The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
constitutional change depend, while no Flemish business was to be transacted except on Flemish soil and in the Flemish tongue; the Great Privilege of Holland and Zeeland (February 17), which contained similar provisions and granted full liberty to the towns to hold “Parliaments” of their own, in conjunction with the other States of the Netherlands or not; the Great Privilege of Namur (May), and the Joyeuse Entree granted to Mary on the occasion of her being acknowledged at Leuven as Duchess of Brabant (May 29), which, while returning to the usages confirmed at the accession of Philip the Good, added new liberties and doubled the measure of restrictions upon the ducal, power.
Thai fear of France rather than any affection for the Burgundian dynasty, or even any warmth of feeling towards Mary herself, had induced the representatives of the vier landen to come to terms with her, was shown by the military preparations upon which they simultaneously agreed. 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.
Meanwhile Mary, still uncertain in which direction to turn for preservation, had sent an embassy to Louis XI, apparently just before her relations with the Flemish towns had been settled. She had little personal advice to depend upon. Her step-mother, the high-spirited Duchess Dowager Margaret, still relied on delusive hopes of English support. Mary’s kinsman, Adolf, Lord zum B^ivenstein and brother of the Duke of Cleves, was both loyal to her and popular with her subjects, but as yet chiefly intent upon securing her hand for his own son. 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. They were animated by the spirit common to lawyers and nobles in the heyday of the Burgundian rule, and shared by the Church (William de Clugny, protonotary of the Holy See, was afterwards arraigned for complicity with them). Towards France they were, attracted by a sympathy which needed no stimulus of sordid interests, whether or not they had from the first resolved that the end must be the acceptance of Louis XI’s marriage-scheme and the reabsorption of the Burgundian in the French dynasty; while they detested a policy of concessions to the several portions of the crumbling monarchy of Charles the Bold.
Louis, on his side, was resolved to secure a party in Flanders. The agent whom he had first, in spite of Commines’ warning, sent to Ghent for the purpose-no other than the notorious Olivier le Dain-had indeed been obliged to depart discomfited, and had only partially redeemed his credit by cleverly bringing into his master’s power the city of Tournay, always well disposed towards France. Louis, however, when Mary’s embassy reached him at Peronne, was at particular pains to show courtesy towards the Flemish towns in the person of the distinguished hooftman of Bruges, a member of the great patrician family of Gruuthuse. Little importance attached to the ambassadors’ offers of the cession of all the possessions given up by Louis in the Treaty of Peronne, and the recognition of his suzerainty in Artois and Flanders; and as to the real nodus of the transaction, the question of a marriage engagement between Mary and the Dauphin, they declared themselves to be without instructions. While, therefore, the embassy returned to Flanders to report, Louis seems to have, by private communications with Hugonet and d’Himbercourt, secured their adherence to the marriage-scheme. At Arras, of which he took possession in March, 1477, he received a deputation from Ghent, and-playing the kind of double game which his soul loved-revealed to them the confidence reposed by Mary in the privy councillors detested by the city.
Thus, on the return of the civic deputies to Ghent, the storm broke out. The city was already in a condition of ferment; some of the partisans of the old regime had been put to death; and the agitation, which had spread to Ypres and as far as Mons, was increased by the claims put forward at Ghent on behalf of the restoration of Liegeois independence by the Bishop of Liege, urged on by William of Aremberg, Sire de la Marck, the “Boar of the Ardennes,” and the terror of all who respected the ordinances of either God or man. Distracted by her fears, Mary seems actually to have countenanced Hugonet’s final proposal that she should quit Flanders and place herself under the protection of the French King, when at the last moment Ravenstein induced her to reveal the design. He immediately informed the representatives of the vier landen, and the deans of the trades of Ghent, and on the same night (March 4) Hugonet, d’Himbercourt and de Clugny were placed under arrest. A rumour having been spread that their liberation was to be attempted, and news having arrived of the resolute advance of the French forces, new disturbances followed; and Mary issued an ordinance naming a mixed commission of nobles and civic officials to try the accused with all due expedition (March 28). She afterwards interceded in favour of one or both of the lay prisoners (for de Clugny was saved by his benefit of clergy), and at a later date expressed her sympathy with the widow and orphans of d’Himbercourt, the extent of whose share in the Chancellor’s schemes remains unknown. After being subjected to torture, both were executed on April 3. They met with short shrift at the hands of their judges; but they cannot be said to have been sacrificed to a mere gust of democratic passion; and Mary and her Council, and the other Estates of the Netherlands assembled at Ghent, were with the city itself and the sister Flemish towns one and all involved in the responsibility of the deed.
There was now no solution left but war, and at Eastertide Louis XI advanced from Artois into Hainault. At the same time no doubt could remain as to the way in which the question of Mary’s marriage must be settled. An English engagement such as the Duchess Dowager desired was hopelessly impeded by the disagreement between the factions at Edward’s Court, one of which favoured the claims of the Duke of Clarence, while the other supported Earl Rivers, the brother of Queen Elizabeth. At Ghent there was for a time a strong wish that Mary would bestow her hand upon Adolf of Gelders, the friend of the towns, who had been liberated from prison on Charles’ death, and proclaimed Duke notwithstanding Mary’s protest. He had entered himself as a member of one of the trades of Ghent, and had been named commander of the Flemish levies against France. But, instead of gaining Mary’s hand, he was destined to fall fighting in her service before Tournay (June), leaving his children Charles and Philippa as hostages in her hands, though the former had been proclaimed Duke in Gelderland. Of Mary’s kinsmen of the Cleves family two were still talked of for her hand-the Duke’s son and subsequent successor, John, and Philip, the son of his brother Adolf zum Ravenstein. Philip had been brought up with Mary, whose father was said to have at one time favoured the idea of their future union, agreeably it was rumoured to Mary’s own wishes. But after the English project had come to naught the Duchess Dowager transferred all her influence to the only remaining suitor, the selection of whom promised high political advantage; and the choice actually fell upon Archduke Maximilian of Austria.
The vigilance of the Emperor Frederick III had long prepared this match, and even the catastrophe of Nancy had been unable to baulk his purpose. Now, while at Bruges Mary was seeking to satisfy a clamorous demand for a suppression of the pretensions of le Franc, the imperial envoys arrived to urge upon her the acceptance of the Austrian suit (April 18); and Mary formally accorded it. On May 21 Maximilian, who had been delayed by the slackness of the response made by the Estates to the imperial appeal for support of his enterprise (the Wittelsbachs were jealous about Hainault and Holland, while the King of Bohemia remembered the Luxemburg connexion), at last started on his expedition; and after passing through Louvain and Brussels, where he was well received, at the head of a body of near 8000 horsemen, arrived at Ghent. At six o’clock on the following morning his marriage with Mary was solemnised by the Bishop of Tournay, in the presence of the Count of Chimay and the hooftman of Bruges, “min jonker” of Gelders and his sister bearing the tapers before the bride. He had not come a day too soon. 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