Malines in 1507 was a very different city from that of to-day; as we could have seen it a year ago with its narrow and winding streets, its fragments of old ruins, its little gabled houses, we loved it for its quaintness and its modest picturesqueness which formed a kind of foil to the vast tower of St. Rombaut, lifting like a truncated obelisk above a low plain. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it was, like the other great cities of Flanders and Brabant, a place of palaces and gardens, a courtly and splendid city, rich, busy, magnificent. In the night of the “Spanish Fury” in Antwerp it is of record that amongst other proud buildings, five hundred palaces of marble or chiselled stone were destroyed, and this gives some idea of the nature of the other cities that rivalled and exceeded Antwerp in magnificence. Malines, when the Duchess Margaret took up her abode there, was no village of dark and dirty little streets, but a city of palaces, far finer than London, or even Paris, and a fitting residence for a princely court and for the future Emperor.
The new Regent made it more magnificent than ever; it was a time when five centuries of mediæval culture were blooming in beauty and great learning, and the beneficent qualities of the early, or Christian Renaissance, were uniting with all that had come from an epoch whose term had already arrived. In Italy the Renaissance had rotted into a poison, but the virus had penetrated only a little way into the veins of Europe. The Papacy was rotten to the core, the Medici were cloaking their pestilential tyranny and their glorification of material gain in the fine vesture of learning and æsthetics. Machiavelli was dethroning Christian ethics and substituting efficiency in its place, but the Christian Renaissance was still fighting its losing battle through Cardinal Cusa, Sir Thomas More, and Erasmus. Dürer, Holbein, Hans Sachs were giving a new glory to at least two of the arts in Germany, and as yet Luther was no more than a threat, Wolsey a rising star whose balefulness was not apparent, Calvin unheard of, Henry VIII a splendid prince shortly to be proclaimed “Defender of the Faith” he was so soon to cast down into the mire.
In the domains of Margaret of Malines the afterglow of Catholic culture was still golden and gracious, and while she defended the interests and the welfare of the principality she held in trust with a vigour and a persistency that threw into the shade the lesser abilities of her male predecessors, she made of her city a new centre of learning and righteousness. Here came Louis Vives and Adrian, Archbishop of Utrecht, later the Pope of a year who, had he lived, might have reformed the Church and made the Protestant Reformation innocuous; Erasmus of Rotterdam, that engaging character who could have matched and worsted Luther, and done his work better than he, had he possessed the sincerity and the consecration of a martyr; “Cornelius Agrippa,” Massé, Everard, Molinet, Renacle de Florienne, and other lesser lights. Mabuse, Van Orley, Coxcie came as painters to produce the altar-pieces and portraits desired by the Regent and her court; composers and musicians sought her patronage, for she had a passionate love for music of all sorts and wrote many poems and songs which they set after the fashion of the time. Her interest in architecture was intense, and she made Rombaut Keldermans her court architect, charging him amongst other things with the completion of the vast tower of the church of his name-saint, begun by his direct ancestor Jan in 1452. This was a famous family of master masons, Jan, with his brother André, Mathieu, Antoine, and later Antoine II, Rombaut, and Laurent. The designs for the completion of St. Rombaut’s tower and also for a great Hôtel de Ville are still preserved, and in vision one can see them carried out by and by in a new and regenerated Malines under a new and regenerated civilisation. As a matter of fact, the stone for St. Rombaut’s spire was already cut and on the ground when the fortunes of Flanders changed, and in 1582 it was all seized by the Prince of Orange, and carried away to build a new town at Willemstadt. During Margaret’s regency, the great Cathedral of Ste. Gudule at Brussels was built, the good part of the Ghent Hôtel de Ville, the belfry of Bruges, the spire of Antwerp, as well as innumerable other great works that perished at the hands of the Spaniards, the Calvinists, and the French devils of the Revolution.
As a collector of books, pictures, works of art of all kinds she was indefatigable. In her own house, which was a true palace of art, were Van Eycks, Memlings, Van der Weydens, Dierick Bouts, most of which succumbed long ago to ignorance and vandalism. There were priceless tapestries without end, sequences of six or more: The Life of Queen Esther, the Story of the Three Kings, of the Earthly Paradise, of Arcadia; La Cité des Dames, the History of the Cid, of Alexander, of St. Helena. An inventory of the palace art still exists and reads like a story out of the Arabian Nights; we here find catalogued wonderful carpets and rugs; armour inlaid with gold and silver; caskets, clocks, vases of precious metals, carved and engraved gems, precious marbles, jasper, ivory, alabaster, chalcedony; gold-and-silver plate set with precious stones. As for her private library it was a treasure-house and a student’s sanctuary. There were one hundred and fifty vellum volumes illumined with colours and gold and bound in velvet, gilded leather, metal studded with gems; there were three editions of Aristotle, four of Livy, with the works of Ovid, Seneca, Cæsar. There was a large collection of theological and moral works, decretals and digests in Latin and French, the works of St. Augustine, Lives of Saints, Bibles, missals, breviaries, books of hours, Gospels, Testaments. Froissart was there, with all the old Arthurian romances, as well as the “Golden Legend,” “Le Livre de Tresor,” “le Mirroir du Monde,” “le Mirroir des Dames”; books on hunting, falconry, chess, fashions. All these were illumined manuscripts, but printing was already an industry, and what Margaret had in this line we can only guess, as this particular catalogue is gone.
It was in this wonderful palace, set in the midst of many other palaces in a rich and courtly city, where the streets were always full of the pageantry of the iridescent mingling of an ending mediævalism and an unfolding Renaissance, that Margaret lived for a quarter of a century, training the little princes and princesses, administering the very complicated affairs of her state, defending it against aggression, composing its internal differences, giving aid to the sick, the suffering, and the disquieted in mind and soul, conversing with the philosophers, poets, and theologians she had drawn from many sources, and all the time keeping architects, painters, sculptors, craftsmen busy in adding to the wealth of beauty already superabundant in the Netherlands.
Flanders and Brabant have always been fortunate when women ruled in the place of men and never more so than under Margaret of Malines. She guarded with the most jealous care every just interest of her people, beating at the outset Henry VII of England in a diplomatic contest, but later refusing to marry the thrifty monarch (“They have tried to marry me three times, but my luck is bad.”), bringing Charles of Guelders to rights, aiding in the defeat of France by her father and young Prince Henry of England at the Battle of the Spurs, but on the whole maintaining an unwonted peace.
Not for a thousand years had there been a time more momentous than the years of Margaret’s regency; more complicated in its conflicting currents, more amazing in its possibilities and in the ideas that were brought forth. The Renaissance was in the saddle in Italy, riding the Church and society to their fall; in Germany Protestantism was claiming and fighting for the succession, while France was following Italy in its progressive corruption, England still standing firm behind her Channel cliffs that seemed so well to defend her against spiritual as well as physical invasion. All things were changing, a new era was establishing itself, but Maximilian was not content to see the old depart without a struggle, nor was his son Charles when he succeeded him. In the voluminous correspondence that has been preserved between the Emperor and his Regent of the Netherlands there is an astounding letter which reveals the almost insane lengths to which the imagination could go in these overstimulated times; in it Maximilian confesses that he has a great scheme for the redemption of Europe and it is this: he, himself, is to be made a kind of coadjutor to the Pope (Julius II, then ill), whereupon he will surrender the Empire to his son Charles, and then when Julius shall die, be made Pope in his place, thus uniting all spiritual and temporal power in the persons of the Hapsburg father and son!
He wouldn’t have made a bad Pope, this shrewd, crusading, idealistic Maximilian, certainly he would have been a better than the Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X type then in vogue, and the vision of Maximilian in the chair of Peter, with Charles V the temporal lord of the world, is stimulating and provocative of speculation as to what might have happened. However, it all came to nothing; Julius recovered, and was succeeded in 1513 by Leo X, who reigned furiously for eight years and then died, to be succeeded, not by Wolsey, who was exerting every diplomatic and pecuniary agency to gain the prize, not by a Cardinal of the Medici or the Colonna, but by an obscure recluse, Adrian, sometime Archbishop of Utrecht, a gentle professor at Louvain whom Maximilian had discovered and sent to Malines to help educate the future Charles V, and who had since been immured in Spain as Cardinal of Tortosa.
It was one of those kaleidoscopic phenomena that gave an exceeding vivacity to the age. Into the midst of a line of Popes distinguished for their highly developed and quite artificial taste, their rapacity and simony, their persistent nepotism and their serene profligacy, came suddenly a shy, ascetic student, pious, austere, and simple. Into the Vatican of an Alexander VI and Leo X he came with his old Flemish housekeeper, to the horror of the curia, and, we may believe, the sympathetic amusement of the angels. For a moment it seemed as though the ideal of Maximilian was to be attained by more orthodox methods. Adrian VI set himself to the task of reforming not alone the curia but the whole Church; to regenerate Catholicism on Catholic lines, defeat Protestantism in its own field, restore peace to the world. Destiny, however, is not to be escaped; the world had busily made its bed and in it it was destined to lie. One by one each young and righteous prince had been taken away by death before he could set his lance in rest against the common enemy, and now the anomalous Pope was denied his self-appointed task. In less than two years he was dead, Clement VII reigned in his stead, and the world, having taken a long breath of relief, went on very much as before, to its inescapable destiny.
When he was fifteen years old Charles formally took over the government of the Netherlands and four years later he was elected to the Empire, becoming Charles V, but Margaret still remained at the head of the Council of Regency of the Netherlands. In the wars between the Emperor and Francis I, the Netherlands escaped as the fighting was elsewhere, and their peace and prosperity remained practically unbroken. In the end Margaret crowned her career by initiating and completing the “Ladies’ Peace,” which resulted in the treaty of Cambrai. Francis I had already been completely beaten by the Emperor, renouncing his claims over Flanders and Artois and promising to keep the peace, but he promptly broke all his engagements and had to be beaten again, very thoroughly this time, with further disastrous results to the remains of Christian culture, for Clement VII had joined with Francis against the Empire, and Rome was stormed and sacked by the lawless troops of the Constable of Bourbon, unfortunately killed in the assault, amidst appalling scenes of murder, arson, and pillage, when untold wealth of ancient art was utterly destroyed. The whole war was a scandal on the name of decency and more than Margaret and the other decent women could bear, so she proposed to the Emperor that she should undertake to make peace, and actually succeeded in doing so, with the aid of Louise of Savoy, mother of King Francis, Marguerite of France, Queen of Navarre, and Marie of Luxembourg, Countess of Vendôme.