Once a great city, Courtrai had recovered something of its ancient wealth and activity, but this had injured it less than one might suppose, and it was still a fair town, with many trees and gardens, and its air of pride in a fine past. There were many churches, confused in their sequent styles, but full of charm, with rich screens of Gothic lace work, old wall paintings, and in one—Notre Dame—Vandyck’s “Elevation of the Cross,” a great picture in every way. Then there was the Hôtel de Ville, late Gothic of the kind that lingered so long in Flanders after it had perished elsewhere, with sumptuous chimneypieces of fantastic carvings and crowded statues, and finally the matchless old bridge with its three round arches and its enormous towers at either end with their high extinguisher roofs; altogether a good old town, so self-respecting and sane that it could achieve a new prosperity without sacrificing its old ideals.

South of Courtrai lies Tournai, on either side the Scheldt, the last outpost of an old culture against a new civilisation, for beyond lies Le Borinage, the Great Scar, where none would venture unless under compulsion. Like Courtrai it holds its own bravely against coal and iron, preserving its fine old buildings, and largely confining itself to its traditional weaving and embroidery, much of which is still the product of hand-looms and deft fingers. All day the black coal barges slide down the river, coming from the inner darkness to disappear in the outer darkness, leaving the city itself clean and sweet, but prosperous withal, and manifesting a tendency toward boulevards that prompts both regret and apprehension.

An ancient capital of the Merovings, a great city in the fifteenth century, four times the size of such struggling communities as London, besieged from time to time by pretty much every state or faction of North Europe, Tournai is full of pregnant records of every age for fifteen centuries. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the grave of King Childebert himself was discovered, containing innumerable remains of royal vestments and regalia—three hundred golden bees from his dalmatic, medals, coins, portions of a sceptre, sword, axe, javelin, together with the great seal-ring of the King himself and, as well, vestiges of the skeleton and trappings of his warhorse, killed and buried with him. Unfortunately these precious relics were seized and taken to Paris, where most of them were later stolen and never recovered. It was from the gold bees, however, that Napoleon derived his idea of substituting this emblem for the traditional lilies of France. Now the lilies are faded and the bees are dust, but a resurrection is possible for either, and out of the war one or the other may come to a new day—or will both yield to the Rampant Lion from a blood-stained and forever-glorious flag, blowing now, though in exile, amongst the banners of Europe, equal in dignity and first in honour?

The Cathedral of Our Lady of Tournai is far less known than its peculiar importance and its peculiar beauty demand. It is a curious accretion and plexus of styles, from the middle of the eleventh to the end of the fourteenth century, with an incongruous but beautiful rood-screen of the Renaissance. Cruciform, and of great size (425 feet in length), it has the apsidal transepts of the Rhenish style, each with its columned ambulatory; a central tower with high pointed roof, also Rhenish (and English) and, as well, four slim surrounding towers, two to each transept, as at Laon, where they are not all complete, and at Reims, where they never rose above the nave cornice. All this is in a fine, strong, simple, round-arched transition style, far superior to anything on the Rhine, and at least equal to Noyon and Paris. The four tall towers are equal in size and general design, but run from a consistent Romanesque to a straightforward Gothic in detail, the effect being particularly vital and interesting. The enormous choir of late and very delicate mediæval design, having been begun in the last quarter of the thirteenth and finished in the middle of the fourteenth century, is one of the few Gothic things one regrets, for while it is very beautiful in itself, it has eliminated what was probably a strikingly effective Romanesque choir, while its towering mass crushes all the rest of the church and makes it a rather shapeless composition.

The cathedral has suffered constantly and at the hands of many kinds of unscrupulous vandals. The “Reformers” in the sixteenth century pillaged it and wrecked its gilded shrines and its ancient glass; the Revolutionists continued the dread work in the eighteenth century, and a hundred years later blundering efforts to reinforce it by crude masses of masonry were succeeded by equally blundering efforts at restoration. It has, however, preserved and gathered together many treasures of Catholic art, including chasubles of St. Thomas à Becket, Flemish tapestries, ivory carvings, embroidered altar frontals, metal work, and mediæval missals.

There are many other fine old churches in Tournai—St. Jacques, St. Quentin, St. Nicholas, St. Brice—all with elements of interest, while the ancient Cloth Hall contains a most valuable collection of mediæval art-work of all kinds, and the older streets still preserve fine dwellings and guild-houses of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

Audenaarde is all old, and it lies some five and twenty miles down the slow-winding Scheldt on its roundabout and unhurried way to Ghent and Antwerp and the sea. Once also it was a great city, now it is a village of six or seven thousand souls, for it has fortunately never recovered its prosperity under the new and unhandsome conditions that marked the nineteenth century, as happened in the case of Brussels and Antwerp and Ghent. In earlier days it was famous, like Arras, for its tapestries, and many of those exquisite fifteenth-century masterpieces that are now exiled in alien museums where they do not belong, but where at least their value is appreciated and estimated at almost their weight in gold, came from its looms. Tapestries are made here no more, nor in any other place, for their art was of a peculiar subtlety that, even if it finds appreciation amongst stray connoisseurs and curators, is as far beyond the powers of the present day and generation as the glass of Chartres or the sculptures of Reims. Linen and cotton weaving and the brewing of beer have taken the place of tapestries in Audenaarde, but the old town itself is little harmed thereby.

From the large and pious and opulent days of the later Middle Ages, there remain in Audenaarde a very splendid great hall and two equally great churches of rather unusual value. The hall is early sixteenth century, very rich and equally graceful, with a slender tower and spire, ending in a great crown as did the now-shattered tower of Arras. Its rooms are very splendid, with big carved chimneypieces of the most elaborate design, and with its small size and scrupulous detail it ranks with Bruges and Arras and in advance of the more ambitious creations of Brussels and Ghent.

The two remaining churches of Audenaarde, Ste. Walburga and Notre Dame, have much distinction and architectural value, particularly Notre Dame, which was Cistercian and is a surprisingly pure example of the reserved and ascetic Gothic which always marked the buildings of this order—which it largely created as a matter of fact. Ste. Walburga is quite different, with its Romanesque choir of very modest proportions, its ambitious and overshadowing nave of the fifteenth century, and its unfinished transepts showing where the great scheme of rebuilding, undertaken when it was too late and religion was already a waning force, had been abandoned. There has been too much restoration in the case of all these works of admirable art, and the ancient atmosphere is pretty well gone, but they are noble still, in spite of the nervous and mechanical attentions of archæologists and architects and other well-meaning but misguided people.

IX

A TALE OF THREE CITIES

To Ghent, over which lay for centuries the oblivion that came upon all the cities of Flanders after they lost their independence and fell into the hands of the unscrupulous princes and states of the Renaissance, one following another with variety of oppression but no cessation thereof, has come a new vitality. It is as great a city now as then, counting a population of well over 200,000, while Bruges has no more than a quarter of this number. Providentially, it has suffered less than might have been feared by this accession of prosperity; its wonderful churches and tall towers, its quays with their serried lines of high gabled houses, its great castle of the Counts of Flanders, its winding streets and tortuous canals lined with ancient and lovely dwellings and spanned by little stone bridges, all tell even now for almost their full value; and though the city is quite metropolitan in its cleanness and well-being, with fine new streets and bridges and shops, the spell of a great antiquity is over it, and the new follows the old with conscientious effort and delightful delicacy of feeling. If an old city must gain a new lease of life, let it be after the fashion of Ghent.

Here is an old treasure-house full of wonders, and it can be touched upon lightly, if at all, for it demands a volume to itself. It has a dozen churches, all of the deepest interest; the Cathedral of St. Bavon, St. Nicholas, St. Michael, St. Jacques, standing to the front. All suffered from the Protestants and the French Revolution, and some from the mishandling of restorers, but they retain their individuality, which is very marked, for one and all are very local variants of the styles one finds elsewhere; they are of Ghent and of no other place. Brick is used widely, as elsewhere in Flanders, either by itself or mingled with stone; and it is used with that intelligence, so rare in modern times, that indicates the possibility of adapting a style to the materials through which it is expressed. Of course, then art was as living a thing as religion and the realities of liberty, whereas now they all fall in the category of those fictions that please while they do not persuade—which makes all the difference in the world. All Flanders is a lesson in the use of brick, and as it is used here in St. Nicholas, and in the houses of the Quai aux Herbes, as it was used in lost Louvain, in desolated Ypres, in battered Malines, it was a study in good art, a lesson in the history of human culture, a demonstration of the perfect adaptation of modest means to a very noble end.

Ghent must have been a city of indescribable beauty about the middle of the sixteenth century before its dark days began and one scourge after

another followed the Reformers with their combination of dull brutality, insane self-sufficiency, and savage fury of destruction. Even now the group of towers, St. Bavon, St. Nicholas, and the belfry with its “Great Bell Roland”—though the original spires are gone and the belfry has further suffered the indignity of an extinguisher cap of iron—gives some faint idea of what must have been before coal and iron came, first to destroy and then most hideously to re-create. So also does the towering old castle give a hint, whether you see it from the Place Ste. Pharailde or from the canal, with its great buttresses lifting out of the water; so does the unfinished but sumptuous Hôtel de Ville with its fretted bays and balconied turrets; so do the beautiful ruins of the ancient abbey shrouded in vines and trees. Life in a mediæval city such as this could have left little to be desired so far as beauty of environment was concerned, and when this contained within itself unspoliated, unrestored churches that were in use all the time and meant something besides a seventh-day respectability, and a great bell in a tall tower, around whose rim were the words, “My name is Roland. When I toll there is fire; when I ring there is victory in Flanders,” it is easy to see how men could and did paint such pictures as “The Adoration of the Lamb That Was Slain.”

This, with the other great pictures in Flanders, will be considered in another chapter. It is the central art-treasure of the cathedral, the pride of the Netherlands, and one of the wonders of painting of the world.

Past tragic Termonde—a name and a deed never to be forgotten so long as history endures—now only a desert of broken walls and a place of unquiet ghosts, the Scheldt goes down to Antwerp, the last of the inner circle of impotent defences of the eternal things that cannot resist, against the passing things that are omnipotent during their little day. In the sixteenth century it was the greatest and richest city in Europe; now, with its 400,000 inhabitants, it is double its former size but numerically counts for little beside the insane aggregations that call themselves cities and are the work of the last century of misdirected and evanescent energy. Its greatness culminated in 1550, and then came the sequence of catastrophes that reduced it to material insignificance for three hundred years, the Protestant Reformation, with its savage destruction in 1566 of churches and monasteries, and of what they stood for as well; the Spanish occupation, with Alva’s enormities in 1576, when the more industrious and able citizens were driven into England, and the city itself burned; the winning away by the Dutch of its old command of commerce; the closing of the river by the Peace of Westphalia, and finally the devastating storm of the French Revolution which destroyed pretty much of anything that had been left. By this time the population had fallen to 40,000, but under Napoleon a short-lived recovery began, which was brought to an end by the revolution of 1830, and it was not until the middle of the century that a more lasting development was initiated.

Antwerp is a good enough modern town, as these go, but its disasters have robbed it of all its ancient quality, and even the cathedral has the air of being out of place. Great as it is, it is not a masterpiece, or even an exemplar of its many Gothic variants at their best. Its unusual width and number of aisles, its great height and its forest of columns give a certain impressiveness and a very beautiful play of light and shade, while its single tower is quite wonderful in its slender grace and its intricate and delicate scaffolding. Its one famous picture is the over-praised “Descent from the Cross” of Rubens, painted while he was under Italian influence and therefore, if quite uncharacteristic, nobler and more self-contained than the products of his maturity when he had become wholly himself.

There are one or two other churches of fragmentary value, the unique museum made out of the old dwelling and printing-office of Christopher Plantin, with its stores of mediæval and Renaissance industrial art, and the Royal Museum where there are more admirable examples of the painting of Flanders, Brabant, and the Netherlands than are to be found gathered together in any other one place. For critical, or in a limited way, artistic study, this hoarding together, cheek by jowl, of innumerable works of art collected from desecrated churches and ruined monasteries, has its uses, but no one of the pictures torn from its original and intended surroundings tells for its full value. One wonders sometimes whether a daily newspaper, a school of fine arts, or a picture-gallery is the most biting indictment of contemporary culture and artistic sense; certainly whatever the answer, the picture-gallery presents powerful claims that are not lightly to be disregarded.

So, from the dunes of the North Sea around to the wide estuary of the Scheldt, the ring of defences is complete, and in the midst like a citadel lies Bruges, the Dream City, preserving, guarding, and reverencing its dreams.

I knew Bruges first in 1886 when I seem to remember its old walls, when its new buildings were few and unobjectionable, and when the tourist—English, German, American—was as much of a novelty as he was an anachronism. I am told now that the walls have gone, and the boulevards and architects’ buildings, and the tourists have come in; have come in hosts, with all their destructive possibilities, but I can think only of the old Bruges, still, meditative, serene; a town Maxfield Parish might have designed, but impossible elsewhere except as a survival, by some providential miracle of beneficence, from the heart of the Middle Ages.

This is not to say that Bruges has survived intact. Hurled into the midst of the maelstrom of chaos that characterised the Renaissance in all its political aspects, she was ruined utterly between Maximilian of Austria, the Calvinists, and the Duke of Alva. War and pillage, massacre, bribery, treason, the rack marked the advance in culture and civilisation beyond the dark days of mediævalism. What the Austrian spared the Protestant devoured, while the Spaniard gleaned the crumbs that remained. Bruges, that great city, proud, rich, and beautiful above all cities of the North, counted now a population of a scant 30,000, hopeless, abandoned, poverty-stricken.

The greatest ruin was wrought by one Balfour, a creature in the pay of William of Orange, who in 1578 captured the city and held it for six years, during which time the Catholic religion was prohibited, the bishop was imprisoned, all priests were either driven into exile or tortured and then burned at the stake, while churches were destroyed, turned into stables, sacked and desecrated, and more great pictures, statues, shrines, windows, sacred vessels, and vestments were destroyed than have been miraculously preserved. Every religious house in the vicinity was completely expunged, including the vast Cistercian monastery of Coxyde, the most glorious church in Flanders; and its wide-spread gardens, fields, and orchards regained from the dunes by centuries of labour, reverted to their original estate, and desolation took the place of beneficent and hard-won fertility.

Out of this reign of terror came as some compensation the saving of Bruges—or what was left of it. In 1560 the Pope had made the city an episcopal see, on the urging of Philip II, and after Balfour had met a well-merited, but too sudden and merciful, death, the exiled and plundered orders took refuge within its walls, building new and humbler quarters for themselves and hospitals and almshouses for the miserable citizens. The Church took the place of commerce, and under its care some degree of life came back to the ruined city; and the quality it then took on, of a community of religious houses, institutions of charity and mercy, and old churches restored again to their proper uses, it has never lost.

Toward the end of the seventeenth and all through the eighteenth century the slow destruction of old beauty went on, though with a different impulse. Now it was the unescapable vandalism of ignorance and degraded taste that marked the time; old windows that had escaped the Calvinists were pulled out so that a better light might fall on a new altar, since it was “such an admirable imitation of marble,” even as happened in Chartres, where some of the matchless windows were contemptuously cast into a ditch to reveal the tawdry splendours of the lamentable high altar and imitation marble of the choir which represented the enlightened intelligence of the eighteenth-century canons. The sixteenth century was bad enough, but one wonders sometimes how any continental culture survived the eighteenth century.

Later, when the nineteenth century came to crown with perfect achievement the arduous but incomplete efforts of its predecessor, ugly and barbarous houses took the place of only too many of the beautiful works of the Middle Ages, and finally the wonderful old walls were ruthlessly razed to give place to silly boulevards. And in spite of it all Bruges survives, and more completely than any other city of the North, for it is farthest away from the kingdom of coal and iron, and if war passes it by, it may still remain an oasis, a sanctuary in the desert.

The beauty of Bruges is incomparable and unique. Threaded by winding canals, crossed by innumerable old stone bridges, where pink-and-grey walls, tall gables, spired turrets, leaning fronts of mullioned windows rise from old stonepaved quays and garden walls hung with vines and backed by tree tops; cut by narrow streets of ancient houses, with old churches and convents and chapels on every hand and with slender towers lifting over quaint market-places and little squares and sudden gardens, it is a continuous and ever-varying and never-exhausting delight that, so far as I know, finds its rival only in Venice. A city that has shrunken a little within its walls is always more beautiful than one that has burst them and is steadily intruding into the fleeing countryside. That is the difference between the advance of man and that of nature. Ghent, Rome, Nuremberg are kernels of sweetness surrounded by a monstrously expanding rind that is exceeding bitter, but Carcassonne, Rothenburg, Siena, Bruges are so wholly different there is no possibility of comparison. When the houses of an old town seem to huddle a little more closely together, while superfluous walls fall away and the tide of green comes lapping on already moss-grown walls to cover and obliterate the traces man has left of his less successful efforts, then you have something approaching a perfect environment, particularly if, as here, there are innumerable and endless treasures of the best that man can do, now carefully preserved, and growing better the nearer nature comes to touch them with her wand of magic.

Architecturally, Bruges is fifteenth century with a singular consistency—when it isn’t of a century later or, and less conspicuously, of the fourteenth century; not that it matters much, it all hangs together because it is all of one mood and one impulse and one race. Its Hôtel de Ville, one of the perfect things in architecture, I have spoken of elsewhere; its churches, at least six of them, are each engaging in a different way, and each contains treasures of endless pictures, wood carving, metal work, vestments, gathered from ruined monasteries and churches to take the place of the greater treasures pillaged and destroyed by the Calvinists. Our Lady’s Church, with its curiously beautiful tower and its gem-like porch; the cathedral with its ugly modern tower and its fine interior with all its pictures and treasures of “dinanderie”; the Chapel of the Holy Blood, still fantastic and charming in spite of its sufferings at the hands of the French Revolutionists; St. Jacques, St. Gilles, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with its noble tomb of Count Baldwin of Jerusalem and his wife.

Then there are all the old guild-houses, hospitals, convents, monasteries, and the rows and rows of fine old dwellings, each a model of personal and curiously contented architectural art, but, after all, Bruges is not Bruges because of its single buildings, or all of them together, or because of its pictures and its metal work and wood carving. It is Bruges because of its unearthly beauty of canals and gardens, of endless sudden compositions of lovely forms and lines and silhouettes; because of its still atmosphere of old days and better ways, and because it is a place where religion no longer appears as an accessory but takes its place even in these modern times as a constant, daily, poignant, and personal influence.

Already this living charm had begun to exert itself over a wider and wider field, and when the war came there were more than 4,000 English and Americans who had taken up their residence there, drawn by its subtle charm and by what this stood for once, and stands for now. When the King is back in Brussels again, and real life begins once more, who knows but that the spirit of Bruges may find itself dominant over the spirit (has it a spirit?) of Charleroi, not only in Flanders and Belgium and Europe, but throughout the world, for “the old order changeth, giving place to new,” and the “new” is also, and unmistakably, the old, preserved as here in Bruges for better days, when through suffering and ruin man comes into his own again, and sees once more what is, what is not, worth while.

In Brabant were once other centres of old memories: Maastricht, Liége, Huy, and Namur; Dinant, Louvain, and Malines. None of them remains, for across Brabant runs the black scar that has transformed the cities of the Sambre and the Meuse into smoking anvils, where iron is hammered out into efficiency and coal is torn from the earth and burned in consuming fires to the same end; for across Brabant runs the red scar that efficiency has blazed like a trail of enduring flame, never to be forgotten or forgiven so long as man remains on earth; a portent and a horror to all generations in sæcula sæculorum. Dinant, Louvain, Malines; yes, and Tirlemont, Aerschot, Wavre and the innumerable other names that are uttered below the breath as signifying things that cannot be spoken but never will be forgotten, things that give one at last to understand the stern necessity of the once discredited, but now grateful, doctrines of hell and of eternal damnation in the Christian scheme of the universe.

Dinant, whose fame in the fifteenth century for the making of wonderful works of art in metal, gave the name “dinanderie” to this admirable art—Dinant, crouched under the castle-crowned cliffs of the Meuse, with its quaint church, has gone now, and gone also is Louvain, all but its Hôtel de Ville which is more like a pyx or a reliquary, or some other work of “dinanderie,” than a real building. The destruction of Louvain needs no description, for its fires have burned its story indelibly into human consciousness. We know only too well how its university was destroyed, with its priceless library and its ancient and unique manuscripts; how the great and beautiful Church of St. Pierre was swept by flames and left a hopeless ruin; how its streets were absorbed, one after another, in the roaring conflagration, covering with their débris the stains of massacre and pillage. Of Malines we know less, nor shall until the great cloud rolls back, but there was much there to lose, and some of this we know has been lost while more may follow. In spite of the altars to coal and iron outside the old cincture of the town, Malines itself was a gentle and lovely old place, gathered around its great Church of St. Rombaut with its incredible tower. A town of old houses and still canals in strangely poetic combination, a little Bruges with a finer church than any the perfect Flemish city could boast. The church itself is of a vigorous type of the earliest fourteenth-century architecture, but the great tower, which was planned as the highest and most splendid spire in the world, though it completed only three hundred and twenty of its projected five hundred and fifty feet, is fifteenth century, and as perfect an example of late Gothic at its best as may be found anywhere in the world. It is really indescribable in its combination of majesty, brilliancy of design, and inconceivable intricacy of detail. The exuberance that marks the flamboyant art of France is here controlled and directed into the most excellent channels, and if ever it had been completed it must have taken its place as the most beautiful tower in the world. As it is, it ranks in its own way with the southern flèche of Chartres and Giotto’s Tower in Florence, and more one cannot say.

Information is not forthcoming as to how far it already has been wrecked; it is said that the glimmering pinnacles and niches of its amazing buttresses have suffered severely from shell-fire, and that its carillon, the finest in Belgium, has been destroyed; if nothing worse follows, the world may yet see its visionary spire take actual form at last, in the gratitude of a people for the passing from themselves, and from the world, of the shadow of death.

Inevitably, when one thinks of Malines, Louvain, Ypres, Arras, Soissons, Reims, there comes the suggestion of possible restorations, concretely expressed already by German savants and archæologists incapable of comprehending the difference between art and imitation, and as some palliation for the evils that have been done. It is a thought that must resolutely be put aside. As I said in speaking of Reims, if enough remains to be made habitable by simple patching and protection, let this be done by all means, but without a foot of false carving or glass or sculpture. Build other churches if you like, and as you must, and perhaps on the old general lines, though elsewhere, but let us have no more a Pierrefond or a Mt. St. Michael. What is gone is gone irrevocably, and its shells and shards are too valuable in their eternal teaching to be obliterated by well-meant schemes of rehabilitation. When a whole town passes, as Ypres and Louvain and Arras, then as it fell so let it lie. A kindly nature will slowly turn these bleak piles of fallen masonry into beautiful memorials, clothing them with grass and vines and flowers and trees. Let them stand so for ever, a memorial to the dead and a warning to man in his pride of life and insolence of will; and for the new cities, let them rise as beautifully as may be alongside, but not over, the graves of a dead era. Glastonbury and Jumièges, in their solemn and noble ruin, tell their story to ears that at last are disposed to listen, and the story of Reims and Louvain, with the same moral at its end, must be told eternally after the same fashion.

X

MARGARET OF MALINES

THE historians always call her Marguerite of Austria, but this is hardly fair, for even if she were a daughter of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian she did not come into her own until she took up her residence in a beautiful castle in Malines and made that own the fortune and the destinies and the happiness of the Flemish people who had been given her. On both her father’s side and her mother’s she was English, if you go back far enough, her great, great, great-grandfather having been that “John of Gaunt (Ghent), time-honoured Lancaster” of whom we have heard before. Her mother, Mary of Burgundy, who died when she was a baby, traced her line back through Charles the Bold and Isabella of Bourbon to John of Gaunt’s daughter, Philippa, who married John I of Portugal; and it is through Philippa’s son Eduard and his daughter Eleanor who married Maximilian’s father, the Emperor Frederick III, that the strain comes on the father’s side. So “Margaret of Malines” let her be; and as well the well-beloved Regent of Flanders, for never, even in the great days of great kings and governors, was there ever a better sovereign or a more engaging lady.

The Middle Ages are as full of lovable and admirable women as the Renaissance is of sinister and regrettable representatives of the same sex. They had no votes and they claimed no rights; they were less welcome at birth than princes, and they were incontinently (and often prodigally) married off without a “by your leave” by their scheming fathers. Wholly subservient both in principle and in law, they were anything but this in fact, and a study of the Middle Ages reveals a certain feminine dominance that is startling to the male of to-day. It is well to remember that the clinging type, with the ringlets and facile emotions and tears, is a product of modern civilisation; mediævalism knew nothing of it, and little of that even less attractive aspect that always becomes conspicuous when society is breaking down at the end of an era; a Catherine of Russia, while not without prototypes in the Middle Ages, would have been as anomalous then as a Blanche of Castile in the eighteenth century. Apparently, the only conspicuous differences between the men and women of mediævalism were that the men did the fighting and most of the active or violent work, while the women directed their courses, corrected their mistakes, and built up their character and that of their children; and that the men confined themselves to the tactics while the women controlled the major strategy of the battle of life.

The glitter and the show remained with the men, the substance of power remained with the women, and as their vision is apt to be wider and more penetrating it is fortunate that this was so. Of course it was all a part of the very real supremacy of Christianity over all domains of activity, all phases of life and thought. As soon as its power began to lapse and old pagan theories came in with the Renaissance, while Our Lady and the saints were dethroned by the Reformation, the wholesome balance was overthrown and women slowly fell back to that earlier position where the only defence against male oppression was the power of sex, the result being those artificial barriers and differences, and the unwholesome bartering of bribes and promises and threats, that always have resulted, and always will, in a complete downfall of personal and social righteousness. The problem to-day is not how women are to get the ballot but how they are to regain their old mediæval equality (or supremacy if you like) without it. During mediævalism men were more masculine and women more feminine than ever before or since, and in all probability a good part of the ethical, cultural, and social success of the time was due to this fact and to the absence of artificial barriers that denied to demonstrated character and to proved capacity the opportunity of effective service.

Whenever you find a great man in mediæval history (or any other for that matter) cherchez la femme; ten to one you will find behind a St. Louis a mother like Blanche of Castile, or a guardian like Margaret of Austria behind a Charles V. Men try in vain to change the course of history by their own efforts; women always have the power to do this through the new generation they are nursing and educating, while the men are exhausting their energies in the fighting and the politics and the everlasting strenuousness that bring so many great things to pass that hardly last overnight. After all, so far anyway as the Middle Ages are concerned, it was the monks and nuns at their endless prayers in chapel and cell and cloister, and the mothers in their tall towers and their walled gardens, with their children about them, that made the great and enduring things possible.

Margaret of Malines was as perfect a type of this consecrated womanhood as one could find in a year’s delving in ancient history; in addition she was a particularly charming lady and a very great statesman. Moreover her twenty-three years of rule in the Netherlands cover a particularly significant and interesting period in the history of this country and the end of mediæval civilisation here when it had outlasted its career elsewhere in Europe, so we may try in a chapter to give some idea of society in the Heart of Europe, at exactly the moment when it was about to surrender to the anarchy that already was progressively dominant elsewhere.

Margaret was born on January 10, 1480, in Brussels. Her father, the Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg, was apparently a kind of imperial Admirable Crichton—handsome, fearless, a gallant knight, a poet, painter, scholar, patron of all arts and letters, and as serenely conscious of his personal merits as they deserved. Her mother was the beautiful Mary of Burgundy, daughter of the headlong and magnificent Charles the Bold and Isabel of Bourbon who, like Margaret’s own mother, and her father’s mother, Eleanor of Portugal, was one of those fine and beautiful characters with which mediæval history is so full. When the little Margaret was only two years old her radiant mother, who was adored by every one, was killed while hunting and Maximilian, who was heartbroken and quite frantic with grief, found his two children, Margaret and her brother Philip, seized by the somewhat aggressive burghers of Ghent on the ground that it was for the state, and not the father, to determine their education and their future. Louis XI of France was undoubtedly behind them, for he believed he saw his chance to devour Burgundy, and in the end he cleverly engineered the treaty of Arras whereby the small Margaret was affianced to his son Charles and taken to the French court to be properly educated, while Philip remained in Flanders to be reared as the burghers saw fit.

Fortunately, the old French spider, Louis XI, died almost as soon as Margaret reached Paris, and her education was undertaken by his daughter the Princess Anne, who became regent for the Dauphin Charles and was another of those strong and righteous personalities of a time that already had almost exhausted itself by overproduction. Under her able direction the château of Amboise became a kind of “finishing school” for princesses, and here the small Margaret was subjected to a system of training that would stagger the present day. “On a foundation of strong religious principles hewn from the early fathers of the Church and the Enseignements de Saint Louis, she built up a moral and philosophic education with the help of the ancient philosophers, especially Plato as studied with the commentary of Boethius,” maintaining a cloisteral simplicity of life and fighting affectation and pretence with an austere ardour that contrasts quaintly with the court life of the time. And all this just before the discovery of America and on the eve of the election of the Borgia, Alexander VI, to the Papacy!

In spite of her gorgeous betrothal to the poor little awkward and misshapen prince, the marriage was destined not to come off; political considerations intervened, and Charles married Anne, the heiress of Brittany, out of hand, and the Princess Margaret was unceremoniously returned to Flanders where she was received with enthusiasm by her loyal if turbulent and irresponsible Flemings.

The situation was characteristically fifteenth century, which is to say impetuous and fantastic. Maximilian had just been made King of the Romans and heir to the Holy Roman Empire; he had ventured into the nest of unruly Flemings, been captured, and imprisoned for eleven weeks, to the scandal of Europe and of the Pope who put both Bruges and Ghent under the interdict. Maximilian won in the end by promising much and performing little, and then backed Brittany against France, intending to marry the little Princess Anne, but he lost both the battle and his coveted bride with her desirable territories, both being won by his prospective son-in-law Charles who at one blow threw over Margaret, and won the very lady her father had been striving to attain. Maximilian’s irritation was perhaps excusable under the circumstances, but when he found no one who really cared to help him in a war against France he turned to schemes of a new crusade for driving the Turks out of Europe, consoled himself with a Sforza princess from Milan, and worked out a beautiful new scheme of a Spanish alliance by marrying his son Philip to the Princess Juana and Margaret to the royal Infante, Don Juan. Margaret was now seventeen, and after Dona Juana had made her way to Flanders by sea, always in imminent danger of shipwreck, and married Prince Philip, she took the poor storm-tossed ladies-in-waiting back with her by the same uncomfortable route, producing for their edification, in the midst of the worst of the incessant tempests, her proposed epitaph which ran:

The epitaph was not needed, and Margaret reached Spain at last, where she was received with wild joy, at once becoming the idol of all who met her, from Queen Isabella down. The prince was of the same temper as herself, handsome, noble in character, learned, proficient in all the arts, and they were married the moment Lent was over, in the midst of a kind of frenzy of general joy and magnificence. This was on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1497; on October 4 the fairy prince was dead of the plague, dying as he had lived his brief life of nineteen years, a gentle and perfect knight, destroying the golden dreams of his people, breaking the heart of the Queen, and leaving Margaret, heartbroken also, to await the birth of her child, who was born only to die after a single breath. The life of the girl-widow was despaired of, but she finally recovered, and in spite of the prayers of the sorrowing Queen and court, who had acquired a passionate affection for her, returned to Flanders, where her brother Philip, through a sequence of deaths in the royal family of Spain, had suddenly found his wife the heir to the vast and powerful kingdom. Margaret arrived in 1499 and two years later, again for political reasons (her spirited father now being interested in the conquest of Italy), was married to Duke Philibert of Savoy, Philibert le Beau, a figure of splendour, courage, learning, and beneficence; devoted to his people, to governmental and industrial reform, to the founding of schools, hospitals, monasteries. One looks aghast on the mortality of young and promising leaders at this particular time. They arise like splendid stars, they embody all the beneficent quality of the five centuries of mediævalism that already had come to an end; they have no kinship with the new type of the Renaissance then first showing itself—with a Henry VIII, a Francis I, a Philip II, an Alexander VI—and one by one they are blotted out of the darkening heavens. Born out of due time, after the ending of an epoch of righteousness and beauty, they seem to be taken away from a world they could not save and that could only have been for them a misery and a disappointment, as it was for Margaret’s baby nephew, Charles, who was destined to inherit the world in its chaotic desolation only to surrender it at last and seek refuge in the cloister.

So it was with this model of chivalry, Philibert the Beautiful; three years of ecstatic happiness were granted him and his duchess, Margaret, and then he also died, in the room in which he had been born, at Pont d’Ain, only twenty-four years before. Margaret withdrew at once from the world, cut off her great wealth of golden hair, and devoted herself to prayers and devotions, and to the building at Brou, in memory of the dead duke, of that matchless piece of architectural jewel work, the shrine that occupied the energies of the greatest artist-craftsmen in Europe for a period of twenty-five years, From every part of France, Flanders, Burgundy, Italy architects, painters, sculptors, glassmakers, wood-workers, craftsmen in metals were gathered together, and thus they laboured year after year, at first supervised by the Duchess Margaret from an oratory she had built where she might divide her time between intercessions for the repose of the soul of her knight and superintendence of the building that was to immortalise his memory and form the place of sepulture for him, and for her when God willed. In the money of our time the cost of this shrine, small as it is, was over $4,000,000, and it represented the ending of art as it marked the ending of a great epoch.

The peace and the withdrawal from the world the poor princess desired above everything were denied her. Two years after the death of the Duke of Savoy, Philip, the only son of Maximilian, brother of Margaret, husband of poor Dona Juana, who was destined to a life of madness, Philip, Archduke of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, King of Castile, another of the promising princes of Christendom, died at the age of twenty-eight, leaving five children, with another shortly to be born, and amongst them was the seven-year-old Charles, the heir of the world. At the solemn obsequies in the Cathedral of St. Rombaut in Malines (the same whose tower is now shattered by Prussian shells), at the end of the mass, the King-at-Arms of the Golden Fleece cast his baton