The Rest Is History - 634. Joan of Arc: Heroine in Chains (Part 3)

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

How was Charles VII, with the help of Joan of Arc, able to fight his way to Reims to be crowned in the ancient seat of French kings? Why was she able to continually defeat the formidable soldiers of England, in battle? And, how was Joan’s legendary ascent finally brought shatteringly down, as she fell into the hands of her dreaded English enemies…? Join Tom and Dominic as the discuss the apex of Joan of Arc’s many triumphs, her continued war with the English, and the terrible moment that would see her captured, cast in irons, and put on trial for her life… _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editor: Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude  Producer: Tabby Syrett Senior Producer: Theo Young-Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Selz on Monday at the hour of Vespers, alongside a great body of armed men. I saw her mount her horse, arrayed all in white armour, with only her head bare and holding a small axe. The great black charger was very restive at her door and would not let her mount. Lead him, she said, to the cross which is in front of the church. And there she mounted, the horse standing still as if he had been bound. Then, turning towards the church which was close by, she said in a beautiful, feminine voice,

You priests and people of the church, make processions and prayers to God for us. Then, turning to the road, forward, forward, she said. Her unfolded standard was carried by a page. She had her small axe in her hand, and by her side rode a brother who had joined her eight days before. So that's a letter written on the 8th of June 1429 by a soft, tender-hearted young nobleman, Guida Laval, he's writing to his mother, and he is pumped. He is so full of excitement because he has just seen the heroine of the hour, Joan of Arc.

And Dominic, how beautifully you conveyed her feminine voice there. Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed that. It's so she'd been brought back to life. So a month has gone by since this extraordinary moment in the history of France and French military achievements at the Liberation of Orleans. So to remind listeners, O'Leon had been under siege for six months by the English, it 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 O'Leon.

So 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 O'Leon, illegitimate half-brother of the Richard Duke of O'Leon, who was languishing in the Tower of London, had been there ever since the Battle of Agin. Corps where he'd been captured. You know, he is, his team aureon 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 Vént. Then there's Etienne de Vignolle, better known as Lair, the wrath of God, man of very humble origins, had his legs crushed by a chimney of a pub falling on top of it, but still very feared, very charismatic, the great warlord of his day. And then there is this guy, Gilles de Ray, a Breton nobleman with a particular taste for guerrilla warfare. And Gide Lavelle knew him very well because Gie's brother was married to the daughter of Schilder Ray. Yeah. And there's another side to Gilles-Dor-Rae, isn't there, which we perhaps won't go into

immediately, but perhaps it's a shadow over his reputation. We may be coming to that in due course. anyway, but at the time, there is no blot on the escutcheon of Gilles-Dor-Rae or any of the other French captains, because in the wake of the miracle of Alleyon, they have come to think of themselves as brothers in arms, and they have an incredible glamour now, and this is why Gidea 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, most glamorously, most stirringly, embodies the miracle of All Neon. It's not the bastard, it's not Lair,

it's not Gilles de Re, it's a teenage girl. And the sense of her charisma is palpable in the spirit of devotion with which Gidea LaValle has described this person to his mother. Yes, I saw her mount her horse, arrayed all in white armour, with a little bit of her. only her head bear and holding a small axe. And you can sense here the influence of the kind of Arthurian chivalric romances that were so popular in the 15th century. I mean, she's effectively, it's as though one of the books that they love, one of the stories or the songs that Trubedores sing has come to life, isn't it? Yeah. So this, of course, is Joan of Arc. And it's absolutely astonishing that only months before, you know, she'd been a peasant in a kind of homespun

dress. And now she is like Solonsalot. She's transformed herself into a kind of flower of chivalry. And she's won the hearts and the admiration of these very battle-hardened men. So, you know, the bastard Lair, Gilles de Rey. You know, it's astonishing. And she'd done it because she was very courageous. She'd shown tremendous seal. She'd shown enormous, a kind of, a kind of real sense of what it would take to defeat the English, to relieve the siege. But I think also she embodied something that is completely exceptional, because Joan of Arc, through the entire sweep of medieval history, is someone exceptional. And this is a kind of instinctive genius for display and image. She's kind of the medieval David Bowie on steroids. She understands

How to Project herself? But just on this, right? I mean, actually, you know, she's as a woman, that's sort of Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga might be as good a parallel. But just on this, she is drawing not just on

the religious iconography and whatnot, but she is very clearly drawing on the tradition of the chivalry romances. And she's playing a part. I mean, the point of that 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 sort of stuff. I mean, there is a definite element of spectacle about the Joan of Arc phenomenon. Yeah. I mean, I suspect this isn't kind of, you know, calculation. It's expression of what is in her heart. But what is in her heart has been massively influenced, I think, by the romances that we know that she listened to when she was growing up. And clearly she has dreams of chivalry.

The mad thing is, is that she's not a young man, she's a young woman. She's not only dared to live these dreams out, but she has persuaded hard-bitten nobleman to share in them, to see her, a peasant girl, as a nobleman. And Marina Warner, whose book I've already cited is brilliant on this. So Marina Warner writes, Joan was the personification of mobility. She accepted neither her peasant birth nor her female condition, none of the limitations. 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 knight born to the role. But the thing is, of course, she is not a knight. She's a woman. And, I mean, this is the paradox of her, isn't it? That she's playing a male part, a traditionally male part, and she's surrounded by men. But, I mean, she's not pretending to be a man, right? She doesn't cast off her feminine identity at all, but she actually draws on it. And it's the fact that she is, surely that's what gives her part of the sort of, as well, supernatural or divine power, is the fact that she is setting herself outside the conventional gender norms.

So people see her as a woman apart. Yeah. Or she's fusing the most potent expressions of what is male and female. So we've said to how, you know, how she's, she buys into the show. and the glamour of knighthood. But she also instinctively understands that there are deep reserves of spiritual power that women particularly are able to channel.

So, you know, she is absolutely not trans. She does not want to change her sex. She never claims she never pretends to be male. She always calls herself Jean-La Pusel, Joan the maid. And what she's doing there is drawing on all the traditions that are associated with the body of a virgin girl. Yeah.

You know, she's casting it as the very essence of her identity. And so she is male in the most martial way it's possible to be male, but she is female in the holiest way it is possible to be female. And it's this fusion that is so unique and that makes Joan such a completely exceptional person in the, you know, the sweep of medieval European history. So we compared her before a couple of times to another person we've done on the show, Catherine of Sienna. But Catherine of Sienna draws almost exclusively on kind of female archetypes. Well, she's the bride of Christ, isn't she?

Joan is a bit different. And in the first episode, you talked about her obsession with St. Michael, the kind of, you know, a patron saint, a warrior saint and so on. the captain of heaven, all of that, the leaders of the archangels. And St. Michael, I mean, you might say a very male figure, but is he? Because he's a little bit amorphous, isn't he? Well, he's an angel, and so he's sexless. Right. Angels do not have sex in any sense.

Right. Okay. Yeah. That's a very niche, a very niche hobby. And so he's neither male. He's not female. he is kind of more than that. And Michael, as we said, had become the emblem of French resistance, and Joan has now become

the emblem of French resistance. And although the comparison, I don't think, is ever overtly made by Joan's contemporaries, there is a hint of this kind of sexless character that they see her as possessing in the way that her companions in arms repeatedly speak of her as someone who is. attractive, but who nevertheless never provoke sexual desire in them. So 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 where any of her soldiers or squired moved in this way. And I think it's important for Jones' comrades, her male comrades, to emphasize that she is a maid, that her virginity is the marker of her holiness, and that this holiness in turn is the evidence that she is what she says she is, a messenger sent from God. Right. And there's no sense that any of the captains at Orleans, you know, when she's berating them on all of that kind of thing, when she is haranguing them about bad decisions and stuff, there's no sense that any of the

captains doubt her and say, who is this flipping jumped up peasant girl, you know, who claims to be sent by God, or any of the knights or any of these people, they collectively, you know, choose to believe. Do they? Or are 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. You know, she prayed, the wind changed. She suggested that the English should be attacked. They attacked the English. It works out. Ollian is liberated. The miracle stands for itself. She's done exactly what she said she would do. And this is why people like Guy de Laval, whose kind of enthusiastic

description of Joan we began this show with, that's why they're buying into it. You know, 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 would seem terrible has now been raised up in this kind of illumined by this splendor, this sense of glory, this sense of kind of wonder and the miraculous. And that's what Guy and loads of other people are buying into. I mean, it's interesting because effectively Jones' liberation of Orleans is the only miracle that she has performed.

So in that letter that you read, Ghee 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 I mean it's pretty feeble stuff. And Joan herself, you know, she repudiates all this.

She always said, and this again is a massive point of difference between her and other female visionaries or indeed, you know, visionaries full stop. They allane 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 Orleans. Yeah. I mean, it's not really a supernatural miracle. I mean, sieges are often relieved. I mean, sure, the French thought they were going to lose and actually they ended up winning and they're delighted by that. But you don't need to resort to supernatural explanations for why they were able to route

the English. I mean, that's... Well, Dominic, you don't. But that is the one miracle. that Joan says that she has performed. And I guess you would say it was a miracle that the relief of Orlyan 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. Right. And that mission was to relieve Orleans, and that was the test. And she has passed it.

And so her claim to have been sent from God is now widely accepted by, basically, everyone on the French side. Not least, the man that she is serving, who is the dauphin. So even Joan still calls him the dauphin, don't they? Everybody calls him the dofins, the titular Charles the 7th, because he won't really become king or be accepted as king. So he's driven back the English and gone into Grasse and been crowned because Rance, 80 miles northeast to Paris, in English-held territory, this is the place where for generations French, kings have been crowned. millennium. You need to get there. And Charles has been hanging around for seven years. It's the death of his father in 1422, hoping desperately he can get to Reuss and be crowned and there seems no prospect of it whatsoever. And Joan has promised him not only that she will relieve Orleans, but that she will crown him in Reince 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 Orlyor, he kind of really sets his shoulder to the wheel in an attempt to try and help her fulfill these other two prophecies. So the relief force that had been sent to Orlyor, 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 Dofans treasury is empty. And that again is part of the miraculous quality of the relief of Orlyor. You know, it's come despite the fact that the dofant effectively is bankrupt. In the wake of the relief of Ornoyor, the dauphin is now confident that men will answer his call and not expect to be paid because now they will do it because, you know, they are following a miraculous virgin. God, that really, 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 Tor and Orleans, and among them, of course, was Guida Laval. So he's kind of typical of, you know, he's expressive of why these people are now ready to fight for

the Dofé in a way that they hadn't been before and not expect to be paid for it. Right. And in fact, Gidea LaValle, to fund this campaigning, he had been forced to sell lands. So not any is he not being paid. He's actually, you know, he's short of a few estates or two. Now, among the, various nobles and captains of France, as we mentioned in the previous episode, there is one who, right from the beginning, has been a massive Joan fan. And this is the Duke of Alonso, Jean, who's only 20, but has been appointed by the Donofant to serve as commander-in-chief of this expeditionary force that has been recruited. Joan herself, even though in her letters, she described herself as a captain of men, she has no official rank, but she doesn't actually need one.

and the DoFat gives instructions to Alonso that he is to act in all matters by her advice. And as it turns out, the campaign is an amazing success. And Joan's advice, again, turns out to be incredibly effective. And just as they had been humiliated at Alleyon, so now a succession of English commanders find themselves very much coming second best when they come up against Joan. and her men. So let's, should we go through

these campaigns? So first of all, this place called Jaalgo, and that's upriver from Orleans. It's a bridging point. The Duke of Suffolk

is there, and he's there, and he is made a completely battered by French artillery, aren't they? Yeah. They have a,

the French have a bombard called the Shepardess, which is named after Joan. And, you know, 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 knights 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 knight. Yeah. So that's the,

that's the Duke of Suffolk taken prisoner. And he, of course, had been in command at Orleans. But one later there's an even more crushing blow for the English to to to India because this time it's the turn of Talbot so John Talbot yeah the great Lawrence Delalio of of the English to be taken prisoner and he suffers a crushing defeat not in you know he's he's not he's not defending a town he's in he's in the open and this is a pitched battle of the kind that the English ever since Agincourt have pretty much taken for granted that they are bound to win But now they lose.

2,000 Englishmen are killed. This is a loss of manpower that they can't really afford. But of course, even more damagingly, perhaps, is the fact that they have lost this reputation for invincibility. And again, you know, this redounds massively to Jones' credit. And she goes to the Dofan and she says, look, we've had these twin victories. Two of your enemies are now prisoner, Suffolk and Talbot. is clearly with you, now we must seize the moment. We must advance beyond the safe zone of the Loire and we must go deep into enemy-held territory. And our target must be a place some 130 miles

to the north of the Loire beyond Paris. And this is, of course, the holy city of Morance. And this is a really, really sort of dodgy undertaking for a couple of reasons. First of all, you know, it's 130 miles away. They're not going to have time to organize a supply train. They're going to have to move very fast for that reason. And because of that, because they're not going to be able to take supplies, they are going, not going to be able to take artillery either, which means they're not going to be able to lay a siege to her house.

They can't be a protracted siege. But as always, Joan says, oh, God will provide. And the Dofam believes her. And God does provide. Because on the 5th of July, the Doefan his army with Jones. They arrived before the walls of Trois, and this is the principal city of Champagne. And, of course, it is where the dauphin had been disinherited by his father, by the terms of the peace treaty that the lunatic Charles VI had signed with Henry V and the Duke of Burgundy. And the Duke of Burgundy exercises a very strong influence on the city.

The council is loyal to the Duke to Philip the good. And so when the dauphin appears before the walls of the city, the city, the king is a very strong influence on the city. the council refuses to surrender. But Joan is not daunted or put off by this at all. And she tells the Dofins, my voices have told me that within four days, I will lead you into Tois, despite the fact, as you mentioned, Dominic,

that the French have no artillery. So how on earth is this going to happen? So what Joan does, she 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 general, you know, the kind of everyday people in the city, they gather on the walls and they look down and they see Joan

and they see her men blocking up the ditches and they get more and more nervous. And 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 shattered the town's resistance. So even before Joan and her forces attack, the people of Tuar are so spooked that they've decided to surrender and they force the council to do this. And so just as Joan had prophesied, the Dofair rides into the city and Joan is there with him carrying her great silken white banner. So another tremendous victory. And if I can just pause the narrative for a second. So obviously, for understandable reasons, you want this to be as glamorous and exciting as story as possible.

so you are kind of playing up the miraculous elements and amazing triumphs against the odds that are only explicable by Jones' extraordinary charisma and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. However, a skeptic might say that you actually gave the game away, not in this series, but in the very first series we ever did

about the Hundred Years' War, where you pointed out a great length and very convincingly that the English were always, you know, France is richer, more powerful, more populace, all of this. And in a way, the English so-called triumphs in the Hundred Years War

were always a losery. And you could argue that the English were always massively overextended, that it was always... I mean, I remember in the old days, when you used to diss Henry V, he 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. And I suppose in a way you could say, Of course, Joan is really important to this story. But even if you take her out of it, you could argue that this would have happened at some point anyway, that the English were never going to be able to hold on to all this territory. They're hugely outnumbered in terms of demography. France, one day France would get its act together under a charismatic leader of some kind,

and that that's what lies behind this story. They're kind of geopolitical, the strategic realities of the Hundred Years' War. Okay, so just, I mean, two points to that. The first is that what Joan is doing is turning the needle on French morale. Yeah. 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 Agincourt, the sense that they are invincible. And Joan effectively has destroyed that mystique. The second thing, the specific issue of Toir and why they surrender, it's not.

the English who are the enemy in Tois. It's the Duke of Burgundy. Burgundian, right. And the Dofant is there as a representative of the bitter, bitter enemy of the Burgundians, the Arminiacs. So in that sense, the surrender really is, I think, extraordinary and a tribute certainly to the mystique of Joan. Yeah. And 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. I mean, we're kind of get slightly off-piece here, but I think that had Orly on Fallen, had the English advanced into the south, had they captured Borge,

had the Dauphin fled, had they been able to establish a kind of very loose sovereignty over the whole of France, it would still have been impossible for them to hold France that 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 Alion is relieved and that Charles, his war captains and the men who have rallied to his banner, find that when they go out deep into English and Burgundian held France, actually everything falls to pieces. The whole stack of cards falls to pieces. They wouldn't have done that without Joan. I mean, it may be that Joan is, I mean, she is effectively kind of calling her

enemy's bluff. But, you know, 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 enemies, she is a figure of dread. someone who seems to have exercised witchcraft. So I've taken you slightly off the narrative.

Let's get back to the narrative. So basically with the fall of Trois, the road to chasse 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 Dofan. Well, just to pick up on that, in the wake of Allior, 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 Rance. And Joan would not have known that. She doesn't have the military sensibility to understand that. But I think that she has a kind of gut feeling, this is our moment, God is with us, and she turns out to be right. Perhaps for the wrong reasons. Right. So let's get up to the Dofah and the narrative. So the Dofah, by the 16th of July, he is 12 miles out St.

at a place called set-soe and all is looking good. So dignitaries from Rance arrive and they offer their submission to him. And that afternoon, the 16th of July, the Archbishop of Rens, 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 Dauphan and Joan arriving in the city at last after all this time. Yeah. And the sinister figure of Gilles-Tor-Rae, meanwhile, who's been writing with them, he has headed out to the Abbey of Saint-Rémy, the guy who had a baptised Clovis almost a thousand years before. And this was oil that had been brought down from heaven

by a dove. And it was kept in the holy ampula, which was a vial of Roman glass. And this is what you had to use to anoint the king. He gets it, comes back, so that's ready for the day. Unfortunately, the regalia of Charlemagne, so a sword, a crown and so on, this is in the abbey of San Deney 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, and so basically everything is ready to go, needs must, the coronation can go ahead. And so it begins the following, morning, 9 o'clock, it's the 17th of July, 1429. Charles, the dauphin, approaches the high altar.

The Duke of Alonsohn is waiting for him. The Duke of Alonanon knights, Charles. Charles is then presented to God. He's touched with oil, the holy oil that has been brought from the Abbey of Saint-Rémy. And he is then crowned by the Archbishop of Rance. And throughout the ceremony, Joan is by the side of the dauphin, holding her beautiful white banner. And when the coronation has been completed, she falls to her knees before the dauphin, and she tells him noble king, God's will is done, and then she breaks down in tears.

Oh, tear-jurking scene. And meanwhile, the new, the king, as I guess we should call him, Charles the 7th, he's granting all sorts of favours, isn't he? So fan favourite, Gilles de Réé, is made a Marshal of France. Guillaire, Foude LaValle, future Aristot, who we heard from at the beginning, he's a count. The bastard of Orleans is there. That bloke, the wrath of God is there. Renéé-en-en-en-ju is there, all these characters. And actually, Jones family are there too. So this is a signal honor for them. I mean, they basically, I mean, they were respectable peasants, but they were peasants nonetheless. And now here they are at the coronation of the king. And being put up at public expense. So it's, yeah, it's incredible. Her father, her brothers,

her godfather. And Charles is the king, as we're called. him from now on. I mean, he is very keen to show them marks a favor. So at the end of July, he announces that Jones Village, Domremi, will be exempt in perpetuity from taxes. Wow. And then a few months after that in December, incredibly, he announces the ennoblement of Joan, her family, all the descendants of her family. And again, this is something that, in perpetuity, it will last right the way up to the French Revolution. They return their nobility. And, you know, you would have to say, I think maybe even you, Dominic, that these honours are very worthily given, that the coronation of Charles the 7th 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 100 years war. because Charles's legitimacy has now essentially been proclaimed to the world. The stain of that crime at the Bridge of Montreux, the murder of the Duke of Burgundy. It's effectively been washed clean. And so 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? Collie, we'll 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 as a 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 Saracens. Oh, 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. Well, but also, she also wants to attack the Hussites, so she wants to have a crack at the checks. Oh, come on. This is absolutely shocking.

Yeah, but, but, Dominic, of course, what she's doing there is trying to patch things up between Charles I seventh and the greatest peer in France, the Duke of Burgundy. And she writes that letter on the very day of Charles of 7th's coronation in Rance. And 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 nobleman 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 Armagnac 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 should 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 has 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 march towards a rance.

And 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. And if we invade all his territories and, you know, seize towns that are kind of loyal to him, then we'll really crash that opportunity. And actually, that is what happens because Philip is very alarmed by the fact that Charles 7th is now in Rance and has taken Troyes and all this kind of thing. And so one week before Charles's coronation in France, 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 it an envoy to Charles who arrives in the wake of the coronation, kind of. saying, well, you know, should we at least have negotiations? And they do. But ultimately, Philip just cannot bring himself to let bygones be bygones. You know, he sees Charles the seventh 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 of Seventh at Raz, the Anglo-Bugundian pact hold, Phillips' alliance, with. Bedford remains secure. 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 the fifth'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 Orleans.

Two of his key captains Suffolk and Talbot have been taken prisoner. Champagne has been lost. So that's their sort of eastern flank of Paris. And this business in France is a disaster for the English cause because the Dauphin has been crowned. And the English claimant to the throne of France, Henry of Lancaster, Henry the 6th, is still only a very little boy and a very dreamy and pious little boy at that, not martial at all. So 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.

And 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. And he sees her 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. you know, is 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 Pussell, 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 Christendom 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 germanely, the claim of Charles the seventh 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. And 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 VIII 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 overextension 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, I mean, it is a tribute to the renown of Joan that this is taken very seriously, that if they can capture her, then, you know, that 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 Star, which has been very high and as high as it could possibly be, you get the first signs 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 Raz, she and the Duke of Alessor, who, you know, her biggest fan among the ranks of the French captains,

they arrive before the gates of Paris. And in the opinion of Joan, Paris is ripe for the plucking. And she says, you know, I have been assured by my voices that if we attack it in a full-throated way, the city will fall. And 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 the 7th. So among them is a city called Beauvais, dominated by a towering cathedral, but only half

finished. And for one man in the circle of the Duke of Bedford, this is a particular humiliation. And this man is a guy we've already met. We met him in the first episode. He is called Pierre Couchon, and he's the bishop of Beauvais. And he's the guy who thought the English are going to win and he'd thrown his lot in with the English and he thought, you know, they're going to win and that's God's will. Yeah. And now he has lost the city that is probably his sea to the French and more specifically to this fiend in female form, this sorceress, this witch.

And so he like Bedford has particular cause now to view Joan in a very, 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 8th of September, Joan launches this great attack on Paris. Now, some listeners may be thinking, you know, the relief of Orleans 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. I mean, she attacks with a very, very small number of men. Charles of Seventh 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'd said she would capture Paris and now she hasn't. Joan implies this is basically because Charles O'7 didn't trust me. If everyone had piled in, we would have got it. And she may well have been right about that, actually. Paris kind of was quite vulnerable, maybe a full force, but a gamble because Paris is the

best defended city basically west of Constantinople. I mean, its 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 pro-Bugundian, and Charles VIII is, you know, I mean, he's on the Amniac side. Yeah.

And so all these circumstances combined 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 8th of September is the birthday of the Virgin Mary, and it is therefore seen as very disrespectful of Joan to have launched in the time.

attack on that day. So that casts a slight aspersion on the notion of her holiness. Well, I suppose you could argue, I mean, again, if you're being just sort of strictly empirical about it, she's gambled and gambled and gambled and one day, you know, it won't work. You compared her with, in the 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 of overwhelming odds.

And, you know, sometimes that works and it's brilliant. And then sometimes you're Tom Holland and you go to watch a test match and it only takes two days because England of shame themselves. And that's basically the siege of Paris. Yeah. And I think in the wake of this, even though her fame across Europe remains absolutely constant, people think she's, you know, this incredible wonder. People can't stop talking about her. She's this massive celebrity. I think at the Charles's court, there is a sense that perhaps something has changed.

And this is basically because she's done what she said she'd do. She said that she would relieve all year. She's done it. She said that she would take Charles to rounds 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, I mean, 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, really enjoys being, you know, a captain. She doesn't want to go back to her village. She doesn't want to take off her beautiful armour and her, you know, her rich furs and

everything and go back to her kind of peasant girls' dress. You know, that's not what she's about at all. And so all that winter, rather than return to Don Ramey, 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 he, again,

this Brenno problem, he doesn't have the money for it. You know, and money issues are not the, you know, that's not Jones Fybe at all. Right. She's not worried about that. Yeah. So basically, um, her vision and reality are coming into increasingly, you know, they're colliding with increasingly kind of destabilizing effect for her reputation at the court, right? Right. I mean, I think that, you know, we've, we have this incredible description of how 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 and, you know, and the two don't really gel. So by March 1430, Joan has had enough. And she thinks, well, if if no one else

is going to continue the war, then I'm going to do this myself. And so she raises a company of men, 200 men in all, 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, you know, 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' War. And it seems to some that Joan, you know, this holy maid, has now joined the ranks of the free companies.

And this is a very, very bad look for her. Joan herself would absolutely have repudiated that charge. I mean, 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 sieges against the Burgundians, roaming the badlands that now surround Paris, trying to prosecute the war. And in this spirit,

on the 23rd of May 1430, she arrives at a town called Compienne, and this is some 50 miles north of Paris, and it is under siege by the Duke of Burgundy, because Compienne had owed loyalty to the Duke of Burgundy and had then switched its alliance to Charles the 7th. And so now the Duke of Burgundy is out for revenge. And Joan says, OK, I'm going to get right there, and I'm going to try and relieve compienne. Aulian style. Oliant style. And this, now, not only that the 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. and at sunset she launches this sortie, this 23rd of May 1430. And talk us through how this attack goes, Tom.

Well, it doesn't go well. It gets beaten back by the Burgundians and 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 splendid in her white armour.

She's got her silk and banner aloft. Everyone in that battle, Burgundian as well as French, absolutely knows who she is. So eventually she heads back towards the drawbridge, towards the gate, but by now the guards in Compienne 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. And so she's surrounded by a swarm 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. And Jean-La Pusel is now a prisoner. So Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy. Oh, he must be absolutely delighted. Yeah. So we have a witness who sees him. He, he, he, He comes to inspect Joan and the witness says, I've never seen anyone so delighted.

And that evening after the Duke of Burgundy has been to look at Joan, he writes letters to all the towns in France and the low countries who might have been tempted to rebel against him. And he proclaims, you know, 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 Capter 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 has a, you know, he's a very serious player, a very loyal servant of the Anglo-Bergan. a Gundian alliance. And so this is the person into whose hands Joan now passes. And Joan, of course, you know, she sees herself as a knight. 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. Huge profit. He can, you know, 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, right? Well, you would think the obvious person is the man whose cause she has promoted for so long, who is Charles the 7th of France. But disappointingly, Charles the 7th, he, I reckon, you see, I reckon there's a part of him that thinks, oh, thank God I've got rid of that. You know, she was becoming a bit of an albatross.

A bit of a nightmare. Yeah, a bit of a nightmare. I'm kind of 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, very damaging. And so Charles doesn't comment on it. He never mentions Joan by word from this point on. And instead he hands over responsibility for the crisis to his chancellor, who is the Archbishop of Ravs who had crowned him.

and the Archbishop of Rance, who was also the guy who had led the investigation into Joan back in Poitiers before the Siege of O'Neillian, he now basically operates as Charles's spin doctor. And 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-peased that she has now been undone by her own pride and folly. And God has therefore punished her by allowing her to be captured. and therefore, you know, 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 of 7th has now demonstrably failed to maintain the favour 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 goal of the Duke of Bedford is the precise opposite.

He wants to make as big a fuss of Jones' capture as he possibly can. And 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 the 7th

that people go back to saying he's an illegitimate king. And so Bedford by now is adopting a two-pronged strategy to bring this about. firstly, the month before James capture, he had sent for the eight-year-old Henry the 6th to come to Calais. And Bedford's plan is to have him crowned in Rance or at a pinch Paris and thereby erase the memory of Charles's coronation. This is his plan. There is a problem.

Rance is still in enemy hands and Normandy is too unstable to risk the king traveling to Paris. So it's a bit like, you know, in the wake of the Iraq war, President Bush, you know, he could maybe land in Baghdad and stay in the green zone, but he couldn't venture out to Fallujah. There's the same issue with, you know, they can't guarantee Henry the Sixth safety. And so instead, he's left to kick his heels in Calais, and it's all a bit embarrassing. And 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. And it is Pierre Couchon, 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. And he says to Bedford, look, you should buy Joan off John of Luxembourg. And 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. And when she is convicted, then the coronation of the DoFat 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. He genuinely, like, 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 is a witch. Yes, and the French servants of the

Lancasterian regime think that as well. Okay. Of course, I mean, that conviction is interfused with a desire to preserve the regime that they have committed themselves to 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 of 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 and she, 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. 60 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 does damage to her liver. She's obviously badly injured. And so it takes time for her to be nursed back to health. But, you know, the deal has been. done. And so Bedford can think, brilliant. Now at last we have a plan. So by July, sufficiency in Normandy have sufficiently stabilized that Henry the 6th can now process from Calais to Ruon. And Ruon, which is the leading city in Normandy, by this point, well, it is effectively the kind of

the green zone for the English regime. It's the place that is absolutely secure. It is the Lankastrian stronghold. And so 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 Sen while a military escort is recruited to escort her to Rouen. And finally, 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. Right. Well, just one episode to go to complete the story of Jonah Bark. And if you really can't wait, as I can't wait, then if you're a member of the Restus History Club, you can hear that episode right now. If you're not a member The Rest is History Club

and would like to join and to sample all of its incredible benefits, then head to the rest ishistory.com. But what a cliffhanger. One episode to go. Tom, merci. Au-voa.

Goodbye.