Free Joan of Arc by Timothy Wilson-Smith Page B

Rémi by the saint’s living embodiment, the Archbishop of Reims; and then he was crowned. In October 1422 Charles had been acknowledged as king at Mehun-sur-Yèvre by a forlorn group of followers. From the moment his father died, according to his lawyers, he had the legal authority of a king, yet he was still known as the Dauphin. What made him the Most Christian King were the sacred mysteries of 17 June, le beau mystère as it was described. His anointing made him, unlike all his lay subjects, a priest-king after the order of Melchisedek, who had the right to take communion in both kinds; and it prepared him to become, by a separate rite, a thaumaturge who could ‘touch’ for the tubercular condition called scrofula, the so-called king’s evil. His anointing also gave him, unlike many other kings, some authority within the Church.
    Certain traditional parts of the ceremony could not be followed at Charles’s coronation. At one stage, the twelve peers of France, six ecclesiastical and six lay, should have been summoned to stand before the high altar. Three of the clerics were present – the Archbishop of Reims, the bishops of Laon and of Châlons – but three were absent, among whom Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais, was deeply involved in Burgundian politics. Among the laity, the Duke of Burgundy, conspicuous by his absence, alone was a peer in his own right; the other five peerages had reverted to the Crown. Of the twelve peers, then, nine had to be substituted. Another official who should have been present was the leading military officer in France, the Constable, but Richemont, who had fought alongside Joan in the Loire valley, had since been disgraced, so his ceremonial sword was carried by the brother-in-law of Joan’s critic, Georges de La Trémoïlle. Other than the king, however, the person most prominent in the cathedral was Joan. She stood beside him, holding her banner, next to him the focus of attention. At the end of the ceremony she knelt down, and clasping him by the knees wept tears of joy. ‘Gentle King,’ she exclaimed, ‘now is God’s pleasure fulfilled. He desired that the siege of Orléans be lifted, and that you should be brought into this city of Reims to receive your holy consecration, so showing that you are the true king, the man to whom the kingdom of France should belong.’
    It is not clear if Joan was present at the banquet mounted to celebrate the coronation. If she was not, the reason must have been because she had not yet been ennobled. Among the people of Reims, however, she was revered; and as Charles rode round the city, his crown on his head, she rode at his side. The crowds pressed towards her to touch her. She was thrilled that the great aim of her mission had been accomplished. She remained sure that she was called to do more; but what precisely and how precisely she would do it, she was uncertain.
    Joan’s days in Reims were the high point of her public career, for the coronation ceremony gave meaning to everything she had done for her king. A modern visitor to the cathedral may be awe-struck by its beauty and in looking to explain such feelings will probably point to the daring of the masons’ work. Gothic engineering was a new skill, which facilitated the building of churches much taller than Roman and Romanesque arches could sustain. The pointed arches at the royal abbey of St-Denis led to a proliferation of glass where before there had been massive walls; the use of flying buttresses at Chartres produced higher, lighter walls and yet more glass; at Reims and then more ambitiously at Amiens, the pitch of the nave was still steeper. Finally, the Ste-Chapelle in Paris was made into an exquisite glass house and at Beauvais the pillars strained so high till the nave came crashing down.
    We cannot tell whether Joan had an aesthete’s eye. What we can believe is that for her Reims was the home on earth of St Rémi, a saint she had known as a child in Domremy. Reims