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Ursula is preserved here: the left is at Bruges. I am gradually getting the hang of this excellent but somewhat scattered woman, and bringing her together in my mind. Her body, I believe, lies behind the altar in this same church. She must have been a lovely character, if Hans Memling's portrait of her is a faithful one. I was glad to see here one of the jars from the marriage-supper in Cana.
This assault was the most furious and bloody of the siege, but it was the last. Spencer saw that, in spite of the splendid courage of his soldiers and of the Flemish burghers, it would be impossible to take the town before the French army arrived, and during the night the English, with their allies from Ghent and Bruges, retired from before Ypres.
In Bruges the town council caused even some of their own servants to be placed in confinement, and kept on bread and water, for attempting to lay hands upon a supposed heretic.
The scant effect of the regulations relating to the latter may be easily understood when we read that, on the occasion of the marriage of Margaret of York to Charles the Bold, Belgian artists and artisans were ordered to prepare and to decorate a large wooden house which was subsequently transported by water from Brussels to Bruges.
As we rolled over the ancient drawbridge which gives admittance to sleepy Bruges, a bespectacled sentry, who looked as though he had suddenly been called from an accountant's desk to perform the duties of a soldier, held up his hand, palm outward, which is the signal to stop the world over. "Halt!" he commanded quaveringly. "Advance slowly and give the word."
Julie slipped the letter of the morning inside the elastic band which held the packet; then she closed and locked the doors, returning the key to its place in her dress. Both the lock and hinges of this little hiding-place were well and strongly made, and when the wings also were shut and locked one saw nothing but a massively framed photograph of the Bruges belfry resting on a wooden support.
England and Flanders were thus brought close together, and their commercial relations reacted on the policy of both countries. In the shadow of the Bruges belfry, amid English, French, German and Italian traders, a new civilization was born, which, combining the Latin and Germanic influences to which it was subjected, was soon to assert its own originality.
A deputation, in the name of the states, had already been sent with fresh propositions to Don John, at Namur. The envoys were Caspar Schetz and the Bishop of Bruges. They had nearly come to an amicable convention with the Governor, the terms of which had been sent to the states-general for approval, at the very moment of the Prince's arrival in Brussels.
But the people of Bruges remained dumb; and their silence scared Philip the Handsome, who vainly attempted to attract a concourse of people about him by the proclamation of brilliant jousts.
His great-grandfather, Maximilian, kept in durance by the citizens of Bruges; his great-grandmother, Mary of Burgundy, with streaming eyes and dishevelled hair, supplicating in the market-place for the lives of her treacherous ambassadors, were wont to hold a less imperious language to the delegates of the states.
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