should ever be granted by the province without the consent of Ghent.  This charter would have been conclusive in the present emergency, had it not labored under the disadvantage of never having existed.  It was supposed by many that the magistrates, some of whom were favorable to government, had hidden the document.  Lieven Pyl, an ex-senator, was supposed to be privy to its concealment.  He was also, with more justice, charged with an act of great baseness and effrontery.  Reputed by the citizens to carry to the Queen Regent their positive refusal to grant the subsidy, he had, on the contrary, given an answer, in their name, in the affirmative.  For these delinquencies, the imaginary and the real, he was inhumanly tortured and afterwards beheaded.  “I know, my children,” said he upon the scaffold, “that you will be grieved when you have seen my blood flow, and that you will regret me when it is too late.”  It does not appear, however, that there was any especial reason to regret him, however sanguinary the punishment which had requited his broken faith.

The mischief being thus afoot, the tongue of Roland, and the easily-excited spirits of the citizens, soon did the rest.  Ghent broke forth into open insurrection.  They had been willing to enlist and pay troops under their own banners, but they had felt outraged at the enormous contribution demanded of them for a foreign war, undertaken in the family interests of their distant master.  They could not find the “Bargain of Flanders,” but they got possession of the odious “calf skin,” which was solemnly cut in two by the dean of the weavers.  It was then torn in shreds by the angry citizens, many of whom paraded the streets with pieces of the hated document stuck in their caps, like plumes.  From these demonstrations they proceeded to intrigues with Francis the First.  He rejected them, and gave notice of their overtures to Charles, who now resolved to quell the insurrection, at once.  Francis wrote, begging that the Emperor would honor him by coming through France; “wishing to assure you,” said he, “my lord and good brother, by this letter, written and signed by my hand, upon my honor, and on the faith of a prince, and of the best brother you have, that in passing through my kingdom every possible honor and hospitality will be offered you, even as they could be to myself.”  Certainly, the French king, after such profuse and voluntary pledges, to confirm which he, moreover, offered his two sons and other great individuals as hostages, could not, without utterly disgracing himself, have taken any unhandsome advantage of the Emperor’s presence in his dominions.  The reflections often made concerning the high-minded chivalry of Francis, and the subtle knowledge of human nature displayed by Charles upon the occasion, seem, therefore, entirely superfluous.  The Emperor came to Paris.  “Here,” says a citizen of Ghent, at the time, who has left a minute account of the transaction