As the Duke of Bedford and other English captains were besieging Orleans, they received a startling letter from a seventeen-year-old girl.
From October 1428 to the following May, an English army besieged the French city of Orléans, southwest of Paris. Invoking the Treaty of Troyes, signed in 1420 on the back of the late Henry V’s victory at Agincourt, the Duke of Bedford claimed the French crown for his young nephew Henry VI, and might have won it but for a defiant teenager named Joan of Arc, who in March sent Bedford this stinging rebuke.