SCHLOSS ELTZ
the other royal houses of Europe, the Reverend T. H. Passmore writes engagingly thus:
The record of this people, until the close of the fifth century, is dim and discursive. Up to that time they were more like a firework display than a people. They appear and disappear on the historic horizon confusingly, the only unifying condition being a general and most sacred sense of mission, the mission being the demolition of the universe. The first head upon which history steadily focusses its light is that of the great Clovis. He was lord of the small Salian tribe in Batavia and sacked and plundered all around him to such an extent that the other Frankish tribes who lived along the Belgic rivers were smitten with admiration and flocked to the standard of so virtuous a prince.... The pious Clovis was a born diplomatist. He was a sanguinary Teuton, a cultured Roman, and a Christian saint according to circumstances. He was great.
After clearing Gaul of the Burgundians and other Germans who still barred his progress, and wiping out the Alemanni—those chronic foes whom Rome had found invincible—Clovis listened to the prayers of his Christian wife, Clotilde, and was baptised in Rheims Cathedral by St. Remigius with three thousand of his devoted Franks, who would probably have heard of it again had they made any trouble about the matter. He does not seem, however, to have grown any nicer or kinder on this account. St. Gregory of Tours, his biographer and panegyrist, who was somewhat modestly endowed with the sense of humour, tells us gravely that on one occasion, after dismissing with prayer a synod of the Gallican Church, he quietly proceeded to butcher all the Merovingian princes. Having pushed his arms into France, he fixed on Paris as his royal seat; conquered the Goths under Alaric, his only remaining rivals; and was invested with purple tunic in St. Martin’s church at Tours. Twenty-five years after his death the Emperor Justinian generously bestowed on his sons the provinces of Gaul, which they already possessed; and most gracefully absolved its inhabitants from their allegiance to himself, which had only existed in his own august imagination. Thus the French kingdom of the Merovingians, to the generation succeeding Clovis, already included all Gaul from western France to the Rhine and their suzerainty reached to the Alps and beyond them.
Luxembourg had long been Christian after a fashion; the first Bishop of Trèves had been appointed by St. Peter himself, while the Emperor Constantine, who had lived much in the city, fostered the new religion in every way. Later, at the time of the era-making Pepin of Heristal, St. Willibrord came from England on his great mission to the heathen of Friesland, and while converting them, and much of Norway and Denmark to boot, established here at Echternach a great monastery that was his spiritual power-house, from which he drew the energy that sent him on his endless journeys and cruises, by land and sea, for the winning of souls to Christ. He did his work well, none better, and wherever he went Christianity went with him, and a new civilisation, a new culture, that remained for many centuries after he had been called to his high reward, buried in his dear abbey at Echternach and enrolled in the Kalendar of Saints.
It was a vast monastery and a magnificent one, but it is a monastery no longer; for centuries it continued to pour out from its inexhaustible Benedictine store, missionaries, prophets, priests, leaders and protectors of the people; fostering education, agriculture, the arts; establishing order, nursing a piety that found its reward in this world through the consciousness of an ever-widening civilisation, and a greater reward in heaven. Then the power and wealth grew too great for the equanimity of princes, and it was robbed by one after another, oppressed by lay abbots in commendam, its Benedictine monks driven out and secular canons intruded, and finally pillaged by recreant bishops of the new dispensation of humanism and enlightenment and by that concentration and apotheosis of the same, Le Roi Soleil, and so handed over to the emissaries of the deluge that followed him, the attractive exemplars of revolution, who swept the place clean of books and pictures and statues and all the hoarded art of a thousand years—yes, even of the poor ashes of the good saint himself—to make place a half century later for the ashes and slag of blast-furnaces set up within the ancient walls, and for the housing of soldiers and their mounts.
Still, the work could not wholly be undone, Luxembourg was a Christian state and so it remained, through fair days and foul, the fairest being perhaps those when, united to Flanders and Brabant under the Emperor Maximilian, it fell into the charge of that great lady and unofficial saint, Margaret “of Malines,” whose story I have tried to tell elsewhere.