Joan of Arc

The chief turning point here, the Lancastrians’ Stalingrad, is generally reckoned to have occurred at Orléans in 1429. It involved an illiterate seventeen-year-old peasant girl from the far eastern frontiers of France, Joan of Arc. Convinced that she had been called upon to restore the dauphin, disinherited for the past ten years, to his rightful position as King, and that she was acting as the mouthpiece for voices, including those of saints Michael, Katherine and Margaret who chose to speak through her, Joan sought out the dauphin on the Loire. Whether genuinely convinced, or merely keen to manipulate her for political ends, various figures at the dauphin’s court claimed to identify her as the Pucelle or ‘Maid’ whose restoration of France had been prophesied since the 1390s. Joan not only brought a new messianic spirit to the French resistance at Orléans, from where the English were compelled to withdraw, but forced the dauphin’s hand, persuading him to lead a triumphal progress to Rheims. There, on 17 July 1429, having been greeted by crowds shouting ‘Noel!’, as if Christ himself were come again, he was crowned as King Charles VII.

It was this, more than anything, that persuaded the English political leadership to opt for almost immediate coronation of the seven-year-old Henry VI, as King both of England and France. Having been accorded an honoured place at the coronation of Charles VII, Joan herself was captured less than a year later, at Compiègne, north of Paris, attempting, as at Orléans, to bring her miraculous powers to bear upon an English siege. In 1431, at Rouen, she was tried, renounced her many sins, but then, two days later, changed her mind and claimed that once again her voices had spoken to her. The relapse into heresy was her undoing. She was publicly burned, her naked body exposed to the crowd before incineration, and the ashes thrown into the Seine.

The irony here is that Joan’s spirit of prophecy, so significant to the revival of French morale, was one to which King Henry V, the chief author of that English conquest against which Joan had fought, had been peculiarly attuned. Perhaps precisely because he had passed so much of his life in the company of men, with barely a passing acquaintance with his mother or wife let alone with other women, Henry V had a peculiar respect for female spirituality, both in its power for good and its potential for evil. We have already considered the Church’s wider scepticism about female saints and their supposed gifts of prophecy: from whom were such gifts derived, from God or from the Devil? Regardless of such reservations, and despite the suspicions that he is said to have entertained against his own step-mother, Queen Joan, accused after Henry IV’s death of sorcery and traffic with hidden powers, Henry V had been an enthusiastic patron of religious women and in particular of the order of St Bridget of Sweden, introduced by the King to a new foundation at Syon Abbey on the opposite bank of the Thames to his Carthusian priory at Sheen. The nuns of Syon, who, like the Carthusians, continued to play a significant role in the religious life of Henry VI, popularized the prophetic ‘Celestial Visions’ of their foundress: emotion-charged images of Christ and his mother not dissimilar to the visions seen by the distinctly unofficial St Julian of Norwich. Joan of Arc with her voices and her visions was merely a militant embodiment of the spirit of prophecy first detected in Bridget.