Ralph Adams Cram

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:

“Ci-gist Margot, la gentile demoiselle
Qu’eut deux maris, et ci mourut pucelle.”

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

THE TOWER OF ST. ROMBAUT, MALINES

along the pavement and cried three times in a loud voice: “Le Roi est mort!” Raising it again he cried again: “Vive don Charles, par la grace Dieu, Archiduc d’Autrice, Prince des Espagnes!” and without a pause a herald continued, raising his great banner from the ground, “de Bourbon, de Lostric, et de Brabant”; and a second, “Comte de Flandres, d’Arethorys, de Bourgone, Palatin d’Haynault, de Hollande, de Zelande, de Namur, et de Zutphen!” and a third continued the long list, and a fourth, the last ending: “Marquis du Sainct Empire, Seigneur de Frise, de Salins, et de Malines!”

So the future Lord of the World entered into his inheritance at the age of seven, and as always, without a murmur or a protest, Margaret left her oratory, turned from her slowly rising shrine, and went into Flanders to be guardian for the future Emperor, to train him for his task, and meantime to administer for him one of the most turbulent, if rich and beautiful, dominions of his patrimony.

Bruges and Ghent were too uncertain in their temper as the result of an uncontrolled guild system and its inevitable democracy, inorganic and chaotic. Moreover, Margaret herself had been educated in Malines by her grandmother, Margaret of York, widow of Charles the Bold, so to Malines she came with four of her little nephews and nieces, and was received with great rejoicing, taking up her residence in a very splendid palace, the HÔtel de Savoy, portions of which still remain and are used as a Palais de Justice.

Malines in 1507 was a very different city from that of to-day; as we could have seen it a year ago with its narrow and winding streets, its fragments of old ruins, its little gabled houses, we loved it for its quaintness and its modest picturesqueness which formed a kind of foil to the vast tower of St. Rombaut, lifting like a truncated obelisk above a low plain. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it was, like the other great cities of Flanders and Brabant, a place of palaces and gardens, a courtly and splendid city, rich, busy, magnificent. In the night of the “Spanish Fury” in Antwerp it is of record that amongst other proud buildings, five hundred palaces of marble or chiselled stone were destroyed, and this gives some idea of the nature of the other cities that rivalled and exceeded Antwerp in magnificence. Malines, when the Duchess Margaret took up her abode there, was no village of dark and dirty little streets, but a city of palaces, far finer than London, or even Paris, and a fitting residence for a princely court and for the future Emperor.

The new Regent made it more magnificent than ever; it was a time when five centuries of mediÆval culture were blooming in beauty and great learning, and the beneficent qualities of the early, or Christian Renaissance, were uniting with all that had come from an epoch whose term had already arrived. In Italy the Renaissance had rotted into a poison, but the virus had penetrated only a little way into the veins of Europe. The Papacy was rotten to the core, the Medici were cloaking their pestilential tyranny and their glorification of material gain in the fine vesture of learning and Æsthetics. Machiavelli was dethroning Christian ethics and substituting efficiency in its place, but the Christian Renaissance was still fighting its losing battle through Cardinal Cusa, Sir Thomas More, and Erasmus. DÜrer, Holbein, Hans Sachs were giving a new glory to at least two of the arts in Germany, and as yet Luther was no more than a threat, Wolsey a rising star whose balefulness was not apparent, Calvin unheard of, Henry VIII a splendid prince shortly to be proclaimed “Defender of the Faith” he was so soon to cast down into the mire.

In the domains of Margaret of Malines the afterglow of Catholic culture was still golden and gracious, and while she defended the interests and the welfare of the principality she held in trust with a vigour and a persistency that threw into the shade the lesser abilities of her male predecessors, she made of her city a new centre of learning and righteousness. Here came Louis Vives and Adrian, Archbishop of Utrecht, later the Pope of a year who, had he lived, might have reformed the Church and made the Protestant Reformation innocuous; Erasmus of Rotterdam, that engaging character who could have matched and worsted Luther, and done his work better than he, had he possessed the sincerity and the consecration of a martyr; “Cornelius Agrippa,” MassÉ, Everard, Molinet, Renacle de Florienne, and other lesser lights. Mabuse, Van Orley, Coxcie came as painters to produce the altar-pieces and portraits desired by the Regent and her court; composers and musicians sought her patronage, for she had a passionate love for music of all sorts and wrote many poems and songs which they set after the fashion of the time. Her interest in architecture was intense, and she made Rombaut Keldermans her court architect, charging him amongst other things with the completion of the vast tower of the church of his name-saint, begun by his direct ancestor Jan in 1452. This was a famous family of master masons, Jan, with his brother AndrÉ, Mathieu, Antoine, and later Antoine II, Rombaut, and Laurent. The designs for the completion of St. Rombaut’s tower and also for a great HÔtel de Ville are still preserved, and in vision one can see them carried out by and by in a new and regenerated Malines under a new and regenerated civilisation. As a matter of fact, the stone for St. Rombaut’s spire was already cut and on the ground when the fortunes of Flanders changed, and in 1582 it was all seized by the Prince of Orange, and carried away to build a new town at Willemstadt. During Margaret’s regency, the great Cathedral of Ste. Gudule at Brussels was built, the good part of the Ghent HÔtel de Ville, the belfry of Bruges, the spire of Antwerp, as well as innumerable other great works that perished at the hands of the Spaniards, the Calvinists, and the French devils of the Revolution.

As a collector of books, pictures, works of art of all kinds she was indefatigable. In her own house, which was a true palace of art, were Van Eycks, Memlings, Van der Weydens, Dierick Bouts, most of which succumbed long ago to ignorance and vandalism. There were priceless tapestries without end, sequences of six or more: The Life of Queen Esther, the Story of the Three Kings, of the Earthly Paradise, of Arcadia; La CitÉ des Dames, the History of the Cid, of Alexander, of St. Helena. An inventory of the palace art still exists and reads like a story out of the Arabian Nights; we here find catalogued wonderful carpets and rugs; armour inlaid with gold and silver; caskets, clocks, vases of precious metals, carved and engraved gems, precious marbles, jasper, ivory, alabaster, chalcedony; gold-and-silver plate set with precious stones. As for her private library it was a treasure-house and a student’s sanctuary. There were one hundred and fifty vellum volumes illumined with colours and gold and bound in velvet, gilded leather, metal studded with gems; there were three editions of Aristotle, four of Livy, with the works of Ovid, Seneca, CÆsar. There was a large collection of theological and moral works, decretals and digests in Latin and French, the works of St. Augustine, Lives of Saints, Bibles, missals, breviaries, books of hours, Gospels, Testaments. Froissart was there, with all the old Arthurian romances, as well as the “Golden Legend,” “Le Livre de Tresor,” “le Mirroir du Monde,” “le Mirroir des Dames”; books on hunting, falconry, chess, fashions. All these were illumined manuscripts, but printing was already an industry, and what Margaret had in this line we can only guess, as this particular catalogue is gone.

It was in this wonderful palace, set in the midst of many other palaces in a rich and courtly city, where the streets were always full of the pageantry of the iridescent mingling of an ending mediÆvalism and an unfolding Renaissance, that Margaret lived for a quarter of a century, training the little princes and princesses, administering the very complicated affairs of her state, defending it against aggression, composing its internal differences, giving aid to the sick, the suffering, and the disquieted in mind and soul, conversing with the philosophers, poets, and theologians she had drawn from many sources, and all the time keeping architects, painters, sculptors, craftsmen busy in adding to the wealth of beauty already superabundant in the Netherlands.

Flanders and Brabant have always been fortunate when women ruled in the place of men and never more so than under Margaret of Malines. She guarded with the most jealous care every just interest of her people, beating at the outset Henry VII of England in a diplomatic contest, but later refusing to marry the thrifty monarch (“They have tried to marry me three times, but my luck is bad.”), bringing Charles of Guelders to rights, aiding in the defeat of France by her father and young Prince Henry of England at the Battle of the Spurs, but on the whole maintaining an unwonted peace.

Not for a thousand years had there been a time more momentous than the years of Margaret’s regency; more complicated in its conflicting currents, more amazing in its possibilities and in the ideas that were brought forth. The Renaissance was in the saddle in Italy, riding the Church and society to their fall; in Germany Protestantism was claiming and fighting for the succession, while France was following Italy in its progressive corruption, England still standing firm behind her Channel cliffs that seemed so well to defend her against spiritual as well as physical invasion. All things were changing, a new era was establishing itself, but Maximilian was not content to see the old depart without a struggle, nor was his son Charles when he succeeded him. In the voluminous correspondence that has been preserved between the Emperor and his Regent of the Netherlands there is an astounding letter which reveals the almost insane lengths to which the imagination could go in these overstimulated times; in it Maximilian confesses that he has a great scheme for the redemption of Europe and it is this: he, himself, is to be made a kind of coadjutor to the Pope (Julius II, then ill), whereupon he will surrender the Empire to his son Charles, and then when Julius shall die, be made Pope in his place, thus uniting all spiritual and temporal power in the persons of the Hapsburg father and son!

He wouldn’t have made a bad Pope, this shrewd, crusading, idealistic Maximilian, certainly he would have been a better than the Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X type then in vogue, and the vision of Maximilian in the chair of Peter, with Charles V the temporal lord of the world, is stimulating and provocative of speculation as to what might have happened. However, it all came to nothing; Julius recovered, and was succeeded in 1513 by Leo X, who reigned furiously for eight years and then died, to be succeeded, not by Wolsey, who was exerting every diplomatic and pecuniary agency to gain the prize, not by a Cardinal of the Medici or the Colonna, but by an obscure recluse, Adrian, sometime Archbishop of Utrecht, a gentle professor at Louvain whom Maximilian had discovered and sent to Malines to help educate the future Charles V, and who had since been immured in Spain as Cardinal of Tortosa.

It was one of those kaleidoscopic phenomena that gave an exceeding vivacity to the age. Into the midst of a line of Popes distinguished for their highly developed and quite artificial taste, their rapacity and simony, their persistent nepotism and their serene profligacy, came suddenly a shy, ascetic student, pious, austere, and simple. Into the Vatican of an Alexander VI and Leo X he came with his old Flemish housekeeper, to the horror of the curia, and, we may believe, the sympathetic amusement of the angels. For a moment it seemed as though the ideal of Maximilian was to be attained by more orthodox methods. Adrian VI set himself to the task of reforming not alone the curia but the whole Church; to regenerate Catholicism on Catholic lines, defeat Protestantism in its own field, restore peace to the world. Destiny, however, is not to be escaped; the world had busily made its bed and in it it was destined to lie. One by one each young and righteous prince had been taken away by death before he could set his lance in rest against the common enemy, and now the anomalous Pope was denied his self-appointed task. In less than two years he was dead, Clement VII reigned in his stead, and the world, having taken a long breath of relief, went on very much as before, to its inescapable destiny.

When he was fifteen years old Charles formally took over the government of the Netherlands and four years later he was elected to the Empire, becoming Charles V, but Margaret still remained at the head of the Council of Regency of the Netherlands. In the wars between the Emperor and Francis I, the Netherlands escaped as the fighting was elsewhere, and their peace and prosperity remained practically unbroken. In the end Margaret crowned her career by initiating and completing the “Ladies’ Peace,” which resulted in the treaty of Cambrai. Francis I had already been completely beaten by the Emperor, renouncing his claims over Flanders and Artois and promising to keep the peace, but he promptly broke all his engagements and had to be beaten again, very thoroughly this time, with further disastrous results to the remains of Christian culture, for Clement VII had joined with Francis against the Empire, and Rome was stormed and sacked by the lawless troops of the Constable of Bourbon, unfortunately killed in the assault, amidst appalling scenes of murder, arson, and pillage, when untold wealth of ancient art was utterly destroyed. The whole war was a scandal on the name of decency and more than Margaret and the other decent women could bear, so she proposed to the Emperor that she should undertake to make peace, and actually succeeded in doing so, with the aid of Louise of Savoy, mother of King Francis, Marguerite of France, Queen of Navarre, and Marie of Luxembourg, Countess of VendÔme.

Margaret’s work was apparently finished. All her brother’s children had been guarded, educated, and married, Eleanore to the King of Portugal, Isabelle to the King of Denmark, Marie to the King of Hungary, while Ferdinand who had been educated in Spain had married Anne of Hungary and received from his brother, the Emperor, the throne of Austria, to which were added Bohemia and Hungary after the great beating back of the Turks from Vienna in 1529, since King Louis, husband of Marie, had lost his life in the terrible disaster of the battle of Mohacs in 1526, when for the moment the Moslems had been victorious and had threatened all Europe from the field where 20,000 had laid down their lives in a vain attempt to stem the heathen tide.

As for her imperial nephew Charles, he was now the unquestioned head of the Holy Roman Empire and leader of Christendom; on February 24, 1530, he was solemnly crowned by the Pope, in Bologna, with the Iron Crown of Lombardy and the crown of Charlemagne. Peace of sorts, had settled on Europe, and it was a peace of Margaret’s own making. The Lutheran heresy was sullen and threatening, but thus far there was no actual violence. There was a pause in the ominous progress of events, and tired, apprehensive Margaret determined to resign her charge to the Emperor, who was coming from his crowning to visit her in Malines, and retire to one of the convents she herself had founded. She had earned the peace she desired, and a greater peace, which was accorded her by the grace of God, for on November 30, 1530, she died from an overdose of opium given her by her physicians in preparation for an operation that had become necessary, owing to an injury to a foot which had not been properly treated.

She died as she had lived, thoughtful for others, generous, meek in spirit, sincerely and devotedly a Catholic. All the Netherlands mourned for her as a righteous and able governor and, after the imposing funeral services in Bruges, she was carried through the snow, along the road she had followed on her wedding journey, thirty years before, to the church at Brou, where she was placed by the side of the husband, who had been hers for so few years, and for love of whom she had built the most beautiful shrine in Europe.

The church at Brou is the last of Gothic art, and Margaret of Austria, by the love of her people, Margaret of Malines, was the last of the great and righteous and pious women of the age that had made this art its own.

With the passing of Margaret, Malines ceased to be the capital of the Netherlands, but for compensation in some sort it was made an archbishopric; and though its great palaces have passed with its glory, the hoarded art and the

marvellous library of the Regent gone to feed the fires of sacrilege or enrich the galleries of the uttermost parts of the earth, though its wealth is no more and throngs of finely clad burghers and merchants no longer enrich its winding streets with the pageant of a wedded MediÆvalism and Renaissance, out of this ecclesiastical aggrandisement has come in these later days a new honour to Malines; for when war and pillage again swept it with the flames of hell, it was the Cardinal of Malines, Archbishop Mercier, who dared to stand forth and defy the spoiler, while shaming his too-cautious ecclesiastical superior, weighing, vacillating, counting costs and profits in the midst of his buzzing curia.

The Heart of Europe, pierced by the sword and shedding the life-blood that had coursed for a thousand years through the arteries of the world, knew that the hour of the eternal question had come, that the clean division between right and wrong had been cut by the sword, that once more the Voice had gone forth: “He that is not with Me is against Me,” and that there was no longer place on earth for the emasculate, the neuter, in the catchword parlance of the time, the neutral. Peter shuddered and hesitated on the throne of the Fisherman; great nations outside the widening ring of fire counted the cost and dreamed day-dreams of arbitration and pacification, but once again Malines spoke, as in the past, with the tongue of the past—and of the future. Mercier of Malines spoke for God and his own people, and for the righteousness that is eternal, as four centuries ago spoke Margaret of Malines.