158

THE FRENCH INVADE FLANDERS.

[CHAP. III. demned to death. Having vainly entreated in their favour the judges at the Town Hall, Mary hastened to the Vrijdags Markt, where the people were assembled in arms; and ascending the balcony of the Hoog-Huys, with tearful eyes and dishevelled hair, implored the people to spare her servants. Those in the neighbourhood of the Hoog-Huys cried out that the prisoners should be spared; but the remoter crowd, who beheld not the spectacle of Mary's touching grief, persisted in the sentence. After a short contention, the merciful party were forced to yield; and Mary returned to her palace, her heart swelling with unspeakable anguish at the treachery of Louis. Three days after Hugonet and

Humbercourt were beheaded (April 3rd, 1477).

After this bloody catastrophe Louis altered his tone. He complained loudly of what had been done; stepped forward as the protector of Mary, who had been kept a kind of prisoner, and declared the democrats of Ghent and Bruges guilty of high treason. Nothing seemed to resist the progress of the French; they occupied Hainault, threatened Luxemburg, and penetrated into Flanders. At length Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres awoke, and put on foot an army of 20,000 men, though scarcely to be called soldiers. The command of them was given to the unnatural Adolf of Gelderland, who after the death of Charles had been liberated from imprisonment by the citizens of Ghent, and had set up pretensions to Mary's hand. He led the Flemings to Tournay; but here the men of Bruges began to quarrel with the men of Ghent; the French seizing the opportunity, routed both, and Adolf of Gelderland, after a brave defence, was slain (June 27th, 1477).

Such was the end of one of Mary's suitors. She had had several more as the Dauphin; the son of the Duke of Cleves; Her uncle! the Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV.; Lord Rivers, Edward's brother-in-law, and others. Various circumstances had prevented the Emperor from pursuing the Burgundian match for his son during the lifetime of Charles, and indeed, as we have seen, he had been leagued with the Swiss against that Prince; but in April a formal embassy arrived at Bruges, whither Mary had withdrawn after the bloody scene at Ghent, to demand her hand for Maximilian. That prize was an object of so much contention and intrigue that it required all the address of Mary's confidants, Madame Hallewyn, Olivier de la Marche, and Charles's widow, Margaret of York, to procure the ambassadors an audience. It had been arranged by Mary's council that she should postpone

CHAP. III.]

MARRIAGE OF MAXIMILIAN AND MARY.

159

her reply; but when the ambassadors recalled to her recollection a written promise which she had made to marry Maximilian, and a ring which accompanied the letter, and inquired if she was willing to keep her promise, policy gave way to love, and she at once acknowledged her engagement. She was betrothed April 21st; but four months elapsed before the Austrian Prince came to seek his bride in Flanders. This was owing partly to the want of money, partly to the dilatoriness of Frederick. The bridegroom was so poor that Mary is said to have advanced him 100,000 florins in order that he might make a befitting appearance at Ghent. The marriage, which took place August 18th, 1477, laid the foundation of the increased greatness of the House of Austria.

The lands and towns of the Netherlands had employed the interval between the death of Charles and the betrothal of his daughter, not only to obtain from Mary the confirmation of their ancient privileges, but also to extort new ones. Maximilian, brought up in the tenets of the Habsburg family respecting the divine rights of Princes, looked with no favourable eye on these citizens; and his own character in turn was not much calculated to please a somewhat coarse commercial people. He was a polished knight and even a poet, after the fashion of those times; and worse still, a poring, tasteless devotee of the old school learning. Instead of marching against the French, who were burning several Belgian towns, he repeated at Bruges the celebration of his wedding, and then retired to Antwerp, where he lived in ease and luxury.

The attention of Louis, however, was diverted from Belgium by the affairs of Franche-Comté and Burgundy. Louis had got Franche-Comté, chiefly through the influence of John, Prince of Orange, whom, as we have said, he had made Governor of the Burgundies; but being jealous of Orange's influence there, he soon began to raise up rivals against him, and he refused to restore John's lands. This drove the Prince into open rebellion. He renewed his allegiance to Mary, whose father-in-law, the Emperor, in a proclamation, reminded the inhabitants of Franche-Comté of their duty to the Empire. The Prince of Orange at the head of a considerable force defeated Louis's lieutenant Craon, at Vesoul (March 19th, 1477), and took possession of that town, as well as of Rochefort and Auxerre, in the name of Mary. In this state of things Louis proposed a truce to Maximilian and Mary, to which they foolishly assented (September). The French King likewise

160

WARS OF FRANCE AND BURGUNDY.

[CHAP. III. secured himself on the side of England by renewing the truce of Pequigny for the term of his own life and that of Edward IV. The House of York was indeed hampered by its own home quarrels, in which, early in 1478, Clarence fell a victim to the unappeased resentment of the King and to the machinations of his brother the Duke of Gloucester. Louis is said to have been consulted respecting that unfortunate Prince, and not obscurely to have advised his death by quoting a line from Lucan.1

In January, 1478, Maximilian and Mary purchased a peace with the Swiss League by the payment of 150,000 florins; but Louis was still able, by means of bribery, to secure the services of those venal mountaineers. Little, however, was done in that year, and in July the truce between the French King and the Netherland Sovereigns was renewed for a twelvemonth: only to be broken, however, in the spring of next year, when the Netherlanders resumed the offensive, seized Cambray, and invaded the Vermandois. Louis contented himself with holding them in check, and directed all his efforts towards Franche-Comté, where Chaumont d'Amboise, helped by large bodies of Swiss, soon overran the whole province. Dôle, the capital town, though valiantly defended by the students of the University, who were cut to pieces in a sally, was taken, sacked, and burnt, when most of the other towns quietly submitted. Yet they were plundered by the Swiss, for pillage, as well as pay, was the motive of their service.

66

The French were not so successful in the Netherlands, where they had to contend with the terrible leaders of the Walloons; men whose character may be inferred from their names, as the Boar of the Ardennes" and "the Bull-calf of Bouvignes." These leaders, with the Prince of Chimai and others, invaded Luxemburg with 10,000 men. Maximilian himself entered Artois and Hainault, and completely defeated the French at Guinegate, a hill near Térouenne in Artois; but he neglected to make any good use of his victory, which, in fact, had cost him so dear that he had been obliged to abandon the siege of Térouenne. War was still conducted in a most barbarous manner. Maximilian caused the French commandant of the little town of Malaunoy to be hanged, because his stubborn resistance had delayed the Netherland army three days; and Louis, in retaliation, hanged near fifty of his prisoners of the highest rank: seven on the spot where his commandant had been executed, and ten before the gates of each of the four towns of Douay, St. Omer, Lille, and Arras. The letters

1 Cabinet de Louis XI., ap. Martin, t. vii. p. 136.

CHAP. III.]

DEATH OF MARY OF BURGUNDY.

161

of Louis at this period abound with a sinister gaiety; he talks of nothing but hanging and making heads fly.1

The war after this period offers nothing worth recording. On August 27th, 1480, a truce was concluded for seven months, which was afterwards prolonged for a year. During this truce the King reviewed, near Pont-de-l'Arche, in Normandy, an army of 30,000 combatants, including 6,000 Swiss-the first instance on record of a camp of manoeuvre in time of peace. In 1481 died Charles du Maine; the last heir of the second Angevin House of Provence. The agreement by which Provence was to fall to the French Crown on this event has been already mentioned, and as Charles made Louis his universal heir, Anjou and Maine also fell to him, as well as the claims of the Angevin House on Naples: a fatal legacy, which Louis XI.'s practical and prosaic mind neglected to pursue, but which was destined to be the source of many misfortunes to his successors. René had died in the previous year. The annexation of Provence with its ports made France a great Mediterranean Power.

Another important death was that of Mary of Burgundy, March 27th, 1482, in consequence of a fall from her horse at a hawking party near Bruges. She left a son and a daughter, Philip and Margaret; a second son, born in September, 1481, had died immediately after baptism. Mary with her last breath recommended her husband to the Flemings as the guardian of her son Philip, now four years of age; but they erected a kind of Republic, and paid not the slightest heed to Maximilian. He was recognized, indeed, as Regent in Hainault, Namur, Brabant, and some other lands where the Kabbeljauwen, or democratic party prevailed; but the Hoeks, or aristocrats, were against him, and the Flemings would not hear of his guardianship. The citizens of Ghent seized the person of young Philip, and the Flemish Notables, supported by a cabal long since entered into with the French King, appointed a regency of five nobles, who immediately began negotiations for peace with France. They opposed Maximilian on all points, even the disposal of his daughter, whom they wished to betroth to the Dauphin, and to send into France for her education.

2

The health of Louis was now fast declining. He had been

' Martin, t. vii. p. 130.

These two parties sprang up in Holland after the death of William IV., Count of Hainault, in 1345; with whom expired the Avesnes line of Hainault, which since 1300 had held also Holland and Zealand. The original principles of

these parties are not known, but at a later period the Kabbeljauwen, or Cod-fish party, represented the municipal faction, while the Hocks (hooks) were the nobles, who were to catch and control them. Motley, Dutch Rep. vol. i. p. 40.

162

LOUIS XI. AT PLESSIS.

[CHAP. III. struck with an apoplexy, which had impaired his mental as well as his bodily faculties, and had reduced him to a living skeleton; yet he still persisted in directing everything. He was grown so suspicious that he avoided all the large towns, and at length almost entirely confined himself to his Castle at Montils-lezTours, in Touraine, which, from the triple fortification of ditch, rampart, and palisades with which he surrounded it, obtained the name of Plessis. Forty crossbow-men lurked constantly in the entrenchment, and during the night shot at everybody who approached; while a strong guard surrounded the Castle and occupied the rooms. All round Plessis were to be seen corpses hanging on the trees; for Tristan l'Ermite, Provost of the Maréchaux, whom Louis called his compère, or gossip, caused persons to be tortured and hanged without much troubling himself for proofs of their misdeeds."

3

Louis had sent his wife into Dauphiné; his son was educating, or rather growing up without education, at his birthplace, the Castle of Amboise. Louis was accustomed to say that he would always be wise enough if he knew these five Latin words: Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare. Even Louis's daughter Anne, and her husband, the Sire de Beaujeu, were rarely permitted to see the King, though they had always been faithful and affectionate. He was attended only by astrologers and physicians, and some of those low people in whose society he delighted. In order to divert himself, he sent for rare animals from distant climes, and hired musicians and peasants, who danced before him the dances of their countries. From the King's fear of death, Jacques Coithier, his physician, gained a great ascendency over him, and being a brutal and avaricious man, extorted 10,000 gold crowns a month, besides making the King give him several lordships and the presidency of the Chambre des Comptes. Pope Sixtus IV., aware of the King's abject superstition, sent him so many relics from Rome that the people became riotous at the spoliation of the churches. Among them were the corporal, or linen cloth, on which "Monseigneur St. Pierre" had said Mass, the rods of Moses and Aaron, &c. Yet, which is a most singular trait in his character, Louis remained to the day of his death inaccessible to the influence of the clergy.

In Low Latin, Plexitium, enclosure (locus undique clausus, Ducange).

2 Such is the account of Claude de Seissel, which, from his enmity to Louis, may be a little exaggerated; but Comines

shows that great cruelties were exercised at Plessis and elsewhere. See Martin, t. vii. p. 145.

3 "He who cannot dissemble, knows not how to rule."