with Marie passed away
the last independent ruler of the house of Burgundy, whose greatness was
to be transmitted to and surpassed by the son of this Philippe, the
great Emperor Charles V.

The brief and troubled life of Marie de Bourgogne affords but little
opportunity for an estimate of her capabilities. She was reared under
conditions the most unfavorable to the development of independence,
self-reliance, and capacity for practical affairs; for feudalism, even
at its best, as we have seen, produced but few women who were capable of
ruling a nation, and the spectacular chivalry of the Burgundian court
found no place for woman but as an angelic, gracious, beautiful
spectator of its great shows, one infinitely removed by every detail of
her education and of her social life from the sordid cares of life and
of politics. Marie was not of that rare type that might, even under such
conditions, rise to power; she was not strong enough of will to mark out
a policy of her own and bend men and conditions to serve that policy. In
not one of her public acts as duchess can we find that she was
uninfluenced by those around her; she was indeed swayed first by one set
of counsellors, then by another, the natural result being inconsistency,
duplicity, and inefficiency. But where the mere woman appears, where
there is room for the operation of impulses purely personal, as in the
case of Hugonet and Humbercourt and in the selection of her husband,
Marie displays nobler feelings; and though the cause of civilization was
to be advanced by the dismemberment of the heterogeneous Burgundian
duchy and the annexation of the greater part of it to France, our
sympathy is not with the spider who sat spinning his meshes of intrigue
in the den at Plessis-lez-Tours, but with the generous, impulsive young
ruler whom we know he will fatally entangle. With Marie in Burgundy, as
with the passionate and unhappy Marguerite of Anjou in England, we are
inclined to forgive the ruler who could not rule, or who resorted to
infamous means in her struggles to rule, when we remember that both were
women brought face to face with tremendous problems and made the sport
of crafty, cruel, unscrupulous foes and faithless friends.

CHAPTER XV

ANNE DE BEAUJEU: THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE KINGDOM

_C'est la moins folle femme du monde, car, de femme sage il n'y en a
point_ (she is the least foolish woman in the world; there are no wise
ones). The cynical old king