the walls after she gets hit in the thigh. This is obviously a massive embarrassment. She said she would capture Paris, and now she hasn't. Joan implies this is basically because Charles VII didn't trust me. If everyone had piled in, we would have got him. And she may well have been right about that, actually. Paris was quite vulnerable, maybe a full force, but a gamble because Paris is the best defended city, basically, west of Constantinople. I mean, it's The fortifications are enormous. But also there is this whole issue of the Civil War, which has always been bubbling away. The mass of people in Paris are very Probegundian, and Charles VII is on the Armoniac side.

And so all these circumstances combine to explain it. But there's also one additional factor which is used to explain Joan's failure to capture Paris. This is actually quite damaging to her. And this is that the eighth of September is the birthday of the Virgin Mary. Memory, and it is therefore seen as very disrespectful of Joan to have launched an attack on that day. So that caused a slight aspersion on the notion of her her Holiness.

Well, I suppose you could argue, again, if you're being just strictly empirical about it. She's gambled and gambled and gambled, and one day it won't work. You compared her with... In a previous episode, you mentioned her basball quality, which for people who don't know, it's the England cricket coach who just believes in constant aggression and attacking, even in the face overwhelming odds. Sometimes that works and it's brilliant. Then sometimes you're Tom Holland and you go to watch a test match and it only takes two days because England have shamed themselves. That's basically the siege of Paris.

Yeah. I think in the wake of this, even though her Fame across Europe remains absolutely constant, people think she's this incredible wonder. People can't stop talking about her. She's this massive celebrity. I think at the Charles' Court, there is a sense that Perhaps something has changed. This is basically because she's done what she said she'd do. She said that she would relieve all your money. She's done it. She said that she would take Charles to Rans and crown him, and that she's done as well. Basically, what is there left for her to do?

They don't need her. They don't need her anymore.

They don't need her. But also, by her own standards, those were the two things she set herself to do. She's done it. So what now? And it's obvious, I think, also to everyone at the court, that Joan really enjoys being a captain. She doesn't want to go back to her village. She doesn't want to take off her beautiful armor and her rich furs and everything and go back to her peasant girl's dress. That's not what she's about at all. And so all that winter, rather than return to Domremy, Joan is saying to the king, Come on, let's keep going. Let's attack the English in Normandy. It'll be brilliant. We'll sweep them into the sea despite the fact that Charles is not going to do this because the English are very strong in Normandy. And again, this brepal problem, he doesn't have the money for it. And money issues are not... That's not Joan's vibe at all. She's not worried about that.

Yeah. So basically, Her vision and reality are coming into increasingly… They're colliding with increasingly destabilizing effect for her reputation at the court, right?

Right. I think that we have this incredible description of her as someone from the court of King Arthur. She is operating in the dimension of romance. Charles is operating in the dimension of-Reality. Spreadsheets and budgets. The two It didn't really gel. By March 1430, Joan has had enough. She thinks, Well, if no one else is going to continue the war, then I'm going to do this myself. She raises a company of men, 200 men in all, and And among them is her brother Pierre, who had joined her at Rance. And basically, she turns freelance. And Dominic, we've talked about these companies before, these free companies. They're bands of soldiers who might very easily seem to those who are attacked by them as bandits. And they had been a plague in France throughout the length of the Hundred Years's War. And it seems to some that Joan, this Holy maid, has now joined the ranks of the free companies. This is a very, very bad look for her. Joan herself would absolutely have repudiated that charge. She would have said, Well, I'm doing what Charles and his captains should have been doing. I'm taking the fight to the English.

I'm taking the fight to the Burgundians. And to be fair to her, all that April, she and her company are roaming from flashpoint to flashpoint, supporting the French in their battles and their seages against the Burgundians, roaming the Badlands that now surround Paris, trying to prosecute the war. In this spirit, on the 23rd of May, 1430, she arrives at a town called Compiègne, and this is some 50 miles north of Paris, and it is under siege by the Duke of Burgundy because Compiègne had owed loyalty to the Duke of Burgundy and had then switched its alliance to Charles VII. And so now the Duke of Burgundy is out for revenge. Jones says, Okay, I'm going to ride there and I'm going to try and relieve Compiègne. Aulian style.

Aulian style, exactly. Now, not only does Jones say she's going to do this, but she is acting on the advice of her voices because her voices are still there. We haven't mentioned her voices for a while, but the voices are still giving her divine instructions, aren't they? And they say, Charge across the drawbridge, attack the Burgundian siege positions, and you know what? You are going to capture the Duke of Burgundy himself. At sunset, she launches this sortie, this 23rd of May 1430. Talk us through how this where the attack goes, Tom.

Well, it doesn't go well. It gets beaten back by the Burgundians, and a trumpet has sound the retreat. But Joan, of course, she's not a girl for a retreat. So rather than obey the summons, she stays on the edge of the battle. Of course, she's not fighting. Joan doesn't herself fight, but she is a splendid figure. She's splendent in her white armor. She's got her silk and banner aloft. Everyone in that battle, Burgundian as well as French, absolutely knows who she is. Eventually, she heads back towards the drawbridge, towards the gate. But by now, the guards in Compiègne are worried that the Burgundians will break in if they leave it open. So very reluctantly, they close the gates and they pull up the drawbridge, and Joan is now stuck on the wrong side of the moat. She's surrounded by a sworn of Burgundian soldiers. She's pulled down from her horse. She rises to her feet. She draws her sword. She looks around for a suitable person to surrender to. There's a Burgundian captain, and she hands a sword over to him. Jean La Pucelle is now a prisoner.

Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy, must be absolutely delighted.

He's pumped. We have a witness who sees him. He comes to inspect Joan, and the witness says, I've never seen anyone so delighted. That evening, after the Duke of Burgundy has been to look at Joan, he his letters to all the towns in France and the low countries who might have been tempted to rebel against him. He claims this glorious achievement, Jones capture, we are certain, will everywhere be greeted as the most splendid news, for it clearly demonstrates the error and foolish credulity of all those who have let themselves be convinced by the deeds of this woman. And as it turns out, Jones captor is a servant of a particularly proficient Burgundian Lord, a very loyal servant, not just of the Duke of Burgundy himself, but of Bedford and the English cause. He's called John of Luxembourg. He's a very serious player, a very loyal servant of the Anglo-Burgundian Alliance. And so this is the person into whose hands Joan now passes. And Joan, of course, she sees herself as a night. She is now of noble standing. She sees herself, therefore, as a prisoner of war, whose treatment should be governed by the laws of war.

And John of Luxembourg is not reluctant to buy into this, because, of course, if Joan is a prisoner of war, is of noble standing, then he stands to make a lot of money. A huge profit. He can ransom her or sell her on for a large sum. But there are complications with this.

Right. Because who's going to pay this ransom? Well, you would think the obvious person is The man whose cause she has promoted for so long, who is Charles VII of France. But disappointingly, Charles VII, you see, I reckon there's a part of him that thinks, thank God I've got rid of that. She was becoming a bit of an albatross.

A bit of a nightmare.

Yeah, a bit of a nightmare. I'm glad that they've got her now, and I don't want her back.

Yes. And I think also the fact that Joan has been captured is also potentially very damaging. And so Charles doesn't comment on it. He never mentions Joan by word from this point on. Instead, he hands over responsibility for the crisis to his Chancellor, who is the Archbishop of Raths, who had crowned him. The Archbishop of Raths, who was also the guy who had led the investigation into Joan back in Poitou before the siege of Orléans, he now basically operates as Charles' spin doctor. His take on Joan is that she'd gone rogue and that although her mission had indeed been blessed by God, she'd gone so off piece that she has now been undone by her own pride and folly. God has therefore punished her by allowing her to be captured and therefore Therefore, that's it. God's washed his hands of her, basically.

I mean, you don't have to be incredibly cynical to believe that, though, do you? Because if you believe that her previous success was blessed by God, when things go wrong, that shows that she's misunderstood God's wishes and that God has abandoned her, surely. So you could think that quite sincerely.

I think you absolutely could. But it is obviously an embarrassment that this person who had sponsored the coronation of Charles VII has now demonstrably failed to maintain the favor of God. So I think in Charles' opinion, let's just keep quiet about it. Let's just pretend it never happened. Let's just hope the whole business will go away. Now, it's not going to go away because, of course, the of the Duke of Bedford is the precise opposite. He wants to make as big a fuss of Jones capture as he possibly can. I think that he feels that Jones capture has given him the opportunity to pluck from the very jaws of defeat, an absolutely seismic propaganda victory. What he needs to do is basically so tarnish the coronation of Charles VII that People go back to saying he's an illegitimate king. Bedford, by now, is adopting a two-pronged strategy to bring this about. Firstly, the month before Jones capture, he had sent for the eight-year-old Henry VI to come to Calais. Bedford's plan is to have him crowned in Rans or at a pinch Paris, and thereby erase the memory of Charles' coronation. This is his plan.

There is a problem. Rans is still in enemy hands, and Normandy is too unstated able to risk the king traveling to Paris. It's a bit like in the wake of the Iraq war, President Bush, he could maybe land in Baghdad and stay in the Green zone, but he couldn't venture out to Falluja. There's the same issue with They can't guarantee Henry VI's safety. Instead, he's left to kick his heels in Calais, and it's all a bit embarrassing. Then suddenly, Joan is captured, and now Bedford can see a second massive opportunity. The witch is in the hands of one of his allies. It is Pierre Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, within whose bishopric, crucially, Joan had been captured, who now steps up to the plate with a solution that he presents to Bedford. He says to Bedford, Look, you should buy Joan off John of Luxembourg. Then when Joan is in the hands of the English, hand her over to us, to the Church, and I, in my role as Bishop of Beauvais will try her for heresy, for sorcery, for conjuring up demons, basically for anything you want to mention. I can guarantee, because I know that she's a witch, that she will be convicted.

When she is convicted, then the coronation of the dofa will be revealed to the world to have been a literally Satanic fraud.

Just one quick point. Again, is this cynicism? Is this cynical policy?

No, it's not cynicism at all.

I think this is important to get across to people because I think there's a general perception that, Oh, this was terribly manipulative and cynical, the trial of Joan and all this. But the English, genuinely, genuinely, sincerely think this woman quite clearly as a witch.

Yes, and the French servants of the Lancasterian regime think that as well.

Okay.

Of course, that conviction is interfused with a desire to preserve the regime that they have committed themselves serving. I mean, there's no question about that. But it's perfectly possible to believe that your own interests and the interests of God are one and the same.

I'm glad that we've proved the sincerity in English. Let's continue.

So this strikes Bedford as a brilliant plan. Basically, everyone's a winner. John of Luxembourg is going to get his money. The English are going to get their hands on the witch who has done their cause such lethal harm. And the Bishop of Beauvais has the opportunity to serve the Lord his God by getting rid of a witch.

Brilliant. Everyone wins.

The only person who doesn't win, of course, is Joan. When she is informed that she is going to be sold to the English, hurls herself from the window of the 60-foot tower in which John of Luxembourg has been keeping her. Oh, my God. Sixty feet. I know. It's incredible. Somehow she survives the fall. I mean, something must have broken it, but she's very badly concussed. I think she has damage to her liver. She's obviously badly injured. It takes time for to be nurse back to health. But the deal has been done. Bedford can think, Brilliant. Now, at last, we have a plan. By July, sufficient in Normandy have sufficiently stabilized that Henry VI can now process from Calais to Rouen. Rouen, which is the leading city in Normandy, by this point, well, it is effectively the green zone for the English regime. It's the place that is absolutely secure. It is the Lancasterian stronghold. Henry arrives there, and Bedford and the Lancasterian regime can be confident that he is safe and secure there. Then in September, Joan is formally delivered by John of Luxembourg to the English. He gets a massive payment. He's very happy about that.

That November, Joan is taken to a fortress in the mouth of the Seine, while a military escort is recruited to escort her to Rouen. Finally, on On the 23rd of December, so just before Christmas, she's under very heavy guard. She's loaded down with chains. She is brought through the gates into Rouen, a city she is destined never to leave because, Dominic, she has less than half a year to live.

Crikey. Well, just one episode to go to complete the story of Joan of Arc. If you really can't wait as I can't wait, then if you're a member of the Rest is History Club, you can hear that episode right now. If you're not a member of the Rest is History Club and would like to join and to sample all of its incredible benefits, then head to therestishistory. Com. But what a cliffhanger. One episode to go. Tom, merci. Au revoir.

Goodbye.