For more than a century, Avignon had been a seat of the papacy; and when it ceased to be so it was still hallowed ground: secular dominion would no longer take root there; and the Holy See remained in possession and governed it. The Eternal City herself had been a warning. During the paralysis of papal authority there, she had been a prey to anarchy. The Orsini, the Colonnas and a score of minor brigands had desolated her pleasant places, and decimated her people. Avignon was not to be put to such a trial. The Church still governed and order reigned. It is true that sometimes when the French kings waxed recalcitrant, they would drive out the pope’s lieutenant and seize the town; but they always repented them of the evil, and gave back the sacred city unharmed. At last one hundred years ago, those sans culottes of the revolution dissolved that charm as they did many another. The Second House of Burgundy Froude in his history, calls the kings of Spain the house of Burgundy. They were properly Hapsburgs and of the eldest branch. At the same time they were descended from Mary of Burgundy; and it shows how deeply the career of her ducal ancestors had impressed itself on the mind of the historian, that he would fain continue the name beyond conventional usage. There were but four of those dukes, and they flourished a century only; but they made changes which greatly moulded the polity of Europe. England whose history is our history, allowed herself to be drawn into the vortex. She allied herself with the House of Burgundy for the insane purpose of enabling the Plantagenets to transfer the seat of their empire from England to France, by which England would have been reduced to the condition of a province. She escaped that humiliation, but at the cost of her continental domain, the patrimony of Eleanor of Guienne wife of the first Plantagenet king, which comprised nearly one-third of France. I propose to give some account of the foundation of that Second House of Burgundy. My authority is chiefly but not wholly Barante who takes for his motto: Scribitur ad narrandum non ad probandum, and is none the less quoted by both English and French historians. There were two Burgundies: the duchy still called Burgundy, and the county better known as La Franche Comté. The people of both were French; but while the duchy was a fief of France, the county was a fief of the Empire. And there were two great lines of Burgundian dukes: the first the Robertine descended from Robert king of France son of Hugh Capet; and the second, the Valois line descended from Charles of Valois brother of Philip-the-fair.