Adolphus William Ward

“ As early as the thirteenth century Bruges, practically a port by means of its control of Sluys, had become a world's fair, and Ghent in Eastern and Ypres in Western Flanders had grown with amazing rapidity into great industrial centres of population surrounded by many other flourishing towns of which the names are now in part forgotten. With their activity and wealth had grown a sense of power and an impatience of external control for which in the Middle Ages no complete parallel could have been found on the hither side of the Alps. ”

“ Furthermore, in those centres of civic life, whose mercantile and industrial prosperity had in the Europe of the later Middle Ages been the real source of the importance of the Netherlands and of the Burgundian monarchy, that prosperity was except in certain specially favoured seaports helplessly and hopelessly on the wane; and the great communes which had of old been its most favoured seats, were, in the truthful words of a modern historian, smitten to the heart. ”

“ The lasciviousness, that pervaded the Court of Charles VII of France and made that of Edward IV a seminary of pleasant vice, readily found its way into the surroundings of Philip the Good, who had a large family of bastards, and mistresses by the score. The extravagant delights in which the nobles might share when not engaged in warlike service impoverished many and ruined some; and Charles the Bold's relations with his nobility were strained to the utmost by the military burdens which he imposed on them. ”

“ It has frequently been assumed that the progress of art and literature in the Netherlands must have benefited by the patronage of an open-handed dynasty and a sumptuous Court. But, although the Renaissance owed not a little to the goodwill of Philip the Good and his family, they either used its culture as a political expedient or (in Voltaire's phrase) treated it as a passe-temps. ”

“ Without the support of the good towns of Flanders-Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres-Philip the Bold could not have secured the hand of the richest heiress in Europe; and of the political greatness achieved by his dynasty the true foundations are to be sought in the resources of the great communes themselves, with whom it was engaged in perennial conflict, and, in a less degree, of the other towns around them. ”

“ In Holland and Zeeland the towns attained to an advanced condition of prosperity and importance later than in Brabant, just as the latter had lagged behind Flanders. Yet, though the growth of the towns in the Northern Netherlands was relatively slow, neither was their commercial and industrial progress hampered, as was the case in Germany, by too close a control on the part of transmitted interests, nor was their political life, like that of the Flemish communes, handed over to the gusts of the market-place. ”

“ The principles and policy of the Burgundian dynasty found their most skilful agents in the highly-trained lawyers who, after studying in France, at Louvain, or in the University founded by Philip in Franche Comte, held high judicial office in the Netherlands. The ground had been in some measure prepared for them, at all events in Flanders, though it was precisely here that the judicial innovations of this period met with the most stubborn resistance. ”

“ The judicial Chamber on the other hand, which came to be generally known as the Council of Flanders, was, after many shiftings of place, finally brought back to Ghent in 1452; the Council of the Counts of Holland, and that of the Dukes of Brabant, having been alike reformed on the acknowledgment of Philip's sovereignty. In each case the substance of the reform lay in the introduction, by the side of the great lords and officials previously composing the Council, of trained lawyers, devoted to the maintenance of the ducal authority, and inclined to stimulate its self-consciousness. ”

“ While in Holland and Zeeland as well as in Hainault Maximilian was at once acknowledged as guardian of his son and regent on his behalf (mambourg) , Flanders and Brabant refused to concede this position to him, except under the control in each case of a Council named by the province. Yet on every side faction was raging. At Liege William de la Marck savagely murdered the Bishop and thrust his own son into his place, defying Maximilian and the nobles of Brabant and Namur so long as he knew himself supported by France ”

“ In place of the ducal army which had ceased to exist, 100,000 men were to be levied, of whom Flanders contributed more than one-third, and the rest in proportion. Raised by means of half-obsolete feudal obligations, or as communal or rural militia, this army, though its numbers were helped out by a system of substitutes, proved inadequate to its purpose; but the fact of its levy not the less shows that the mind of the Netherlands had been made up to resist the French advance. ”

“ The economic decline of Flanders in the fifteenth century has been obscured by the glowing descriptions of luxurious life in which the Court chroniclers of Philip and Charles abound. The great industry which had filled the famous Cloth-hall of Ypres steadily declined; till about the time of the death of Mary a city population which had formerly amounted to something like 100,000 had fallen to about one-twentieth of that total. Ypres, like some other of the Flemish towns, had suffered from special causes, but there was one which fundamentally affected them all. ”

“ In the struggles of the Dukes with the communes the nobles ranged themselves readily on the side of the former down to the close of Philip's reign-notably in Flanders, where Courtray had never been forgotten. Only very gradually under him, though more abruptly under his successor, the modern notion of the sovereign throned in majestic isolation superseded the feudal conception of the prince among his peers. ”

“ Part of Hainault was already in Louis' hands, and Brabant and Flanders were alike threatened; but, now that the political situation had so decisively altered to his disadvantage, he paused. Mary, in securing the protection of which she stood in need against the contending influences around, and the popular bodies confronting her, had at the same time gained for the Netherlands the alliance of a House not less resolved upon withstanding the encroachments of France in the West of the Empire, than it was upon resisting Hungarian ambition and the Turkish danger in the East. ”

“ The share of the Netherlands in the history of the Renaissance, on the other hand, is, insofar as it has not already come under notice here, comprehended in a single name-Erasmus. The ducal Court, as has been seen, was not indifferent to intellectual abilities of many sorts and kinds; the examples of his father and half-brother were in a sense bettered by Bishop David of Utrecht, and a fresh impulse was given to the patronage of learning and its appliances by the English consort of Charles the Bold. ”

“ Before the middle of the century the proportion of the total exports of the Netherlands, estimated at between six and six and a half million of pounds Flemish, assignable to Antwerp was reckoned at eighty per cent.-that to Bruges at one-half per cent. While Antwerp had supplanted Bruges, the advance of Amsterdam was beginning to emulate that of the great Belgian city, and the mariners of Holland and Zeeland were in the North Sea and the Baltic learning to play their destined part of carriers on the ocean. ”

“ By the beginning of February, the Four Members of Flanders, the three Estates of Brabant and Hainault, and the deputies of the States of Holland were assembled at Ghent. In the hands of these representatives of the vier landen, who explicitly took it upon themselves to act on behalf of the country at large, the executive remained till the Austrian marriage, and their united action imposed upon the lady of Burgundy the grant of the great charter of Netherlands liberties, and of the special charters which supplemented it. ”

“ Neither the Emperor nor England had come forward as allies against the French invasion; and at home all was disturbance and disorder. Holland and Zeeland were once more torn by the old faction-feuds; in Gelderland Arnhem was ready to give the signal for renewed revolt; Utrecht had driven out its Burgundian Bishop. Meanwhile Flanders was exposed to the full force of the French advance; her trade and industry were at a standstill. Ghent and her sister-towns had no desire for annexation to France ”

“ The inheritance brought by Margaret of Maele to the French prince, who was the founder of the ducal dynasty, included the county of Artois, with its capital of Arras, a city of great mercantile prosperity as early as the thirteenth century, and the whole of Flanders. To the latter on the eastern side Malines (Mechlin) and Antwerp had been yielded by Brabant, and on the south certain Walloon districts, long united with France and including Lille and Douay, had been restored so as likewise to be left to his daughter by the last Count of Flanders of the native line. ”

“ The very large numbers of scholars attending its schools signally contributed throughout the Netherlands to lay the foundations of an enduring literary culture, and the fact that the teaching and training of these scholars was everywhere impregnated with the spirit of religious devotion determined the significance, to the most illustrious as well as to the humblest of them, of the advance of the New Learning. ”

“ The real holders of power in the Flemish communes were now the working population at large, divided on a system varying in the several towns into trades or handicrafts (am-bachten) ; in Brabant these trades had before the accession of Philip effected a compromise with the lignages; in Holland and Utrecht their authority was great but not overwhelming; in Liege, as has been seen, it was paramount. ”

“ The time for taking the matronly advice of her former governess, Jeanne de Commines, Dame de Hallewin, had not yet come. Very naturally, therefore, she fell back upon the counsel of the men who had been faithful to his father's interests in his last and worst days, and who still sat in her Privy Council, though differing in their policy from the majority of its members. The Chancellor Hugonet (to leave out his other titles) and the Sire d'Himbercourt,' Count of Meghem-the former a Burgundian, the latter a Picard by birth-persuaded the youthful Duchess to allow them to negotiate with France. ”

“ But long before this Amsterdam, converted into a seaport by the formation of the Zuiderzee in the thirteenth century, had risen into prominence, and by the middle of the fifteenth she had left behind all the older towns of importance-Dort, Delft, Haarlem, Alkmaar, Middelburg, and Zierikzee -while among the younger Gouda, Leiden, Schiedam, and Rotterdam were likewise active centres of industrial and mercantile life. ”

“ In the three great Flemish towns, the great mass of the trades ordinarily asserted their power by the votes of their representatives, and on critical occasions by the organised resort to arms under their banners in the market-place (wapeninghe) . By itself each trade formed not only a military, but also a social and religious unit, with its common purse for purposes of business, pleasure and charity, and often with a chapel and a hospital of its own. ”

“ The honours of that day belonged to the trades of Bruges, assisted by those of Ypres and Ghent in defiance of the prohibitions issued by their patrician authorities. And during the entire epoch of the political ascendency of the communes, their self-government was striving to establish itself on broad popular foundations. The elder Artevelde was the Pericles of Ghent, whose extraordinary self-confidence was mainly due to the hope of an effective political alliance with England, based on free commercial intercourse with her, as the chief provider of the raw material of Flemish industry. ”

“ Of a very different character were the relations, in the Netherlands, between the Renaissance and University studies. The complete separation of academical from municipal government at Louvain, and the special attention devoted there to legal studies intended to prepare for the service of the central government, went some way towards estranging that University from popular and provincial interests; but the part which she was long to play in the history of the intellectual culture of the country was determined by the identification of her interests with those of Church and Clergy. ”

“ But he had made up his mind that a calm and reasonable progress, in which scholar and statesman should go hand in hand, was the only way by which victory could be secured and a real and enduring reformation accomplished. ”

“ But the Flemish communes, satisfied with the restoration of free commercial intercourse with France, would probably have been prepared to sacrifice Namur and Hainault into the bargain, and Louis, now near his end, seemed to have lived long enough to master the House of Burgundy. Maximilian, who had been left out of the Council of four, appointed, with Ravenstein at its head, to carry on the government of Flanders with the Estates on behalf of Philip, was powerless, and unable to obtain the annual pension granted to him about this time except by compliance. ”