Quotes from Helen Castor

Amid the chaos and confusion, one thing alone was certain: for the first time, a woman would sit upon the throne of England.

she at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex," the Gesta's author complained, "began to walk and speak and do all things more stiffly and more haughtily than she had been wont, to such a point that soon, in the capital of the land subject to her, she actually made herself queen of all England and gloried in being so called.

If she had truly been sent by God, she would not wear men's clothes in contravention of God's law and the Church's teaching. The nature of her supposed mission was no excuse for this abomination, since no 'greater' good could ever justify sin – and in any case women were forbidden to fight, just as they were forbidden to preach, to teach, to administer the sacraments, and all other duties that belonged to men.

His physicians did not know it, but an attack of measles, such as the one from which the king had recovered a year earlier, serves to suppress the victim's resistance to tuberculosis.

For the first time in the kingdom's history, all the contenders for the crown that Edward was about to relinquish were female.

It was to kings, not queens, that Tudor sovereigns looked for example and warning. ("I am Richard II, know ye not that?" Elizabeth sharply remarked in response to Shakespeare's meditation on the nature of kingship.)

King Henry—have exchanged her son's inheritance for

And then, on 23 February, just eleven days after the massacre at Rouvray, a little band of six armed men arrived, dusty from the road, at the great castle of Chinon. With them rode a girl, dressed as a boy, her dark hair cut short. Her name was Joan, and she had come with a message from God.

What had been right in 1431 in English Rouen – to secure the girl's salvation by persuading her to abjure her heresy and embrace the loving counsel of the Church – was wrong twenty-five years later, in a kingdom from which God had driven the English with their tails between their legs.

The country was populous and wealthy, and patterns of landholding there complex and fragmented. What more could a lawyer want than a place in which endless occasions for dispute arose among a large population with plenty of money to spend on litigation?

That evening, the king rode through the gates of Reims while crowds cried 'Noël!' in welcome. The cheers were politic, but their meaning was inscrutable; after so many years of conflict it was impossible to distinguish between expressions of relief and fear, between enthusiasm and exhaustion.

She had been an exceptional leader in an exceptional moment – a miraculous anomaly who, by the will of heaven, had transformed the landscape in which she stood. She knew that God was with her, and how much work still lay ahead. But what if those around her believed the moment of miracles had passed?

She is, famously, a protean icon: a hero to nationalists, monarchists, liberals, socialists, the right, the left, Catholics, Protestants, traditionalists, feminists, Vichy and the Resistance.