Joan of Arc and English defeat
The regency for Henry VI in France was taken up by his eldest surviving uncle, John, Duke of Bedford, and with it the task of seeking to win acceptance of the Troyes settlement throughout France. Militarily, Bedford needed to carry the war forward successfully into the 'dauphinist' lands south of the Loire.
But before he could push south, Bedford needed to consolidate Anglo-Burgundian authority north of the Loire. In August 1424, his great victory at Verneuil on the borders of Maine and Normandy effectively destroyed the dauphin Charles’s formidable Franco-Scottish army, which in Henry V’s absence had beaten the English at Baugé three years earlier.
By 142S, after some vigorous mopping-up, the position looked sufficiently secure for an offensive southward, and the first English objective was the key bridgehead on the Loire south of Paris, Orléans.
'Joan of Arc's charisma breathed a new confidence into the army she led to Orléans.'
Orléans was invested in September 1428, but the besieging force was too small to attempt an immediate storming. The aim had to be to starve the garrison out. At first it looked as if there was little chance of a relief for the defenders, but in February 1429, Joan of Arc arrived at the dauphin’s court at Chinon with her story of the voices that had given her the mission of ridding France of the English.
Her charisma breathed new confidence into the relieving army that she led to Orléans in May, and it successfully broke the siege. On 12 June at Jargeau and again at Patay on 17 June, she defeated the retreating English. Just a month later, on 16 July, she watched as her ‘gentle dauphin’ was solemnly crowned Charles VII of France in Rheims cathedral.
After Joan’s capture in the following year and her subsequent execution for heresy, the English succeeded in recovering some of the towns they had lost in the wake of her victories and more or less held their own for a while. But in 1435, Philip, Duke of Burgundy, abandoned his English alliance at the Congress at Arras, and recognised Charles VII as his king. This dealt a mortal blow to English hopes of making the Troyes settlement stick.
Paris opened its gates to Charles's general, Arthur, Constable de Richemont, in April 1436, and though the English still controlled most of Normandy and campaigned vigorously along its borders, the prospects for their cause began to look very gloomy indeed.
Negotiations formed a continuous background to the fighting from 1435. They finally bore fruit in 1444 with a general truce agreed at Tours. It was hoped that the arranged marriage there between Henry VI of England and the French princess Margaret of Anjou would help to make the truce a step toward full peace terms.
Then in 1449, an English force sacked and looted Fougères in Brittany. Charles VII, who had used the break in fighting to reorganise his royal army, declared himself no longer bound by the terms of the truce.
His forces rapidly overran Normandy during 1449-1450. In 1451, he repeated this success in Gascony. The veteran English commander John Talbot arrived there the following year with a force from England and retook Bordeaux. But on 17 July 1453, his army was disastrously defeated at Castillon and Talbot himself killed.
Soon after, with Bordeaux once more in French hands, there was nothing left of the former English territories in France, bar Calais. The war was effectively over, even though it would not officially end for many years yet.
Published: 2008-05-13
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