Having thus for the moment discarded the trade of war, Philippe busied himself with diplomacy; purchased the defection of Albert of Nassau; concluded a secret treaty with the English King, affiancing his daughter Isabelle to the Prince of Wales, and his sister Marguerite to Edward himself. Thus on the very day when the truce expired he was enabled to pour his troops into Flanders with every anticipation of a successful and speedy issue. Nor was he doomed to disappointment. What could Guy do? Betrayed by his burghers, without friends and without cash, by the end of April he had lost all heart, and presently he was on his knees at Ardenburg before Charles of Valois, the French commander, humbly suing for peace. Absolute submission to the King’s mercy, total abandonment of the remnant of territory which he still held, and a journey to Paris along with two of his sons and fifty of his barons, there to treat face to face with the King—these were the only terms upon which Valois would consent to relinquish hostilities, but he guaranteed to Guy, in the King’s name, that if he failed to obtain peace in the course of the year, he should be free to return to Flanders. Stern as the conditions were, Guy and his little following forthwith set out for Paris, but only on their arrival there to be thrown into prison. Philippe was not bound, he said, by a treaty to which he had never assented, and presently, having obtained judgment from his lawyers that Guy had forfeited his dominions by reason of felony, he took possession of the entire county, and declared it annexed to the French crown. This was early in the year 1300. ‘The burghers of the Flemish cities,’ says a German historian, ‘had been all corrupted by the gold or the promises of the French King, who would never have dared to cross their frontiers if they had been true to their Count.’[22] The rest of this story is more intimately connected with Bruges, and it must be told at greater length.
CHAPTER XIV
Peter de Coninck
ALTHOUGH the city on the Roya had been in great measure responsible for the success of the French arms—at the very commencement of the war she had opened her gates to Philippe le Bel—she was destined to be the chief factor in the great movement which ended by chasing the French from Flanders.
Early in the spring of 1301 Philippe le Bel had resolved to make a triumphal progress through his new domains, and on the 18th of May, accompanied by his Queen, he arrived at Douai—having visited Courtrai, Audenarde, Peteghem, Ghent—where he was received with the greatest magnificence. Towards the close of the month he reached Bruges, and Bruges would fain have surpassed her rival in the cordiality and gorgeousness of her welcome. All the palaces and public buildings were hung with precious stuffs; on platforms draped with taffeta stood the wives and daughters of the burghers, arrayed in glorious apparel, and tradition tells us how the shimmer of their gems and the lustre of their silks aroused the envy of Isabelle of France. ‘I thought,’ quoth she, ‘that I alone was Queen, but here I see six hundred.’
But if the majores et potentiores were exuberant in their manifestations of loyalty, the people were dumb. In vain Philippe called the sheriffs to him, and bade them proclaim public games; no man would take part in them. Indeed, these very games were destined to be the source of the ill-fortune which afterwards befell the French.
The sheriffs essayed to place to the cost of the city companies the price of the gala uniforms expressly manufactured for the occasion. The latter refused to acknowledge the debt, and riots ensued which presently culminated in successful rebellion. In those days there dwelt in the city of Bruges a little wizened, one-eyed man who loved the people. Speaking no language but his own rude mother-tongue, he knew how to infuse so much fire into it, and to mould it into such pithy sayings, and there was so much shrewdness in his speech, and so much sense in his ugly head that, in spite of his physical infirmities and in spite of his uncouth form, his influence with them was unbounded. This man was the dean of the great Guild of Weavers, Petrus de Coninck, or, in plain English, Peter King.
What his original station in life may have been, and what public offices, if any, he may have filled, are questions, perhaps, which will never be determined. May be, as Gheldorf thinks, he was a man of noble birth who had formerly occupied some position of trust at Guy’s Court—it was by no means an unusual occurrence for Flemish noblemen in those days to become members of city companies. May be Kervyn is right in asserting that he was a son of the people; nor, if this were so, does it follow that De Coninck had not been attached to his sovereign’s household; men of doubtful origin, before and since, have sometimes been esteemed by princes, and Guy is known to have favoured his lesser folk. Perhaps he was a Flemish Karl of the Liberty of Bruges, one of those sturdy yeomen whose ancestors for generations back had, each of them, cultivated his own plot of land and held it by the strength of his own right arm.
Be this as it may, neither the baseness nor the brilliancy of De Coninck’s origin diminished or increased the esteem in which he was held by the people. They loved him for what he was, and not for what his forebears had been; and when, supported by the deans of five-and-twenty guilds, in the market-place of Bruges, beneath the shadow of the great bell tower which had just arisen from its ashes more beautiful than it was before, he thundered at the corruption and ambition of the city fathers and called them sycophants and knaves, the vast crowd which thronged the market-place rallied round him to a man, and swore to refuse the obnoxious tax—that not one groat of their hard-earned coin should find its way into the coffers of so corrupt a municipality. In vain the outraged sheriffs caused De Coninck and his comrades to be put under arrest; that very night the people burst open their prison and set them free, and when John of Ghistelle, the chief of the Leliaerts,[23] concerted with them a plot to fall on the Clauwaerts[24] unawares and cut down all their chiefs, the bell which should have signalled the work of destruction was for more than one of the plotters his own passing knell.
Somehow or other the Clauwaerts had got wind of the storm that was brewing, and as the first shrill cry of the tocsin clanged over the city, they flew to arms. Panic laid hold of the Leliaert host, and though the swiftness of their heels saved some, not a few of the leaders were reckoned amongst the slain, and others before nightfall were safely lodged in the prison which had so lately held De Coninck and his friends; but the measure of the great tribune’s vengeance was not filled up yet.
Jacques de Châtillon, the King’s lieutenant, had for days been encamped outside the city walls, but he deemed the force at his disposal too small to risk a conflict. Each day, however, was bringing him fresh recruits, and a bloody encounter was at hand, when certain men in whom each side trusted offered their mediation. Thanks to their good offices an arrangement was effected, and next day De Châtillon and his knights rode into the city at the same moment that De Coninck and his friends left it. That a man of De Coninck’s stamp should have consented to act thus is at first sight incomprehensible, but after events show that this seemingly cowardly and vacillating conduct was inspired by no mean or unworthy motive. So great were the odds against him that, if he had then hazarded an engagement, nothing short of a miracle could have saved his little band from being cut to pieces. He was well aware that if he surrendered unconditionally the best thing he could hope for would be a halter, and that with his life was linked at that juncture the liberty of Flanders. He knew, too, the man he had to deal with, and that if he gave him sufficient rope he would certainly end by hanging himself. In a word, Châtillon’s narrow, arbitrary and exasperating policy would soon drive not a few of the Lily’s staunchest supporters—for the greater number of them were only Leliaerts from self-interest—to throw in their lot with the Lion, and that then, with a united Flanders at his back, he might hope to accomplish something. These events occurred in the month of July 1301.