Brilliant success in relieving the English siege of Orléans validated her visions: failure in subsequent campaigns raised big questions. That would make people fight for him.Īll this had its limitations. She also saw the immediate practical necessity of another achievement of the imagination: taking her unimpressive Prince Charles of Valois to Reims Cathedral, so that he could be anointed as a true King of France with the thousand-year-old holy oil of King Clovis. She had no grasp of military strategy apart from the most vital element in hand-to-hand combat: a soldier’s conviction as he stared into the eyes of his enemies that he was destined by God to win – the trump card of the jihadist. The Maid did not graduate from some Valois equivalent of Sandhurst: her credentials were provided by those arbiters of the imagination, theologians.

Her force of imagination gave her legitimacy her extraordinary presence galvanised others into turning imagination into action.

Joan heard voices of angels and saints telling her what to do: visions and voices were eminently practical instruments of politics in medieval Europe, because in the absence of popular elections and referendums, there were few other means of executing major U-turns in policy. We live in times when it is easy to understand how people can be bestial to each other because of their religious imaginations. And now England and France are also at peace only the Isles de la Manche remind us that once the ancestors of Queen Elizabeth II ruled a kingdom spanning the Channel waters, a truly European power, whose centre might just as well have been Paris as Westminster. Poor Sir Matthieu did not live to follow his master back to France and see Bourges once more, but he found an honourable and tranquil grave in East Anglia.

By 1431 de la Pole was home, his purse considerably lighter after paying a crushing ransom, but he would have been a natural host for this now-Anglophile scion of the French royal house. The village was one of the principal homes of William de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk: in 1429, he had found himself the opposite number of the Duke as a prisoner in France, captured in the wake of the crushing English humiliation at the relief of the city of Orléans, which turned Joan forever into “the Maid of Orléans”. It is likely that the Duke of Orléans spent time at Westhorpe as an honoured if involuntary guest alongside Sir Mathieu Borgue.

Joan of Arc by Helen Castor