Personal reasons also inclined Marie to favor the Austrian suitor. Maximilian had been in some sort the choice of her father, and this alone would have some weight with her. Besides, he was young; report said he was handsome: "The hairs of his august head are, after the German fashion, golden, lustrous, curiously adorned, and of becoming length. His port is lordly." And report spoke no ill of this fair young golden-haired Teuton; he might be some three years younger than Mademoiselle de Bourgogne, but he was already a man and a bold hunter, though as yet he had had no opportunity of showing whether he were capable of leading armies, a very necessary accomplishment in one who would undertake the care of Mademoiselle and her much coveted heritage. He was poor: but was not she rich enough to make up the deficiency? On the whole, Mademoiselle was so favorably impressed with what the Austrian advocates could tell her that she determined to receive the embassy then on the way to present the formal claim of Maximilian.
The Duke of Cleves, who had hopes for his own son, did his best to delay the ambassadors, and, failing that, to make Marie promise to give them an audience and then send them about their business. She had already had enough of diplomatic experience to make her cautious. The Duke of Cleves was not taken into her confidence, but was permitted to hope that Mademoiselle would not settle the matter with the Austrian envoys.
The envoys came, and were received in public audience, where their chief rehearsed the details of the negotiations between the late duke and emperor, and ended by presenting a letter written by Mademoiselle herself in acknowledgment of the betrothal, and a diamond sent by her as a token. Then Marie, to the utter dismay of the intriguers, quietly replied, of her own accord: "I wrote that letter by the wish and command of my lord and father, and sent that diamond; I own to the contents."
Marie and Maximilian were formally married on April 27th, and the people, weary of the state of uncertainty in which they had been kept, seemed content to make the best of the marriage. The prince was a German, did not speak their language or understand their customs; but then he was prepossessing, and would doubtless make as good a defender of their liberties as could be found. With the marriage, Marie practically ceased to appear as a direct participant in political affairs. Her new husband was devoted to her, and for a time things looked more encouraging for this last scion of a great race. True, Louis sent his barber-surgeon, Olivier, to protest, in the name of the suzerain, against the marriage of his feudal ward without his consent. But the Flemish nobles and their lady laughed at the barber, who really came more to spy than in the hope that this mediaeval protest would avail aught. Later, in his first battle, Maximilian completely defeated the French army under the traitor Lord Crèvecoeur, at Guinegatte, August 7, 1479.
Meanwhile, a son had been born to the young couple, and their domestic happiness was unclouded. Fortune was not to smile on them long, however, for the Flemings were constitutionally rebellious, now refusing to grant Maximilian supplies necessary for defence, till he actually had to pawn his wife's jewels, now blaming all their misfortunes on this foreigner, now distracting his attention from the still encroaching French king by riots and revolts. In the unequal contest the French were destined to win; and ere Marie had been married five years an accident cost her her life and left Maximilian almost as helpless in the hands of the Flemings as she had been. She had been hunting, a sport of which both she and Maximilian were passionately fond, when her horse threw her. The injuries might not have proved fatal if medical aid had been resorted to in time; but Marie, with pitiful false modesty, refused to submit to the examination of the surgeons, and died, after lingering three weeks, March 26, 1482. Her infant son, Philippe le Beau, remained as the nominal heir of Burgundy; but the guarding of the duchy was a hopeless task when a regency must control affairs, and so with Marie passed away the last independent ruler of the house of Burgundy, whose greatness was to be transmitted to and surpassed by the son of this Philippe, the great Emperor Charles V.
The brief and troubled life of Marie de Bourgogne affords but little opportunity for an estimate of her capabilities. She was reared under conditions the most unfavorable to the development of independence, self-reliance, and capacity for practical affairs; for feudalism, even at its best, as we have seen, produced but few women who were capable of ruling a nation, and the spectacular chivalry of the Burgundian court found no place for woman but as an angelic, gracious, beautiful spectator of its great shows, one infinitely removed by every detail of her education and of her social life from the sordid cares of life and of politics. Marie was not of that rare type that might, even under such conditions, rise to power; she was not strong enough of will to mark out a policy of her own and bend men and conditions to serve that policy. In not one of her public acts as duchess can we find that she was uninfluenced by those around her; she was indeed swayed first by one set of counsellors, then by another, the natural result being inconsistency, duplicity, and inefficiency. But where the mere woman appears, where there is room for the operation of impulses purely personal, as in the case of Hugonet and Humbercourt and in the selection of her husband, Marie displays nobler feelings; and though the cause of civilization was to be advanced by the dismemberment of the heterogeneous Burgundian duchy and the annexation of the greater part of it to France, our sympathy is not with the spider who sat spinning his meshes of intrigue in the den at Plessis-lez-Tours, but with the generous, impulsive young ruler whom we know he will fatally entangle. With Marie in Burgundy, as with the passionate and unhappy Marguerite of Anjou in England, we are inclined to forgive the ruler who could not rule, or who resorted to infamous means in her struggles to rule, when we remember that both were women brought face to face with tremendous problems and made the sport of crafty, cruel, unscrupulous foes and faithless friends.
CHAPTER XV
ANNE DE BEAUJEU:
THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE KINGDOM
C'est la moins folle femme du monde, car, de femme sage il n'y en a point (she is the least foolish woman in the world; there are no wise ones). The cynical old king, Louis XI., sums up for us in this epigram his estimate of the daughter whom he loved and trusted more than any other person of his own blood. This daughter, Anne de France, was but a young woman when her father died, but the tortuous policy and the sagacious aims of Louis XI. had become familiar to her as a mere girl, and she lived to continue and in some sort to carry to successful terminations the principal schemes cherished by her father.