The style of the banquets given on grand occasions was regulated on a scale of almost puerile splendour. The banquet of vows given at Lille, in the year 1453, and so called from the obligations entered into by some of the nobles to accompany Philip in a new crusade against the infidels, showed a succession of costly fooleries, most amusing in the detail given by an eye-witness, the minutest of the chroniclers, but unluckily too long to find a place in our pages.* * Such excessive luxury naturally led to great corruption of manners and the commission of terrible crimes. During the reign of Philip de Mâle, there were committed in the city of Ghent and its outskirts, in less than a year, above 1400 murders in gambling-houses and other resorts of debauchery. As early as the tenth century, the petty sovereigns established on the ruins of the empire of Charlemagne began the independent coining of money; and the various provinces were during the rest of this epoch inundated with a most embarrassing variety of gold, silver, and copper. Even in ages of comparative darkness, literature made feeble efforts to burst through the entangled weeds of superstition, ignorance, and war. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries history was greatly cultivated; and Froissart, Monstrelet, Oliver de la Marche, and Philip de Comines, gave to their chronicles and memoirs a charm of style since their days almost unrivalled. Poetry began to be followed with success in the Netherlands, in the Dutch, Flemish, and French languages; and even before the institution of the Floral Games in France, Belgium possessed its chambers of rhetoric (rederykkamers), which laboured to keep alive the sacred flame of poetry with more zeal than success. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these societies were established in almost every burgh of Flanders and Brabant; the principal towns possessing several at once.‡ The arts in their several branches made considerable + Oudegherst, t. ii. *See Oliver de la Marche, 1. i. f. 29. 1555. THE FINE ARTS. 77 progress in the Netherlands during this epoch. Architecture was greatly cultivated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; most of the cathedrals and town houses being constructed in that age. Their vastness, solidity, and beauty of design and execution, make them still speaking monuments of the stern magnificence and finished taste of the times. The patronage of Philip the Good, Charles the Rash, and Margaret of Austria, brought music into fashion, and led to its cultivation in a remarkable degree. The first musicians of France were drawn from Flanders; and other professors from that country acquired great celebrity, in Italy for their scientific improvements in their delightful art.* Painting, which had languished before the fifteenth century, sprung at once into a new existence from the invention of John Van Eyck, known better by the name of John of Bruges. His accidental discovery of the art of painting in oil quickly spread over Europe, and served to perpetuate to all time the records of the genius which has bequeathed its vivid impressions to the world. Painting on glass, polishing diamonds, the Carillon, lace, and tapestry, were among the inventions which owed their birth to the Netherlands in these ages, when the faculties of mankind sought so many new channels for mechanical development. The discovery of a new world by Columbus and other eminent navigators gave a fresh and powerful impulse to European talent, by affording an immense reservoir for its reward. The town of Antwerp was, during the reign of Charles V., the outlet for the industry of Europe, and the receptacle for the productions of all the nations of the earth. port was so often crowded with vessels, that each successive fleet was obliged to wait long in the Scheldt before it could obtain admission for the discharge of its cargoes. The university of Louvain, that great nursery of science, was founded in 1425, and served greatly to the spread of knowledge, although it degenerated into the hotbed of those fierce disputes which stamped on theology the * Guicciardini. Its degradation of bigotry, and drew down odium on a study that, if purely practised, ought only to inspire veneration. Charles V. was the first to establish a solid plan of government, instead of the constant fluctuations in the He caused management of justice, police, and finance. the edicts of the various sovereigns, and the municipal usages, to be embodied into a system of laws; and thus gave stability and method to the enjoyment of the prosperity in which he left his dominions. CHAP. VII. 1555-1566. FROM THE ACCESSION OF PHILIP II. OF SPAIN TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE INQUISITION IN THE NETHERLANDS. IT has been shown that the Netherlands were never in a more flourishing state than at the accession of Philip II. The external relations of the country presented an aspect of prosperity and peace. England was closely allied to it by queen Mary's marriage with Philip; France, fatigued with war, had just concluded with it a five years' truce; Germany, paralysed by religious dissensions, exhausted itself in domestic quarrels; the other states were too distant or too weak to inspire any uneasiness; and nothing appeared wanting for the public weal. Nevertheless there was something dangerous and alarming in the situation of the Low Countries; but the danger consisted wholly in the connection between the monarch and the people, and the alarm was not sounded till the mischief was beyond remedy. From the time that Charles V. was called to reign over Spain, he may be said to have been virtually lost to the country of his birth. He was no longer a mere duke of Brabant or Limberg, a count of Flanders or Holland; he was also king of Castile, Aragon, Leon, and Navarre, of Naples, and of Sicily. These various kingdoms had interests evidently opposed to those of the 1555. PHILIP II. 79 Low Countries, and forms of government far different. It was scarcely to be doubted that the absolute monarch of so many people would look with a jealous eye on the institutions of those provinces which placed limits to his power; and the natural consequence was, that he who was a legitimate king in the south soon degenerated into a usurping master in the north. But during the reign of Charles the danger was in some measure lessened, or at least concealed from public view, by the apparent facility with which he submitted to and observed the laws and customs of his native country. With Philip the case was far different, and the results too obvious. Uninformed on the Belgian character, despising the state of manners, and ignorant of the language, no sympathy attached him to the people. He brought with him to the throne all the hostile prejudices of a foreigner, without one of the kindly or considerate feelings of a compatriot. Spain, where this young prince had hitherto passed his life, was in some degree excluded from European civilisation. A contest of seven centuries between the Mahomedan tribes and the descendants of the Visigoths, cruel like all civil wars, and, like all those of religion, not merely a contest of rulers, but essentially of the people, had given to the manners and feelings of this unhappy country a deep stamp of barbarity. The ferocity of military chieftains had become the basis of the government and laws. The Christian kings had adopted the perfidious and bloody system of the despotic sultans they replaced. Magnificence and tyranny, power and cruelty, wisdom and dissimulation, respect and fear, were inseparably associated in the minds of a people so governed. They comprehended nothing in religion but a God armed with omnipotence and vengeance, or in politics but a king as terrible as the deity he represented. Philip, bred in this school of slavish superstition, taught that he was the despot for whom it was formed, familiar with the degrading tactics of eastern tyranny, was at once the most contemptible and unfortunate of men. Isolated from his kind, and wishing to appear superior to those beyond whom his station had placed him, he was insensible to the affections which soften and ennoble human nature. He was perpetually filled with one idea that of his greatness; he had but one ambition that of command; but one enjoyment—that of exciting fear. Victim to this revolting selfishness, his heart was never free from care; and the bitter melancholy of his character seemed to nourish a desire of evil-doing, which irritated suffering often produces in man. Deceit and The blood were his greatest, if not his only, delights. religious zeal which he affected, or felt, showed itself but in acts of cruelty; and the fanatic bigotry which inspired him formed the strongest contrast to the divine spirit of Christianity. Nature had endowed this ferocious being with wonderful penetration and unusual self-command; the first revealing to him the views of others, and the latter giving him the surest means of counteracting them, by enabling him to control himself. Although ignorant, he had a prodigious instinct of cunning. He wanted courage, but its place was supplied by the harsh obstinacy of wounded pride. All the corruptions of intrigue were familiar to him; yet he often failed in his most deeplaid designs, at the very moment of their apparent success, by the recoil of the bad faith and treachery with which his plans were overcharged. Such was the man who now began that terrible reign which menaced utter ruin to the national prosperity of the Netherlands. His father had already sapped its foundations, by encouraging foreign manners and ideas among the nobility, and dazzling them with the hope of the honours and wealth which he had at his disposal abroad. His severe edicts against heresy had also begun to accustom the nation to religious discords and hatred. Philip soon enlarged on what Charles had commenced, and he unmercifully sacrificed the well-being of a people to the worst objects of his selfish ambition. Philip had only once visited the Netherlands before |