Free Joan of Arc by Timothy Wilson-Smith Page A

sign of the cross and sprinkled her with holy water, she told him to approach: ‘I will not fly away.’ On 8 July Charles called a council of war, from which Joan was excluded, to debate whether to bypass the town, as Archbishop Regnault of Chartres urged, or to attack it. Joan was called in to give her views, and she proposed an attack. The very sight of her preparations was enough for the people of Troyes. Once she began the attack, the rules of war meant that the besieged would have no legitimate defence against whatever fate Charles might allow. The prospect of the terrible consequences that could follow from their defiance made Troyes submit. A triumphal entry and the free gift of supplies was enough to buy Charles off. In return he freely pardoned the people of Troyes their offences. The march to Reims was turning into a procession.
    The people of Reims were now the only possible obstacle left to the coronation. Charles was anxious because he was aware that if they resisted he had inadequate artillery and siege machines. Joan reassured him that they would come to meet him; and once more she proved to be right. She was almost in her home country. A neighbour, a farmer called Gérardin d’Épinal, came with four friends to see her. He would recall that previously she had told him that she had a secret she would not disclose because he was a ‘Burgundian’ and that now she was afraid of nothing except treason. On Saturday 16 July the royal party reached Reims. On the following day Charles was crowned.
    The lengthy coronation service in Reims Cathedral was the happiest time in Joan’s short life. The ceremony enacted publicly Charles’s calling to be the sacred monarch of a holy kingdom; it was for his role in life that she had fought; it was his vocation that gave her life its meaning.
    Reims was the royal, national cathedral of France. On its façade is a sculptural group consisting of Clovis, King of the Franks, his Christian wife Clotilda and St Rémi. The pagan chief is being baptised while the saint receives the ampulla from a dove; in the ampulla is the holy oil that will be used to anoint all Frankish and French kings; and the dove stands for the Holy Spirit. There are variations on the royalist theme. The priest-king Melchisedek gives communion in bread and wine to the patriarch Abraham, clad in the armour of a thirteenth-century knight. King Solomon, standing for Christ the King, stands beside the Queen of Sheba, representing the Church. Inside the nave are representations of twenty kings, beside the bishops who consecrated them. Only Karolus (Charlemagne) is named, as he is the most important of all since Clovis. In other French Gothic churches are other examples of devout kingship: at Chartres the story of Charlemagne; at St-Denis the story of Godfrey de Bouillon, the Frankish leader chosen after the First Crusade to rule in Jerusalem; in the Ste-Chapelle in Paris the story of St Louis. Nowhere else, however, is there so much emphasis on the Most Christian King as there is at Reims. On the western front by the great rose window King David is anointed by the prophet Samuel, King Solomon by the prophet Nathan. David shows kingly courage by slaying Goliath, Solomon kingly justice by returning the disputed child to its true mother and kingly piety by building the Temple. Above all these scenes God gives his fatherly blessing to the kings.
    Nobody knows if Joan studied these figures, but they were biblical stories familiar to the illiterate poor, from which class she sprang. Nobody knows what exactly she witnessed; for 1429 there is no equivalent to the Coronation Book of Charles V that contains the liturgy by which Charles’s grandfather had been consecrated King of France. We do know, however, that from nine o’clock in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon the drama moved steadily towards its climax, when Charles was anointed on the head, hands and chest with the holy oil from the ampulla of St