Three days later the Duke of Bavaria solemnly plighted his troth to the Duchess Marie in the name of Maximilian.
The reader will call to mind how one summer’s morning, at daybreak, Longfellow from the summit of the Belfry witnessed this quaint betrothal, along with many other scenes in the history of Bruges.
‘I beheld proud Maximilian
Kneeling humbly on the ground;
I beheld the gentle Marie
Hunting with her hawk and hound;
And her lighted bridal chamber
Where a duke slept with the queen,
And the armed guard around them
And the sword unsheathed between.’
The poet’s account of the proceedings is not quite accurate. There was no question of sleeping. The Duchess of Burgundy and the Duke of Bavaria placed themselves on the nuptial couch for an instant only, and, moreover, Marie was never a queen. She died before her husband was elected King of the Romans.
Four months after the betrothal, at eleven o’clock on the night of August 18 (1477), the youthful bridegroom—he was only eighteen years of age—reached Ghent, and at once waited on Marie at the Hôtel de Ten Walle, where a sumptuous banquet had been prepared for him. When he met his fiancée, note the Flemish chroniclers of the day, both she and he bowed down to the ground, and they each turned deathly pale. Sign of their cordial love said some, presage of coming woe croaked others.
Next day the marriage was celebrated very quietly (August 19, 1477) in the chapel of the Hôtel de Ten Walle, at six o’clock in the morning, in the presence of Louis of Gruthuise and Jean of Dadizeele, of whom later on. The same day Maximilian swore to respect the liberties of Ghent, and shortly afterwards he took a similar oath at Bruges, where the burghers had adorned their streets in his honour with bunting and greenery and flowers, and had everywhere traced this one device, significant alike of present misery and the expectation of brighter days: Gloriosissime Princeps defende nos ne pereamus. Alas! their hopes were doomed to disappointment. It could hardly have been otherwise. With such a feeble pilot at the helm a prosperous voyage was out of the question.
Maximilian’s faculties had developed so slowly that at the age of twelve years he had not yet learned to articulate, and it seemed probable that he would remain all his life with the intellect of a child. It was doubtless owing to the hopelessness of the task that up to this time no attempt was made to instruct him, and indeed, if his poor feeble brain had been early pestered with facts and figures, it is not unlikely that it would have altogether broken down under the strain. That he was able, however, later on not only to entirely overcome the difficulty which he had in speaking, but also to acquire an accurate knowledge of Latin, French and Italian, shows that there was no radical brain malady, though he remained, till the day of his death, unusually lacking in will power, morbid, vacillating, vain, and so given to day-dreaming that his waking visions sometimes almost amounted to hallucination. It would seem, then, that his good qualities—his kindliness of heart, his generosity, the ease with which he forgave injuries—were but the outcome of inclination, and that his shortcomings—his overweening ambition, his transparency, even whilst essaying to be most secret, his utter inability to keep his word, even when sanctioned by the most solemn oaths—were, after all, rather mental than moral defects.
Such was the man into whose keeping the honour and the freedom of Flanders were now entrusted, nor were the burghers long in discovering that the stalwart champion from whom they had hoped such great things was after all but a broken reed, and soon their enthusiastic loyalty was turned to bitter resentment.
As the war with France dragged on, and Maximilian, by his hesitancy and vacillation, continued to frustrate the plans of his generals, and render his own undoubted courage of no avail, his unpopularity increased from day to day. His lavish prodigality too was no small cause of annoyance to the thrifty burghers. Notwithstanding the hard times, they had contributed generously and without complaint to the cost of the war, and it was bad enough that the feebleness of their Sovereign should render their sacrifices unavailing, but not to be borne that he should lavish on foreign favourites those funds which they of their penury had contributed for the defence of the fatherland.
But this was not all: Maximilian was rapidly exhausting his wife’s treasure. In 1479 he had already sold to the great house of Medici no small portion of the famous Burgundian plate. Jewels of incalculable value had found their way into the hands of Foulques Portinari, who was now threatening to put them into the smelting pot if the cash for which they had been pledged were not immediately forthcoming. He had borrowed large sums from Spanish merchants at usurious rates of interest, paying sometimes as much as thirty or even forty per cent., whilst a syndicate of Bruges merchants, amongst whom was Hendrieck Nieulandt, of whom we shall again hear later on, had advanced him no less than four thousand livres de gros, and, worst of all, by the end of 1481, the famous library of the Dukes of Burgundy, ‘the richest and noblest library in the world,’ had been in great measure dispersed. No wonder that discontent was rampant in the land, and that Maximilian, or rather the men on whose advice he acted, was daily more and more hated. Presently the deputies of the communes met to consider the situation. On one point they had made up their minds: in these hard times, with trade paralysed, industry at a standstill, and the country ravaged by war, no more of their money should find its way into the pockets of foreign favourites.