Off gold and silver eat, was clad in robes
Of scarlet furred with minever, gave feasts
With minstrelsy and dancing, night and day——”
But the power of France leagued with his native sovereign was irresistible, and at the battle of Rosebeke, he laid down, at once, his usurped authority and his life.
Under the Dukes of Burgundy, the annals of these remarkable military merchants is the same continued story of broils and battles, and the union of Flanders to Austria, by the marriage of Mary of Burgundy, only brought a fresh line of combatants into the Low Countries.
In 1500, Charles V, the grandson of this ominous alliance, was born at Ghent, in the old château of the Counts of Flanders, the remains of which are still to be seen in the Place de St. Pharailde, converted into a cotton factory, the lofty chimney of which now pours its volume of smoke above the cradle of a monarch who made it his boast, that “the sun never set upon his dominions.”
With the same fiery independence of their forefathers, the “men of Ghent,” resisted the despotism of the Emperor as sturdily as they had done the exactions of their Earls and Dukes; and it was after quelling one of these insurrections, that Charles, intent on devising a punishment for their contumacy, was advised by the Duke of Alva, the future Moloch of the Netherlands under Philip II, to raze it to its foundations, when Charles replied by pointing to its towers and palaces, and asking him in a repetition of his former witticism, “combien il croyait qu’il fallait de peaux (villes) d’Espagne, pour faire un gant de cette grandeur.”
Charles, however, exacted a punishment more humiliating, if not so savage as that contemplated by the bourreau of the church, by repealing all the charters of the city, dismounting their famous bell, Roland, fining the community, and compelling the ringleaders to supplicate his mercy in their shirts, with halters round their necks, a ceremony which is erroneously said to have been commemorated by the magistrates of Ghent continuing to wear the rope, as a part of their official costume, and which is still kept alive in the distich which enumerates the characteristics of the Flemish cities:—
Nobilibus Bruxella viris—Antuerpiæ nummis
Gandavum laqueis, formosis Brugia puellis