GHENT
The Banquet Hall, Château des Comtes.
Charles V. was born at Ghent in the Cour des Princes, a magnificent palace, of which nothing but a single gateway now remains. John of Gaunt (or Ghent) was born here, too. Here took place the marriage of the Archduke Maximilian to Mary of Burgundy, which gave the Netherlands to the House of Austria. And here, in the Carthusian monastery in the Rue des Chartreux, in a room which is now one of the refectories, Lord Gambier, as Ambassador for George III., signed, on Christmas Eve, 1814, the articles of peace which put an end to the war between Great Britain and the United States of America.
Everywhere, however, in Flanders the chief connecting-link between the past and the present is to be found at the Hôtel de Ville, the centre of the civic life; and it would be hard to find in all the Netherlands, except at Brussels, a more splendid example of Gothic architecture than the north side of the Hôtel de Ville at Ghent.
Within, on the walls of a great hall, the Salle des États, is a tablet in memory of the famous 'Pacification of Ghent,' signed there in 1576, when the leaders of the Dutch and Catholic Netherlands united for the purpose of securing civil and religious liberty and the downfall of the Spanish oppression. Opposite this tablet is a window, through which one steps on to a small balcony where proclamations were made of war, or peace, or royal marriages, and laws were promulgated, in olden times. In another part of the building the twelve Catholics, thirteen Liberals, and fourteen Socialists, who (1907) make up the Council of to-day, meet and debate, in a Gothic hall of the fifteenth century, with the Burgomaster in the chair. The civil marriages, which by the Belgian Constitution of 1831 must always precede the religious ceremony in church, take place in an old chapel of 1574, where there is a large picture by Wauters of Mary of Burgundy asking the burghers of Ghent to pardon one of her Ministers. Just outside the door of this Salle des Mariages a painting of the last moments of Count Egmont and Count Horn hangs in a passage, with a roof 500 years old, leading to the offices of the Tramway Company. Thus the everyday business of the town is conducted in the midst of the memorials of the past.
GHENT
Béguinage de Mont St. Amand.
In front of the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville there used to be a wide, open space, in which the burghers assembled; but now the ground is occupied by a row of houses (the Rue Haut-Port), intersected by narrow streets, one of which leads to the Marché de Vendredi, the scene of the greatest events in the history of Ghent. This is a large square, surrounded by a double row of trees, in the middle of which is a statue of Jacques van Artevelde, the 'Brewer of Ghent,' who stands with arm up-raised, pointing to the west, as if to show his fellow-citizens that help was coming from England, or that the enemy was on the march from France.