Chapter II: Part 2

France, Burgundy, England, now against each other or some count or duke working in his turn for dynastic or political dominance. Another cause of dissension was the complicated absurdity of feudal tenure, whereby the French-speaking people of Brabant and Lorraine were united to the Empire, the Flemings to France, while, as happened in the case of the Count of Flanders, a prince might be one of the Twelve Peers of France, and a vassal of the King, and yet be vassal to the Emperor for portions of his land. The process of progressive unification which was taking place elsewhere was here reversed, and by the end of the twelfth century Brabant had been broken up into five counties, while as far as the Seine were small and involved feudal domains and bishoprics, such as Hainault, Vermandois, Ponthièvre, Amiens, Reims, Coucy, Beauvais.

Flanders retained a certain unstable unity, and against this Philip Augustus of France set himself in his comprehensive policy of unification; after his first invasion Ferrand of Portugal, who had married the heiress of the last Baldwin of Flanders and Hainault, took the lead in forming an alliance with England and the Empire for the crushing of France and the division of the kingdom. Bouvines saw the ending of the ambitious plot, and as well the beginnings of modern France. Later came the League of Grammont and the second attempt to destroy France, which failed also; but at the battle of Courtrai by the Lys, the Flemish army of 25,000 utterly defeated a French force of double the number, with the loss of the proudest blood in France. A thousand knights fell, with 20,000 squires and men-at-arms, and in the Church of Our Lady of Courtrai, 700 gold spurs, from the heels of dead knights, were hung to the glory of the great victory.

So through the thirteenth century incessant fighting went on both in Flanders and Brabant, and in the great bishopric of Liége, the net result being the complete downfall of feudalism in advance of the rest of Europe and the solidifying of the popular passion for personal liberty and self-government.

The fourteenth century was the golden age of the communes and as well of renewed resistance to the continuous encroachments of France, when the brief period of the commercial alliance with England under Edward III came to an end. This English alliance, prompted by both commercial and political considerations, had been the dream of the first Van Artevelde, Jacques by name, the leader of the weavers of Ghent. For nine years he had laboured for the interests of his fellow guildsmen and Ghentois, supporting King Edward III in his claims on the crown of France, plotting and planning to preserve the independence of Flanders. He fell a victim, however, to the spirit of irresponsible faction which already had been the inevitable outcome of the democratic, socialistic, and selfishly greedy elements inherent in an unhampered guild system, and was murdered by his own followers in the streets of Ghent.

In the meantime Louis de Mâle, had become Count of Flanders, in succession to his father, Louis de Nevers, while Wenceslas of Luxembourg, son of the King of Bohemia, who had married one of the daughters of John III, became Duke of Brabant. Here, as in Flanders, the various guilds had gained a control that was periodically contested by the nobles, particularly in Louvain, where the disorders continued for twenty years. In the end the cities were defeated, for they had used their power ill, determining their action by superhuman cruelty and greed, oppressing the weaker communes whenever they threatened their trade, fighting amongst themselves, splitting up into factions, and vacillating between sudden enthusiasms and corresponding treachery. Already the tendency was setting in away from the mediæval looseness, mobility, and even democracy in government, and toward that centralisation coupled with autocracy which was to be the contribution of the Renaissance to the science of government and was to end in the absolutism of Henry VIII, Philip of Spain, and Louis XIV. Even if the guilds had shown a high standard of morals and of statesmanship, if the communes had been truly patriotic and national in their aims and methods, they could hardly have stood against a tendency already clearly defined and marking the new era, now coming to birth, as their high beginnings had marked that already drawing to its close.

Louis made war against Brabant, lost, but regained Malines, which he had sold to his father-in-law of Brabant, and then turned his attention to a final suppression of Ghent, the last stronghold of the declining democracy of Flanders. It was in 1279 that Bruges asked for a canal to the Lys to make amends for the silting up of her only outlet to the sea. Ghent protested, fearing loss of her own trade, and took up arms when Louis granted the canal. The “White Hoods” defeated the forces sent against them, whereupon the fickle burgers of Bruges and Ypres went over to their side and long, hard fighting followed, until Louis found himself besieged in Audenaarde by some 60,000 “White Hoods” and was only saved by the intervention of his son-in-law Charles of Burgundy. Retreating to France, with headquarters at Lille, he reorganised his forces, renewed the attack, captured Ypres, and, one after the other, all the cities of Flanders except Ghent, to which he laid siege. At this last crisis in its fortunes Ghent turned to Philip, son of Jacques van Artevelde, who took command, organised a force of 5,000 men, led them against Count Louis’ army of 40,000, attacked near Bruges, and defeated it utterly, Louis escaping only in the clothes of his servant. Bruges was occupied and its walls destroyed, Ypres and Courtrai joined in with Ghent, and Bruges itself turned against its count.

The issue was now fairly joined between commons and knights; Louis de Mâle made his cause that of order and the nobility against anarchy and the proletariat, the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy joined him, and under Oliver, constable of France, 80,000 men, amongst whom no communal levies were admitted, marched on Ghent and its allies. Against this force Philip van Artevelde mustered 40,000 men who advanced to the attack with a mad confidence born of their recent victory over Louis. In a thick fog they hurled themselves in a solid body on the centre of the enemy, broke it, saw victory before them, and then, the fog lifting, found themselves flanked on both sides by the constable’s horse, and abandoned themselves to a panic that ended in the slaughter of more than half their number, including Van Artevelde himself, whose brief day of success and glory had lasted exactly eleven months.

The French sacked Courtrai and went home, whereupon Ghent again took heart of hope, and, aided by Henry Spencer, Bishop of Norwich, with 3,000 men, defied Louis and laid siege to Ypres, which was relieved by the returning French, and a truce was finally signed at Calais.

It was the end of the democratic communes, not only in Flanders but in Brabant, where Duke Wenceslas at the same time had defeated the communes at Louvain, and as well in France, where the growing spirit of communal

independence was wiped out by a king who had found in Flanders the proof that this cannot co-exist with a strong and centralised monarchy.

Already industrial decline had set in; the country had been harried by French armies and by civil wars, many had gone overseas to England to establish there a rival industry that slowly sapped the prosperity of Flanders and Brabant. The Black Death had decimated the remaining population, and Bruges, Courtrai, Ypres, indeed nearly all the great towns but Ghent, slowly lost their population until hardly a tenth was left. Still a large degree of prosperity remained, and wealth was as much desired and as successfully attained as before, only within narrower lines and by a far smaller number of people.

When Louis de Mâle died, shortly after the victory of his French allies over the communes, his son-in-law, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, became Count of Flanders, and the fifteenth century was dominated by Burgundian efforts to build up a strong central kingdom when it became evident that it could not control the destinies of France. Flanders, Brabant, and Namur were all incorporated in Burgundy, and later Holland and Hainault, so that it seemed for a time that a great central state might arise between the Empire and the kingdom of France.

Philip’s first efforts were to wean Flanders from its friendship with England in order that he might use the country for the invasion he had planned to bring about. He died in 1404 before he could carry out his schemes and was succeeded by his son, John the Fearless, whose aim was the French crown, in opposition to the Duke of Orleans who had become supreme in Paris. He marched on the capital, which opened its gates to him, while Orleans took refuge in the south but returned and too confidingly patched up some kind of a peace with Burgundy, who had him assassinated in the streets of Paris in the following year. Out of his murder grew the league of the partisans of Orleans, the “Armagnacs,” who took their name from Count d’Armagnac, father-in-law of one of the daughters of the murdered duke, and the warfare between them and the house of Burgundy.

In the meantime Henry V had laid claim to the French throne, had invaded France, and fought the battle of Agincourt. Thus far John the Fearless had kept out of the fight, but now he allied himself with the Dauphin and went to meet him at Montereau to seal his allegiance. Here he was in turn slain by the Armagnacs in revenge for his own murder of the Duke of Orleans, and his son, Philip the Good, at once threw himself into the arms of England, against France, and it was he who handed over the B. Jeanne d’Arc to the Bishop of Beauvais, after her capture at Compiègne in 1430, as a witch and sorceress.

Philip was more devoted to his new possessions than to his native Burgundy, and under him Bruges and Ghent took precedence of his old capital of Dijon. Philip also was the founder of the Order of the Golden Fleece on the occasion of one of his numerous marriages, this time in Bruges and to the Countess of Nevers. The marriage was a great event in many ways, for to it came the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, he being then Regent of France for the English king and realising that the triumphant career of Jeanne d’Arc was having results that urged him to make the most of the Duke of Burgundy, the only friend left to his royal master. The Golden Fleece, the oldest order on the Continent, was instituted in particular honour of Flanders, and especially the city of Bruges, the world centre of the wool trade. There were to be but twenty-four knights, under the leadership of the duke, and they were granted extraordinary privileges, amongst them immunity from all other states, princes and laws, being subject only to their sovereign master, though they remained citizens of their respective states, whatever those may have been. Philip II of Spain did away with this intolerable anomaly, and in 1725 the order was divided between Spain and Austria, so losing wholly its original and most distinctive quality as a signal honour especially pertaining to Flanders.

By 1435 Philip, whose affection for England had been at the best lukewarm, could bear no longer the appalling misery of France and the excesses of the English armies. All north of the Loire had become a wilderness and even in the later Middle Ages pity was a feeling still easily aroused. By the treaty of Arras Burgundy finally separated itself from the English alliance and joined Charles VII, the immediate result being a letting-up of the war in France and a transferring of hostilities to Flanders. The duke led an enthusiastic force of Flemings against Calais, failed to capture it, and then discovered

the erratic nature of his Flemish subjects, for they forthwith turned against him as suddenly as they had deserted the English alliance, and Philip proceeded forthwith to break their spirit, or rather the frantic independence of their cities. He succeeded, and yet Flanders prospered in spite of the sporadic internecine warfare. Prosperity somehow came back and wealth increased, while Memling, the Van Eycks and their great line of successors, together with other masters of art in allied fields, gave a glory to the time that will endure for ever. Then followed years of strife and turbulence, of shifting alliances and of sympathies as ready to turn as to be aroused. Philip died, was succeeded by his son, Charles the Bold, and the disorders broke out afresh so successfully that at first he was forced to give back all the communal privileges his father had taken away. In addition to his domestic troubles he found himself the object of the serpentine plots of Louis XI now King of France. Charles was equal to the occasion, however; he married Margaret of York, sister to the English King, so acquiring a new ally; marched against Liége, the centre of the local disaffection, captured it triumphantly, then turned on the crafty and unscrupulous Louis and proceeded to beat him at his own game. In the midst of this enviable adventure, Liége revolted once more, and this time Charles, dragging Louis at his heels, captured the city again, now showing none of the mercy he had before exhibited. The whole city was sacked, only the churches and monasteries being spared, and the ruins were given to the flames. In spite of the exemption accorded religious property, the destruction of the great city was too manifestly a violation of the common decencies of Christian conduct to be neutrally endured by the Pope, who at that time (it was almost five centuries ago) did not fear to take a strong stand for righteousness when occasion offered, and Charles had to make his peace with the head of the Church as best he could.

The policy of “frightfulness” had its advantages to its perpetrator, however, and the other rebellious cities surrendered at discretion, losing their treasured liberties and becoming simply communities in a united and centralised state. In the end Charles lost, for Louis XI was a schemer of such profound duplicity that only the devil himself could have matched him in the long run, and on even terms. The duke met failure at every turn: in his effort to co-ordinate his unruly provinces into a working organism, in his ambition to become King of Burgundy instead of duke, in his last war against the Swiss when he was utterly defeated and slain. He was succeeded by his daughter, the famous Mary of Burgundy, who also became a victim of the royal spider of France, but countered on him by suddenly marrying Maximilian, son of the Emperor, and so beginning that train of events that severed Burgundy from its French associations and brought its several parts into a relationship with Germany that continued for nearly three centuries.

Young, beautiful, clever, and immensely popular, Mary of Burgundy seemed destined to accomplish what her father had failed to bring about, the unification and restoration of a great Burgundian state, but after only five years of rule she was killed by a fall from her horse while hunting, and Philip, her infant son, became duke in name, and the old political troubles rose to a climax that in the end brought in the Spanish dominion and the ruin that followed in its wake.

The cities of Flanders and Brabant turned again to France, in a frantic effort to regain their lost liberties, while Maximilian, who had been crowned King of Rome, and was of course next in succession to the Empire, fought again and again to restore his supremacy, and regain his infant son, the future Philip the Fair, who had been sent to France to be educated and to get him out of the hands of his father. In the end he defeated the ring-leading cities, Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres, and was acknowledged regent. In 1493 Frederick died and Maximilian succeeded him as Emperor, proclaiming Philip as Count of Flanders, marrying him out of hand to Joanna, Infanta of Castile, and betrothing his sister to Don John, heir to the crown of Spain. The sudden rise of a great new power in the Iberian Peninsula had overturned all the old alignments; the driving of the Moors from Spain and the union of Aragon and Castile in Ferdinand and Isabella had revealed a new force that might be used against France, and more dependable than England, and the new Emperor was not slow to recognise his opportunity. His sister never married Don John, who died before the projected wedding, and was followed by his sister, the Queen of Portugal, so suddenly the Count of Flanders and his countess became heirs to the throne of Spain. They gained little advantage from this, although after the death of Queen Isabella in 1505 they went to Spain, and were proclaimed as king and queen, but their glory was short-lived, for in the following year Philip met a sudden and untimely end, his queen went mad through grief, and the Emperor became the dominating influence in Spain as well as in Flanders through the guardianship of his five-year-old grandson, the future Charles V.

During his minority his aunt, Margaret of Austria, had acted as regent, and with a wisdom and a benevolence her male predecessors had never shown, so that when in 1515 Charles became actual ruler of Flanders, he found himself in possession of a calm and contented community. Carefully educated by his admirable aunt, Charles, the heir to seventeen kingdoms, could speak the language of each, and he had, moreover, the enormous advantage of being tutored by the great Erasmus of Rotterdam. Hardly had he become King of Spain through the death of Ferdinand, when his grandfather died, and he became Emperor as well. Practically all Europe, and America also, were his, and after his war with France which ended at Pavia with the capture of Francis I (when all was “lost save honour”), he was the temporal Lord of the World, except England alone, while the spiritual power of the Papacy was his only rival on the Continent, and the Pope himself was his old tutor, Adrian, Archbishop of Toledo.

Charles was as able as he was universal in his sovereignty; he organised his vast empire on practical lines under well-chosen regents, none of whom was more excellent than Margaret of Austria, under whom the country prospered exceedingly. She was as shrewd and far-seeing as she was admirable in character; a poet in her own right, she fostered art, letters, and general culture, and her death in 1530 was a loss to Flanders and also to the Emperor, who immediately appointed his sister Mary regent in her place, a lady of less distinguished abilities, but a good and faithful servant for a quarter of a century.

Charles V estimated Luther, and the Reformation generally, at something of their true value; he saw the menace as well as the merit of the budding revolution and opposed it firmly because of its dangerous elements, which were already revealing themselves. The great era of the Middle Ages had come to an end, carrying with it in its fall many of those elements of righteousness in thought and action for which Charles cared almost passionately. He was of the older age rather than of the new, and in the end the conviction that he had failed to stem the tide, coupled with the progressive ruin of the old religion, the old philosophy, the old order of life, led him to abdicate what was almost the throne of the world and seek refuge in a monastery, where he devoted the brief remainder of his life to prayer, meditation, and the making of watches.

In the meantime, however, he had done Europe inestimable services, amongst them the beating back of the Moslem host, the recovery to Christianity of Hungary, the conquest of Tunis, and the general blocking of the double lines of Mohammedan advance. He was successful in his new crusade against the Eastern infidels, but he could not arrest the progress of heresy and anarchy in the West, and he finally abandoned the fight in despair, turning over to others a royalty too heavy to be borne. To his son Philip were given Spain, the American possessions, and the “Low Countries,” which then comprised all Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg as well as Artois and Cambrai. So began the Spanish dominion over the very centre of the Heart of Europe. It was the richest state in the world; when Philip II became sovereign there were seventeen provinces with 208 great walled towns, 150 boroughs and more than 6,000 villages. The products were infinitely varied and were famous throughout the world: woollen cloth, linen, silk, velvet, damask, embroideries, gloves, metal-work of every kind. Antwerp was in the lead in commerce, and it is said that the city had a population of 250,000, with 1,000 resident foreign merchants; 500 ships entered the port daily, and 300 wagons from across the frontiers of France and the Empire, while more business was transacted there in a week than in two years in Venice, her great commercial rival in the South. Such were the lands that came to Philip of Spain: the richest prize that Europe could afford.

IV

A SPANISH NETHERLANDS

When Philip II came to the throne there was a new king in France, Henry II, who forthwith broke the peace Charles V had engineered, and proceeded to invade both Italy and Flanders. He was promptly beaten, in the north by Egmont at St. Quentin, and after so disastrous a fashion that hardly any one but Nevers and Condé escaped. It was in gratitude for the brilliant victory of his Belgian troops that Philip built the palace of the Escorial. Trying again the next year, Henry did indeed, through the Duke de Guise (whose luck was better than that which followed him when he met Alva the year before in Italy), regain Calais, during the absence of the English garrison, who were home on a holiday; but again Egmont came into the breech, crushed the French at Gravelines, and so forced the treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis, which obliged France, amongst other penalties, to give up to Philip more than two hundred walled towns, though she was allowed to retain Calais, Mary of England now being dead.

Flemish soldiers, now forming the best trained and most effective army in Europe, had won the war for Philip, but out of the victory came in the end the ruin of their country, for before leaving for Spain, which he loved, he demanded of the Netherlands, which he disliked, three million florins toward the expense of the war. This was granted, but coupled with a request that the Spanish garrison be withdrawn. It happened that this demand was made at the instigation of William, Prince of Orange, who now appears on the scene, for he had discovered that Henry and Philip had secretly agreed to stamp out Protestantism in the Low Countries by introducing the Spanish Inquisition, and that the alien garrison was to be the means of putting this plan into effect. William of Orange was not a Fleming but a German; he had expected to be made regent when the King went back to Spain, and had been disappointed. He was neither a Catholic nor a Protestant, but a cold, silent, far-seeing politician of extremely rationalistic views. He knew that the spirit of independence in the Netherlands was so dominating that Catholics and Protestants alike could be allied against both the Inquisition and a foreign garrison. He cleverly united them on this basis, alienated the last flicker of friendly feeling on the part of Philip, and so precipitated the conflict that raged for almost a century to the ruin and misery of all the seventeen provinces. Philip appeared to yield, went back to Spain, and at once began his scheming for the destruction of the Protestant heresy in his too-independent territories.

So far as the aristocracy, the rich burghers, and the cultivated classes were concerned, Protestantism had made little if any headway in spite of the wide corruption of the Church, but among the peasants and the ignorant, particularly in the great cities, it had taken firm hold. To Philip it was both a damnable heresy and a civil menace; he hated it as his father had hated it, but Charles V was of a different mould and temper. Philip was a Spanish Catholic, and therein (at that time) lay all the difference. To him with his cold mind and pitiless temper there was only one question: how to root out this accursed and poisonous growth. The answer was at hand in the shape of the peculiar type of inquisition which had been invented in Spain for the sole purpose of completing the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from the Peninsula after the final defeat of the Mohammedan invaders. It had proved its efficiency to admiration, and, though it had never been used against Christian heretics, Philip felt (as others have felt after him) that both the righteous State and the Catholic Church were, through the King, fighting for their lives, and that he had no right to balk at any means that offered when it was a question of life or death.

The old “Papal” Inquisition, which came into existence toward the end of the Middle Ages, and was the corollary of the dawning spirit of the Renaissance with which it synchronised, was legitimate enough, if you hold, as every one held then, that spiritual evil is as wicked as material evil, and just as worthy of formal punishment. Trials were conducted according to civil law, they were public, and the secular arm alone inflicted punishment. The “Spanish” Inquisition, which is the form so bitterly condemned to-day, was a creature of the Renaissance in its fulness. It was an engine of the most diabolical efficiency, for its proceedings were secret, its finding irrevocable, its penalties merciless and as cruel as English criminal law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though it lacked certain of the refinements of torture that were first developed under “Good King Hal” when he was waging his war against the monks and monasteries of his own England.

Had Philip been dealing with the Popes of the Middle Ages, he could never have imposed the Spanish Inquisition on the Netherlands, but those of the Renaissance were as different as possible, and he had no trouble in gaining their consent. A few burnings took place, and then the loyal and Catholic but intensely patriotic nobles took matters into their own hands and through the regent, Margaret of Parma, warned the King that unless the thing was stopped the provinces would act in defence of their own rights and in accordance with their solemnly guaranteed privileges. The Protestant mob also began to act after its own fashion, without waiting for an answer from Philip, and week after week carried on a course of destruction that wrecked cathedrals, monasteries, churches, and destroyed more old stained glass, wonderful statues, great pictures, jewelled vestments, and sacred vessels than have escaped to this day. The senseless and sacrilegious fury of this mob of the baser sort not only lashed the King into a cold fury but it even halted some of the Catholic nobles, many of whom, including Egmont himself, began to wonder if, after all, the Inquisition was not permissible in the light of the revelations that were being made in the desecrated churches of Antwerp and Ghent and Tournai. No advantage was taken of this changing sentiment, however, and, ready at last, Philip struck, and the Duke of Alva, with an army of 10,000 picked men, marched up from Genoa, occupied Brussels, seized every disaffected leader, including even those like Egmont and Horn, who were both loyal and devout Catholics (but barring Orange, who had cautiously retreated to Germany), and established the “Council of Blood,” which during the first week of its activities executed more than eight hundred men whose only crime was protesting against the denial of their guaranteed liberties and the maintenance of the Inquisition.

The Prince of Orange organised in Germany a small armed force for the deliverance of the cowed and horrified Netherlanders, but his first victory over Alva’s forces was answered by immediate reprisals in Brussels, a score of nobles being sent to the block, including Horn and

_From a photograph by Hanfstaengl_]

Egmont, the latter being the most honoured of the nobles and as good a Catholic as he was a soldier. The people remained absolutely crushed, making no effort to rise in support of the Prince of Orange, who, defeated by Alva, sought the aid of the French Protestants, attacked from the sea by means of privateers who preyed on Spanish commerce, and finally, by establishing a base in Holland, raised this portion of the Spanish Netherlands against Alva and made himself actual head of a new state. In the meantime a Huguenot army had laid siege to Mons, but just as victory seemed near the Massacre of St. Bartholomew ended the Protestant party in France for ever, destroyed all the hopes that had been raised through the possibility of assistance from Coligny, and sent Orange back again behind the Rhine, leaving Flanders and Brabant to their fate. Alva saw to it that this was sufficiently awful, and then began operations against Holland, but by this time Philip had become thoroughly tired of the costly war and listened willingly to the enemies of the terrible duke, recalled him, and sent in his place the comparatively mild and accommodating Requesens.

The tale is now one of progressive and finally successful efforts at pacifying the country, the undoing so far as possible of the bloody work of Alva, the winning back to the Church and to the Spanish crown of all those who had not gone over definitely to Protestantism and the Prince of Orange. Both the Pope and the King offered full amnesty, and the southern provinces, those, that is, that now form the kingdom of Belgium, accepted at once and completely, for after all they were solidly Catholic and in principle not averse to Spanish dominion. The northern provinces--_i. e._, Holland--rejected all overtures, binding themselves completely, implacably, and savagely to Protestantism, and from now on the former Spanish Netherlands became two states: Holland, soon to win its independence, and Belgium, now and for a long time to come, a Spanish province.

Order was still far away. It was in the year 1573 that Requesens came to reverse the policy of Alva, and not until the Peace of Utrecht in 1715, when Spanish rule was finally terminated, that there was any rest or relief for the tortured and ruined provinces of Flanders and Brabant. Requesens died; the Spanish troops mutinied, were joined by the German mercenaries, and began a war on their own account, burning and sacking Antwerp, butchering 6,000 of the population, and harrying the country right and left. Then came Don John of Austria, Philip’s new governor-general, the victor of Lepanto, and a figure out of the pages of mediæval romance. He came too late; anarchy was firmly fixed in the saddle, riding rough-shod over the desolated garden of Europe. Abandoning his original policy of pacification, he turned to war and was successful, but only to find about every power in Europe represented in the roaring inferno. Orange was fighting from Antwerp as his headquarters, the provincial representatives, with Brussels as their centre, were howling for help from any source; the Protestant faction called John Casimir, Count Palatine, to their assistance, while the Catholics appealed to the Duke d’Alençon, and both put in an appearance, the latter seizing Maubeuge and working thence into the interior, while the former defeated Don John in a pitched battle and drove him back to Namur, where in a few months he died of chagrin and a broken heart, after making his nephew Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, his successor in the field.

Hell is the only name that can be applied to the unhappy land, the condition of which was not unlike that of Mexico in this year of enlightenment, 1915. The Renaissance and the Reformation together had extinguished both civilisation and culture over the greater part of Europe; war was everywhere and incessant, all principle had been abandoned and the ethical standards of society had disappeared. Slaughter, civil war, assassination, treason, and sacrilege howled through an ever-widening desolation and the end of the world seemed at hand. Fortunately, in a way, the outrageous career of the Protestants served as an impulse to union; their savagery in Ghent and Brussels somehow pulled the people of Belgium together and enabled Parma to win some small order out of the insane chaos. He began a new campaign, drove out the French, laid siege to the Calvinists in Ghent, and at last (the Prince of Orange having been assassinated at the instigation of Philip) broke down the last Protestant resistance in Brussels and Antwerp and for the moment restored peace over a deserted, ruined, and blood-stained land. And then Philip II died and dying abandoned the country he had received as the richest in Europe and left as the most miserable and poverty-stricken, handing it over to new rulers in the persons of his daughter Isabella and her husband, the Archduke Albert of Austria.

The great and happy and wealthy state created by the House of Burgundy had been utterly destroyed and irretrievably ruined. A new Protestant state had been formed from one fragment in the north, other portions were shortly to be incorporated in France, and the nine provinces that still remained out of the original seventeen were hardly more than a geographical abstraction. Half the great cities had been sacked and burned, the craftsmen and artisans were slaughtered or in exile, the cold and greedy Hollanders had seized (and were to retain by force or fraud) the vast commerce that once was the possession of Flanders and Brabant, agriculture had ceased, famine was universal, religion and mercy and education were memories, while the old civic spirit and the old freedom and independence were things of so long ago they were not even remembered.

To do them justice, the new sovereigns meant well by the exhausted country, but first of all they had set their hearts on the crushing of the Protestant Netherlands, and nine years of war set in which ended at last with the complete victory of the Dutch republic and its acknowledged independence. Then came the anomaly of twelve years of peace with the astonishing outburst of a genuine and brilliant if evanescent culture. Peace is a good foundation for industry, trade, and commerce, but the fact is unavoidable that the black ploughing and the red fertilising of a land by war frequently bring a luxuriant crop of those cultural products that have issue in character as they follow from it. Here in Flanders the years between the Peace of Antwerp in 1609 and the restoration of Spanish rule on the death of Albert in 1624, were opulent with all manner of civic and personal wealth in those lines that are cultural rather than material. It was a time of the restoration of religion through new monastic foundations, of the establishing of houses of mercy, of the building up of great universities, of the development of printing, of the production of great scientists and scholars, of a new era of painting. The University of Louvain dates from this time, the great printing-house of the Plantins and the Moretus, the art of Rubens and Vandyck.

It was all temporary, however, and ephemeral. Spain took charge once more, the Dutch continued their policy of commercial and religious aggression, the Thirty Years’ War drew the unfortunate provinces into its whirlpool; the war between France and Spain was largely fought on their territory, the war of France against the United Netherlands resulted in the seizure by the unsuccessful party--France--of Belgian territory as a salve to its wounded pride. Year after year Belgium was subject to renewed devastations; what the Protestants and Spaniards had left the French despoiled. Brussels, which had now become the richest and most splendid of the cities, was bombarded with red-hot cannon balls and almost wholly destroyed, sixteen churches and four thousand houses being burned, and the great city deprived of almost its last examples of the great art of the Middle Ages.

And so the wretched tale goes on, generation after generation. God alone knows how or why anything was left in Belgium, either of art or culture or character or religion, or even of the rudiments of civilisation. Still something did remain for destruction, as was proved a little later by the revolutionists of France and recently by the Prussians, both of whom have performed the final work quite perfectly. The Heart of Europe had been torn, lacerated, crushed, for one hundred and sixty years, and yet somehow it continued to beat on. A great Christian culture, a great congeries of Christian peoples, product of the splendid centuries from 1000 to 1500 A. D., had been destroyed and superseded by the very different force engendered by Renaissance and Reformation. If there are those who still, despite the blazing enlightenment of the last twelvemonth, retain any illusions as to the comparative beneficence of the two epochs, it would be well for them to consider in detail the annals and the peoples and the personalities of the Heart of Europe during the five centuries of mediævalism, and the same during the five centuries of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The contrast is striking, the revision of judgments unescapable, the lesson, immediately to be applied in the present crisis, pregnant of possible benefits.

With the Peace of Utrecht all that is now Belgium passed to the Emperor Charles VI, and Austrian dominion began. In contrast to the preceding horrors it was comparatively uneventful; while Prince Charles of Lorraine was governor the country was quiet and prosperous and a certain advance occurred on cultural lines. This enlightened prince deserves well of history in one respect at least, for, by an imperial decree he caused to be issued, it was solemnly asserted that a gentleman did not lose his status as such if he indulged in the practice of the arts or letters! Joseph II, who followed him, was a pedantic reformer of laudable intentions, who set himself to the perfecting of everything, both religious and secular, to the extreme irritation of his people who simply wanted to govern themselves and apparently cared little whether this were well done or ill. In the end the whole country broke up again in rebellion and disorder, the nobles leagued in one group under the Duke d’Arenberg, the lower classes in a second with a vulgar and noisy demagogue, Van der Noot, as its leader. Somehow or other they managed to get together at Breda, raised an army, defeated the Austrian garrisons, and drove the Emperor Joseph across the Meuse when he forthwith died of sheer discouragement.

Then followed a short-lived “republic” engineered by Van der Noot, who was an adherent of the new French ideas, with an attack on the nobles which was sufficiently successful to bring their party to an end. Next, the powers who looked most askance at the fast-growing revolution--England, Holland, and Prussia--united for the restoration of Austrian authority, on general principles, and the Emperor Leopold II, with their support, asserted, and then established his authority, capturing Namur and within two weeks occupying the whole country (which accepted him contentedly enough), driving the ambitious advocate with the revolutionary tendencies into a well-merited exile. Austria tried honestly enough to conciliate the country, but its temper and inclinations were otherwise, so France was asked to intervene, which she was not loath to do, sending Dumouriez to undertake the task. Badly beaten at first, he succeeded finally at Valmy and Jemappes, and the French Revolution assumed control. The cabal of assassins then in power in Paris decreed that Belgium should be saved, but that first she must be purged, and a choice assortment of thirty ruffians was sent to Brussels to see that this was done. A guillotine was set up at once, and clerics, nobles, and the wealthier merchants became its victims, while the patriot army, supported by the local revolutionists, acted after their kind and sacked the remaining churches, destroyed religious houses, and generally plundered whatever they safely could, _i. e._, whatever was unable to defend itself. Dumouriez countenanced none of this, but he was playing a double game, acting ostensibly for the cabal in Paris though with the idea always before him that if he could control Belgium and conquer Holland he would be in a good position from which to turn on his employers, crush them, and then restore the monarchy on constitutional lines. Unfortunately for his plans, he was defeated by the allies and again Austria won back her insecure provinces. She was received with the facile enthusiasm which now seemed chronic with the shattered Belgian character, but after a few months was driven out for the last time when France was finally victorious over the half-hearted, selfish, and ineffectual allies, only one of whom, England, was waging war against the republic with anything approaching sincerity and determination.

Again the French--or rather the republican faction--entered into possession, and unhappy Belgium felt the full force of its grinning hypocrisy, its satanic savagery, and its unscrupulous greed. “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” was painted on the walls, and simultaneously the country was robbed of its last coins, its laws and privileges were overthrown, its citizens deprived of even the most fundamental rights of liberty and property, while the few remaining abbeys and castles were sacked, burned, and their ruins razed to the ground. Alva had been an amateur compared with the new apostles of liberty, and when at last Belgium was declared regenerate and was incorporated in the French “republic,” nothing remained for incorporation except a name, a memory, and a huddle of entirely ruined and perfectly hopeless victims of four centuries of cumulative enlightenment and progress.

Of course they rebelled; of course whole groups of desperate men took to the forests and moors, robbing, killing, existing as best they could, and of course they were crushed again and again; at last, however, Bonaparte began to bring some order out of the republican anarchy, and conditions improved. When at last he proclaimed himself Emperor the Belgians accepted him with the same avidity they always had shown for any man who promised some alleviation of their intolerable sufferings. Holland was occupied and given a king of its own, Napoleon’s brother Louis, who was not only the strongest and finest character in the family, but so righteous in his kingship and so whole-heartedly devoted to his Dutch that he soon alienated the sympathies of his imperial brother while failing to gain those of his somewhat difficult subjects.

The dream empire began to dissolve; Holland revolted, and the Prince of Orange was restored; Belgium was occupied by the Allies, who had got to work again, and the scheme of a new state, to be formed of all the old seventeen provinces united under the Prince of Orange, was brought forward against the wishes of the Belgians, who preferred the restoration of Austrian rule. They had lived too close to their Protestant Dutch neighbours and had too keen a memory of their character and habits to desire amalgamation with them on any terms.

Napoleon went to Elba, came back, called on his “loyal Belgians” to support him, advanced into their territories, and at Waterloo lost everything and melted away into history and legend, leaving Belgium in unnatural union with the Dutch provinces, where it remained for some fifteen years, revolting in 1830, making good its rebellion, and establishing itself as an independent state under the sovereignty of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg, who had been elected King on the refusal of the Duc de Nemours, first chosen by the victorious provisional government.

The long agony was at an end; it had lasted from August 22, 1567, when the Duke of Alva entered Brussels, until July 21, 1831, when Leopold I was crowned King of Belgium, a period of two hundred and sixty-four years. Other peoples and other states have been brought low, time out of mind; have suffered, disintegrated, and disappeared. It would be hard to find another instance, however, where so fabulously rich a people, and so cultivated withal, so supreme in their achievement of a lofty and well-rounded civilisation, have been called upon to submit to so prolonged, varied, and searching an assault, to descend to such depths of misery, poverty, and degradation--and who yet have preserved through two centuries and a half of agony and spoliation a tradition and a habit of righteousness that, when the great test arrived, blazed upward in sudden fierceness of self-revelation to the confusion of new enemies and the wonder of a world. What lies beyond awaits the proof, but for the moment three centuries have dropped away and the old independence, the old fearlessness, the old honour of Bruges and Ghent, of Liége and Malines shine again on old battle-fields of new carnage and in new hearts of old righteousness. The new era begins, and the world waits, confident of the issue.

V

THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART

BETWEEN Paris and Cologne, Strasbourg and Bruges lies, in little, nearly the whole history of northern architecture from Charlemagne to the last Louis of France, when it ceased to be an art and became a fashion. The greater part of Normandy lies, it is true, across the Seine, and is, for the time, beyond our field of vision, but, barring Caen, architectural significance is well concentrated in the triangle, Rouen, Dieppe, le Havre. The same is true of the old Royaume of France; though Chartres and Bourges lie to the south, the beginning, and in some sense the culmination, of Gothic is to be found between Seine and Somme. In the east, to the Rhine, we have practically all that Germany has contributed, except in the later days of the Renaissance.

If we like, we may go far beyond the dim and mysterious era of the Carolings, finding in Trèves old Roman ruins that take us back four or five centuries earlier, but the real history of this region begins with Charlemagne and takes us to his favourite city of Aix-la-Chapelle for the single, but vastly significant, building left us as evidence of his inspiration and his creative power. With the ending of this day-dream there comes a great silence, while civilisation and culture disappear again, to be restored two centuries later, far to the west, and at the hands of the Normans. Here we find St. Georges de Bocherville, Fécamp, and the inestimable and forgotten ruins of Jumièges. For transition to Gothic we have Senlis, Soissons, Noyon, with Laon and Paris as earliest Gothic of pure and consistent type; Châlons, Amiens, and Reims for culmination, and Abbeville, Rouen, Beauvais, Troyes, and Strasbourg for its sumptuous decline.

From the other hand we go on from Aix to Cologne for the fine eleventh-century work that took up the tale after the second Dark Ages that followed the ending of the empire of the Carolings, with more examples at Laach and in Hildesheim, which also are beyond our survey. A century later we get the consistent Teutonic art of Trèves, Mayence, Spires, and Worms, while the high Gothic of the noon of mediævalism is found at Cologne and Strasbourg, with the last rich fantasy of all, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in Brussels and Antwerp and Malines, in Courtrai, Tournai, Namur, Louvain, Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges. For Renaissance we find all we need, and everywhere; churches, palaces, guild-halls, châteaux, dwellings, from the fanciful transition at Dieppe, Rouen, Gisors, to the sophisticated, well-conditioned, and perfectly artificial restored classic of Nancy.

As there is no other country in the north, of equal area, where history has been made so plenteously and of such varied quality, so it is with its art, and its architecture in particular, which marks the beginnings, the culmination, and the close of the three stylistic periods of Christian civilisation in the West--Carolingian, Norman, and Gothic--and through monuments singularly significant and equally notable in their perfection. It would be impossible to quote a tenth of them; there are a hundred at least, each of which demands (and many have received) a volume or more, but at least we can pick the most priceless, either for history or beauty, in a farewell that may be final for all, as already it is for such consummate and vanished masterpieces as the Cloth Hall at Ypres and the Cathedral of Reims.

Let us begin with Aix, just over the Belgian

frontier, the “City of the Great King,” where culture lightened again after the long night, and where, of all the churches and palaces of the Emperor, only one remains as evidence of what he did. The royal chapel has been built onto and over and around, but the original norm remains in the shape of that polygonal form with surrounding arcades that was a step in the development of the perfect Gothic chevet. To a great extent it is a replica of San Vitale in Ravenna, and may very well have been built by the descendants of those Roman craftsmen who, after the fall of the one-time capitol of the world, sought refuge either under Byzantine protection in Ravenna or on Lake Como, where the tradition is they carefully cherished the traditions and the esoteric mysteries of their art, perpetuating the slowly fading memory through secret lodges that, some held, were the progenitors of modern freemasonry.

When the possibilities of a new culture and a restored civilisation revealed themselves to the conqueror, who was also statesman, patriot, and (after his dim and flickering light) Christian, two centuries had left the West a wilderness, and all was to do over again. There were, it seemed, neither scholars nor artists nor righteous leaders of any sort in the world, and the task must have appeared hopeless. Charlemagne, undaunted, sent east and west, from Britain to Spain, searching out those who, by report, rose above the hopeless level of barbarian mediocrity. Alcuin of Britain, Peter of Pisa, Theodulphus, Hincmar, Eriugena, Radbertus Maurus, gathered around him at Aix, forming a cultural centre, reforming the Church, building up schools, creating an art almost out of nothing.

There was little enough, though Rome had its basilicas of the time of Constantine--San Paolo, San Lorenzo, Santa Maria Maggiore; from the East, it is true, travellers brought back wondering stories of the splendour of Justinian’s churches, with Hagia Sophia at the head; in Ravenna were the more modest monuments of the Exarchate--Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, San Vitale--in Istria, at Parenzo and Grado, were churches showing some new elements probably provided by Lombard builders, and San Pietro, Toscanella stood like a miracle, novel, without forebears, a new version of an ancient theme. These are what we have left, and then there was more, for much has since been destroyed, but most of it lay far afield, and in the north there was nothing. The work of co-ordination was well performed, however, and the succession was re-established; after the chapel at Aix, therefore, architectural development was continuous, if moderate, though any estimate must be dubious owing to the almost complete destruction of the monuments. We still have the apses of Sant’ Ambrogio in Milan; San Donato, Zara, N. D. de la Couture of Le Mans, and Montier en Der, none of them particularly inspiring or inspired, and none with any hint of what was suddenly to happen at Jumièges in the eleventh century. That the latter building may not have been as amazing an innovation as it appears is indicated by fragments and foundations of the work that came between it and Charlemagne, as at St. Martin of Tours, where the Revolution has left us nothing but foundations indicative of a former superstructure that may well have been the connecting-link, and might have changed our entire estimate of the quality of the architecture of the second Dark Ages. As it is, this chapel at Aix stands not only first in the great recovery of the eighth century, but almost unique, with no successors for nearly three centuries.