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Richard
III Society
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Richard
III and the City of Bruges
By Sandra Worth
(Printed in the Ricardian Register Fall 2003--Copyright ©
Sandra Worth,: used with permission)
Often referred to as the Venice of the North for
its canals and medieval atmosphere, Bruges, the city that offered
Richard III refuge during two exiles, is perhaps best described by the
nineteenth century novelist Georges Rodenback, who called it a
mysterious sleeping city of the dead. The dead that sleep here are ones
with whom Ricardians are familiar: Mary of Burgundy, Phillip the Good,
Charles the Bold, Louis de Gruthuyse, Maximillian of Austria. They are
present at every turn, as large in memory as they were in life. Indeed,
the ghosts of Charles the Bold’s empire seem to linger in the
narrow streets and squares that bear their names and which echo, day
and night, with the beat of horses hoofs against the cobbles. Paintings
and murals honor their images and scenes from their lives, gilded
effigies adorn their tombs, hotels and inns bear their names; and
pageants celebrate their proudest moments.
First established between the seventh and ninth
centuries on the shores of the Zwin, the once magnificent seat of the
Dukes of Burgundy has been an international center of trade since its
inception. Today the bustle of traders has given way to tourists who
come to visit the fifteenth century that marked Bruges’s
Golden
Age: They flow down the streets, glide along in barges, and clip-clop
past in carriages, faces upturned to the city’s historic
splendors. Turning along a narrow residential street, they pause to
admire the white-capped matrons who sit in open doorways, skillfully
weaving the fine lace that was part of Burgundy’s once famous
textile trade, and passing the thirteenth century hospital that is one
of the oldest in Europe, they gaze at black-garbed Benedictine Sisters
strolling through its gardens. They continue, past old houses and the
leaning trees that border quiet canals winding by ancient churches,
cathedrals, belfries, almshouses, statues and old bridges. Standing
tall amongst these are a plethora of architecturally splendid gothic
buildings, brimming with treasures and bearing silent testimony to the
opulence and power that was fifteenth century Burgundy.
When Richard arrived in Bruges for his first exile,
he was seven years old and not yet Duke of Gloucester. His eldest
brother Edward still had to win his crown, and the benevolent monarch
Phillip the Good was Duke of Burgundy. On that first occasion, Richard
and his brother George stayed with William Caxton, a wealthy English
burgher who would later bring the Guttenberg printing press to England
under Edward IV. Nothing remains of either Phillip the Good’s
palace or Caxton’s home, but their absence weighed against
Bruges’s riches bears scant notice. Senor de
Gruthuyse’s
gothic mansion, however, where Richard found sanctuary as a seventeen
year old exile the second time he fled to Bruges, stands proud guard
over the hedged gardens through which he once strolled, beside the
great Church of Our Lady in which he surely attended services.
Today the Gruthuyse mansion is a museum, and an especially meaningful
one for the Ricardian visitor. Here can be found room after room with
gilded wood ceilings, polished tile floors, fifteenth century wrought
iron work, carved stone, wooden filigree screens, marble columns,
stained glass windows, magnificent tapestries and baroque statues.
Here, too, is the original medieval kitchen that prepared the food on
which Richard dined. The museum overflows with paintings by artists who
were Richard’s contemporaries: Jan Van Eyck, painter to the
court
of Phillip the Good; Hugo van der Goes, who is thought to have painted
the contemporary portrait of Richard’s sister, Margaret of
York,
Duchess of Burgundy; and Hans Memling, who sold a triptych to Lord
Hastings’s brother-in-law, Sir John Donne, which now hangs in
the
National Gallery.
Louis de Gruthuyse, one of Bruges most admired and
honored Burgundian figures of the late fifteenth century, served under
both Phillip the Good and his son Charles the Bold with great
distinction. He was the confidante and envoy of Mary of Burgundy, and
in all likelihood, this man who had known Edward IV and Richard III
also proved a good friend to Margaret of York. Revered in his time as a
brilliant diplomat, a brave warrior, and a patron of the arts, his
motto, Plus est en Vous, (More is in You) suggests a man of ideals and
is in gilded evidence throughout the estate. It was Senor de Gruthuyse,
Governor of Holland, who risked Charles the Bold’s censure by
rescuing Edward from certain capture or death at the hands of the ships
of the Hanseatic League. As soon as Edward regained his throne the
following year, he rewarded Gruthuyse with the earldom of Winchester
and a generous annual income. Gruthuyse wasted no time using this money
to build a chapel connecting his mansion with the famous Church of Our
Lady so that he could follow church services from his home.
Of all the rooms and treasures in the Gruthuyse
Museum, it is this small chapel, built with Edward’s money,
which
provides the strongest link with Richard’s era. The chapel,
completed in 1472, of carved wood and stone, connects the Gruuthuyse
mansion with the chancel of the Church of Our Lady where both Charles
the Bold and Mary of Burgundy are buried. Their ornate bronze tombs,
gilded and decorated with recumbent statues and the family coats of
arms, are clearly visible from the chapel window. Mary’s
sarcophagus, commissioned by her son Phillip the Fair and completed in
1502, was surely admired by Margaret of York, the step-mother who had
loved her, before Margaret left for Mechlin, where she herself would
die a year later.
The Church of Our Lady where Mary of Burgundy and Charles the Bold lay
side by side in their magnificent tombs is itself a splendid gothic
building that dates from the thirteenth century. Stunning stained glass
windows trace Mary of Burgundy’s genealogy, from her
grandfather
Phillip the Good down to her grandson Charles V, Emperor of the Holy
Roman Empire. A few steps away, along the central nave, are thirty
coats of arms above the stalls belonging to the knights who were
present at the second Chapter of the Golden Fleece, the Order founded
by Phillip the Bold. The ceremony was held in the church in 1468, as
Edward’s sister Margaret was preparing to leave England to
wed
Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and as the Earl of Warwick’s
rift
with Edward and his Woodville queen was about to rupture into war.
A short walk from the Church of Our Lady, along
Gruthuyse Street and the canal, takes the visitor to the Town Hall,
which fronts a quiet square. Inside the ornamented building whose
façade is decorated with six pointed arched windows and
forty-eight baroque statues are housed larger-than-life paintings
depicting the final moments of the last of Burgundy’s rulers,
appropriately entitled The Death of Charles the Bold—who died
besieging Nancy in 1477—and the Fatal Fall of Mary of
Burgundy,
who was killed in a fall from her horse in 1482, and whose death
unleashed the events that plunged Burgundy into decline. Here too is
the gorgeous gilded council chamber first used by Phillip the Good in
1464, as Edward in England secretly wooed and wed Elizabeth Woodville,
a fateful marriage that set into motion the bevy of disasters soon to
devour the House of York and end forever the four hundred year reign of
the Plantagenets.
Across town rises the Jerusalem Church, which
Richard surely visited. Completed in 1470 as he arrived in Bruges for
his second exile, it was inspired by the Church of the Holy Sepulcher
in Jerusalem and is one of the rare buildings to survive intact from
the fifteenth century. The nobleman and his wife who founded the
church, and who no doubt met Richard and dined with Margaret of York
and Charles of Burgundy, are buried here, at the center of this
evocative stone, brick, and wooden church.
Not only does Bruges bear witness to its Golden Age with architecture,
monuments, statues and art work, but it celebrates the era with music
and pageants that hark back to historic moments. The most noteworthy of
these is the re-enactment of Margaret of York’s marriage to
Charles the Bold, a banquet held every Saturday evening from April
through October in a converted Jesuit church, while minstrels,
fire-eaters, jesters, knights and falconers entertain the hall, just as
they did in 1468.
Bruges’s decline began with the mismanagement
of Charles the Bold, whose character is perhaps more accurately
conveyed by the other translation of his name, “Charles the
Rash.” His premature death besieging the inconsequential town
of
Nancy led Louis XI to claim that the duchy of Burgundy had reverted to
France in the absence of a male heir. Mary of Burgundy’s
marriage
to Maximillian of Austria kept Louis at bay temporarily, but what
Burgundy urgently needed to resolve the matter was England’s
help
in fighting France. Although Burgundy was England’s
traditional
ally against France and the keystone of English trade, Edward
hesitated, reluctant to forfeit the fifty thousand crown annuity Louis
XI paid him according to the terms of the Treaty of Picquigny. The
annuity had not only bought Edward freedom from the money worries that
had plagued the early years of his reign, but had afforded a lavish
life style that he, and his avaricious, luxury-loving Woodville queen,
were loathe to relinquish.
In addition, Louis had cleverly dangled yet another choice morsel
before their hopeful eyes: The prospect that their daughter, Elizabeth
of York, betrothed to the Dauphin by the terms of the treaty, would one
day become Queen of France. For these reasons, when Margaret of York
returned to England in 1480 in a final effort to save her adopted
country, Edward refused his sister the aid that could have rescued
Burgundy.
As Burgundy struggled to survive in these dire
circumstances, there followed in 1482 a disaster that would prove its
death knell. Mary of Burgundy, an avid horsewoman, was thrown from her
horse and killed, leaving her duchy in the hands of her husband,
Maximilian of Austria, whom some now hated as a foreigner and a tyrant.
Christine Weightman, Margaret of York’s biographer, observes
the
following:
“She (Mary of Burgundy) was buried in the Church of Our Lady
in
Bruges… There, in the only church north of the Alps to
possess a
statue by Michaelangelo the young duchess lay at peace while rebellion
broke out all over her territories.”
By the end of the year Maximillian was forced to
come to terms with Louis of France. He signed the Treaty of Artois, and
his daughter Margaret of Austria was betrothed to the Dauphin, her
dowry to include all of Burgundy. The Golden Age of Bruges was over.
Across the ocean, less than four months later in April 1483, Edward IV
died, prematurely and suddenly, consigning England to the machinations
of his detested Woodville queen. His daughter had been spurned by
Louis, and his income decimated; some claimed that Louis’s
humiliation was the blow that killed him. Whatever the truth of the
matter, his death threw England into crisis. For three months the land
tottered on the verge of civil war. Then Richard of Gloucester stepped
forward to take the throne as King Richard III, the last in the long
line of glorious Plantagenet kings of England.
i.
Christine Weightman, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy
1446-1503; Alan Sutton, Stroud, U.K.; paperback, first published 1993;
p. 140
Sources:
• Christine Weightman, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy
1446-1503; Alan Sutton, Stroud, U.K.; paperback, first published 1993
• Richard Vaughan, Charles the Bold: The Last Valois Duke of
Burgundy; Boydell Press, Rochester, N.Y.; 2002
• Paul Murray Kendall, Richard the Third; W.W. Norton
& Co.; New York, London; 1955
• Paul Murray Kendall, Louis XI: The Universal Spider; W. W.
Norton & Co.; New York, 1970
• Paul Murray Kendall, Warwick the Kingmaker, W.W. Norton
& Co.; New York, London; paperback, 1987
• Dictionary of National Biography
Bruges: Information & Reservations
Toerisme Brugge Burg 11 B-8000Bruges Belgium/ tel.: 32-50-44 86 86* Fax
32-50-44 86 00* / www.brugge.be / toerisme@brugge.be
Charles the Bold Wedding Celebrations
info@celebrations-entertainment.be
www.celebrations-celebrations-entertainment.be
tel.: 050/34 75 72* fax 050/34 87 28*
Celebrations Entertainment Vlamingstr.86 8000
Brugge Belgium
*country code for Belgium is 32
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