Works of Grant Allen, page 979
Jean-sans-Peur was murdered by the Dauphin, afterwards Charles VII.; and this cousinly crime threw his son, Philippe-le-Bon, into the arms of the English. It was the policy of Burgundy and Flanders, indeed, to weaken the royal power by all possible means. Philip supported the English cause in France for many years; and it was his defection, after the Treaty of Arras in 1435, that destroyed the chances of Henry VI. on the Continent. The reign of Philippe-le-Bon, we saw, was the Augustan age of the Burgundian dynasty. (Fully to understand Burgundian art, however, you must visit Dijon as well as Brabant and Flanders.) Under Charles the Bold, the most ambitious prince of the Burgundian house, the power of the Dukes was raised for a time to its highest pitch, and then began to collapse suddenly. A constant rivalry existed between Charles and his nominal suzerain, Louis XI. It was Charles’s dream to restore or re-create the old Burgundian kingdom by annexing Lorraine, with its capital, Nancy, and conquering the rising Swiss Confederacy. He would thus have consolidated his dominions in the Netherlands with his discontinuous Duchy and County of Burgundy. He had even designs upon Provence, then as yet an independent county. Louis XI. met these attempts to create a rival state by a policy of stirring up enemies against his too powerful feudatory. In his war with the Swiss, Charles was signally defeated in the decisive battles at Granson and Morat, in 1476. In the succeeding year, he was routed and killed at Nancy, whither the Swiss had gone to help René, Duke of Lorraine, in his effort to win back his Duchy from Charles. The conquered Duke was buried at Nancy, but his body was afterwards brought to Bruges by his descendant, the Emperor Charles V., and now reposes in the splendid tomb which we have seen at Notre-Dame in that city.
This war had important results. It largely broke down the power of Burgundy. Charles’s daughter, Mary, kept the Low Countries and the County of Burgundy (Imperial); but the Duchy (French) reverted to the crown of France, with which it was ever after associated. The scheme of a great Middle Kingdom thus came to an end; and the destinies of the Low Countries were entirely altered.
We have next to consider the dynastic events by which the Low Countries passed under the rule of the House of Hapsburg. In 1477, Mary of Burgundy succeeded her father Charles as Countess of Flanders, Duchess of Brabant, etc. In the same year she was married to Maximilian of Austria, King of the Romans, son of the Emperor Frederic III. (or IV.). Maximilian was afterwards elected Emperor on his father’s death. The children of this marriage were Philip the Handsome (Philippe-le-Beau, or le-Bel; Philippus Stok), who died in 1506, and Margaret of Austria. Philip, again, married Johanna (Juana) the Mad, of Castile, and thus became King of Castile, in right of his wife. The various steps by which these different sovereignties were cumulated in the person of Philip’s son, Charles V., are so important to a proper comprehension of the subject that I venture to tabulate them.
Frederic III. (or IV.)
Charles the Bold.
ǁ
ǁ
Ferdinand
=
Isabella
Maximilian
=
Mary
(of Aragon)
ǁ
(of Castile)
(of Austria)
ǁ
(of Burgundy)
ǁ
ǁ
Johanna the Mad
=
Philippe-le-Beau
(of Spain)
ǁ
(of Burgundy and Austria)
ǁ
Charles V.
During the lifetime of Maximilian, who was afterwards Emperor, Mary, and her son Philippe-le-Beau, ruled at first in the Low Countries (for the quarrel between Maximilian and Bruges over the tutorship of Philippe, see ). After the death of Isabella of Castile, Ferdinand retired to Aragon, and Philippe ruled Castile on behalf of his insane wife, Juana. Philippe died in 1506, and his sister, Margaret of Austria, then ruled as Regent in the Netherlands (for Charles) till her death in 1530. Charles V., born at Ghent in 1500, was elected to the Empire after his grandfather, Maximilian I., and thus became at once Emperor, King of Spain, Duke of Austria, and ruler of the Low Countries. (In 1516 he succeeded Ferdinand in the Kingdom of Spain, and in 1519 was elected Emperor.)
The same series of events carried the Netherlands, quite accidentally, under Spanish rule. For Charles was an absolutist, who governed on essentially despotic principles. His conduct towards Ghent in 1539 brought affairs to a crisis. The Emperor, in pursuance of his plans against France, had demanded an enormous subsidy from the city, which the burgesses constitutionally refused to grant, meeting the unjust extortion by open rebellion. They even entered into negotiations with François Ier; who, however, with the base instinct of a brother absolutist, betrayed their secret to his enemy the Emperor. Charles actually obtained leave from François to march a Spanish army through France to punish the Flemings, and arrived with a powerful force before the rebellious city. The Ghenters demanded pardon; but Charles, deeply incensed, entered the town under arms, and took up his abode there in triumph. Alva, his ruthless Spanish commander (portrait in the Brussels Gallery), suggested that the town should be utterly destroyed; but the Emperor could not afford to part with his richest and most populous city, nor could even he endure to destroy his birth-place. He contented himself with a terrible vengeance, beheading the ringleaders, banishing the minor patriots, and forfeiting the goods of all suspected persons. The city was declared guilty of lèse-majesté, and the town magistrates, with the chiefs of the Guilds, were compelled to appear before Charles with halters round their necks, and to beg for pardon. The Emperor also ordered that no magistrate of Ghent should ever thenceforth appear in public without a halter, a badge which became with time a mere silken decoration. The privileges of the city were at the same time abolished, and the famous old bell, Roland, was removed from the Belfry.
Thenceforth Charles treated the Netherlands as a conquered Spanish territory. He dissolved the monastery of St. Bavon, and erected on its site the great Citadel, which he garrisoned with Spaniards, to repress the native love of liberty of the Flemings (see Ghent). In subsequent risings of the Low Countries, the Spaniards’ Castle, the stronghold of the alien force, was the first point to be attacked; and on it depended the issue of freedom or slavery in the Netherlands. Charles also established the Inquisition, which is said to have put to death no fewer than 100,000 persons.
In 1555, the Emperor abdicated in favour of his son Philip, known as Philip II. of Spain. But his brother Ferdinand, to whom he had resigned his Austrian dominions, was elected Emperor (having been already King of the Romans) as Ferdinand I. From his time forth, the Empire became more exclusively German, so that its connexion with Rome was almost forgotten save as a historic myth, degenerating into the mere legal fiction of a Holy Roman Empire, with nothing Roman in it. Thus, the Netherlands alone of the earlier Burgundian heritage remained in the holding of the Austrian kings of Spain, who ruled them nominally as native sovereigns, but practically as Spaniards and aliens by means of imported military garrisons.
Philip II. — austere, narrow, domineering, fanatical — remained only four years in the Netherlands, and then retired to Spain, appointing his half-sister, Margaret of Parma (illegitimate daughter of Charles V.), regent of the Low Countries (1559-1567). She resided in the Ancienne Cour at Brussels. Her minister, Granvella, Bishop of Arras, made himself so unpopular, and the measures taken against the Protestants were so severe, that the cities, ever the strongholds of liberty, showed signs of revolution. They objected to the illegal maintenance of a Spanish standing army, and also to the Inquisition. In April, 1567, as a consequence of the discontents, the Duke of Alva was sent with 10,000 men as lieutenant-general to the Netherlands, to suppress what was known as the Beggars’ League (Les Gueux), now practically headed by the Prince of Orange (William the Silent). Alva entered Brussels with his Spanish and Italian mercenaries and treacherously seized his two suspected antagonists, Count Egmont and Count Hoorn. The patriotic noblemen were imprisoned at Ghent, in the Spaniards’ Castle, were condemned to death, and finally beheaded in the Grand’ Place at Brussels. (For fuller details of the great revolutionary movement thus inaugurated, see Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, and Juste’s Le Comté d’Egmont et le Comté de Hornes.) Alva also established in Brussels his infamous “Council of Troubles,” which put to death in cold blood no less than 20,000 inoffensive burghers. His cold and impassive cruelty led to the Revolt of the United Provinces in 1568 — a general movement of all the Spanish Netherlands (as they now began to be called) to throw off the hateful yoke of Spain. Under the able leadership of William of Orange, the Flemings besieged and reduced the Spaniards’ Castle at Ghent. In the deadly struggle for freedom which ensued, the Northern Provinces (Holland), aided by their great natural advantages for defence among the flooded marshes of the Rhine delta, succeeded in casting off their allegiance to Philip. They were then known as the United Netherlands. The long and heroic contest of the Southern Provinces (Belgium) against the Spanish oppressor was not equally successful. A desperate struggle for liberty met with little result, and the Spanish sovereigns continued to govern their Belgian dominions like a conquered country. In 1578, Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma (son of Margaret), was sent as Governor to the Netherlands, where he remained in power till 1596. In the prosecution of the war against the Northern Provinces (Holland) he besieged Antwerp, and took it after fourteen months in 1585. In the “Spanish Fury” which followed, Antwerp was almost destroyed, and all its noblest buildings ruined. Nevertheless, under Parma’s rule, the other cities recovered to a certain extent their municipal freedom; though the country as a whole was still treated as a vanquished province.
The next great landmark of Belgian history is the passage of the Spanish Netherlands under Austrian rule. The first indefinite steps towards this revolution were taken in 1598, when Philip II. ceded the country as a fief to his daughter the Infanta Isabella (Clara Isabella Eugenia) on her marriage with Albert, Archduke of Austria, who held the provinces as the Spanish Governor. (Portraits of Albert and Isabella by Rubens in the Brussels Gallery.) The new rulers made the country feel to a certain extent that it was no longer treated as a mere disobedient Spanish appanage. After the troubles of the Revolt, and the cruel destruction of Antwerp by Parma, trade and manufactures began to revive. Albert and Isabella were strongly Catholic in sentiment; and it was under their régime that the greater part of the rococo churches of Antwerp and other cities were built, in the showy but debased taste of the period, and decorated with large and brilliantly-coloured altar-pieces. They also induced Rubens to settle in the Netherlands, appointed him Court painter, and allowed him to live at Antwerp, where the trade of the Low Countries was still largely concentrated. During their vice-royalty, however, Brussels became more than ever the recognised capital of the country, and the seat of the aristocracy.
After Albert’s death in 1621, the Netherlands reverted to Spain, and a dull period, without either art or real local history, supervened, though the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries were in great part fought out over these unfortunate provinces, “the cockpit of Europe.” The campaigns of Marlborough and Prince Eugene are too well-known as part of English and European history to need recapitulation here. At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Peace of Rastadt, in 1714, assigned the Spanish Netherlands to Austria, thus entailing upon the unhappy country another hundred years of foreign domination. Nevertheless, the Austrian Netherlands, as they were thenceforth called (in contradistinction to the “United Netherlands” or Holland), were on the whole tolerably well governed by the Austrian Stadtholders, who held their court at Brussels, and who were usually relations of the Imperial family. Few memorials, however, of Maria Theresa, of Joseph II., or of Léopold II. now exist in Belgium, and those few are not remarkable for beauty. It was during this relatively peaceful and law-abiding time, on the other hand, that the Upper Town of Brussels was laid out in its existing form by Guimard. As a whole, the Belgian provinces were probably better governed under Austrian rule than under any other régime up to the period of the existing independent and national monarchy.
The French Revolutionists invaded Belgium in 1794, and committed great havoc among historical buildings at Bruges and elsewhere. Indeed, they did more harm to the arts of the Netherlands than anybody else, except the Spaniards and the modern “restorers.” They also divided Belgium into nine departments; and Napoleon half sneeringly, half cynically, justified the annexation on the ground that the Low Countries were the alluvial deposit of French rivers. The Belgian States formed part of Napoleon’s composite empire till 1814, when these Southern Provinces were assigned by the Treaty of London to Holland. In 1815, during the Hundred Days, the Allied Armies had their headquarters at Brussels, and the decisive battle against Napoleon was fought at Waterloo. The Congress of Vienna once more affirmed the union of Belgium with Holland; they remained as one kingdom till the first revolutionary period in 1830. The Southern Provinces then successfully seceded from the Dutch monarchy: indeed, the attempted fusion of semi-French and Catholic Belgium with purely Teutonic and Protestant Holland was one of those foredoomed failures so dear to diplomacy. A National Congress elected Léopold of Saxe-Coburg as King of the Belgians (Roi des Belges), and the crown is now held by his son, Léopold II. For nearly seventy years Belgium has thus enjoyed, for the first time in its history, an independent and relatively popular government of its own choosing. The development of its iron and coal industries during this epoch has vastly increased its wealth and importance; while the rise of Antwerp as a great European port has also done much to develop its resources. At the present day Belgium ranks as one of the most thickly populated, richest, and on the whole most liberal-minded countries of Europe. Its neutrality is assured by the Treaty of London, and its army exists only to repel invasion in case that neutrality should ever be violated.
County and Town in England
TOGETHER WITH SOME ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE
CONTENTS
A PREFATORY NOTE
SHIRES AND COUNTIES
INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS A COUNTY?
I. SOUTH-EAST
SUSSEX
KENT AND SURREY
II. WESSEX
HAMPSHIRE
WILTS AND BERKS
DORSET
THE ISLE OF PORTLAND
SOMERSET
III. SOUTH-WEST
DEVON
CORNWALL
IV. WEST MIDLANDS
GLOUCESTERSHIRE
HEREFORDSHIRE
SHROPSHIRE
V. NORTH-WEST
CHESHIRE AND FLINT
LANCASHIRE
CUMBERLAND
VI. SOUTH MIDLANDS
OXFORDSHIRE
BEDFORDSHIRE
VII. NORTH MIDLANDS
HUNTINGDONSHIRE AND NORTHAMPTONSHIRE
NOTTINGHAMSHIRE
RUTLAND
DERBYSHIRE
VIII. NORTH-EAST
LINCOLNSHIRE
YORKSHIRE
NORTHUMBERLAND AND DURHAM
IX. EAST
NORFOLK AND SUFFOLK
CAMBRIDGESHIRE AND THE ISLE OF ELY
CITIES, TOWNS, AND BOROUGHS
INTRODUCTION: THE ORIGIN OF ENGLISH TOWNS
I. EAST
ST. ALBANS
COLCHESTER
NORWICH
II. NORTH
YORK
NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE
MANCHESTER AND SALFORD
III. SOUTH
SALISBURY
MAIDEN CASTLE AND DORCHESTER
IV. SOUTH-EAST
HASTINGS AND ST. LEONARDS
BRIGHTON
V. SOUTH-WEST
BATH
WELLS AND TAUNTON
TAVISTOCK AND PLYMOUTH
EXETER
ANNALS OF CHURNSIDE
I. KING’s PEDDINGTON
II. MANBURY CASTLE
III. THE ROMAN ROAD
IV. THE ROMAN VILLA
V. PEDDINGTON AND CHURNEY
VI. SHERBORNE LANE
VII. DANES’ HILL
VIII. DOMESDAY BOOK.
IX. THE STONE PIER
X. CHURNEY ABBEY
XI. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF KING’S PEDDINGTON
Stanford’s Geogl Estabt
A PREFATORY NOTE
The map of England is an epitome of English history, but it wants reading. This little book is an attempt by a man who had studied it lovingly to help others to get in the way of understanding it for themselves. The local story of an English county or town shows one many things that the ordinary history-books do not and often cannot attempt to notice. It makes their dry bones live. It gives meaning to a number of isolated and unconsidered facts. It has a charm of its own that attracts many who have not the opportunity of doing good historical work on a larger scale.
Grant Allen had special gifts for writing such a guide to local English history as this book really is. He had a good eye for the “lie of the land”; he was a perpetual observer, and a born expositor and interpreter. He had a first-hand knowledge of many of the documents on which much of our early history rests. He wrote brightly and clearly without seeking to efface his own individuality. He loved his subject for itself, and had thought it over in his many journeys and resting-places all over England.
It was a pleasant thing to go a walk with him. The country was to him a living being, developing under his eyes, and the history of its past was to be discovered from the conditions of its present. He would put himself into this past, as an historian must do, and could recognise the lines along which the changes had gone and were going. He could read much of the palimpsest before him. He was keen to note the survivals that are the key to so much that has now disappeared but that once existed. He was persevering and would keep a problem before him for years, watching for fresh evidence or seeking for better explanation of the evidence he already possessed. He never forgot or allowed you to forget that there is a great mass of extant historic evidence not to be found in books or even in vellums or papers. The object-lesson was dear to him, and he could make it a real means of education. Plants, trees, birds, beasts, insects, rocks and rivers, braes and banks, moors and marshes, the sea-shore and the high fells, each and all had a tale to tell, and he could translate more of the tale than most men. He had also the charm of being singularly wide-minded in historical matters (for, after all, history is a science, though a science in a rather rudimentary stage), and he was ready to test his most cherished theories and reject them if he found they would not stand the trial. Like Freeman, he was always open to conviction, and grateful to any one who would give him fresh light.
