So the future Lord of the World entered into his inheritance at the age of seven, and as always, without a murmur or a protest, Margaret left her oratory, turned from her slowly rising shrine, and went into Flanders to be guardian for the future Emperor, to train him for his task, and meantime to administer for him one of the most turbulent, if rich and beautiful, dominions of his patrimony. Bruges and Ghent were too uncertain in their temper as the result of an uncontrolled guild system and its inevitable democracy, inorganic and chaotic. Moreover, Margaret herself had been educated in Malines by her grandmother, Margaret of York, widow of Charles the Bold, so to Malines she came with four of her little nephews and nieces, and was received with great rejoicing, taking up her residence in a very splendid palace, the Hôtel de Savoy, portions of which still remain and are used as a Palais de Justice. Malines in 1507 was a very different city from that of to-day; as we could have seen it a year ago with its narrow and winding streets, its fragments of old ruins, its little gabled houses, we loved it for its quaintness and its modest picturesqueness which formed a kind of foil to the vast tower of St. Rombaut, lifting like a truncated obelisk above a low plain. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it was, like the other great cities of Flanders and Brabant, a place of palaces and gardens, a courtly and splendid city, rich, busy, magnificent. In the night of the “Spanish Fury” in Antwerp it is of record that amongst other proud buildings, five hundred palaces of marble or chiselled stone were destroyed, and this gives some idea of the nature of the other cities that rivalled and exceeded Antwerp in magnificence. Malines, when the Duchess Margaret took up her abode there, was no village of dark and dirty little streets, but a city of palaces, far finer than London, or even Paris, and a fitting residence for a princely court and for the future Emperor.