had proclaimed that all landed estates should, in lack of heirs male,
escheat to his own exchequer. He had debased the coin of the country, and
thereby authorized unlimited swindling on the part of all his agents,
from stadholders down to the meanest official. If such oppression and
knavery did not justify the resistance of the Flemings to the
guardianship of Maximilian, it would be difficult to find any reasonable
course in political affairs save abject submission to authority.

In 1493, Maximilian succeeds to the imperial throne, at the death of his
father. In the following year his son, Philip the Fair, now seventeen
years of age, receives the homage of the different states of the
Netherlands. He swears to maintain only the privileges granted by Philip
and Charles of Burgundy, or their ancestors, proclaiming null and void
all those which might have been acquired since the death of Charles.
Holland, Zeland, and the other provinces accept him upon these
conditions, thus ignominiously, and without a struggle, relinquishing the
Great Privilege, and all similar charters.

Friesland is, for a brief season, politically separated from the rest of
the country. Harassed and exhausted by centuries of warfare, foreign, and
domestic, the free Frisians, at the suggestion or command of Emperor
Maximilian, elect the Duke of Saxony as their Podesta. The sovereign
prince, naturally proving a chief magistrate far from democratic, gets
himself acknowledged, or submitted to, soon afterwards, as legitimate
sovereign of Friesland. Seventeen years afterward Saxony sells the
sovereignty to the Austrian house for 350,000 crowns. This little
country, whose statutes proclaimed her to be "free as the wind, as long
as it blew," whose institutions Charlemagne had honored and left
unmolested, who had freed herself with ready poniard from Norman tyranny,
who never bowed her neck to feudal chieftain, nor to the papal yoke, now