The Story of Brussels

by Ernest Gilliat-Smith

On the 1st of December 1406, full of years and good works, died Duchess Jeanne. She was the last of her generation, and the liberal traditions of the house of Louvain died with her. She had outlived the man who had so long plotted for her heritage well-nigh three years, and, as she had wished, she was succeeded by her great-nephew Anthony. Though a brave and chivalrous prince, his ideals were not the ideals of his subjects, and in consequence he was always at loggerheads with them, but when he was gathered to his fathers, struck down at Agincourt (October 25, 1415),[19] the evil days of his son John made Anthony regretted. Not that John was a vicious man, but he was physically and morally weak—de petite et foible complexion, as his secretary and intimate friend De Dynter has it; and Chastelain: 'Peu estoit enclin au harnois, et avec ce de féminin gouvernement, car en lui avoit peu de fait et peu de malice. Et pour ce, aucuns estant entour luy, qui le réoient simple, le gouvernèrent à leur prouffit et peu au sien, ne à ses pays.'[20] Herein we have the source of the difficulties which continually beset his path, difficulties of all kinds and with all sorts and conditions of persons—with his clergy, his nobles, his burghers, his common folk, and, within his own domestic circle, with his brother, his mother-in-law and his wife. She was the greatest difficulty of all, and it would have been marvellous indeed if his marriage had proved a happy one. What could there have been in common with the indolent, feeble, dull-witted John of Brabant and his brilliant and beautiful cousin Jacqueline, who had inherited, with the shrewdness and the masterful will, all the energy and all the daring of her mother's ambitious race? No more ill-assorted match could well have been devised than that which William of Holland urged with his last breath on his only daughter, the apple of his eye, who at that time was a child-widow of sixteen. With his body gangrened from the bite of a dog, and his mind confused with horror and grief at the foul deed which six weeks before had deprived Jacqueline of a husband, the dying man saw a pillar of strength in his poor little rickety nephew. He knew that when he was gone she would need a protector; he dreaded the cruel ambition of his brother, the Bishop of Liége, who, he fondly believed, would hurl himself in vain against the bed-rock of the house of Bourgogne. Jacqueline herself had no such illusion, her cousin of Brabant was known to her, her eyes were not blinded by the glamour of his race, and she was convinced he would prove a sorry champion. Moreover, she had loved the Dauphin, her first husband, with whom she had been brought up, and the tragic circumstances of his death—poisoned, as all men believed, by his uncle of Orléans—had embittered her grief at his loss, and made her the less inclined to hurry again into wedlock. But for all that the marriage took place: the family council, held shortly after William's death at Biervliet, in Zeeland (July 31, 1417), was unanimously in favour of it, and in spite of her reluctance, and in spite of the opposition from interested motives of the Bishop of Liége, the hapless Jacqueline was presently constrained to give her hand to the poor stripling whom she loathed.

On Sunday, the 1st of August 1417, John and Jacqueline publicly plighted their troth, and it was arranged that they should be united in wedlock as soon as the necessary dispensation could be obtained from the Holy See. A matter this not easy of accomplishment, owing to the opposition of the Bishop of Liége, who naturally objected to a marriage intended to prevent his making good his claim to his niece's heritage, to which he maintained he had the better right—Holland and Hainault, as imperial fiefs, being not transmissible in the female line.

This man at the family council, dissembling his real intentions, had not only acknowledged Jacqueline's right to the whole of her father's dominions and approved of the proposed match, but had actually volunteered himself to procure the requisite dispensation, and afterwards he had prevailed on the men of Dordrecht to receive him as their Sovereign; and from thence, on the 3rd of September, he had secretly sent letters to Constance representing to the Fathers assembled there for the purpose of electing a new Pontiff and other matters, that if this incestuous union were sanctioned the country would be plunged in civil war.

Appointed to the See of Liége in 1390, a dissolute boy of seventeen in sub-deacon's orders, in spite of the reiterated protests of his canons and to the no small scandal of his people, John the Pitiless had persistently refused episcopal consecration. For a sub-deacon to be freed from his vow of celibacy he knew was not impossible, perhaps, as his enemies said, it was in his mind to found a house and convert the ecclesiastical state over which he presided—a republic then in all but the name, with a mitred figurehead for president—into a lay principality to be handed down to his descendants. In any case, he would preserve a free hand in view of political eventualities. For twelve years the people waited, groaning under John's oppression, for one after another he suppressed all their liberties, and shamed by his evil life, and then, at the end of their patience, they hunted him out of the town, and chose in his place a worthier man, Thierry, son of the Lord of Perwys, who in due course received from Benedict XIII. episcopal consecration. But John the Pitiless was not the man to accept defeat, he appealed to his brother of Holland and to his brother-in-law of Burgundy, and after a long and bitter struggle he was presently reinstated. The last stand was made at Othée, in the plain of Russon, on the 23rd of September 1408, when the men of Liége were utterly routed. Amongst the eight thousand slain were Bishop Thierry and his father, the Lord of Perwys. When all was over they found their dead bodies on the battlefield, side by side and hand in hand. Better so, for John's fierce triumph was a veritable orgie of blood. Such of his victims as were laymen he beheaded or hanged, and he showed his pity for their daughters and wives and his respect for the ecclesiastical state by casting the women into the Meuse, and with them the canons whom Thierry had appointed, and the priests whom he had ordained. Then it was that the Liége men first called him Jean sans Pitié.

Such was the man who now professed himself so solicitous for the purity of family life and so fearsome lest the loosening of ecclesiastical discipline should have for its outcome war. But the Fathers of Constance were in no way deceived by his specious pleading, and as soon as they had chosen a Pope (Martin V.) the dispensation was accorded. John, however, was not yet at the end of his resources; as a prudent man he had taken care to have two strings to his bow: he had not only written to the Fathers of Constance, but also to his friend the Emperor Sigismond, who, as soon as he learnt that the brief had been dispatched, compelled the Pope by threats of imprisonment to revoke it. Embarrassing this, no doubt, to the agents of the Duke of Brabant, but they seem to have been equal to the emergency; for the clerks whose duty it was to affix the pontifical seal to the new rescript, dated Constance, January 5, 1413, conveniently forgot to do so for several days, and thus it came about that when at last it reached the interested parties the marriage had already taken place.

Edmund De Dynter, Duke John's secretary, tells us how it all happened:—Late on the evening of Thursday, March 10, 1413, the dispensation arrived at the Hague, where the Courts of Holland and Brabant and Burgundy had been anxiously awaiting it for over three weeks. The same night John and Jacqueline privately plighted their troth, and immediately after the ceremony, says Edmund De Dynter, who seems to have been present, they were conducted to the bridal chamber. Doubtless they had some inkling at the Hague of what had taken place at Constance, but in reality there was no need for haste, the newly-married couple had time to visit Mons and other towns of Hainault, where their sovereign rights were acknowledged, and Jacqueline had been welcomed as Duchess of Brabant at Brussels and Louvain and Bois-le-Duc before the second rescript was placed in the hands of Duke John. Shortly afterwards 'two venerable masters in theology' arrived at the Coudenberg, where the Court was now installed, bringing with them a sealed letter from Martin V. informing John that he might give full credence to what the bearers said. They told him that as the revocation had been extorted by force, it was to be regarded as null and void, and that as soon as the Pope had crossed the Alps and was out of the Emperor's power, he would dispatch a third rescript confirmatory of the first. And the Pope was as good as his word: in due course the promised letter arrived, dated Florence, August 27, 1418.

Though baffled in the matter of his niece's marriage, John the Pitiless had otherwise strengthened his position. The better to prosecute his claim to her heritage he had resigned his See, obtained a dispensation from his vow of celibacy, and married a rich widow—Elizabeth, Duchess of Luxembourg, step-mother to John of Brabant. Shortly afterwards the Emperor had publicly invested him with the disputed fiefs, and in Holland at least, especially among the burghers of the great towns, he had a very considerable following. Meanwhile he was still at Dordrecht, and presently he felt himself strong enough to openly declare war against Jacqueline and her husband.

The Estates of Brabant, well aware that in face of so redoubtable an adversary half measures would be useless, urged the Duke to attack Dordrecht by land and sea. John's counsellors, however, were of a different opinion. The expedition, they said, must be conducted with due regard to economy, and to expend money on ships were an altogether unnecessary outlay; and thus it came about that the siege of Dordrecht very soon had to be raised. John, who had at first taken the field, now retired to Brussels; city after city and fortress after fortress fell into the hands of his opponent; Philip of Burgundy, to whom his father, John the Fearless, absent in Paris, had left the care of his affairs in the Low Countries, offered his mediation, and a compromise was effected. On the 13th of February 1419 the Duke of Brabant ceded in fief to John the Pitiless a portion of his wife's domains, permitted him to take the title of Regent, and paid him a handsome indemnity into the bargain—100,000 English nobles.

The burghers of Brabant were enraged and disgusted, and Jacqueline was beside herself with indignation, the more so as they and she had each a personal and most intimate grievance against the men whose parsimony had caused this shame. The burghers never forgot that for years past these harpies had fattened at their expense, considering neither the interests of the State, which they starved, nor of the Sovereign, whom they cajoled and fleeced, for John never failed to apply to his towns whenever he found himself short of cash; and Jacqueline believed what was whispered at Court as to how the vilest of them, William of Assche, erst treasurer of the ducal household, now amman of Brussels, and his son-in-law, Everard T'Serclaes—the eldest son of the Deliverer—had obtained the baneful influence which they exercised over her feeble lord: Assche at the cost of his daughter's fair name, and T'Serclaes at the sacrifice of his own honour and the honour of his wife. Poor little John was bewitched seemingly by the charms of Lauretta of Assche, or at all events Jacqueline thought so, and she was proportionately jealous. But it was not these men, but that grasping old fox, Treasurer Vandenberghe, who was the first to experience the people's wrath. 'Ever swift to sweep in coin, and tardy, yea, of a truth most tardy, in the matter of payments,'[21] he it was who had been the chief promoter of the cheese-paring policy which had brought forth such disastrous results, and hence he was condemned by the Estates to exile, and declared to be for ever incapable of again holding office in Brabant. Nor was this all: Brussels and Louvain informed the Duke that they would grant him no further aid until the sentence had been carried out. It was the first passage of arms in the great struggle between John and his bonnes villes. The friends of the Duchess had been the first to strike, but her opponents were not slow to hit back. At Brussels her arch foe, William Assche, refused, quite illegally, to publish his colleague's condemnation, but the aldermen made him pay for it: they would no longer acknowledge him as amman, and flung him into gaol. Of the whole college one member only withheld his assent—Everard T'Serclaes, and in consequence he was declared to have forfeited his rights of lignage and to be for ever incapable of holding municipal office.

Meanwhile John and the Treasurer had betaken themselves to Mons, where the latter presently endured a worse punishment than exile: on the 23rd of March 1419, during the absence of the Duke and the Duchess hawking, Vandenberghe, sick and slumbering in his chamber, 'was suddenly aroused by the bastards of Holland' (Jacqueline's natural brothers), 'who very soon sent him to sleep again, and so soundly that no man shall ever wake him more; for without any respite they struck him stone dead, and forthwith went their way.' 'Spite,' says Secretary De Dynter, 'because he had stopped their pensions'; and Monstrelet adds, 'The Duchess, according to common report, was a sufficiently consenting party to what her brethren had done.'