The pagan classical world had an empirical morality which celebrated the skillful and successful use of force. It feasted and immortalized those who were able to wield it. It averted its eyes from failure and regarded the weak and helpless with indifference. The Judeo-Christian tradition was quite different. Although the Israelites in the Davidic kingdom were briefly strong in their part of west Asia, David himself in his defining struggle with Goliath epitomized the heroically puny, and for most of their existence the Israelites were struggling against great empires, often unsuccessfully. The Psalms are usually the poetry of the weak, the abandoned, the helpless, the forsaken. The Israel of the Maccabees was a resistance movement against their Greek overlords, inheritors of Alexander’s empire, and those killed in the struggle were treated by the Jews as hallowed saints. Thus the concept of the martyr was born. It was seized upon eagerly by the first Christians, beginning with St. Stephen, stoned to death, professing his faith in Christ in his last moments, embracing his fate calmly, unprotestingly, almost eagerly.
All the heroes of early Christianity were martyrs. St. Peter crucified, on his insistence upside down so as not to compete with Christ, who was upright. St. Paul, beheaded. St. Lawrence, roasted to death by a gridiron. St. Sebastian, sentenced to be shot by archers but surviving, and then being battered to death with cudgels. And then the brave women: St. Barbara, first shut in a tower (her symbol), then tortured to death. St. Catherine, whom the pagans sought to break on the wheel (her symbol) but it was the wheel that broke; and finally beheaded. St. Agnes, a mere child of twelve when she was martyred by being stabbed in the throat. And so on: a long litany of glorious horrors, the blood of the martyrs watering the seeds of the church until, in God’s good time, and in the reign of Constantine, the state itself became Christian and the faithful emerged from the catacombs to inherit the land.
Christian heroism, then, was innocent, suffering, almost pacifist, in its earliest phase. Next to the life of Christ and the Virgin, Christian art, as it burgeoned in the Middle Ages and climaxed in the Renaissance, concentrated on depicting the martyrs in their sacred death agonies. The favorite heroes were those who met the most gruesome deaths, or those which could be rendered by artists with realistic and edifying relish: the archetype of all pictorial martyrology being, perhaps, the vast canvas of St. Sebastian being shot by the archers, the masterpiece of the Pollaiuolo brothers, now in the National Gallery, London.
But in a man’s world it was unlikely that the dominant culture, as Christianity became in Europe, should confine heroism to unresisting suffering and the passivity of women. Sluggishly to begin with, then with growing power, Christianity responded to the threat of Muslim conquest, especially in Spain. In the struggle to turn back Islam, the concept of Christian knighthood was born, and quickly attracted its own saints, real or imaginary, male, in armor, with sword, lance and shield, horsed and triumphant, St. George being the archetype. This new kind of hero, from the end of the eleventh century, assumed the mantle of the Crusades, with a white surplice over his armor, the red cross of Christ emblazoned on it.
The Christian hero was not merely a man of physical characteristics—courage, skill at arms, and a commanding presence on the battlefield—but sought to display metaphysical qualities too. These included religious faith and devotion, which took the form of founding churches, abbeys and nunneries with the spoils of battle, and the ideas brought together in the concept of chivalry: courtly manners, hospitality, patronage of minstrels, poets and artists; above all, respect for women. The virtues thus embodied in the earlier spirit of martyrdom were transmitted and reborn in knightly conduct which was gentle as well as bold, delicate and thoughtful toward others as well as resolute in righteous conflict. He was, above all, honorable. Christian kings became ex officio heads of the knightly profession, and modeled themselves on earlier prototypes: King Arthur in England, Charlemagne in France, Otto the Great in Germany. The king was the fountain of honor, and to institutionalize the role, kings founded orders of chivalry, such as the Order of St. Denis in France and, above all, the Order of the Garter in England. This was established in the mid-fourteenth century by Edward III, himself a warrior of great experience and success. It had a round table where the knights feasted at Windsor Castle, consciously re-creating the Round Table of knights who gathered around the semi-mythical King Arthur, “the last of the Romans,” who defended Christian Britain from Saxon pagans.
It is fitting that the exemplary medieval hero should come from the ranks of kings, and no one fits the part more completely than Henry of Monmouth, king of England as Henry V. He is a true hero in many ways, and has a strong claim to be rated the greatest of all English monarchs. I thought it would be instructive to compare and contrast him with Joan of Arc, La Pucelle, who occupies a comparable position in the French medieval pantheon. Joan was only a small child when Henry died, but they were pitted against each other historically in the great Hundred Years War between the French and English crowns—Henry establishing a unique position of power in that long conflict, and Joan, the unique woman warrior of medieval chivalry, playing a decisive role in overthrowing Henry’s work, under his feeble heir.
A medieval king of England did an executive job. He was head of state and head of government, head of the armed forces, leader ex officio of the nobility and the landed interest, the active patron of the mercantile class and ultimate source of justice for the peasants, the protector of the church, as well as its chief source of appointments, and not least the presiding officer of the central court, where law was made as well as enforced. The king took all important decisions, or delegated them at his peril, and he was constantly on the move, to be at the scene of the action.
Medieval kingship wore a man out, or killed him in a variety of ways. An analysis of how the Norman and Plantagenet monarchs died provides food for somber thought. William the Conqueror died of a wound received in a siege, already an old man by eleventh-century standards. William Rufus was killed in a mysterious hunting accident. Henry I died of what we would call gastroenteritis, a common fate of monarchs forced to travel in a mobile camp—the same fate overtook King John. Henry II, prematurely aged by endless work and campaigning, died of exhaustion, still soldiering. So did Edward I, an old man in a war camp, his sword by his bedside. Richard I was killed in a siege. Henry III and Edward III were lucky and met peaceful ends after long lives. Edward IV died exhausted; he was also prematurely aged. The same could be said of Henry V’s father, Henry IV. Edward II was murdered by having a red-hot poker thrust up his anus. Richard II, Henry VI and Edward V were murdered too, and Richard III was killed in battle and his body stripped naked. It is a daunting necrology, is it not?
Henry V was inducted into this life of toil, risk and exposure in what might be called the hard way. Once, when I was giving a history lesson to the late Princess Diana, wife of the Prince of Wales, we discussed the predicament of a person born to be king. Her husband had been heir apparent from birth. She said she had found him utterly selfish and self-centered because he had been spoiled from the cradle on. I pointed out that this was the common fate of heirs apparent, and that they rarely matured into successful monarchs, unless special circumstances made their childhood or youth exceptionally difficult, hazardous, or stressful. We went through a list of all the English monarchs to see if the theory held up—which it did on the whole.
Henry V fits into this analysis. He was, indeed, heir apparent from the age of twelve, when his father seized the throne from King Richard II, until his twentieth year, when he succeeded as king. But his childhood, youth and early manhood were unsettled, not to say vertiginous, never easy, often difficult and even perilous. His grandfather John of Gaunt, by marital prudence, had become perhaps the richest man in Europe, and Henry’s father (known variously as Derby, Hereford and Bolingbroke), as the sole surviving son, inherited it all, and thus became an object of suspicion to the king. In 1398, when Henry was eleven, Richard II exiled Henry’s father, confiscated all his property and took the boy as a kind of privileged hostage on his disastrous campaign in Ireland. Had Richard been a more decisive and ruthless man, the boy Henry’s life might well have been forfeit when his father invaded England to seek redress.
As it was, by the age of twelve, Henry (often referred to as Henry of Monmouth, where he was born) was heir apparent, and bore the sword of justice at his father’s coronation. He performed his first political act: he gave his assent, in secret and along with other magnates, to the strict imprisonment of the former king. He was declared the “Prince of Wales, duke of Aquitaine, Lancaster and Cornwall, Earl of Chester, and heir apparent to the kingdom of England.” These were not empty titles. The revolt of Owen Glendower in Wales, trouble in Scotland and the tendency in England of discontented nobles to seek the return of Richard to the throne meant that the king had to unload some responsibility on his young heir’s shoulders, and in effect the prince was given charge of Wales. And, since the deposed Richard was too dangerous to the king to be permitted to live, young Henry, barely thirteen, was made party to the decision to have Richard put to death in Pontefract Castle. In discharging his Welsh duties he had, of course, a council, but it is clear he was active both in decision taking and fighting almost from the start. He was present and fought in a siege while still thirteen, and as he moved through his early teens more and more real power shifted to him. At the battle of Shrewsbury, culmination of the desperate crisis of Henry IV’s reign, when the Percys of Northumberland joined the other rebels, Henry was aged fifteen and present throughout the battle, receiving a nasty wound in the face but continuing to fight until the death of Percy (“Hotspur”) led to a rebel rout. Young Henry was present too in the aftermath, when Percy’s uncle, the Earl of Worcester, was publicly executed for treason, and he was given all Worcester’s silver.
Henry’s teenage training, indeed, was as much in finance as in fighting, for most of the money required to keep an army in the field against Glendower, and to garrison the network of expensive Welsh castles—Caernarvon, Conway, Harlech, and so on—which were vital to holding Wales down at all, had to come from Henry’s revenues as Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Chester. Some support he got from the treasury in London, but this had to be negotiated, and Henry had to use his personal clout to ensure that the money, in trunks of silver and barrels of copper pennies, actually arrived at his castles and headquarters where the soldiers were paid. It was hard, anxious work, and good training. Henry was never in any doubt, from his earliest youth, of the close connection between cash and successful military force.
There was also hard fighting in Wales, the prince being in the thick of it, reporting growing success against the Welsh rebels in letters to his father, and being repeatedly thanked for his efforts both by Henry IV and Parliament, which pronounced him a youngster of “bone coer et corage.” By the time he was eighteen, the Welsh uprising had been mastered and the speaker of Parliament probably gave him the credit. By this time he was attending Parliament himself and is also listed as sitting in the King’s Council. He was a grown man, and an experienced one with five or six years of varied campaigning behind him, including two successive sieges which he conducted personally. The documents show him dealing with artillery experts, “canoners et autres artificies,” cannon stones, saltpeter and gunpowder. The first great age of gunpowder was dawning, and Henry was right in the forefront of the new technology. The evidence suggests that it was the prince’s use of cannon which proved the decisive factor in his suppression of the Glendower revolt, and also his ingenuity in employing ships to move the guns around the royal castles to Wales, most of which had direct access to the sea. By being a professional soldier very young, and acquiring the skill and jargon of the trade, Henry also formed working friendships with those members of the nobility who took fighting seriously, and the knights who formed the officer backbone of the royal army. These two powerful groups in society, many of whom later served him in France, became loyal subordinates and treated him with the highest respect. It cannot be overemphasized that the extent to which a king knew the business of commanding soldiers in battle, and his personal courage in action, was absolutely vital in ruling a medieval kingdom successfully. Right from the beginning of his career, Henry shaped up as a practical, down-to-earth hero, of the camp and palisade, the siege engine and the battery, the cavalry charge in full armor, and the hand-to-hand combat. He had scars to show too.
Hence the Prince Hal Shakespeare portrayed in Henry IV parts one and two—roistering, consorting with low companions, robbing travelers, in trouble with the lord chief justice—has little basis in reality. What is true is that, from 1409, when Henry IV made his will, he was ill and unable to discharge all the duties of kingship. Prince Henry had to take on many of them himself. There were inevitable disagreements over policy, and the prince may have become frustrated. A later Burgundian chronicler, Monstrelet, on what authority we know not, told a story that the prince, attending the sick king in his bedchamber and thinking him asleep, took up the crown, which lay on a cushion by his bedside. At that moment the king awoke. This tale was taken up by the Tudor history writers Holinshed and Hall, and eagerly seized upon by Shakespeare, who had a marvelous instinct for a dramatic scene. In a sense he wrote a whole play around this incident. There was also a tale that the prince came to the help of a trusty servant of his who was being tried for an affray, and the chief justice, William Gascoigne, cited him for contempt of court. There may be some truth to this, though tales that the prince kept company with men of lower rank clearly refer to his friendships with soldier-knights, who had served with him before and were to do so again. The prince’s recorded attendance in Parliament, and in the council, his trips to Wales and to Calais, where he was captain of the castle and port, and to his other widespread possessions and responsibilities left him no time for regular dissipation. Shakespeare seized brilliantly on a few fragments to construct a superb play about a debauched young man who redeems himself and matures into a hero. But to my mind the part of Prince Hal, shown as frivolously deceitful and ultimately mean and cruel in his treatment of Falstaff, never quite rings true. And the reason is that it was untrue. The young Henry was a hardworking, serious, and extremely efficient young man who was all along preparing himself systematically to become a great warrior-king.
Where Shakespeare gets the man absolutely right is in his play of Henry as king. The moment Henry came to the throne, in 1413, he began preparations for an invasion of France to assert his territorial claims to Aquitaine and Normandy. He planned not just to conduct cavalry raids, or chevauchées, through France, as Edward III and the Black Prince had done, but to take fortified towns and conduct a conquest of firmly held territory. Under cover of diplomacy with the weak French king Charles VI, he stockpiled arms, assembled a siege train and readied ships to transport 10,000 men across the Channel. He confirmed his links with the fighting peers of the English nobility, got Parliament, when he was already liked and trusted, to vote for financial supplies, and sailed from Southampton in August 1415, landing on the Normandy coast near Honfleur, which he promptly besieged. At once his professionalism asserted itself. He set up his big guns in front of the main gate of what was supposed to be an impregnable walled city. Their bombardment destroyed the gate completely, and the garrison promptly surrendered. He then “stiffened the town with Englishmen” and prepared to turn it into another Calais, a fortified harbor as base for the reconquest of Normandy and a jumping-off point for the southwest too.
Then a typical campaign disaster struck in the form of an outbreak of fever. It carried off some of Henry’s closest friends among the army elite, and a third of his 10,000 men had to be sent home sick. His council advised him to return home too, but Henry felt that his taking of Honfleur, although it was “the key to the sea of all Normandy,” was not sufficient to justify a large-scale and costly expedition. So Henry, against expert advice, determined to march with what was left of his army across northwest France to Calais, and “see those lands whereof he ought to be lord.”
Thus he set out, with 6,000 men, mostly archers, to cover 150 miles through every territory. This was a very risky venture, for a French army of 14,000 was now shadowing him. It suggests that Henry had an adventurous view of strategy, and great confidence in his own skill at tactics and trust in his own men not to let him down. The French blocked his chosen crossing of the Somme, and he was forced to move inland to an unguarded ford near Nestlé. By this time the main French army had moved ahead of him, crossing the Somme at Abbeville, and blocked his route to Calais. Henry had no alternative but to fight, with the odds against him more than three to one, and most of the French force composed of steel-clad men-at-arms. Before the battle there was a notable exchange, recorded by the king’s contemporary biographer, with one of his senior commanders, Sir Walter Hungerford: “We need 10,000 men to fight such a battle.” Henry: “I would not have a single man more than I do, for these I have here with me are God’s people.” This exchange was worked by Shakespeare into a main theme of the play, “We few, we happy few.” And no doubt Henry knew that a general who was also a king, in command of a comparatively small army but thoroughly under his control, had a good chance of bringing off a tactical success, provided he knew what he was doing.
This, indeed, is the key to Agincourt, one of the great battles of history. The position Henry adopted was a one-thousand-yard front behind a muddy field, with thick woods on either side protected by archers, who fortified their positions with anticavalry stakes driven into the ground. When the enormous French cavalry force hesitated to charge into the mud, Henry ordered his archers to advance within bow shot—250 yards—to drive in fresh spiked stakes, and then open fire. Carrying out this maneuver successfully suggests to me first-class training in battle conditions. It worked, for the French, suddenly exposed to lethal arrow fire as they stood, followed their instincts and charged. Then, seeing the stakes, and with the fire of arrows intensifying, they tried to wheel their horses and back off, so turning the ranks of horsemen behind them into total confusion. The French horses were on the whole not big enough to allow a heavily armored fighting man to ride them skillfully in a mêlée. Henry knew this, and so did his bloodthirsty archers. So the great struggling mass of the French army became an easy target for endless volleys of arrows. The horses were easier to kill or wound than their riders, but once they were unhorsed, the archers ran up and clubbed them to death, or slipped knives into the slits in their armor.
The result was a fearful slaughter. Many French knights, including notables, surrendered. But one-third of the French army, unable to get into the conflict, was still intact, and Henry ordered that partly disarmed prisoners who could not be easily controlled should be dispatched. This was done, as was characteristic of Henry’s decisiveness and indeed ruthlessness. The scale of the slaughter has doubtless been exaggerated, for the king was not anxious to kill valuable captives who could be ransomed. In any case, we know that 1,000 high-value prisoners were brought back to England. These included some of the grandest and richest nobles of France. The victory revealed Henry as a matchless field commander—confident, cool, quick thinking and thoroughly professional. It was an overwhelming victory, against heavy odds, and established him at a stroke as the greatest general in Europe.
It also had a psychological effect on Henry himself. Already a pious and God-fearing man, he became convinced that his victory was God given, and that he was in truth the Lord’s anointed. His father had always harbored doubts about his right to the throne of England, and this had made him a nervous and indecisive sovereign, much troubled by rebellion. Henry’s self-confidence became absolute, and it radiated outward—to his own nobles, to Parliament, to the nation as a whole. No one now doubted his title to the throne. His confidence in his destiny, however, was accompanied by what can only be called a humble acceptance of God’s goodness to him in saving him from humiliating defeat at Agincourt and, almost certainly, saving his life. Henry never became arrogant. He never pushed his luck. He remained realistic in his demands and expectations. He built up an excellent working relationship with the nobility, the knights of the shires, the burghers of the towns and, so far as we can see, the peasantry. They provided the taxes when he asked for them, but his requests were reasonable, and he was able to prove to them that the money was sensibly spent. His control of the treasury and exchequer was firm and sure. He developed close and good-tempered relations with the Church, which owned a fifth of England. He stood no nonsense. When his uncle Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester and reputedly the richest man in England, accepted a cardinal’s hat from the pope without getting Henry’s permission, the king’s response was prompt, dramatic and severe. The new prince of the Church had to abase himself and paid dearly in hard cash for being allowed to keep his red hat. Nor would Henry tolerate the existence in England of religious houses owned by French mother abbeys, whose monks were French and whose revenues were repatriated to France. These so-called alien priories were nationalized. (An unfortunate precedent, as it turned out, for Henry VIII, 120 years later, used the same precedent to seize all the English monasteries.)
Henry, indeed, played the nationalist card with great skill. He was the first English king to speak English habitually and to write it fluently and idiomatically. His letters are nearly always in English. When campaigning in France, he wrote home regularly letters designed to be read out in Parliament or to the leading citizens of London and other towns, reporting what he was doing. He encouraged the use of English in all government procedures, in the courts and in the House of Commons and the Lords. His nobles also began to write their letters in English. Indeed, it could be said that Henry invented the English letter—and in the next generation, as the survival of the Paston Letters shows, it became an art form, a part of English literature. Henry inherited from his father, and grandfather Gaunt, a patron of Chaucer, a love of books. Like his father and his uncle Beaufort, he had a sizable library of his own, for use as well as for show. He acquired his first books when he was aged eight, when he was given seven volumes of Latin bound together (together with chords for his zither). A list exists of 160 books belonging to him as king, and they included poetry, romances, history, law and devotion; in Latin and in French, as well as English for, like Henry IV, the king was at ease in all these languages. He also owned a batch of 110 volumes he had captured at Meaux, though he was probably outdone by his brother John, Duke of Bedford, who acquired over 800 books in France. He was clearly a bibliophile, and so was another brother, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, the founder of the Bodleian Library in Oxford and whose handsome bust still dominates the oldest part of the institution, known as “Duke Humphrey.” Henry had no time for scholarship, of course, but he clearly saw the English language, which had been given an enormous fillip by the work of Chaucer (doubtless familiar to Henry), as part of the national heritage, to be given every support by a patriotic king. There is a tradition that Henry attended the Queen’s College at Oxford in 1398, under the supervision of his uncle Henry, who was then chancellor of the university. Indeed, when I was an undergraduate, the part of the college facing St. Edmund’s Hall was pointed out as having once contained his sleeping chamber. He was said to have been tallish, well built, athletic, with brown eyes and hair, kept close clipped around the back and sides (like any well-turned-out soldier), clean shaven and with a powerful speaking voice. He was extremely decisive and could be fearsome. Anyone who needs evidence of this last trait should see his handwritten letter, in English, conveyed secretly to the emperor, by hand of John Tiptoft in January 1417, and now in the British Museum Cottonian Manuscripts. The detailed personal ordinances he drew up for his duchy of Lancaster convey the same impression.
Henry entered France again in 1417, this time taking Rouen by siege, making it capital of Normandy again and establishing his authority all over the vast duchy. By a complicated series of negotiations with the Burgundians and the French court, and by impressive displays of military power when necessary—he took every town he besieged, without exception—he entered Paris in 1420, and signed a treaty at Troyes. Under this, Charles VI disinherited his (supposed) son, the dauphin, and made Henry his heir; and Henry in turn married Charles’s daughter, Catherine. Henry attended the lit de justice at which this arrangement was made, sitting alongside Charles on the bench of state. When Charles died, Henry became king of France as well as England, and was in a military position to enforce his claim to the full. Indeed, most of the French nobility wanted him as king. The dauphin was tainted by the adulterous conduct of his mother and by his reputed participation in an atrocious murder. Henry was known for square dealing with his own nobility and Parliament and above all as a celebrated commander in battle, who could not be beaten. And if Henry had lived another thirty years, who knows how Anglo-French history might have developed? As it was, in 1421 he caught one of the infections which were liable to strike at any moment a man who spent much of his life in unsanitary camps and bivouacs. His death followed the next year. He was in his midthirties, probably the ablest man ever to sit on the English throne, and one who was well liked, respected and trusted by all those, high and low, who had dealings with him. He was generous, too, and thoughtful. He gave his old nurse at Monmouth, Joanna Waring, an annuity of £20 a year—a considerable sum—and his will testifies to his judgment and decency. If I had to pick an unsullied hero from all English history, Henry would be the man.
Many, including some French people, would say that Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) was France’s greatest heroine. Their lives overlapped, just when she was born, at Domremy on the borders of Lorraine and Champagne in eastern France, on January 6, 1412. Henry was twenty-four and soon to become king. When Agincourt was fought she was three. She was a girl of ten, already working on her parents’ farm, when Henry died. It is not inconceivable that they might have married. What sons!—what daughters!—might not they have produced! What they had in common was an overwhelming sense of linkage between warfare and the will of God. Henry believed that he was the rightful ruler of France, and that God’s support for his claim was demonstrated by his amazing victory at Agincourt and the events leading up to the Treaty of Troyes. Joan believed it was God’s will that this entire process should be reversed and that she was God’s chosen instrument to place the dauphin, the rightful sovereign, on the throne as Charles VII. Both saw warfare as somehow sanctified, though neither was in the smallest doubt about its uglier side. Both took to it as teenagers, with extraordinary aptitude.
Joan’s career was pitifully short. She first saw a light and began to hear voices in 1424, when she was just thirteen. It took her four years to persuade various levels of Gallic authority that she was innocently sincere, and to get access to the dauphin at Chinon on February 23, 1429. He authorized her to put her visions to the test—she put on men’s clothes, donned white armor, and collected a force to relieve the city of Orleans, besieged by the English. On April 29, she got into the city, and on May 8, the English raised the siege. There followed other successes, and Joan was able to get the dauphin crowned king of France in the sacral cathedral of Reims on July 17. Between spring 1429 and spring 1430 she was involved in almost continual fighting with the English and their Burgundian allies. In May 1430 she was taken prisoner at Compiègne, and sold to the English for 10,000 livres. Tried in Rouen for sorcery and heresy, she confessed and was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. When she withdrew her confession, she was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431, and her ashes thrown into the Seine. A quarter-century later, after a six-year investigation, she was formally proclaimed innocent of the charges against her by Pope Calixtus III, in 1456. She was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920.
In some ways we know more about Joan of Arc than we do about Henry V, for the official records of her trial, and of her rehabilitation process, have survived, and are a mine of curious information. Yet there are key lacunae. It is tragic that no French writer of her age had the sense to write her life, based on material from those who knew her. It was a miserable age of mediocrity. Henry VI of England was a pious but inactive and feeble ruler. Some of his commanders in France were able but none imaginative or outstanding. The French commanders were, if anything, worse. Charles VII was an odious creature. He took little interest in Joan, reluctantly listened to her, gave her meager support, was never present while she fought his battles, never thanked her for having him crowned—something he could not do for himself—made no contribution to her attempts to take Paris, and no effort to release or ransom her after her capture, issued no protest at her condemnation and did nothing to get the verdict reversed. In this desert of talent and virtue, Joan emerges as a brief candle of courage and goodness, soon extinguished.
Joan was not a shepherdess, more a farmhand. She eventually learned to write her name, Jehanne, but never to read or write. After her death all kinds of rumors circulated about her supposed royal descent, but there is no evidence of anything unusual about her birth. Her family were totally undistinguished. There is no evidence of any strong influence on her childhood. She loved church bells and, when working in the fields, would kneel down, cross herself and pray when she heard them. But so did countless other peasant girls. She always referred to herself as la pucelle, an archaic name for “maid,” which has survived entirely because of her. She never showed the slightest desire to marry or have children. Indeed she said at her trial: “There are quite enough other women to perform the usual jobs women do.” From the age of thirteen, when she first heard her voices urging her to save France, she was quite clear, coherent and undeviating about what she wanted to do: “to give France her rightful king and expel the English.” She always stuck to her original story. It never varied in any important detail. She identified the voices as those of St. Michael, St. Catherine and St. Margaret—always these three. There was no romantic embroidery. It was impossible to move her from it by bullying threats or cunning traps. She evidently had the gift of recognizing people she had never seen before, e.g., the dauphin. She sometimes prophesied, on the whole correctly, but never formally. There is no evidence whatever of witchcraft.
Joan was without vanity—she refused to sit for her portrait. No contemporary image of her exists. We know she had a short neck; little bright red marks behind her right ear; short black hair; a dark and sunburned skin—“black and swart”—a body of “great force and power,” “finely and well formed”; she was strong, healthy, plain and sturdy. No one described her as pretty, though the Duke of Alençon, who liked and admired her, said she had shapely breasts. To use a phrase of Jane Austen, “She was no more than a fine girl.” But she was formidable. Her original attire was the coarse red skirt worn by the farm women of Lorraine up to the First World War. When she was first allowed to take part in the war, she promptly put on male clothes supplied by her cousin Durand Lassois. Then she was bought a complete outfit, boots and all, by the citizens of Vaucouleurs: black doublet, short dark gray tunic, high boots, black cap. She later wore elements of scarlet and green, the colors of the House of Orleans, to distinguish her in battle, and cloth of gold and scarlet lined with fur (in the winter), but her elaborate appearance was strictly military in purpose. She wore two family rings, inscribed with “Jhesus Maria” and with a cross. She wore plain armor, without gilding or coat of arms. She said her sword would be found in the church of St. Catherine de Fierbois, and it was there, and she wore it always.
The Duke of Alençon, whose life she saved in action, gave her a fine horse. He was impressed by her skill at riding, tilting and in action. She must have been a born rider. This impressed the men too. They were also struck by the fact that she could spend six days and nights without removing a single piece of her armor. They admired too her modesty and the skill and discretion with which she performed her natural functions. In the year or more she spent in the field, there was never any attempt at seduction or rape, by men on her own side or, after her capture, by enemies. This was not, as some writers have supposed, because she was plain. Soldiers in need will rape any woman, irrespective of age or appearance. There was an aura about her which made men respect her. Indeed they testified that, when with her, they were without carnal thoughts. There is no suggestion she was unfeminine, however. Her page, Louis de Contes, who held her in the highest regard, testified that he often saw her in tears. There was something distinctly feminine about the small battle-axe she carried. Her voice was womanly. After the battle of Patay, June 8, 1429, she took the head of a badly wounded English soldier on her knees, saw that he confessed and comforted him until he died. It is significant that she seems to have made a surprising number of women friends. There was no demand among the wives of prominent men, French, English or Burgundian, for her prosecution.
She was wounded twice. The first time an arrow entered her body just above her left breast, penetrating six inches. She pulled it out with her own hands, and quickly returned to duty. At the time of her failure to take Paris, she was hit by an arrow in the thigh, the archer shouting: “Paillarde! Ribande!” (not an Englishman, evidently). In custody she was tortured and ill treated but responded stoically. Her confession reflected loneliness, confusion and bewilderment. She recovered her courage and self-confidence, and her faith, and her last days and hours were impressive. At the stake she called loudly and repeatedly on Jesus. There is a reliable report that John Tressant, secretary to Henry VI, exclaimed as she died: “We are lost! We have burned a Saint!”
The French have always in modern times blamed the English for what happened to Joan. General de Gaulle often said: “I can never forgive the English for what they did to Jeanne d’Arc.” But the crime, if it was a crime, was a French one. The two judges were Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, in whose diocese her supposed offenses had taken place, and the deputy inquisitor of France, Jean Lemaistre, Dominican prior of Rouen. We have a complete list of those who took part in the trial: 1 cardinal, 6 bishops, 32 doctors of theology, 16 bachelors of theology, 7 doctors of medicine, and 103 others. Of these only eight were English, of whom two attended regularly but took no part in the process. The trial was in many ways a travesty since Joan was allowed no counsel and was not permitted to call any witnesses. Her chief enemy was not really the English but the Church. She had made no effort to conciliate the French clergy and as a free woman had operated entirely through the secular authorities. She does not seem to have had much to do with the clergy at any time in her life. What made Joan dangerous, in the eyes of the Church hierarchy, was that she claimed to have a message directly from above, without any mediation by the Church. So did many other antinomians, eccentrics and egregious religious spirits in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Church invariably treated them with suspicion and hostility, and many were prosecuted for heresy. In the Church’s eyes, the fact that Joan was an enemy of the English was secondary, though obviously the Church had to take note of the views of what was theoretically the strongest crown in Christendom. But English official hostility merely reinforced the horror and detestation the Church felt for a young woman who used the power of religion outside the parameters they laid down. It would be accurate to say that Joan was the victim of clerical trades unionism and male prejudice.
The heroic glamour of Henry V and the tragic faith of Joan gave a fine glow of nobility to the last phase of the Hundred Years War, otherwise a soulless and wasteful episode in European history, which reflected no credit on England or France, or the universal church for that matter. And here it is worth remarking that, whereas the English, through the pen of Shakespeare, made Henry V the exemplary poetic hero of a splendid play, the French failed to turn Joan, who ought to have become a transcendental national heroine, into an artistic paradigm. There was a failure of kingship to begin with. Charles VII did nothing for Joan, though he owed his throne to her. The delay of more than a quarter century in the rehabilitation procedure was significant. And the verdict was shifty. It did not declare Joan a martyr or even actually state that she “had remained faithful and Catholic until and including her death”—as her family had wished—but merely that the judges had “acted improperly.” None of the key judges, all French, was condemned. Some were still alive, but they were left undisturbed in their benefices. The French kings exercised enormous influence in Rome, where they were always addressed as “Your Most Christian Majesty.” But none pressed for Joan’s canonization. It was left for the Third Republic to do that, and to declare her “the second patron of France,” with the second Sunday in May as a national feast in her honor. But her day has never been a public holiday.
French writers have been curiously reluctant to use Joan as a theme. It is true that Jean Chapelain (1595–1674) wrote an epic, La Pucelle, in twenty-four cantos. But though he was a great friend of Richelieu, only half was published—the rest had to wait until 1882. Only a handful of French have even read it; the vast majority have never heard of it. It is true that Voltaire wrote La Pucelle. But it is not one of his better works. There is a famous portrait of Joan in Jules Michelet’s history of France (volume five), a prose life by Anatole France, a poem by Péguy, and a play by Paul Claudel, Jeanne au bûcher, set to music by Honegger. Anouilh also wrote a play, L’Alouette. But there is nothing in French literature comparable to George Bernard Shaw’s masterpiece, Saint Joan. And a number of English churches have been dedicated to her. Someone had the justice and wit to erect a statue of her in Winchester Cathedral, opposite the tomb of Cardinal Beaufort, who had a discreditable, albeit marginal, role in her condemnation. When, after the appalling scenes of murderous atheism that marked the Paris commune of 1870–1871, the great basilica of reparation was erected on the summit of Montmartre, a matchless opportunity was missed to dedicate it to Joan. But of course she was not then a saint! The truth is, from start to finish, from the miserable ingratitude of Charles VII onward, official France has always shown itself unworthy of this great patriotic martyr. But she dwells warmly in the hearts of many people in France, even in this infidel age, just as Henry V and his happy few are remembered by those English who still love their country.