Although it was the hour of compline when Bertulph’s messenger reached Ghent, on learning of his old friend’s dilemma, he at once made ready to start, and pushing on through the darkness, in spite of bad roads and bad weather, made such expedition that he reached Bruges before cock-crow. All was in readiness, the body had been prepared for burial—the trusty abbot had secured a conveyance which was now drawn up in a secluded corner hard by the cathedral, before daybreak he would again be free of the town, and once in the open country there was little fear of hindrance or detection.
All that remained of Charles had been placed on the bearers’ shoulders, and under the direction of Bertulph and the abbot, the weird cortège was slowly wending its way down the nave of St. Donatian’s, had indeed almost reached the great western portal, when suddenly the stillness of the early morning became a whirl of angry voices and tramping feet. There could be no mistake as to its import. Somehow or other the project had become known, and all Bruges had turned out to oppose it.
In order to understand the cause of this seemingly sudden revulsion of feeling, a word of explanation is perhaps necessary.
The whole life of Charles of Denmark is wrapped and swathed from beginning to end in mystery and contradiction. Half soldier, half saint, with his Bible in one hand, and Charlemagne’s sword ‘Joyeuse’ in the other, he flits across the stage of European history like some pale, crimson-robed phantom from another world.[10]
Was he a cunning schemer—a layer of deep plots which he never lived to carry out, or was he only a dreamer of dreams, tossed about by wayward impulses and passing fancies, this incomprehensible Dane, king’s son or scullion’s son, as the case may be, who almost accomplished so much and in reality achieved so little—this tissue of inconsistencies who usurped for himself a petty principality and despised an imperial diadem, who crushed his proud lords with a lion’s fierceness, and went barefoot to kiss the hands of beggars, this most marvellous devotee who showed himself on occasions so generous and at times appears so mean, who deprived himself of meat and raiment that he might have the more to succour the needy, and spat on his best friends and trampled them in the dust? This friend and father of churches, who all his life long lavished on them wealth, honour, obedience, and whose end, by a strange irony of fate, was at length destined to be the outcome of an unjust quarrel which he himself had forced on his own ecclesiastical chief.
Questions difficult to answer these, with the evidence at present at our disposal. Dr. Wegener thinks (p. 6) there is ground for believing that the dream of Charles’s life was to win his paternal heritage—the crown of Denmark, and that if he had lived longer he might perhaps have realized it. May be his hopes flew higher still, and that the ultimate goal of his ambition was to carry out his father’s darling project and establish once more, in all its glory, the kingdom of Canute the Great. But, however this may be, and whatever may have been Charles’s failings and his foibles and his faults, one thing is certain: his good deeds alone followed him. The hospitals and asylums which he founded, the churches and monasteries which he built, his courtesy and sweetness to the poor and the simple, the sympathy and protection which he showed to the oppressed, the lordly feasts which he made in his palace at Bruges for the blind and the halt and the maimed—these are the things which lived after him, and friend and foe alike agreed to forget the rest.
Prayers and Masses were everywhere offered for the repose of his soul, perhaps even in his honour. Bertulph himself sang ‘Requiem’ for the foe who had once been his friend, and when all was over and the poor had returned to their houses enriched by his alms, his servants found him weeping over the grave. Even Burchard sought reconciliation. Despite the ban of the Church, Pagan practices died hard with the Flemish Karls of the seaboard, and Burchard, who was a true Karl, would make his peace with Charles after the manner of his forefathers. Accompanied by a band of wild retainers from the Forest of Thor, he entered at midnight the choir of St. Donatian’s, where lay the body, and there, by the light of flaming torches, celebrated the weird Dodsisas, or banquet of the dead. Libations of wine and libations of ale were poured over the grave, and as the loving-cup passed from hand to hand each man muttered, ‘We drink to thee, Count Charles,’ and then Burchard alone knelt down on the pavement and with his lips touched the marble slab which covered his victim’s remains, saying, as he did so, ‘Accept, O shade, this kiss of peace and reconciliation, and, appeased by these our offerings, vouchsafe to lay aside all thought of enmity and vengeance.’ In a word, owing to the tragic circumstances of his death, the memory of ‘this Charles of Denmark’ was clean wiped out. The citizens of Bruges were only mindful, and to this day they are only mindful, of ‘Blessed Charles the Good.’
Such being the case, it is not to be wondered at that, in an age when relics were prized above rubies, the burghers should be loth to part with so precious a thing as the body of their martyred Count. At all hazards they would keep it, thus they averred, and with much clamour and a mighty rush they burst into the cathedral. In the midst of the uproar rumour passed from mouth to mouth that a hunchback had been actually healed, in the twinkling of an eye, there, in the midst of them all, by simply touching the holy thing they were fighting for—fresh confirmation, were any needed, of Charles’s sanctity. Bertulph indeed only laughed at the tale; that poor Charles should be able to work miracles after his death seemed to him so very improbable. But Bertulph was a sceptic, so it was said, and nobody minded him. Five hundred unimpeachable burghers could vouch for the truth of the story, and the tumult increased tenfold. The clergy themselves, either from fear or conviction, now threw in their lot with the mob, and seizing on chairs, stools, thuribles, candlesticks, anything that came to hand, laid about them manfully. What did the provost mean by taking this step without consulting their wishes? Was not St. Donatian’s as great as Blandinium, and were not the canons of Bruges as good men and true as the monks of Ghent? By God and His saints the body of Charles should never quit their cathedral! They would die first! In face of the opposition of his own clergy and the increasing fury of the mob, resistance was impossible, and Bertulph gave way, whilst Abbot Arnulph, giving thanks to God that he had escaped with a whole skin, was glad to go back to his monastery without the much-coveted treasure. This satisfied the people for the moment and they returned quietly to their homes, but in public estimation the crime of endeavouring to give Charles decent burial outside Bruges was as great a one as that of his murder, and in the sequel Bertulph had to pay dearly for it.
On the following morning (Friday, March 4), after a solemn Requiem Mass had been chanted for him in the chapel of St. Peter outside the Bourg, Charles was laid to rest in the place where he fell in front of the Lady Altar in St. Donatian’s.