Joan of Arc's, Battle of Orleans,
A.D. 1429.
"The eyes of all Europe were turned toward this scene, where it was reasonably supposed the French were to make
their last stand for maintaining the independence of their monarchy and the rights of their sovereign."
HUME.
Orleans
When, after their victory at Salamis, the generals of the various Greek states voted the prizes for
distinguished individual merit, each assigned the first place of excellence to himself, but they all concurred in giving their second votes to
Themistocles. This was looked on as a decisive proof that Themistocles ought to be ranked first of all.
If we were
to endeavor, by a similar test, to ascertain which European nation had contributed the most to the progress of European civilization, we should
find Italy, Germany, England, and Spain each claiming the first degree, but each also naming France as clearly next in merit. Especially
the town of Orleans.
It is impossible to deny her paramount importance in the history of Orleans. Besides the formidable
part that she has for nearly three centuries played, as the Bellona of the European commonwealth of states, her influence during all this period
over the arts, the literature, the manners, and the feelings of mankind, has been such as to make the crisis of her earlier fortunes a point of
world-wide interest; and it may be asserted, without exaggeration, that the future career of every nation was involved in the result of the
struggle by which the unconscious heroine of France, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, rescued her country from becoming a second
Ireland under the yoke of the triumphant English.
Seldom has the extinction of a nation's independence appeared more inevitable than was the case in
France when the English invaders completed their lines round Orleans. A series of dreadful defeats had thinned the chivalry of France, and
daunted the spirits of her soldiers. A foreign king had been proclaimed in her capital and foreign armies of the bravest veterans, and led by the
ablest captains then known in the world, occupied the fairest portions of her territory. Worse to her, even than the fierceness and the strength
of her foes, were the factions, the vices and the crimes of her own children.
Her native prince was a dissolute trifler, stained with assassination of the most powerful noble of the
land, whose son, in revenge, had leagued himself with the enemy. Many more of her nobility, many of her prelates, her magistrates, and rulers,
had sworn fealty to the English king. The condition of the peasantry amid the general prevalence of anarchy and brigandage, which were added to
the customary devastations of contending armies, was wretched beyond the power of language to describe. The sense of terror and wretchedness
seemed to have extended itself even to the brute creation.
''In sooth, the estate of France was then most miserable. There appeared nothing but a horrible face,
confusion, poverty, desolation, solitariness, and fear. The lean and bare laborers in the country did terrific even thieves themselves, who had
nothing left them to spoil but the carcasses of these poor miserable creatures, Wandering up and down like ghosts drawn out of their graves. The
least farms and hamlets were fortified by these robbers, English, Bourguignon, and French, every one striving to do his worst: all men-of-war
were well agreed to spoil the countryman and merchant. Even the cattle, accustomed to the larume bell, the sign of the enemy's approach, would
run home of themselves without any guide by this accustomed misery."
In the autumn of 1428, the English, who were already masters of all France north of the Loire, prepared their forces for the
conquest of the southern provinces, which yet adhered to the cause of the dauphin. The city of Orleans, on the banks of that river, was looked
upon as the last stronghold of the French national party. If the English could once obtain possession of Orleans, their victorious progress
through the residue of the kingdom seemed free from any serious obstacle. Accordingly the Earl of Salisbury, one of the bravest and most
experienced of the English generals, who had been trained under Henry V., marched to the attack of the all-important city; and, after reducing
several places of inferior consequence in the neighborhood, appeared with his army before the walls of Orleans, on the 12th of October,
1428.
Orleans
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