“Charles watched from a stage as the entire urban elite filed in front of him, bare-headed, with nooses round their necks and wearing only their shirts. They knelt and begged his forgiveness, but for a time the emperor ‘looked into the distance, saying nothing in reply, appearing to reflect on what the people of Ghent had done and whether or not he should pardon them’, until Marie begged him to forgive them ‘in honour and memory of his birth there’. This he graciously granted. He also laid the first stone of a citadel to be erected on the spot chosen by his grandfather Maximilian after an earlier revolt.66”