At last one hundred years ago, those sans culottes of the revolution dissolved that charm as they did many another.

The Second House of Burgundy

FROUDE in his history, calls the kings of

Spain the house of Burgundy. They were properly Hapsburgs and of the eldest branch. At the same time they were descended from Mary of Burgundy; and it shows how deeply the career of her ducal ancestors had impressed itself on the mind of the historian, that he would fain continue the name beyond conventional usage.

There were but four of those dukes, and they flourished a century only; but they made changes which greatly moulded the polity of Europe. England whose history is our history, allowed herself to be drawn into the vortex. She allied herself with the House of Burgundy for the insane purpose of enabling the Plantagenets to transfer the seat of their empire from England to France, by which England would have been reduced to the condition of a province. She escaped that humiliation, but at the cost of her continental domain, the patrimony of Eleanor of Guienne wife of the first Plantagenet king, which comprised nearly one-third of France.

I propose to give some account of the founda

tion of that Second House of Burgundy.

My authority is chiefly but not wholly Barante who takes for his motto: Scribitur ad narrandum non ad probandum, and is none the less quoted by both English and French historians.

There were two Burgundies: the duchy still called Burgundy, and the county better known as La Franche Comté. The people of both were French; but while the duchy was a fief of France, the county was a fief of the Empire. And there were two great lines of Burgundian dukes: the first the Robertine descended from Robert king of France son of Hugh Capet; and the second, the Valois line descended from Charles of Valois brother of Philip-the-fair.

The last duke of the Robertine line was Philip de Rouvre, so called from the castle of Rouvre where he was born near Dijon. He inherited both Burgundies and Artois from his grandfather, his father having been killed at the siege of Aiguillon. Now this Philip de Rouvre, like some of my readers, is an interesting personage only by the woman he married; and to his wife. rather than to him I ask your attention.

She was Margaret daughter of Louis de Mâle, count of Flanders, lord of Ghent, of Bruges, of Ypres and of other municipalities of the Low Countries. Margaret was his only child and heir. It was she who was destined to bring to

the House of Burgundy, those first acquisitions in the Netherlands which were to draw the rest after them, and make the Spanish Hapsburgs counts of Flanders, of La Franche Comté, of Holland, of Hainault; dukes of Brabant, lords of Ghent, etc., an accumulation of titles by no means empty, such as the world had never seen before. In a word, Margaret of Flanders was to lay the foundation of the Belgic wing of the empire of Charles-the-fifth.

Margaret was very young when she married Philip de Rouvre, and not long after their espousals Philip died of the plague, leaving Margaret childless; and the great Robertine line which had worn the ducal coronet three centuries, was ended. How then was this childless widow to fulfil the destiny we have marked out for her?

We will leave her to ponder that problem, and take up our story at another point.

John of Valois king of France was called John II., though you have to look with a microscope into French history, to discover John I. No chapter bears his name at the head of it. (v. Captivity, page 62.) John II. was called Johnthe-good for no reason that history has explained. If he ever did anything that was good, it has shared the fate of the men who lived before Agamemnon. He was not even a good soldier for a king, though very pugnacious. His idea

of military strategy was to shut down his visor, couch his lance and spur into the thickest of the fight.

In following up these tactics at the battle of Poictiers, he was knocked off his horse. He could not rise for the weight of his armor; so his attendants set him up on end, and he instantly began to lay about him again, on foot, with his accustomed fury. His eldest son the dauphin, seeing that the battle was lost, turned on his heel and ran away; and not only lived to fight another day but to rule France so well that he gained the name of Charles-the-wise. Not so Charles' youngest brother Philip a boy of sixteen. He stood by his sire to the end; and as the enemy pressed in now on this side and now on that, he would cry out: Look out father, on the right! look out father on the left and would throw himself in front, and play at cut and thrust like a gladiator.

But they might better have followed the example of the dauphin and run away; for they were soon borne to the ground and carried off prisoners to England. There they were graciously received by Edward III. and queen Philippa both of whom were related to their prisoners. Indeed John and Philippa were first. cousins, both grandchildren of Charles of Valois.

After the battle of Poictiers, John gave to the