The Queen of France’s necromancers….

Supporters of Richard III are always incensed that his reputation (courtesy of the Bard, the sainted Sir Thomas More and the House of Tudor) has always been damned because of his scoliosis. Well, the Bard and More embellished a curved back into much, much more. They turned him into a wicked hobgoblin!

But in those long-gone centuries there was a widespread belief that anyone whose body was slightly less than ideal had to be wicked, maybe even in league with the Devil. But Richard wasn’t the only monarch to be maligned in this way, for there was a Queen of France whose lameness saw her accused of necromancy.

During the Hundred Years War between Eng;and and France there was also a  Breton struggle between two heirs to the duchy, one of whom, Joan of Penthièvre Joan, Duchess of Brittany (acearchive.org) was married to the King of France’s nephew and would surely let France have control. So Edward of England, of course, supported the other heir, who became John IV, Duke of Brittany https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-IV-duke-of-Brittany-died-1345  

The Treaty of Malestroit https://history-maps.com/story/Hundred-Years-War/event/Truce-of-Malestroit (shown above) was signed on 3 May 1342, and months later, on (today!) 2 March 1343, Edward III arrived back in England at Melcombe in Dorset https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1386-1421/constituencies/melcombe-regis. The voyage had been terrible due to a violent storm that continually drove the English fleet toward the western coast of Brittany. So bad was this storm that the superstitious medieval mind couldn’t accept that it was a natural force of nature. No, it had to be the work of necromancers. To be precise the necromancers of the Queen of France, Joan the Lame https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Joan_the_Lame. For her the raising of such a storm would be a cinch!

I learned of Joan’s supposed necromancers in Mark Ormrod’s Yale English Monarchs: Edward III, page 253. And according to this other link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_the_Lame “….Her [Joan’s] political activity attracted controversy to both her and her husband [Philip VI], which was accentuated by her deformity (considered by some to be a mark of evil), and she became known as la male royne boiteuse (“the lame evil Queen”). One chronicler described her as a danger to her enemies in court: “the lame Queen Jeanne de Bourgogne…was like a King and caused the destruction of those who opposed her will.”^[7]….”

Maybe Joan doesn’t have quite as bad a name as poor Richard, and I don’t know if she has her apologists, but Richard certainly does. Those who supported him before the finding of his remains were vociferous in their defence of a king whom they knew in their hearts was innocent of all the charges against him. The discovery of his skeleton in Leicester proved that he didn’t have a withered arm or a hunched back, but he did suffer from scoliosis. This didn’t make him wicked! Nor, I’m sure, did Joan the Lame’s affliction make her resort to necromancers.

So I’m sure that the dreadful storm of March 1343 was an entirely natural event which, if it had indeed been sent by the French queen’s necromancers, was singularly unsuccessful because Edward III reached England safe and well!