Richard III and the City of Bruges

By Sandra Worth

Often referred to as the Venice of the North for its canals and medieval atmosphere, Bruges, the city that offered Richard III refuge during two exiles, is perhaps best described by the nineteenth century novelist Georges Rodenback, who called it a mysterious sleeping city of the dead. The dead that sleep here are ones with whom Ricardians are familiar: Mary of Burgundy, Phillip the Good, Charles the Bold, Louis de Gruthuyse, Maximillian of Austria. They are present at every turn, as large in memory as they were in life. Indeed, the ghosts of Charles the Bold’s empire seem to linger in the narrow streets and squares that bear their names and which echo, day and night, with the beat of horses hoofs against the cobbles. Paintings and murals honor their images and scenes from their lives, gilded effigies adorn their tombs, hotels and inns bear their names; and pageants celebrate their proudest moments.



First established between the seventh and ninth centuries on the shores of the Zwin, the once magnificent seat of the Dukes of Burgundy has been an international center of trade since its inception. Today the bustle of traders has given way to tourists who come to visit the fifteenth century that marked Bruges’s Golden Age: They flow down the streets, glide along in barges, and clip-clop past in carriages, faces upturned to the city’s historic splendors. Turning along a narrow residential street, they pause to admire the white-capped matrons who sit in open doorways, skillfully weaving the fine lace that was part of Burgundy’s once famous textile trade, and passing the thirteenth century hospital that is one of the oldest in Europe, they gaze at black-garbed Benedictine Sisters strolling through its gardens. They continue, past old houses and the leaning trees that border quiet canals winding by ancient churches, cathedrals, belfries, almshouses, statues and old bridges. Standing tall amongst these are a plethora of architecturally splendid gothic buildings, brimming with treasures and bearing silent testimony to the opulence and power that was fifteenth century Burgundy.

  

When Richard arrived in Bruges for his first exile, he was seven years old and not yet Duke of Gloucester. His eldest brother Edward still had to win his crown, and the benevolent monarch Phillip the Good was Duke of Burgundy. On that first occasion, Richard and his brother George stayed with William Caxton, a wealthy English burgher who would later bring the Guttenberg printing press to England under Edward IV. Nothing remains of either Phillip the Good’s palace or Caxton’s home, but their absence weighed against Bruges’s riches bears scant notice. Senor de Gruthuyse’s gothic mansion, however, where Richard found sanctuary as a seventeen year old exile the second time he fled to Bruges, stands proud guard over the hedged gardens through which he once strolled, beside the great Church of Our Lady in which he surely attended services.

  

  

Today the Gruthuyse mansion is a museum, and an especially meaningful one for the Ricardian visitor. Here can be found room after room with gilded wood ceilings, polished tile floors, fifteenth century wrought iron work, carved stone, wooden filigree screens, marble columns, stained glass windows, magnificent tapestries and baroque statues. Here, too, is the original medieval kitchen that prepared the food on which Richard dined. The museum overflows with paintings by artists who were Richard’s contemporaries: Jan Van Eyck, painter to the court of Phillip the Good; Hugo van der Goes, who is thought to have painted the contemporary portrait of Richard’s sister, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy; and Hans Memling, who sold a triptych to Lord Hastings’s brother-in-law, Sir John Donne, which now hangs in the National Gallery.



Louis de Gruthuyse, one of Bruges most admired and honored Burgundian figures of the late fifteenth century, served under both Phillip the Good and his son Charles the Bold with great distinction. He was the confidante and envoy of Mary of Burgundy, and in all likelihood, this man who had known Edward IV and Richard III also proved a good friend to Margaret of York. Revered in his time as a brilliant diplomat, a brave warrior, and a patron of the arts, his motto, Plus est en Vous, (More is in You) suggests a man of ideals and is in gilded evidence throughout the estate. It was Senor de Gruthuyse, Governor of Holland, who risked Charles the Bold’s censure by rescuing Edward from certain capture or death at the hands of the ships of the Hanseatic League. As soon as Edward regained his throne the following year, he rewarded Gruthuyse with the earldom of Winchester and a generous annual income. Gruthuyse wasted no time using this money to build a chapel connecting his mansion with the famous Church of Our Lady so that he could follow church services from his home.

 

Of all the rooms and treasures in the Gruthuyse Museum, it is this small chapel, built with Edward’s money, which provides the strongest link with Richard’s era. The chapel, completed in 1472, of carved wood and stone, connects the Gruuthuyse mansion with the chancel of the Church of Our Lady where both Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy are buried. Their ornate bronze tombs, gilded and decorated with recumbent statues and the family coats of arms, are clearly visible from the chapel window. Mary’s sarcophagus, commissioned by her son Phillip the Fair and completed in 1502, was surely admired by Margaret of York, the step-mother who had loved her, before Margaret left for Mechlin, where she herself would die a year later.



The Church of Our Lady where Mary of Burgundy and Charles the Bold lay side by side in their magnificent tombs is itself a splendid gothic building that dates from the thirteenth century. Stunning stained glass windows trace Mary of Burgundy’s genealogy, from her grandfather Phillip the Good down to her grandson Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. A few steps away, along the central nave, are thirty coats of arms above the stalls belonging to the knights who were present at the second Chapter of the Golden Fleece, the Order founded by Phillip the Bold. The ceremony was held in the church in 1468, as Edward’s sister Margaret was preparing to leave England to wed Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and as the Earl of Warwick’s rift with Edward and his Woodville queen was about to rupture into war.



A short walk from the Church of Our Lady, along Gruthuyse Street and the canal, takes the visitor to the Town Hall, which fronts a quiet square. Inside the ornamented building whose façade is decorated with six pointed arched windows and forty-eight baroque statues are housed larger-than-life paintings depicting the final moments of the last of Burgundy’s rulers, appropriately entitled The Death of Charles the Bold—who died besieging Nancy in 1477—and the Fatal Fall of Mary of Burgundy, who was killed in a fall from her horse in 1482, and whose death unleashed the events that plunged Burgundy into decline. Here too is the gorgeous gilded council chamber first used by Phillip the Good in 1464, as Edward in England secretly wooed and wed Elizabeth Woodville, a fateful marriage that set into motion the bevy of disasters soon to devour the House of York and end forever the four hundred year reign of the Plantagenets.

 

Across town rises the Jerusalem Church, which Richard surely visited. Completed in 1470 as he arrived in Bruges for his second exile, it was inspired by the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and is one of the rare buildings to survive intact from the fifteenth century. The nobleman and his wife who founded the church, and who no doubt met Richard and dined with Margaret of York and Charles of Burgundy, are buried here, at the center of this evocative stone, brick, and wooden church.
Not only does Bruges bear witness to its Golden Age with architecture, monuments, statues and art work, but it celebrates the era with music and pageants that hark back to historic moments. The most noteworthy of these is the re-enactment of Margaret of York’s marriage to Charles the Bold, a banquet held every Saturday evening from April through October in a converted Jesuit church, while minstrels, fire-eaters, jesters, knights and falconers entertain the hall, just as they did in 1468.
Bruges’s decline began with the mismanagement of Charles the Bold, whose character is perhaps more accurately conveyed by the other translation of his name, “Charles the Rash.” His premature death besieging the inconsequential town of Nancy led Louis XI to claim that the duchy of Burgundy had reverted to France in the absence of a male heir. Mary of Burgundy’s marriage to Maximillian of Austria kept Louis at bay temporarily, but what Burgundy urgently needed to resolve the matter was England’s help in fighting France. Although Burgundy was England’s traditional ally against France and the keystone of English trade, Edward hesitated, reluctant to forfeit the fifty thousand crown annuity Louis XI paid him according to the terms of the Treaty of Picquigny. The annuity had not only bought Edward freedom from the money worries that had plagued the early years of his reign, but had afforded a lavish life style that he, and his avaricious, luxury-loving Woodville queen, were loathe to relinquish.
In addition, Louis had cleverly dangled yet another choice morsel before their hopeful eyes: The prospect that their daughter, Elizabeth of York, betrothed to the Dauphin by the terms of the treaty, would one day become Queen of France. For these reasons, when Margaret of York returned to England in 1480 in a final effort to save her adopted country, Edward refused his sister the aid that could have rescued Burgundy.
As Burgundy struggled to survive in these dire circumstances, there followed in 1482 a disaster that would prove its death knell. Mary of Burgundy, an avid horsewoman, was thrown from her horse and killed, leaving her duchy in the hands of her husband, Maximilian of Austria, whom some now hated as a foreigner and a tyrant. Christine Weightman, Margaret of York’s biographer, observes the following:

“She (Mary of Burgundy) was buried in the Church of Our Lady in Bruges . . .  There, in the only church north of the Alps to possess a statue by Michaelangelo the young duchess lay at peace while rebellion broke out all over her territories.”

By the end of the year Maximillian was forced to come to terms with Louis of France. He signed the Treaty of Artois, and his daughter Margaret of Austria was betrothed to the Dauphin, her dowry to include all of Burgundy. The Golden Age of Bruges was over. Across the ocean, less than four months later in April 1483, Edward IV died, prematurely and suddenly, consigning England to the machinations of his detested Woodville queen. His daughter had been spurned by Louis, and his income decimated; some claimed that Louis’s humiliation was the blow that killed him. Whatever the truth of the matter, his death threw England into crisis. For three months the land tottered on the verge of civil war. Then Richard of Gloucester stepped forward to take the throne as King Richard III, the last in the long line of glorious Plantagenet kings of England.

i. Christine Weightman,  Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy 1446-1503; Alan Sutton, Stroud, U.K.; paperback, first published 1993; p. 140

Sources:
Christine Weightman, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy 1446-1503; Alan Sutton, Stroud, U.K.; paperback, first published 1993
Richard Vaughan, Charles the Bold: The Last Valois Duke of Burgundy; Boydell Press, Rochester, N.Y.; 2002
Paul Murray Kendall, Richard the Third; W.W. Norton & Co.; New York, London; 1955
Paul Murray Kendall, Louis XI: The Universal Spider; W. W. Norton & Co.; New York, 1970
Paul Murray Kendall, Warwick the Kingmaker, W.W. Norton & Co.; New York, London; paperback, 1987
Dictionary of National Biography


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