CHAPTER XIII.

THE NETHERLANDS.

I.

The territories under the dominion of the House of Burgundy, which had formed part of the northern division of ancient Lotharingia, and were known to later political geography as the provinces of the Netherlands, were for the most part acquired by the fortune of marriage and inheritance; but a settled plan of policy had from an early date continuously directed and developed the process of annexation. The inheritance brought by Margaret of Maele to the French prince, who was the founder of the ducal dynasty, included the county of Artois, with its capital of Arras, a city of great mercantile prosperity as early as the thirteenth century, and the whole of Flanders. To the latter on the eastern side Malines (Mechlin) and Antwerp had been yielded by Brabant, and on the south certain Walloon districts, long united with France and including Lille and Douay, had been restored so as likewise to be left to his daughter by the last Count of Flanders of the native line. Without the support of the good towns of Flanders-Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres-Philip the Bold could not have secured the hand of the richest heiress in Europe; and of the political greatness achieved by his dynasty the true foundations are to be sought in the resources of the great communes themselves, with whom it was engaged in perennial conflict, and, in a less degree, of the other towns around them. There is no indication, on the other hand, that even during the Burgundian period agriculture, except perhaps pasture, reached a high level in Flanders; in a considerable proportion of its villages, the inhabitants gained their livelihood by manufacturing industry, the villages aiming at becoming small towns, and the small towns at becoming large in their turn.

Philip began the systematic extension of his dominions by the business-like purchase of the county of Namur (Namen) (1422), of which he came into actual possession eight years later by the death of the last female representative of the House of Dampierre. This district was of some consequence by reason of its mining industry, whose products the Meuse carried north, after uniting the waters of the Sambre to its own at the capital. Brabant fell into his hands in 1430 on the death of the young Duke Philip, the brother of Jacqueline's unhappy husband. To the duchy of Brabant that of Limburg had been annexed (1288), with its chief town of Maestricht, the " higher ford" of the Romans and the residence of many Caroling Kings, over which the Bishop of Liege claimed joint rights of sovereignty with the Dukes of Brabant. Unlike the Flemish Counts these Dukes had consistently remained on friendly terms with their towns, where the patriciate (geslachten) vigorously maintained itself throughout the fourteenth century. Ample and solid liberties were conceded to his towns and nobility by Duke John II in the compact known as the Letter of Cortenberg (1312), enlarged by later charters, and above all, when the accession of Wen-ceslas of Luxemburg offered an irresistible opportunity by the famous Joyeuse Entree (blyde inkomste) (1356), which remained the chief pillar of the liberties of the two united duchies down to the tempestuous times of Philip II of Spain. At the beginning of this century Louvain (Leuven) had still regarded herself as the foremost city of Brabant, mindful of the day when she had numbered a hundred thousand inhabitants, and the cloth-industry and the linen-trade had alike flourished within her walls. Soon, however, though she became the seat of the first Netherlands University (1426), a large emigration set in to Brussels, whither the Court likewise transferred its seat. Here the active lower town, and the residences of the nobility lining the descent from the Castle to St Gudule, together contained all the chief elements in the Brabancon population, while the French tastes and manners introduced together with the use of the French tongue by the new dynasty familiarised its favourite residence with an exotic license of life. But, owing to the decay of the cloth industry early in the century, the democratic ascendency of the trades was short-lived in the capital of Brabant; and, like the great Flemish cities themselves, Brussels, though other industries flourished here, was commercially distanced by Antwerp.

In matters of trade, on the other hand, the towns of Holland generally favoured freedom as against privilege and protection, and towards the close of the Middle Ages the single port in the Northern Netherlands which retained any staple-rights of consequence was Dort, whose ancient monopoly of all goods carried on the main rivers of Holland nominally outlasted the Burgundian period. But long before this Amsterdam, converted into a seaport by the formation of the Zuiderzee in the thirteenth century, had risen into prominence, and by the middle of the fifteenth she had left behind all the older towns of importance-Dort, Delft, Haarlem, Alkmaar, Middelburg, and Zierikzee -while among the younger Gouda, Leiden, Schiedam, and Rotterdam were likewise active centres of industrial and mercantile life. Few great noble families remained either in Holland or in Zeeland; but in the latter the small nobility was still numerous in the days of Jacqueline, and it was from them that the main strength of the Hoeks had been recruited in her wars, while that of the Kabeljaauws lay with the ruling classes in the towns. The vanquished cause, however, was consecrated in the memory of the people as having been that of resistance against the dominion of the stranger.

Zuiderzee came in the Burgundian period to rank among the busiest towns of Holland-Hoorn as the chief market in the Netherlands for dairy produce and cattle, Enkhuizen as a centre of the herring-fishery. Friesland proper, on the north-eastern shore, over which Philip asserted his claims as Count of Holland and Zeeland, was not actually absorbed by him. Here the party-name of the Schieringers mainly applied to the lower population settled round the waters of the ancient Westergao, and that of the Veikoopers to the men of substance in and around Groningen, which town held a position so distinctive that it afterwards became eponymous of a whole province (officially called stadt en landen). Philip the Good might possibly have been acknowledged as Lord of Friesland, like John of Bavaria before him, had he been prepared to bind himself to respect the liberties of the population. But this he consistently refused, and the remote region was once more left to itself. Even the subsequent recognition by Groningen of the overlordship of the Bishop of Utrecht was purely nominal; as was the episcopal protection claimed by her against the attempt of Charles the Bold to assert the ducal authority over all West-Friesland (1469.) From the renewed internal party-conflicts in Friesland Groningen discreetly held aloof, intent upon the advancement of her commercial prosperity, by whose side that of ancient "golden" Stavoren was passing away, while that of Leeuwarden had hardly yet begun.

Philip's last important territorial acquisition was that of the duchy of Luxemburg, a sparsely peopled land of mountains and forests whose capital derived importance from the incomparable natural strength of its position. It had been twice temporarily united with Brabant-first under Wenceslas, upon whom it had been bestowed by his brother, the great Emperor Charles IV, and who was married to the heiress Joan; and then under Elizabeth, niece of the second Wenceslas, King of the Romans, who had left it very much to itself and the protection of its natural outworks, the wild Ardennes. To her (commonly called Elizabeth of Gorlitz) he had, after her marriage to Duke Anthony of Brabant, Philip's younger brother, made over his rights in Luxemburg; and since both Anthony and her second husband, John of Bavaria, formerly Bishop-elect of Liege, left her a childless widow, her duchy was plainly marked out for incorporation in the Burgundian dominions. In 1445 Philip purchased it from Elizabeth, who, after he had averted an extraneous attack and established his authority in every part of the duchy, made a formal donation to him of the whole.

Half a century later the Liegeois, instigated by Louis XI of France, waged another struggle against another bishop, Louis of Bourbon, a nephew of Duke Philip of Burgundy. His son, the future Duke Charles, forced the principality to acknowledge the Burgundian Dukes as its hereditary protectors (mambourgs) (1465); but another insurrection speedily broke out, nor was the defiant spirit of the artisans who were masters of the city broken even by the bloody sack of Dinant, hitherto the seat of a flourishing industry in the working of copper and brass. In 1467, after defeating the Liegeois in the field, Charles, now Duke in his father's place, annihilated their privileges and reestablished the Bishop, but at the same time reduced the principality to the condition of a Burgundian fief. In the following year, when Louis XI had placed himself in the power of Charles at Peronne, and a fresh rising had taken place at Liege, the recalcitrant city was overtaken by a fearful doom, at the wreaking of which the French King assisted perforce. Leodensium clades et excidium became the most flagrant of Charles the Bold's titles to fame; and the pillaged churches, in which, formerly, according to Commines, as many masses had been daily said as at Rome, were virtually all that, after a seven weeks' sack, was left standing of Liege. But the principality, which had never been formally annexed by Charles, after his death recovered its political independence; and, with characteristic vitality, the great Walloon city rose rapidly from its ruins.

The temporal power of the Bishops of Utrecht covered, at least in name, the later provinces of Overyssel and Drenthe (called the Upper See), Groningen, and Utrecht (called the Lower). Although much restricted by the " five Chapters,11 whose deputies took the first place in the Diets, the episcopal system of government, as well as the institutions of the city of Utrecht, showed considerable lasting power; largely because, while the representatives of the trades controlled the civic Council, members of the noble families residing at Utrecht had been frequently placed on the roll of the trades themselves. Conflicts, however, repeatedly broke out on the occasion of the filling up of the see, and in Jacqueline's times the factions of the Llchtenbergers and the Lockhorsts respectively supported the Hoeks and the Kabeljaauws. In 1425 the question of the episcopal succession gave rise to a protracted contest, in which Philip took part; and when, after this had come to an end on the expulsion of one of the claimants and the death of the other, the succession was again disputed, he menaced Utrecht with a large armada, and thus managed to secure the see for his illegitimate son David, who kept possession of it till the death of Charles the Bold. From 1456 onwards to that date Utrecht was entirely under Burgundian influence; but though, as will be seen, Maximilian in 1483 assumed the administration of the principality, and though from 1517-24 another of Philip the Good's bastards was put in possession of the bishopric, it was not till 1529 that the temporal government of the Upper and Lower See was definitively assumed by Charles V as the sovereign of Brabant and Holland.

Bruges (14-36). Patched up by the grant of two new charters, it burst forth again in the insurrection known as the Terrible Whit-Wednesday (1438); and after meeting the Duke's forces in the open field, the city, which was suffering from the devastations of a pestilence, was in the end forced to give way. Bruges was only saved from destruction by the intervention of the foreign merchants; but, while the new charters were revoked or modified, the trades were deprived of their cherished right of unfurling their banners without waiting for the display of the Duke's-in other words of the right of taking up arms without his summons-and the sinews of future resistance were cut by the abolition of the communal contribution to the trades (mcendtgelt).

The turn of Ghent came a little later. On her refusal to pay a salt-tax to which Bruges and Ypres had submitted, a conflict began which lasted for four years (1449). After the Duke had twice stopped the ordinary administration of justice, the whole body of the people took the power into its hands, appointed three captains (hooftmannen), and at the sound of the bell assembled under arms on the Vrydags-markt. The Duke retorted by a decree of blockade and outlawry against Ghent. Bruges and the other towns jealously held aloof; and, though the Ghenters appealed both to the French suzerain and to the government of Henry VI of England, they had to fight out the contest virtually alone. In the city a ruthless terrorism maintained an unreasoning enthusiasm, till a long and sanguinary campaign ended, within sight of her towers, by the carnage of Gavre (1453). The settlement which ensued established the ducal authority as paramount in every important function of the administration of the city, abolished the most cherished guarantees of its previous independence, and among other humiliations inflicted on its representatives that of confessing the guilt of the suppressed rebellion in the French tongue. Some of the privileges of the prostrate city were indeed renewed in a new charter, the powers of the royal bailiff were restricted, and no mention was made of the obnoxious salt-tax. But the victory was not the less complete, and was followed by the revocation of the charters of other towns, although they had abstained from supporting Ghent.

In the struggles of the Dukes with the communes the nobles ranged themselves readily on the side of the former down to the close of Philip's reign-notably in Flanders, where Courtray had never been forgotten. Only very gradually under him, though more abruptly under his successor, the modern notion of the sovereign throned in majestic isolation superseded the feudal conception of the prince among his peers. To a large extent the change was doubtless due to the influence of the most splendid of contemporary Western courts. The pictures of its magnificence and luxury drawn by Jacques du Clercq and the elaborate episodes of feast and tournament, with which Olivier de la Marche loves to intersperse his narrative, bear out the assertion of Commines, that in the prodigality of enticements it surpassed any other Court known to his experience. In the Court guide composed by Olivier during the siege of Neuss where Charles displayed in the midst of war the stately ceremonial in which his pride delighted, he details the official system, and the elaborate etiquette which became the model of many generations. But the completeness of the external machinery furnished no safeguard against the venality and corruption inseparable from despotic rule, or against a dissoluteness of manners usually fostered by formal restraint. The lasciviousness, that pervaded the Court of Charles VII of France and made that of Edward IV a seminary of pleasant vice, readily found its way into the surroundings of Philip the Good, who had a large family of bastards, and mistresses by the score. The extravagant delights in which the nobles might share when not engaged in warlike service impoverished many and ruined some; and Charles the Bold's relations with his nobility were strained to the utmost by the military burdens which he imposed on them. Numerous defections followed, and suspicions of treason on the unfortunate field of Morat; only a handful of his nobles fought by his side at Nancy, and hardly any held out by his daughter in her hour of distress.

The principles and policy of the Burgundian dynasty found their most skilful agents in the highly-trained lawyers who, after studying in France, at Louvain, or in the University founded by Philip in Franche Comte, held high judicial office in the Netherlands. The ground had been in some measure prepared for them, at all events in Flanders, though it was precisely here that the judicial innovations of this period met with the most stubborn resistance. The so-called Audiences of the Count, based to some extent on the ancient usage of conveying " quiet truths" to him, led the way to the establishment of the Count's Council, which in 1385 Philip the Bold transformed into the Chamber of the Duke's Council in Flanders, subdividing it into a judicial and a financial Chamber. The latter remained at Lille, whence Philip the Good extended its operations to Namur, Hainault, and the towns on the Somme, while the two financial chambers of Holland and Zeeland, and of Brabant, were united by him at Brussels in 1463. The judicial Chamber on the other hand, which came to be generally known as the Council of Flanders, was, after many shiftings of place, finally brought back to Ghent in 1452; the Council of the Counts of Holland, and that of the Dukes of Brabant, having been alike reformed on the acknowledgment of Philip's sovereignty. In each case the substance of the reform lay in the introduction, by the side of the great lords and officials previously composing the Council, of trained lawyers, devoted to the maintenance of the ducal authority, and inclined to stimulate its self-consciousness. In order, however, to make this authority really supreme, and to avoid the possibility of any appeal to the Parliament of Paris, Philip in 1446, without putting an end to the Privy Council which ordinarily attended him, established a Grand Council, attached to his own person and entrusted with supreme judicial as well as political and financial functions. The centralising process was carried to its final stage by Charles the Bold's settlement of 1473, which maintained the Grand Council as a Council of State for the whole of his dominions, but transferred its financial functions to a Chamber finally fixed at Malines, absorbing into this the Brussels Chamber of Accounts. Charles also established a central judicial Court at Malines, which he sought to surround with all possible external dignity, frequently presiding in person at his sittings. But it remained unpopular, by reason of its slow Roman procedure, and the use of the French language to which it adhered; nor did it survive his fall.

After Philip had, like his father before him, found the communal militia of the Flemish towns untrustworthy in foreign war, he had for his military needs fallen back on the feudal services upon which the first two Burgundian Dukes had placed a precarious dependence; but the forces which he employed for the overthrow of the liberties of Ghent, and which his heir led forth against Louis XI on behalf of the League of the Common Good, already comprised a considerable element of mercenary soldiers-Picards and English in particular. The bandes (Pordonnance of Charles the Bold, a modified imitation of the new French model, were partly recruited among the nobility, partly made up of Italian heavy infantry and the indispensable English archers; and a select body-guard was formed on a similar basis. In 1471 he raised a permanent force of 10,000 men. The towns had to equip contingents at their own expense, but under officers named by the Duke. He improved his artillery, and paid attention to the fighting qualities of his navy. Though Charles was both an unskilful and an unfortunate commander, he was the creator of the standing army which proved so formidable under the rule of his descendants; much of his military expenditure was unavoidable, since the superiority of regular troops over feudal levies was already proved; and he deserves credit for his consistent niaintenance of discipline, more especially as it only increased his unpopularity.

Leaving aside other forms of art-among which something might be said of the attention paid by both Flemings and Walloons to that of music-we find that already under the House of Dampierre, the French literature patronised by the Counts, and the Flemish that was dear to the people, had gone far asunder. In the latter part of the fourteenth century, French historic prose as it were annexed the Netherlands as part of its proper domain. Froissart, the chief prophet of the last phase of chivalry radiating from the Court of the Burgundian Dukes and the exemplar of a whole line of chroniclers devoted to their dynasty, was himself a native of Hainault and spent the last quarter of a century of his life in retirement in Flanders. After him it became indispensable that every important Court or great noble household should possess its indiciaire or historiographer, and the House of Burgundy fostered a series of such literary officials, who placed on record every step in its advance, inflated its pride, and enhanced its fame. The list includes, besides Enguerrand de Monstrelet, on the whole a fairly candid writer, Jacques Lefevre de Saint-Remy, who in the main borrowed or abridged from him, the graphic Jacques du Clercq, Georges Chastellain, by his literary gifts as well as by his masculine outspokenness the most notable of Froissart's successors, and Jean Molinet, whose turgid artificiality and Euphuistic affectations render him a fit narrator of the decay and downfall of Burgundian greatness. All these (except Monstrelet) were officials of the ducal House, which was abandoned by Commines, the one narrator of the great struggle who writes in the spirit of practical statesmanship. Edmond of Dynter, who came into the service of Philip the Good from that of the Dukes of Brabant, furnished a long pragmatic history of the Jacqueline troubles and the complicated course of events in Gelderland.

The value of the Brethren's labours in the transcription of manuscripts has not been overestimated; but these labours belonged to a period that was passing away, and were only slightly supplemented by use of the new invention of the printing-press. On the other hand the work of education had always formed a chief purpose and essential part of the existence of the fraternity. The very large numbers of scholars attending its schools signally contributed throughout the Netherlands to lay the foundations of an enduring literary culture, and the fact that the teaching and training of these scholars was everywhere impregnated with the spirit of religious devotion determined the significance, to the most illustrious as well as to the humblest of them, of the advance of the New Learning. They met it less in the spirit of an enthusiastic humanism than in that of a steady demand for serviceable lore,, such as already gives so much substance to the writings of Cardinal Cusanus, a pupil of Deventer in its earlier days.

Strauss calls "the missionary of humanism." Johannes Sintius (Sin-theim), who taught with Hegius at Deventer and was himself a member of the Brotherhood, rendered a signal service to education in the Netherlands and in Germany by the successful revision of the Latin grammar which had held its own for centuries. But the schools of the Brethren were not seminaries of that narrower humanism which made the study of the classical tongues the sole method and all but the supreme object of education. They encouraged the reading of the Bible and the use of the service-books in the vulgar tongue, cherished the careful use and even the study of the vernacular, and thus brought about the beginning of a new educational movement which on the Upper Rhine was to lead to results such as it could hardly expect to command on the Lower. Many links connect the labours of the Brethren and the great movement which in the fifteenth century strove to quicken the religious life of the German people by bringing learning and education, and literature and art, into living harmony with it. Such a link may be found in the life of Rudolf Agricola, who died in 1485, and, although apparently not a pupil of the Brethren, was a native of the neighbourhood of Groningen, where one of their seminaries was placed. The last years of his life were spent at Heidelberg and Worms. He was a man of three tongues; but it was in theological rather than in philological study that he found the crown of his labours.

A more lasting influence was however being quietly exercised by a school of religious thinkers, to which in the latter half of the century two notable Netherlander belonged. The theology of John (Pupper) of Goch in the duchy of Cleves, who is believed to have been educated in one of the Brethren's schools, and who for nearly a quarter of a century presided over a priory of Austin canonesses founded by him at Malines in 1451, rejected the pretensions of mere outward piety and dead formalism. There is no proof that his writings which were read by few were known to Luther; but they must have come under the notice of Erasmus. The step to the assertion of the universal priesthood of Christian believers was taken by a bolder thinker, John Wessel (Goesevort), who, born at Groningen about the year 1420, was educated in the school of the Brotherhood at Zwolle, but afterwards studied in most of the chief universities of Europe. He was honoured by both Luther and Melanchthon, but he never took Orders, and his academic distinction is his chief title to fame (magister contradictionum). He enjoyed the patronage of Bishop David of Utrecht; but his favourite residence seems to have been the Frisian convent of Adwert, to which a species of high school was attached. Lover of truth as he was, and in one respect at least (viz. as to the doctrine of the Eucharist) even further advanced than Luther, he disliked any appeal to the passions of the people, and had as little thought as Bishop David himself of an open rupture with the Church.

II.

When the death of Charles the Bold at Nancy was ascertained, Louis prepared to seize those parts of the ducal dominions which were nearest to his hand and indispensable for the future of the French monarchy, while keeping in view the ultimate acquisition of them all. He proclaimed his anxiety for the interest of Charles1 daughter and heiress whom he had held at the font; but the project of a marriage between Mary, now close upon her twenty-first year, and the Dauphin, a boy of eight, was full of difficulty, more especially as the suit of Maximilian had already reached an advanced point. This prince's father was naturally not less anxious to preserve the cohesion of the Burgundian inheritance than Louis XI had been prompt to impair it; and from him no revival was to be apprehended of those questions as to male or female fiefs which had of old divided the Netherlands. All the more important was the attitude of the country itself towards the French intervention.

High Admiral of France (the Bastard of Bourbon), accompanied by Commines, to demand the surrender of all fiefs of the French Crown, and in the first instance of the towns on the Somme. His plans were vast, but according to Commines the reverse of vague. Namur, Hainault, and other parts near his borders were to be made over to some of his French vassals, and Brabant and Holland to German princes whom he would thus bind to his alliance. The French fief of Flanders he must have intended to secure for his Crown, of which it would still have been one of the brightest jewels. The towns on the Somme were one after the other-some by golden keys-opened to him; and the defection of Philip de Crevecceur placed him in possession of the Boulonnais. Mary's letter of January 23 to the ducal council at Dijon, protesting against French encroachments in the duchy of Burgundy and the Franche Comte, held out no prospect of armed resistance on her own part; and indeed any attempt of the kind was out of the question. At Ghent, where she was detained whether she would or not, and in the other towns of Flanders and Brabant, the confirmation of the tidings of her father's death had been received with general feelings of relief and joy, and throughout the Netherlands it was resolved to make the most of the opportunity.

The Great Privilege was supplemented by several special applications of its principles to the needs of particular provinces. These were the Flemish Privilege, obtained on the same day by the Four Members of Flanders, upon whose unanimous consent it made any future constitutional change depend, while no Flemish business was to be transacted except on Flemish soil and in the Flemish tongue; the Great Privilege of Holland and Zeeland (February 17), which contained similar provisions and granted full liberty to the towns to hold " Parliaments" of their own, in conjunction with the other States of the Netherlands or not; the Great Privilege of Namur (May), and the Joyeuse Entree granted to Mary on the occasion of her being acknowledged at Leuven as Duchess of Brabant (May 29), which, while returning to the usages confirmed at the accession of Philip the Good, added new liberties and doubled the measure of restrictions upon the ducal, power.

Thai fear of France rather than any affection for the Burgundian dynasty, or even any warmth of feeling towards Mary herself, had induced the representatives of the vier landen to come to terms with her, was shown by the military preparations upon which they simultaneously agreed. In place of the ducal army which had ceased to exist, 100,000 men were to be levied, of whom Flanders contributed more than one-third, and the rest in proportion. Raised by means of half-obsolete feudal obligations, or as communal or rural militia, this army, though its numbers were helped out by a system of substitutes, proved inadequate to its purpose; but the fact of its levy not the less shows that the mind of the Netherlands had been made up to resist the French advance.

Louis, on his side, was resolved to secure a party in Flanders. The agent whom he had first, in spite of Commines' warning, sent to Ghent for the purpose-no other than the notorious Olivier le Dain-had indeed been obliged to depart discomfited, and had only partially redeemed his credit by cleverly bringing into his master's power the city of Tournay, always well disposed towards France. Louis, however, when Mary's embassy reached him at Peronne, was at particular pains to show courtesy towards the Flemish towns in the person of the distinguished hooftman of Bruges, a member of the great patrician family of Gruuthuse. Little importance attached to the ambassadors' offers of the cession of all the possessions given up by Louis in the Treaty of Peronne, and the recognition of his suzerainty in Artois and Flanders ; and as to the real nodus of the transaction, the question of a marriage engagement between Mary and the Dauphin, they declared themselves to be without instructions. While, therefore, the embassy returned to Flanders to report, Louis seems to have, by private communications with Hugonet and d'Himbercourt, secured their adherence to the marriage-scheme. At Arras, of which he took possession in March, 1477, he received a deputation from Ghent, and-playing the kind of double game which his soul loved-revealed to them the confidence reposed by Mary in the privy councillors detested by the city.

The vigilance of the Emperor Frederick III had long prepared this match, and even the catastrophe of Nancy had been unable to baulk his purpose. Now, while at Bruges Mary was seeking to satisfy a clamorous demand for a suppression of the pretensions of le Franc, the imperial envoys arrived to urge upon her the acceptance of the Austrian suit (April 18); and Mary formally accorded it. On May 21 Maximilian, who had been delayed by the slackness of the response made by the Estates to the imperial appeal for support of his enterprise (the Wittelsbachs were jealous about Hainault and Holland, while the King of Bohemia remembered the Luxemburg connexion), at last started on his expedition; and after passing through Louvain and Brussels, where he was well received, at the head of a body of near 8000 horsemen, arrived at Ghent. At six o'clock on the following morning his marriage with Mary was solemnised by the Bishop of Tournay, in the presence of the Count of Chimay and the hooftman of Bruges, "min jonker" of Gelders and his sister bearing the tapers before the bride. He had not come a day too soon. Part of Hainault was already in Louis' hands, and Brabant and Flanders were alike threatened; but, now that the political situation had so decisively altered to his disadvantage, he paused. Mary, in securing the protection of which she stood in need against the contending influences around, and the popular bodies confronting her, had at the same time gained for the Netherlands the alliance of a House not less resolved upon withstanding the encroachments of France in the West of the Empire, than it was upon resisting Hungarian ambition and the Turkish danger in the East. On no other conditions could the House of Austria command support from the princes of the Empire, or continue to hold authority there. With England also the Austrian marriage at once placed the Netherlands government on close terms of friendship.

But already there were signs of impatience in Flanders. Maximilian had immediately on his marriage sworn to respect the privileges of Ghent and Bruges; and loud complaints were now heard of the misconduct of the German and other foreign soldiery, while Ghent was wroth at the imposition of a war-duty on small-beer. This led to an outbreak, in which three of the trades were involved and which, if Molinet is to be believed, had some curiously Catilinarian characteristics. It was quenched, chiefly through the exertions of Jan van Dadizeele, a loyal Flemish noble who now or afterwards was named Bailli of Ghent, and who in the following year (1479) so effectively reorganised the Flemish forces, of which he was named captain-general, that Olivier de la Marche describes these well-disciplined levies as the largest army he ever saw put into the field by Flanders. Town and country had combined to furnish it forth; and not less than five hundred nobles served with it on foot. With this truly national force the young Archduke gained his first victory at Guinegaste near Terouanne (August, 1479); but it could not be followed up, and the capture of the Holland herring-fleet caused renewed discouragement. Though in 1480 Maximilian gained possession of Luxemburg and in 1481, mainly through his general Count Adolf of Nassau, reduced Gelderland, where the insurgents had actually entered into alliance with France, the principal struggle made no progress, and the Archduke refused to be led away by the daring schemes of the Duchess Dowager for an Anglo-Burgundian invasion and partition of France.

September, 1481, a third son was born; but he survived for a few months only. His mother's death soon followed. On March 27, 1482, the results of a neglected fall from her horse proved fatal to the Duchess Mary. Pitiable as was the decease of one so young, and so full of life and happiness, from a political point of view it threatened to prove disastrous to those whom she left behind her.

In accordance with the declaration put forth immediately before their marriage, Maximilian's authority in the Netherlands had come to an end with the life of his consort; and his claims to its continuance must be based on his parentage of their two surviving children, and Philip the young heir in particular. But these children were in the power of Ghent, where, as throughout Flanders, Maximilian was profoundly unpopular. Moreover, the feeling was widespread that apart from his personal prowess the advantages looked for from his union with the Duchess Mary had proved illusory. Neither the Emperor nor England had come forward as allies against the French invasion; and at home all was disturbance and disorder. Holland and Zeeland were once more torn by the old faction-feuds; in Gelderland Arnhem was ready to give the signal for renewed revolt; Utrecht had driven out its Burgundian Bishop. Meanwhile Flanders was exposed to the full force of the French advance; her trade and industry were at a standstill. Ghent and her sister-towns had no desire for annexation to France; but neither did they wish to bear the burden of a war which must end either thus or by covering the hated German prince with glory. They therefore resolved to force him into a peace with France which would leave them free, under the nominal rule of his youthful son. In the three years' struggle which ensued before Ghent lay at Maximilian's mercy, he was obliged to all intents and purposes to rely upon himself. Lower Austria, with parts of Styria and the adjoining duchies, were in the grasp of King Matthias Corvinus, and the Emperor had to depend upon the scant sympathy and goodwill which he could find among the electors at Frankfort. A loud cry arose in the Austrian dominions for the presence of the valiant and vigorous Archduke; but instead of giving way, as so often afterwards, to his natural impetuosity, he resolved so far as his hereditary interests were concerned to bide his time.

Utrecht; in Holland the leaders of the government set up at Hoorn by the Hoeks were put to death by the Kabeljaauws and the town pillaged; and Haarlem only escaped similar treatment by payment of an onerous fine. In the midst of this confusion, Maximilian had to allow the States of the Netherlands, assembled at Alost with the exception of Luxemburg and Gelders, to open a formal negotiation with Louis XI (November), with whom they had been for some time in secret communication. Nor was he able to refuse his assent to the basis on which, in December, 1482, the Peace of Arras was actually concluded, viz. the marriage of his daughter Margaret to the Dauphin, with Artois and Burgundy for her dowry. It was further settled by this peace that Philip should do homage to Louis for Flanders, so that the old relation of vassalage against which Charles the Bold and his father had so long struggled was restored, and a pretext for fresh intervention established. But the Flemish communes, satisfied with the restoration of free commercial intercourse with France, would probably have been prepared to sacrifice Namur and Hainault into the bargain, and Louis, now near his end, seemed to have lived long enough to master the House of Burgundy. Maximilian, who had been left out of the Council of four, appointed, with Ravenstein at its head, to carry on the government of Flanders with the Estates on behalf of Philip, was powerless, and unable to obtain the annual pension granted to him about this time except by compliance. In March, 1483, he finally accepted the Peace of Arras, and without any interposition on his part, his daughter was transferred into the guardianship of the French King, and on June 23 solemnly betrothed to the Dauphin.

Meanwhile the quarrel between Maximilian and the Flemings became more acute. The Knights of the Golden Fleece at Termonde declared his headship of their Order at an end, though he might still preside over its meetings during his son's minority. Bruges refused him admission if attended by more than a dozen companions, and sent to the block several persons who had laid a plot on his behalf. Humours of a similar plot were rife at Ghent; and Maximilian had clearly accepted the challenge of a people resolved upon completely throwing off his authority. He began by sending the faithful Olivier de la Marche to lodge complaints with the French government against the communes, and succeeded in provoking so much distrust in Flanders that, though a French as well as a Flemish army took the field in 1484, no decisive blow was struck. The Flemings however flooded Brabant, where the Archduke's appeal for support of the dynasty was very coolly received, and Count de Romont, the commander of the Flemish levies, proclaimed himself lieutenant-general of Duke Philip against his father. In January, 1485, Maximilian by taking Oudenarde snowed his determination to make himself master of Ghent. But after defeating the Ghenters under their own walls, and capturing their great banner, he was obliged by a mutiny for pay among his troops to retreat, while the French under Crevecceur (des Querdes) entered the city. Soon nothing remained to the Archduke but Brabant and Hainault. Fortunately, however, for him with the Ghenters the powers that were could never be in the right; and such a storm of popular indignation was raised by the misconduct of the French soldiery, that Crevecceur in his turn retired upon Tournay.

When, in the summer of 1486, Maximilian returned to the Netherlands as Roman King, the glamour of this new dignity ensured him a good reception in Brabant and the other provinces through which, as mambourg, he accompanied Duke Philip on a sort of progress; and he was more than ever intent upon taking vengeance on France. But, though he openly broke the Peace of Arras by occupying Omer, which was again taken by Crevecceur with Terouanne in the following year, these campaigns were of no real importance; his chief designs were concerned with the future of Britanny-a vital question for France. It was the fear of a war no longer defensive and of measurable proportions which, together with the slow rate of his military progress in the Low Countries, notwithstanding the oppressive presence of his large bodies of alien troops-German and Swiss mercenaries in particular -led to the renewal of agitation in Flanders against the Austrian regime. Of what advantage had it proved to the economic interests of the good towns ? In 1478 the inte/rcursus had indeed been concluded which placed commerce and navigation between England and the Netherlands on a new footing of security, and King Richard III had granted to the Netherlands merchants in England the lower tariff of duties enjoyed by their German competitors (a privilege taken away again by his successor). But, for reasons already stated, the English trade had more and more passed to Brabant and Holland, and Flanders found her industry and commerce increasingly dependent upon her relations with France.

At last, after Pope Innocent VIII had issued his censures at Bruges, it became known there that the Emperor in person was marching upon Flanders for the delivery of his son. Hitherto the States assembled round Duke Philip at Malines had transacted in a very business-like way with the other States at Ghent; but by the middle of May it was understood that now or never an arrangement must be made with the captive King. He was liberated on condition that he would withdraw from Flanders within four days of his deliverance, and that he approved, as did his son-in-law the King of France, the solemn League and Union entered into on May 1 by the States of several of the provinces for the sake of peace and good government, and for the maintenance of the Treaty of Arras.

Ravenstein protested that he must take up arms in defence of his liege lord even against the Emperor. Henceforth the hostage became the guiding spirit of Flemish resistance to Maximilian. In September, 1488, he was received with acclamation at Brussels ; soon Louvain and the smaller towns of Brabant fell into his hands. Flanders had likewise remained unreduced, while Maximilian was operating on the Lys and in Zeeland; Ypres was occupied by French troops, and the siege of Ghent, begun by the Emperor in person, had been abandoned. By October Frederick III had returned to Germany, and in the last days of the year Maximilian followed. In vain he had assembled the loyal States at Malines ; for the time his field of action lay elsewhere. The Duke of Britanny had died in September, and the struggle with France would have to be resumed on a perhaps more favourable field. But his present task was to reconquer Austria.

Maximilian left behind him as governor-general, with full powers, Duke Albert of Saxony (Albertus Animosus, founder of the Albertine line), who in the organisation and conduct of armies was unsurpassed by any German commander of his age. With resources inferior to those which had been at Maximilian's disposal, Albert had in the first instance to suppress a fresh outbreak of the Hoeks in Holland, who, under the leadership of young Francis van Brederode, after surprising Rotterdam, organised a petty warfare in the style of the gueux of later days. But the States of Holland resolved on putting an end to this Jonker-Franzen war, and the rebel fleet was finally all but annihilated at Brouwershaven (July, 1490), Brederode himself dying soon afterwards of his wounds. Several of the other Hoek leaders died a violent death at Delft; but one of them threw himself into Sluys, which was in the hands of Philip of Cleves. In 1489 Albert restored the authority of Maximilian in Brabant, where the Peace of Frankfort, concluded for temporary purposes with France by the Roman King, was eagerly welcomed, for Bruges and Louvain had suffered unspeakably from war and pestilence. But it was some time before, at Montils-les-Tours, Maximilian's mambournie over Flanders was likewise acknowledged, and Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres undertook to sue to him for pardon, a commission being appointed to ascertain and restore the privileges enjoyed by them under Philip the Good and his successor.

The recovery of Artois, whose capital Arras was surprised by the Landsknechte after the fall of Sluys, would, together with his reconquest of Franche Comte, have encouraged Maximilian to attempt to secure the whole of his daughter's dowry, notwithstanding the pacifications concluded by Charles VIH's government with the Kings of England and Aragon (November, 1492-January, 1493). But the unwillingness of the Netherlands to continue the War, added to his other cares, induced him to accept Swiss mediation for the conclusion of a truce with France, followed in May, 1493, by the Peace of Senlis. The territorial question was settled as nearly as possible on the uti possidetis basis; so that Artois (and the Franche Comte) remained with the House of Burgundy, though Arras was ultimately to revert to France in exchange for certain towns now occupied by her. Margaret, all obligations between her and King Charles having been cancelled by the treaty, returned home joyously, calling out Vive Bowrgogne to the people who flocked round her at St Quentin, and receiving at Valenciennes a popular welcome. After narrowly escaping a design of the Landsknechte to seize her in pledge for outstanding pay, she took up her residence at Namur.

It was not only in commercial matters that Duke Philip and his advisers showed a disposition to emancipate themselves from his father's control. Maximilian had placed at the head of the Privy Council, composed of fourteen members, Count Engelbert of Nassau, the faithful servant of three generations of the House of Burgundy, but the leading voice in it was that of William de Croy, Seigneur de Chievres. He and those who thought with him resented as strongly as the Flemish and Brabancon towns the continuance in the land of the German soldiery, to whose chief commander Albert of Saxony the ducal treasury had pledged Haarlem and several other important places pending the payment of a heavy debt. The influence of de Chievres and the great nobles in general was accordingly in favour of maintaining peace with France, although in the Gelders difficulty above all she showed so little regard for Netherlands interests; and Philip on the whole inclined to follow these pacific counsels.

Five months after Philip's death the unhappy Juana gave birth to a third daughter, and then sank into hopeless insanity. Maximilian showed himself from the first perfectly prepared to enter on a second course of regency, this time on behalf of his elder grandson, now a boy of six years of age. Personally he was as unpopular as ever in the Netherlands, where it was perceived that neither his authority in the Empire nor his influence in European affairs corresponded to his still expanding ambition; and where a strong feeling survived in favour of maintaining friendly relations with France. It was therefore a judicious as well as a necessary step on his part, when, after accepting the offer made to him by the States-General on the motion of the States of Holland and Brabant (October, 1506), he empowered his daughter Margaret to receive in his stead the oaths due to him as Guardian of his grandchildren and Regent; and on her being proclaimed as such by the States-General at Leuven (April, 1507), he appointed her his sole governor-general in the Netherlands.

Maximilian might therefore look forward hopefully to the explanation of his relations with England which he invited Margaret to lay before the States-General early in 1508, when notifying to them the proposed marriage between Charles and Mary Tudor. Not long before this he had enquired of her whether the Netherlands were to be regarded as included in his present war with France. Margaret knew how even the Gelderland trouble was insufficient to counteract the desire of the States for peace with France, and therefore persuaded her father by concluding a truce with Charles of Egmond, which left Gelderland provisionally in his hands, to conciliate his French ally, whose cooperation he needed for his project of vengeance upon Venice. The ill-omened League of Cambray, concluded in December, 1508, was as a matter of fact in a large measure Margaret's work. Soon Maximilian was wrapped up in its progress ; but in the ensuing four years he by no means left his daughter to carry on her government without his supervision. Not only was he extremely sensitive of any supposed want of deference by her to his supreme authority, but he was constantly intervening in the matter of appointments in Church and State-from the bishopric of Cambray to the aldermanship of le Franc. And through all goes the call for money, culminating in July, 1510, with a demand for an annual pension of 50,000 crowns for which Margaret was obliged to tell him the time had not yet come. Her task of mediating between the States and the requirements of Maximilian's complicated Italian policy was a very arduous one.

Malmoe (1512) maintained Lubeck's ascendency there, it secured free navigation for Netherlands vessels, except when carrying contraband of war. But to the schemes of the Emperor-Elect (as he now called himself) against France, with which was curiously mixed up a project for a marriage between Charles and Louis XII's second daughter Renee, the provinces turned a deaf ear. Not even against Charles of Egmond, though Holland and Brabant were dreading his approach, would they grant aids, unless assured of a general peace. With the exception of Antwerp, Malines, and Hertogenbosch, Margaret wrote, the States were (Tune si maulvaise nature that nothing short of the Emperor's own presence could manage the business. But even this expedient seems to have failed; and when in April, 1513, he concluded an offensive alliance with Henry VIII against France, the Netherlands were declared neutral. They took advantage of their neutrality to supply the French with arms and ammunition, but at the same time allowed Henry after he had commenced the siege of Terouanne (June, 1513) to levy both foot and horse in the country. Maximilian approved, but he held no independent command, and the capture of Tournay following on the brilliant victory of Guinegaste was treated by Henry as an English acquisition. But though for a time it seemed as if Margaret's programme of a close alliance against France of England, Spain, and the Austro-Burgundian interest would carry everything before it, Henry was at last estranged by the delay of the marriage between his sister and Prince Charles, due in part at least to the de Chievres influence, and finally entered into an alliance with Louis XII, to whom the English Princess was now wedded. As the project of marriage between the French King and Charles1 sister Eleanor was now likewise abandoned, Charles was in his turn left in a humiliating position, and, though the Netherlands were ex post facto admitted to the new French alliance, all cordiality between the English and Burgundian Courts was at an end. The commercial relations between the two countries had meanwhile made but little advance; the duties levied upon English trade, especially in Zeeland, had again been raised; and a commission summoned to Bruges in 1512 had effected nothing.

Maximilian, were carried out by Charles V for establishing in a new form an organic connexion between the whole of the provinces and the Empire at large? The States took very coolly the inclusion in 1512 of the so-called Burgundian Circle (Gelderland and Utrecht were afterwards added to the Westphalian) in the system of Circles established as it were incidentally twelve years earlier, and persistently declined to acknowledge the right claimed by the Emperor of taxing the provinces for imperial purposes. On the other hand the imperial Diet held fast to the pretension, as was shown at Nürnberg in 1543; and in 1548-just a century before the political bond between the United Provinces and the Empire was finally severed-the entire group of the " Burgundian hereditary lands" was included as the Burgundian Circle in the nexus of the Empire. It was in this shape that, with the proper safeguard of a reservation of the privileges and liberties of the several provinces, the undivided Netherlands were by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 settled upon Philip, then intended by Charles to succeed him on the Imperial as well as on the Spanish throne.

Although, notwithstanding the Gelders War, the Netherlands recovered something of their prosperity during the governorship of Margaret, the downfall of the trade and industry of Flanders was irremediable. Public feeling in England continued to favour the Netherlands, just as of old the Flemish towns had upheld the English alliance; but no substantial change took place for many a long year in the mercantile relations between the two peoples. In consequence of the decline of the Venetian and Genoese trade after the discovery of the Cape route to India, Antwerp, where the Portuguese and Spaniards found the facilities and the security they required, and whither they were followed by the other foreign "nations" from Bruges, gradually became the chief commercial port of Europe; while not a rivulet from the current of trade could be turned back into the sands of the Zwyn. Before the middle of the century the proportion of the total exports of the Netherlands, estimated at between six and six and a half million of pounds Flemish, assignable to Antwerp was reckoned at eighty per cent.-that to Bruges at one-half per cent. While Antwerp had supplanted Bruges, the advance of Amsterdam was beginning to emulate that of the great Belgian city, and the mariners of Holland and Zeeland were in the North Sea and the Baltic learning to play their destined part of carriers on the ocean.