Ask what she carried and you get a strange answer. She had a sword — famously, one found behind the altar at Sainte-Catherine-de-Fierbois — but at her trial she said of the banner instead: "I loved my banner forty times better than my sword." Pressed on why she was always the one holding it, she gave a reason no other captain in that war would have given: "It was I who carried the aforementioned sign when I charged the enemy. I did so to avoid killing any one. I have never killed a man." A banner is normally a rallying point, a thing men look for through the smoke to know where their line is. Hers was that too, but it was also the reason both her hands were full. She described it herself: "I had a standard whose field was sown with lilies. There was a figure of Christ holding the world and on each side of Him was an angel." It was white boucassin, fringed in silk, with Jhesus Maria written on it. It was painted at Tours by a Scottish painter the accounts record as James Power, or Hauves Poulnoir, and the treasurer paid out twenty-five livres tournois for a grand standard and a small pennon — a real object, bought and paid for, on a receipt. On 7 May 1429 she was holding it in the assault on les Tourelles at Orléans when an arrow went into her between the neck and the shoulder. She came back to the field the same day. Ten weeks later, on 16 July, Reims opened its gates, and Charles VII was consecrated the following morning.

The figure has her in full white plate with the banner raised — and the sculptors have followed her own testimony rather than the paintings: white field, gold fleurs-de-lis, silk fringe, and the small painted panel of a figure between two angels. That is the banner she described in a courtroom in Rouen, made from a description she gave under interrogation, and it is unusual for a toy soldier to be that closely sourced. What was said in that courtroom, and how we come to have her words at all, is the subject of Tradition of London's Joan of Arc — a 54mm gloss figure from a different maker, so a companion in history rather than on the same base. Charles, Duke of Orléans owned the city she relieved and never saw her do it; he had been taken at Agincourt in 1415 and was still a prisoner in England, where he stayed for twenty-five years. For the other end of the same quarrel, Henry VIII — a 1/30 W. Britain figure like this one, so the two stand together — spent much of his reign trying to win back the French crown that Joan had done more than anyone to lose him.

Model: 10092 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set