This was the spirit of the masquerade, of the carnival, the Kermesse; and thirty years later, when for a whole generation the country had suffered unexampled miseries, and most of the beggars of 1566 had perished by a violent death, the arrival of the Archduke Ernest as Governor of Brabant was made the occasion for a grotesque display--'a stately procession of knights and burghers in historical and mythological costumes, followed by ships, dromedaries, elephants, whales, giants, dragons.' A strange people. The Dutch had fought with all the courage of the Nervii, and gained their freedom. The Belgians, descendants of the Nervii, had been slaughtered, defeated, tortured, and made slaves, had seen their country laid waste, and their cherished liberties taken from them wholesale; and yet, when all was lost and the heel of the oppressor was planted firmly on their necks, they were made happy by a circus procession. FOOTNOTES. [Footnote 30: Born at Brussels, June 24, 1322.] [Footnote 31: The text of the Joyeuse Entrée of Jeanne and Wencelas is given by Abbé Nameche, vol. iv., pp. 671-679, and the latest form which it took will be found in Poullet's _Histoire de la Joyeuse Entrée de Brabant_, pp. 339-350.] [Footnote 32: Poullet, p. 3.] [Footnote 33: 'Mais bientôt les intérêts communs formèrent des Associations particulières dans le seins même de l'assemblée. Les nobles étaient unis par le droit de la féodalité; au treizième et au quatorzième siècle, les villes Brabançonnes conclurent entre elles des traités d'alliance, et de là l'origine des ordres. On sentit alors l'inconvénient du vote individuel, et l'on admit que les individualités particulières seraient liées par la majorité des suffrages dans le même ordre': (Poullet, p. 45).] [Footnote 34: Wencelas and Jeanne had no children. Jeanne made a will leaving the Duchy of Brabant to her niece Marguerite (daughter of Louis of Maele and her sister), who had married Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Philip the Bold and Marguerite of Maele had two sons--Jean, who became Duke of Burgundy and Count of Flanders on the death of his father; and Antoine, who became Duke of Brabant on the death of his mother.] [Footnote 35: In what is now the Rue des Petits Carmes.] [Footnote 36: 'Then for the first time, from the lips of those reckless nobles, rose the famous cry, which was so often to ring over land and sea, amid blazing cities, on blood-stained decks, through the smoke and carnage of many a stricken field.'--MOTLEY: _Rise of the Dutch Republic_.] CHAPTER XIV THE BOMBARDMENT OF 1695--THE GRANDE PLACE--CHURCH OF STE. GUDULE--CHARLES OF LORRAINE