bery. But the dominions of the free cities and of the ecclesiastical princes were in their own nature exempt from any such processes. If the Duke of Burgundy became also Duke of Brabant, the inhabitants simply passed from one line of princes to another; no change was involved in their laws or in their form of government. But as Mr. Kirk well points out, the bishopric of Lüttich could never pass by marriage, inheritance, forfeiture, or purchase. Just as little could the free Imperial city of Besançon. The duke whose dominions hemmed them in could win them only by sheer undisguised conquest, a conquest too which must necessarily change the whole framework of their government. The rights of princely government were in no way affected by the transfer, even the violent transfer, of a duchy from one duke to another; but the rights of the Church in one case, and the rights of civic freedom in the other, would have been utterly trampled underfoot by the annexation of a bishopric or a free city.

Charles too, lord of so many lordships, was also closely connected with many royal houses. In France he was not only the first feudatory of the kingdom, the Dean of the Peers of France: he was also a prince of the blood royal, with no great number of lives between him and the crown. On his mother's side he claimed descent from the royal houses of England and Portugal : he closely identified himself with England; he spoke our language; he played an active part in our politics; he seems to have cherished a hope, one perhaps not wholly unreasonable, that, among the revolutions and disputed successions of our country, the extinction of both the contending houses might at last place the island crown upon his own brow. Looking to his eastern frontier, to the states which he held of the Empire, he was beyond all comparison the most powerful of the Imperial feudatories. The next election might place him upon the throne of the Cæsars, where he would be able to reign after a very different sort from the feeble Austrian whom he aspired to succeed or to displace. Or, failing of any existing crown, he might dream of having a crown called out of oblivion for his special benefit. Burgundy might again give its name to a kingdom, and his scattered duchies and lordships might be firmly welded together under a royal scepter. Perhaps no man ever had so many dreams, dreams which in any one else would have been extravagant, naturally suggested to him by the position in which he found himself by inheritance.

VOL. XI.— -3

And now what sort of man was he who inherited so much, and whose inheritance prompted him to strive after so much more? We wish to speak of him as he was in his better days; towards the end of his life the effect of unexpected misfortunes darkened all his faults, even if it did not actually touch his

Charles was perhaps unlucky in the age in which he lived; he was certainly unlucky in the predecessor whom he succeeded and in the rival against whom he had to struggle. It may be, as Mr. Kirk says, that he was better fitted for an earlier age than that in which he lived; it is certain that he was quite unfit either to succeed Philip the Good or to contend against Lewis the Eleventh. One can have no hesitation in saying that Charles was morally a better man than his father. He had greater private virtues, and he was certainly not stained with greater public crimes. Yet Philip passed with unusual prosperity and reputation through a reign of unusual length, while the career of Charles was short and stormy, and he left an evil memory behind him. Philip, profligate as a man and unprincipled as a ruler, was still the Good Duke, who lived beloved and died regretted by his subjects. Charles, chaste and temperate in his private life, and with a nearer approach to justice and good faith in his public dealings than most princes of his time, was hated even by his own soldiers, and died unlamented by any one. As in many other men, the virtues and the vices of Charles were closely linked together. He knew no mercy either for himself or for anybody else. Austere in his personal morals and a strict avenger of vice in others, he probably made himself enemies by his very virtues, where a little genial profligacy might have made him friends. His home government was strictly just; his ear was open to the meanest petitioner, and he was ready to send the noblest offender to the scaffold. But such stern justice was not the way to make himself popular in those days. A justice which knows not how to yield or to forgive is hardly suited for fallible man in any age, and in that age Charles sometimes drew blame upon himself by acts which we should now look on as crowning him with honor. His inexorable justice refused to listen to any entreaties for the life of a gallant young noble who had murdered a man of lower degree. In this we look on him as simply discharging the first duty of a sovereign; in his own age the execution seemed to men of all ranks to be an act of remorseless cruelty. In short,

Charles, as a civil ruler, practiced none of the arts by which much worse rulers have often made themselves beloved. He was chary of gifts, of praise, of common courtesy. No wonder then that so many of his servants forsook him for a prince who at least knew how to appreciate and to reward their services.

And what Charles was as a ruler he was even more conspicuously as a captain. In warfare his discipline was terrible; he imposed indeed no hardship on the lowest sentinel which he did not equally impose upon himself; but the commander who had no kind word for any one, and a heavy punishment for the slightest offense, did not go the way to win the love of his soldiers. His cruelty towards Dinant and Lüttich did not greatly exceed-in some respects it did not equal—the ordinary cruelty of the age; but the cold and quasi judicial severity with which he planned the work of destruction is almost more repulsive than the familiar horrors of the storm and the sack.

It was his utter want of sympathy with mankind which made Charles the Bold hated, while really worse men have been beloved. The ambition of Philip the Good was more unprincipled than that of his son, but it was more moderate, and kept more carefully within the bounds of possibility. The means by which he gained large portions of his dominions, Holland and Hennegau especially, were perhaps more blameworthy than anything in the career of Charles, and in particular acts of cruelty and in violent outbursts of wrath there was little to choose between father and son. But Philip's ambition was satisfied with now and then seizing a province or two which came conveniently within his grasp; he did not keep the world constantly in commotion; he had no longing after royal or Imperial crowns, and indeed refused them when they came in his way; his rule was on the whole peaceful and beneficent, and his very annexations, when they were once made, secured large districts from the horrors of border warfare. But Charles was always planning something, and the world was always wondering what he might be planning. He attacked and annexed so widely that it was no wonder if even those whom he had no mind to attack deemed it necessary to stand ready for him.

His loftiest flights of ambition were far from being so wild and reckless as they are commonly represented; his dream of a new Burgundian kingdom was far from irrational; still less was there anything monstrous either in a great French prince

aspiring to a paramount influence in France, or in a great German prince aspiring to the crown of the Empire. But the misfortune of Charles was that he was always aspiring after something; he was always grasping at something which he had not, instead of enjoying what he had. Neither his own subjects nor strangers were allowed a moment's peace: wars with France, wars with Lüttich, Gelders annexed, Elsass purchased, Neuss besieged, Lorraine conquered, Provence bargained for, were enough to keep the whole world in commotion. The ten years of Charles' reign are as rich in events as the forty-eight years of his father.

Mr. Kirk is fond of enlarging on Charles' good faith; and for a prince of the fifteenth century, the praise is not wholly undeserved. As compared with the contemporary kings of England and France, the Duke of Burgundy may fairly pass for a man of his word. He certainly did not openly trample on oaths and obligations like Edward the Fourth, nor did he carry on a systematic trade of secret intrigue like Lewis the Eleventh. Even in the affair of Péronne, to which Mr. Kirk frequently points as an exception to Charles' general straightforwardness, there seems to have been no deliberate treachery on Charles' part, though there certainly was a breach in words of the safeconduct which he had given to Lewis. The King sought an interview of his own accord; it was to take place in the then Burgundian town of Péronne. The Duke gave the King a safeconduct, notwithstanding anything which had happened or might happen. While Lewis was at Péronne, Charles discovered, or believed that he had discovered, evidence that the King was plotting with the revolted people of Lüttich. Charles then kept him as a prisoner till he had signed an unfavorable treaty, and further obliged him to accompany him on his campaign against Lüttich, and to witness and take a part in the utter overthrow of his allies. Here was undoubtedly a breach of an engagement: according to the letter of the bond, Charles should have taken Lewis safe back into his own dominions, and should have declared war and pursued him the moment he had crossed the frontier. But, setting aside the literal breach of faith, to deal with Lewis as he did, to humble him before all the world, to make him follow where he was most unwilling to go, was quite in character with the stern and ostentatious justice of Charles. As a mere breach of faith, it was a light matter compared with the everyday career of Lewis

himself. But what shocked the feeling of the time was for a vassal to put his suzerain lord under personal duress. To rebel against such a lord and make war upon him was an ordinary business; but for a Duke of Burgundy to make a King of France his prisoner was a breach of all feudal reverence, a sacrilegious invasion of the sanctity of royalty, which carried men's minds back to a deed of treason more than five hundred years old.

We cannot look upon this business at Péronne as being morally of so deep a dye as the long course of insincerity pursued by Charles with regard to the marriage of his daughter. It is clear that he was possessed with a strong and not very intelligible dread of a son-in-law in any shape. Like many other princes, he shrank from the notion of a successor; he shrank especially from a successor who would not be one of his own blood, but the husband of his daughter, one who most likely would seek in her marriage and his affinity nothing but stepping stones to the ducal or royal crown of Burgundy. So far one can enter into the feeling; but it is clear that Charles first carried it to a morbid extent, and then made use of it for a disingenuous political purpose. He held out hopes of his daughter's hand to every prince whom he wished for the moment to attach to his interests, without the least serious intention of bestowing her upon any of them. Mary was used as the bait for Charles of Guienne, for Nicolas of Calabria, for Maximilian of Austria. Now this, though it might serve an immediate end, was a base and selfish policy, which could not fail to leave, as in the end it did leave, both his daughter and his dominions without any lawful or acknowledged protector. The feelings alike of a father and of a sovereign should have made Charles overcome his dread of an acknowledged successor, rather than run the risk of leaving a young girl to grapple unprotected with the turbulent people of Flanders and with such a neighbor as Lewis the Eleventh. It is here, we think, rather than in his formal breach of faith at Péronne, that we should look for the most marked exception to that general character for good faith and sincerity which is claimed for Charles by his biographer. It is certain that he piqued himself upon such a character, and that his conduct was on the whole not inconsistent with it. The worst deeds of his later career, his treatment of the princes of Lorraine and Würtemburg, his unprovoked attack on Neuss, his cruelties after the loss of