It was not only the working class which suffered. Many rich families sank into poverty, and their homes, some of which were more like palaces than private houses, had to be dismantled. The fate of one of these lordly mansions is connected with an episode which carries us back into the social life of Bruges in the middle of the seventeenth century. On the right side of the Rue Haute, as one goes from the Place du Bourg, there is a high block containing two large houses, Nos. 6 and 8, of that street. It is now a big, plain building without a trace of architectural distinction; but in the seventeenth century it was a single mansion, built about the year 1320, and was one of the many houses with towers which gave the Bruges of that time almost the appearance of an Oriental city. It was called the House of the Seven Towers, from the seven pinnacles which surmounted it; and at the back there was a large garden, which extended to the canal and Quai des Marbriers.
In April, 1656, the 'tall man above two yards high, with dark brown hair, scarcely to be distinguished from black,' for whom the Roundheads had searched all England after the Battle of Worcester, found his way to Bruges, with his brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and the train of Royalists who formed their Court. For nearly three years after Worcester, Charles II. had lived in France; but in July, 1654, the alliance between Cromwell and Mazarin drove him to Germany, where he remained till Don John of Austria became Governor of the Spanish Netherlands. Thereupon the prospect of recovering the English throne by the assistance of Spain led him to remove his Court, which had been established for some time at Cologne, to Flanders. He arrived at Bruges on April 22, 1656. His brother James, Duke of York, and afterwards King of England, held a commission in the French army, and Mazarin offered him a command in Italy. Charles, however, requested him to leave the French army, and enter the service of Spain. At first James refused; but by the mediation of their sister, the Princess of Orange, he was persuaded to do as his brother wished, and join the Court at Bruges. The Irish Viscount Tarah received Charles, when he first arrived, in his house in the Rue du Vieux Bourg, and there gave him, we read in local history, 'une brillante hospitalité.' But in the beginning of June the Court took up its quarters in the House of the Seven Towers.