JAMES ANID PHILIP VAN ARTEVELDE.*
THESE books are the first serious efforts that have been made in this country to rescue the careers and characters of two re- markable Flemings of the fourteenth century from the not
always tender mercies of the romanticist and the pro-aristocratic pamphleteer. That they should have appeared at the present time, that their authors should have the same purpose—to perform a much-needed piece of historical white-washing—and that they should have written quite independently of each other, are rather interesting proofs that we are emerging from the period of anti-democratic reaction which followed the excesses of the French Revolution. Whether it be that we are getting reconciled to the idea of modern society becoming democratic by evolution, instead of by revo- lution, or whether there be some other explanation, we are every day becoming more willing to believe that men who seemed to be democrats years or centuries before their time must have bad more of good than of evil in their motives and lives. Most of us would probably be thankful to historical investigators who should prove that Rienzi and Masaniello were far-sighted politicians, and were not elevated to a half-satanic "bad eminence" mainly by cir- cumstances. Or, to come nearer our own time, should we not be gratified rather than not, to find that all S pinoza's grief at the death of De Witt was entirely justified, that the later, like the earlier opposition of that eminent Republican to the Orange Family, was at once patriotic and expedient ? In rehabilitating the Arteveldes, Mr. Ashley and Mr. Hutton are, no doubt, fol- lowing in the wake of others. They both admit their obligations
to Lettenhove's Histoire de Flan die and ,Tacques d'Artevelde, and still more to Vanderkindere's Siècle des Arteveldes. Mr. William Longman, in his History of Edward III., too, as Mr. Hutton allows, has vindicated the memory of the elder Van
Artevelde. The younger has had such ample poetic justice done him by Sir Henry Taylor, so generous a eulogium is bestowed upon his "equal temper" and "ample soul,"—
" Rock-bound, and fortified against assaults Of transitory passion, but below
Built on a surging subterranean fire, That stired and lifted him to high attempts,"
that Mr. Hutton need not have worked himself into a Byronic "comic horror" because the dramatist has taken advantage of the licence of his craft to link Philip, on the fatal field of Roose- beke, not to his wife, Yolande van den Broucke, but to "the runaway mistress of the Duke of Bourbon, idealised into an abstract personification of love and purity." Yet, in spite, or rather in consequence, of what was written before they began their task, Mr. Ashley and Mr. Hutton have been able for the first time to put the English public in possession of the real political meaning of the movement of which the Arteveldes were the leaders and victims. James van Artevelde—his son was intellectually and in all respects inferior to him, and was, in fact, but the instrument of a stronger spirit, Peter van den Bossche, who found the name of Artevelde a good one to conjure with—was something more than the ambitious brewer and blatant demagogue who figures in the pages of Froissart and others. The struggle of the Flemish Towns, and particularly. of Ghent, in the fourteenth century against the Counts of Flanders, and their suzerains, the Kings of France, was by no
means a "battle of kites and crows," as Mr. Bright once declared English -history before Egbert to be. As Mr. Ashley puts the matter, in a careful and judicious summing-up,— " In future, it will be James van Artevelde's chief claim to recol- lection that under him the artisans in Flanders gained their first great victory in the straggle for political rights. That victory was not permanent; nor, when an ultimate settlement was attained—for everywhere the craftsmen gained some share in self-government—did it take the exact shape he contemplated. But the importance of his action is not thereby diminished ; and that he carried through the change with so little violence justifies us in judging his Conduct wise
and firm Finally, it repays even so tedious an investigation as this is likely to seem, to find that the history of the Flemish towns in the fourteenth century is the record, not of jealous and meaning- less squabbles, and of the uproars of 'the residuum,' but of an intelligible advance in the world's order."
These works are unlike each other both in their merits and. their demerits. Mr. Ashley's style is more academic than Mr. Hutton's ; and he is a more painstaking and scientific his- torical investigator. We cannot imagine him condescending to such painfully plain thought and writing as this :—" To the
• Tames and Philip van Artevelde. By W. J. Ashley, B.A. Being the Lothias Prize Essay for 1882. London Macmillan and Co. 1883.
James and Philip ran Artereld. Two Episodes in the History of the Fourteenth Century. By James Hutton. London: John Murray. 1883. wine-drinking knights and chroniclers, a brewer of the thick, muddy, ill-fermented beer of those times, which needed an admixture of honey to render it at all palatable, may well have seemed a common fellow of very plebeian origin;" or the rather Teniersish humour of "the fourteenth century was remarkable, if for nothing else, for the invention of the day-shirt and the night-dress." Still less can we suppose him indulging in. the crude political pessimism. of "As it was in the Flemish Com- munes, as it is'in the United States, so it will be in the British Isles, should the populace succeed in gaining the upper-hand. Men of birth, position, and mental culture will withdraw from the management of public affairs, and will abandon the arena to men of the baser sort, pushing, pretentious, and self-suffi- cient." Mr. Ashley is much more cautious in his judg- ments than Mr. Hutton, as a single instance of difference of opinion between them will serve to show. As is well kuown, one of the reasons that led a Ghent mob to murder James van Artevelde in his own house was a belief that he was in favour of a scheme for making that Prince of Wales, who was the son of Edward III., Count of Flanders. Mr. Hutton, fol- lowing Lettenhove, refuses to entertain any such idea, and refers to a proclamation which had been issued by Edward III., in his character of claimant of the French Throne, and in con- sequence, of the suzerainty of Flanders, with its "good towns" and their administrators. No mention was made in this pro- clamation of conferring the position of Count on the Prince. "But," says Mr. Ashley, with no little sagacity,— " The document in question really proves nothing; it merely shows bow unsatisfactory the state of things bad become. The Count and his heirs were to have an indefinitely long period allowed them wherein to acknowledge Edward as suzerain ; until this had been done, the Government was to be in the hands of Edward's allies, i.e., the Rewaert assisted by the good towns. The English reader will notice the resemblance between this plan and that proposed by Sancroft for the government of England after the flight of James II. James's royal dignity was to be left intact, though he had left Eng- land and was plotting to regain his authority by force, but the Regent William of Orange was to govern the country. So, in the case of Flanders, there was to be a Count wandering about in France and Brabant, continually endeavouring to reconquer his county, which was to be ruled by the Rewaert and the Three Members. So absurd a scheme could not possibly work. A succession of exiled Counts whose rights were left intact, and of Rewaerts who had all real power, would have been as ridiculous as parallel lines of Stuart Kings and Orange Regents. Moreover, the title Count of Flanders' was actually conferred by Henry VI. upon his uncle Humphrey of Gloucester, so that the idea of gaining the county for a member of the Royal Family seems to have been by no means strange to Eng- lish politicians. For the Flemings to choose another Count, with the consent of their Sovereign, was the natural way out of their difficulty in 1345; and it may be regarded as a proof of Artevelde's wisdom that he not only felt this, but also saw that to give that dignity to a son of Edward would be an effectual means of securing vigorous English support against France."
On the other hand, Mr. Hutton's style is free from the buck- ram stiffness that marks Mr. Ashley's volume, and which is, per- haps, due to the fact of its being a prize essay. It is arranged on a more intelligible plan ; the " battle-pieces " are decidedly more vigorous, and in such chapters as an interesting one on " Social Life in Flanders," Mr. Hutton deals fully with matters which do not come within Mr. Ashley's scope. Both volumes should be read by any one who wishes thoroughly to understand the movement of which the Arteveldes were the leaders.
There can now be no question that James van Artevelde was a very remarkable man, and during the nine years or so—be- tween 1336 and 1345—of his governorship and " captaincy " of Ghent was wonderfully, if not perfectly, successful, alike in his domestic and in his foreign politics. Mr. Hutton says truly enough of the Dutch, as contrasted with the Flemish, love of liberty, that the one was an instinct, the other a spasmodic sentiment. There was nothing spasmodic, however, about James van Artevelde ; there was nothing even sentimental, if we except his wonderful eloquence. From first to last, he appears as a robust and wary opportunist. When the war be- tween Edward III. and Philip of Valois, in 1336, and the dis- tress caused in Ghent by Edward's prohibition of the export- ation of English wool, brought him to the front, first as an adviser, and then as a municipal and military leader, he had an exceedingly difficult part to play. The free governments of the Flemish towns had sunk into oligarchies composed of the leading merchant or poorter families, who had made the magis- tracy a hereditary privilege. Pressing hard upon the oligarchy were the great artisan guilds which really made Ghent and Bruges what they were, and of which the society of the weavers, to which Artevelde originally belonged, was the most powerful. The struggle seemed certain to end in civil war or revolution. Then, the Flemish towns were the victims of the quarrels, and still oftener of the alliances, between the Kings of France and the Counts of Flanders, who were a race of cruel and vacil- lating tyrants, and of whom the two that figured most in the days of the Arteveldes, Louis de Crecy and Louis de Male, were perhaps the weakest and worst. Artevelde had both to break down the supremacy of the burgher aristocracy without vio- lence, and to establish the practical independence of Flanders. being hampered all the while by the conspiracies of a French party among the citizens, and still more among the rural noblesse, known as the "Leliaerts." He did wonders during the short time .that he was Captain of Ghent. By organ- ising an armed neutrality of the Flemish towns, and playing off Philip against Edward, he contrived for all practical pur- poses to get rid of the yoke of the Count. Mr. Ashley says. that this neutrality of Ghent and its allies was "no prophetia anticipation of the modern neutrality of Belgium, as some have thought, but a compromise between their feudal duties and their economic necessities." But would there have been any- thing very surprising, had a man of such capacity and patriotism as Artevelde been a prophet to so limited an extent? In the domestic politics of Ghent, he appears as a moderate or thin-end-of-the-wedge reformer. For this rifle his own position eminently qualified him, for we may safely believe, with Mr. Ashley, that he "belonged to a well-to-do merchant family, possibly also connected by marriage with the country noblesse; yet not within the circle of those great families which practi- cally shared between them the government of the town. His interests, therefore, were not so bound up with those of the ruling caste as to prevent his adopting the oppo- site cause." So he contented himself with establishing or reviving for administrative purposes the division of his fellow-citizens into three classes or "members," the poorters or merchant families, the weavers, and the ner;nghen or minor crafts. The burgher oligarchs, who bad submitted to the leadership of Artevelde when be was contending against their common enemies, Philip and Louis, turned upon him when the danger they dreaded had passed away, and, raising the cry that he had sold Flanders to England, acted in such a way as to bring about his death at the hands of an ignorant and infu- riated mob composed of members of the small guilds. But his work as a political reformer was done; the Flemish artisans be- came independent of the merchants. With him, indeed, fell the English. alliance, and the neutrality or independence of Flanders- But the "idea" involved in his work survived, to bear fruit within the present century.
In romance, Philip van Artevelde is a more picturesque figure than his father, but in actual history he counts for much less Heis commonly said to have been more of a dreamer than of a man of action, although this view seems to be supported chiefly by his fondness for angling. But he made no attempt to revenge his father's death or complete his work. It was not till1381, or thirty-six years after the death of James van Arte- velde, that a crisis in the history of his native city brought him to the front. Count Louis de Male bad succeeded in stirring up war between the two old allies, Bruges and Ghent. Ghent was besieged, and its citizens had to choose between death by starvation, and a peace that would have placed them absolutely at the mercy of their tyrant. Peter van den Bossche, the popular leader, conceived the idea of rousing the spirits of his brethren by charming with the name of Artevelde, and Philip was elected to his father's position of Captain of the city. After a vain attempt to secure an honourable peace, he headed a desperate sally of the Gantois against their besiegers, which proved perfectly successful; and in the rout of Bever- shoutsveld, Louis de Male nearly found the death he deserved. But success seems to have turned Philip's head. He became fond of show, if he did not also give way to self-indulgence. He manifested but little military skill. When, in 1382, the King of France came to the aid of his vassal and invaded Flanders, Philip exhibited in his defensive operations only carelessness and self-confidence, and his defeat and death at Roosebeke were the result entirely of his own blundering. Philip van Artevelde was a gallant man and a patriot. But James was more ; be was a skilful diplomatist, a military tactician of no mean skill, and a political reformer of foresight and prudence. His career was a tragedy, a torso ; but this may be said of the careers of almost all able men of Liberal ideas in Europe, four centuries age.
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