to face
with them at Saint-Trond, and smashed the mutinous burgher army into
shards, leaving them in their slaughtered thousands upon the stricken
field.

The Duke was very angry. He felt that the Flemings had sought to take a
base advantage of him at a moment when it was supposed he would not be
equal to protecting his interests, and he intended to brand it for all
time upon their minds that it was not safe to take such liberties with
their liege lord. Thus, when a dozen of the most important burghers of
Liege came out to him very humbly in their shirts, with halters round
their necks, to kneel in the dust at his feet and offer him the keys of
the city, he spurned the offer with angry disdain.

"You shall be taught," he told them, "how little I require your keys,
and I hope that you will remember the lesson for your own good."

On the morrow his pioneers began to smash a breach, twenty fathoms wide,
in one of the walls of the city, rolling the rubble into the ditch to
fill it up at the spot. When the operation was complete, Charles rode
through the gap, as a conqueror, with vizor lowered and lance on
thigh at the head of his Burgundians, into his city of Liege, whose
fortifications he commanded should be permanently demolished.

That was the end of the Flemish rising of 1467 against Duke Charles the
Bold of Burgundy. The weavers returned to their looms, the armourers to
their forges, and the glove-makers and leather workers to their shears.
Peace was restored; and to see that it was kept, Charles appointed
military governors of his confidence where he deemed them necessary.

One of these was Claudius von Rhynsault, who had followed the Duke's
fortunes for some years now, a born leader of men, a fellow of infinite
address at arms and resource in battle, and of a bold, reckless courage
that nothing could ever daunt. It was perhaps this last quality that
rendered him so esteemed of Charles, himself named the Bold, whose view
of courage was that it was a virtue so lofty that in the nature of its
possessor there could, perforce, be nothing mean.

So now, to mark his esteem of this stalwart German, the Duke made him
Governor of the province of Zeeland, and dispatched him thither to stamp
out there any lingering sparks of revolt, and to rule it in his name as
ducal lieutenant.

Thus, upon a fair May morning, came Claud of Ryhnsault and his hardy
riders to the town of Middelburg, the capital of Zeeland, to take up his