The epitaph was not needed, and Margaret reached Spain at last, where she was received with wild joy, at once becoming the idol of all who met her, from Queen Isabella down. The prince was of the same temper as herself, handsome, noble in character, learned, proficient in all the arts, and they were married the moment Lent was over, in the midst of a kind of frenzy of general joy and magnificence. This was on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1497; on October 4 the fairy prince was dead of the plague, dying as he had lived his brief life of nineteen years, a gentle and perfect knight, destroying the golden dreams of his people, breaking the heart of the Queen, and leaving Margaret, heartbroken also, to await the birth of her child, who was born only to die after a single breath. The life of the girl-widow was despaired of, but she finally recovered, and in spite of the prayers of the sorrowing Queen and court, who had acquired a passionate affection for her, returned to Flanders, where her brother Philip, through a sequence of deaths in the royal family of Spain, had suddenly found his wife the heir to the vast and powerful kingdom. Margaret arrived in 1499 and two years later, again for political reasons (her spirited father now being interested in the conquest of Italy), was married to Duke Philibert of Savoy, Philibert le Beau, a figure of splendour, courage, learning, and beneficence; devoted to his people, to governmental and industrial reform, to the founding of schools, hospitals, monasteries. One looks aghast on the mortality of young and promising leaders at this particular time. They arise like splendid stars, they embody all the beneficent quality of the five centuries of mediævalism that already had come to an end; they have no kinship with the new type of the Renaissance then first showing itself—with a Henry VIII, a Francis I, a Philip II, an Alexander VI—and one by one they are blotted out of the darkening heavens. Born out of due time, after the ending of an epoch of righteousness and beauty, they seem to be taken away from a world they could not save and that could only have been for them a misery and a disappointment, as it was for Margaret’s baby nephew, Charles, who was destined to inherit the world in its chaotic desolation only to surrender it at last and seek refuge in the cloister.
So it was with this model of chivalry, Philibert the Beautiful; three years of ecstatic happiness were granted him and his duchess, Margaret, and then he also died, in the room in which he had been born, at Pont d’Ain, only twenty-four years before. Margaret withdrew at once from the world, cut off her great wealth of golden hair, and devoted herself to prayers and devotions, and to the building at Brou, in memory of the dead duke, of that matchless piece of architectural jewel work, the shrine that occupied the energies of the greatest artist-craftsmen in Europe for a period of twenty-five years, From every part of France, Flanders, Burgundy, Italy architects, painters, sculptors, glassmakers, wood-workers, craftsmen in metals were gathered together, and thus they laboured year after year, at first supervised by the Duchess Margaret from an oratory she had built where she might divide her time between intercessions for the repose of the soul of her knight and superintendence of the building that was to immortalise his memory and form the place of sepulture for him, and for her when God willed. In the money of our time the cost of this shrine, small as it is, was over $4,000,000, and it represented the ending of art as it marked the ending of a great epoch.
The peace and the withdrawal from the world the poor princess desired above everything were denied her. Two years after the death of the Duke of Savoy, Philip, the only son of Maximilian, brother of Margaret, husband of poor Dona Juana, who was destined to a life of madness, Philip, Archduke of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, King of Castile, another of the promising princes of Christendom, died at the age of twenty-eight, leaving five children, with another shortly to be born, and amongst them was the seven-year-old Charles, the heir of the world. At the solemn obsequies in the Cathedral of St. Rombaut in Malines (the same whose tower is now shattered by Prussian shells), at the end of the mass, the King-at-Arms of the Golden Fleece cast his baton
THE TOWER OF ST. ROMBAUT, MALINES
along the pavement and cried three times in a loud voice: “Le Roi est mort!” Raising it again he cried again: “Vive don Charles, par la grace Dieu, Archiduc d’Autrice, Prince des Espagnes!” and without a pause a herald continued, raising his great banner from the ground, “de Bourbon, de Lostric, et de Brabant”; and a second, “Comte de Flandres, d’Arethorys, de Bourgone, Palatin d’Haynault, de Hollande, de Zelande, de Namur, et de Zutphen!” and a third continued the long list, and a fourth, the last ending: “Marquis du Sainct Empire, Seigneur de Frise, de Salins, et de Malines!”
So the future Lord of the World entered into his inheritance at the age of seven, and as always, without a murmur or a protest, Margaret left her oratory, turned from her slowly rising shrine, and went into Flanders to be guardian for the future Emperor, to train him for his task, and meantime to administer for him one of the most turbulent, if rich and beautiful, dominions of his patrimony.
Bruges and Ghent were too uncertain in their temper as the result of an uncontrolled guild system and its inevitable democracy, inorganic and chaotic. Moreover, Margaret herself had been educated in Malines by her grandmother, Margaret of York, widow of Charles the Bold, so to Malines she came with four of her little nephews and nieces, and was received with great rejoicing, taking up her residence in a very splendid palace, the Hôtel de Savoy, portions of which still remain and are used as a Palais de Justice.