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 fathe{192}r’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; medi?valism 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,{193} the only conspicuous differences between the men and women of medi?valism 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 al{194}ways 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 medi?val equality (or supremacy if you like) without it. During medi?valism 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 medi?val 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{195} 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 medi?val 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{196} 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 medi?val 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{197} 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 chateau 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{198} 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{199} 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{200} 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 medi?valism 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{201} 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{202} 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 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, Mar{204}garet 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 H?tel 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 A............