Guillaume Hugonet's Farewell Letter to His Wife on April 3, 1477: “My Fortune Is Such that I Expect to Die Today and to Depart this World”

Summary

Guillaume Hugonet, chancellor to both the late Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy (1433–77) and his daughter and successor duchess Mary (1457–82), was beheaded on Maundy Thursday, 1477, on a scaffold especially erected for that purpose on the Vrijdagmarkt of Ghent in Flanders. He and two other powerful servants of the house of Burgundy and of the nascent Burgundian state — Guy de Brimeu, lord of Humbercourt and governor of Limburg, Maastricht, and Namur; and Jan van Melle, highest financial officer of Ghent — had been found guilty (by a hastily constituted local tribunal) of (alleged) financial and political corruption (“concussiones et corruptiones”) and of undermining “the ancient privileges” of the city of Ghent. Notwithstanding Mary's tearful pleas made before town magistrates for the lives of her high servants, the people of Ghent — ces gens de Gand, as the contemporary sharp-tongued memorialist Philippe de Commynes condescendingly has it — wanted to smell blood. As a result, Hugonet and his companions were tortured in public — Brimeu so grievously that he had to be beheaded (eventually) seated in a chair — to extract their “confessions”; they were tried, found guilty, and remanded for execution. Early on Thursday, the verdict was read out, giving them a modicum of time to prepare themselves for their deaths to take place a few hours later.

The events at Ghent were immediately “hot news” throughout Europe, given the pre-eminence of Burgundy on the political and general cultural scene of the fifteenth century and the disarray into which the Burgundian territories and cities had fallen after the untimely death of duke Charles the Bold on January 5, 1477, during the siege of Nancy.