Flanders and Brabant have always been fortunate when women ruled in the place of men and never more so than under Margaret of Malines. She guarded with the most jealous care every just interest of her people, beating at the outset Henry VII of England in a diplomatic contest, but later refusing to marry the thrifty monarch (“They have tried to marry me three times, but my luck is bad.”), bringing Charles of Guelders to rights, aiding in the defeat of France by her father and young Prince Henry of England at the Battle of the Spurs, but on the whole maintaining an unwonted peace. Not for a thousand years had there been a time more momentous than the years of Margaret’s regency; more complicated in its conflicting currents, more amazing in its possibilities and in the ideas that were brought forth. The Renaissance was in the saddle in Italy, riding the Church and society to their fall; in Germany Protestantism was claiming and fighting for the succession, while France was following Italy in its progressive corruption, England still standing firm behind her Channel cliffs that seemed so well to defend her against spiritual as well as physical invasion. All things were changing, a new era was establishing itself, but Maximilian was not content to see the old depart without a struggle, nor was his son Charles when he succeeded him. In the voluminous correspondence that has been preserved between the Emperor and his Regent of the Netherlands there is an astounding letter which reveals the almost insane lengths to which the imagination could go in these overstimulated times; in it Maximilian confesses that he has a great scheme for the redemption of Europe and it is this: he, himself, is to be made a kind of coadjutor to the Pope (Julius II, then ill), whereupon he will surrender the Empire to his son Charles, and then when Julius shall die, be made Pope in his place, thus uniting all spiritual and temporal power in the persons of the Hapsburg father and son! He wouldn’t have made a bad Pope, this shrewd, crusading, idealistic Maximilian, certainly he would have been a better than the Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X type then in vogue, and the vision of Maximilian in the chair of Peter, with Charles V the temporal lord of the world, is stimulating and provocative of speculation as to what might have happened. However, it all came to nothing; Julius recovered, and was succeeded in 1513 by Leo X, who reigned furiously for eight years and then died, to be succeeded, not by Wolsey, who was exerting every diplomatic and pecuniary agency to gain the prize, not by a Cardinal of the Medici or the Colonna, but by an obscure recluse, Adrian, sometime Archbishop of Utrecht, a gentle professor at Louvain whom Maximilian had discovered and sent to Malines to help educate the future Charles V, and who had since been immured in Spain as Cardinal of Tortosa.