The wars of the 16th century, destructive enough because of new weapons and the new power of princes, were made worse and all the more ruthless because the combatants could consider each other enemies of God.

God had always been seen as the ultimate guarantor of political order, and so disagreement on religious order easily became disagreement on the nature of the state.  Thus, in France, convinced Huguenots, after St. Bartholomew's, wrote a republican constitution and set up what amounted to a separate state.  Convinced Catholics, too, created their own political party, one that was equally willing to appeal to heaven and the popular will in rejecting an unsuitable king.

The French religious wars also contributed to instability by inviting foreign intervention.  English, German and Genevan Protestants could not be indifferent to the fate of their co-religionists.  Some of them came to France to fight, and not just as mercenaries.  The pope and King Philip of Spain were active in the support of the Holy League, because they worried about the fate of their church in the most populous country in Europe.  Some Frenchmen were willing to tolerate heretics, even a heretic
king, in exchange for domestic peace and a united front against foreigners.  This was especially true as the wars dragged on, decade after decade.  But others prefered to work with foreigners against the enemy within.  The same could be said about English, Dutch, Germans, and Scots, about any country where the religious situation was in doubt.  The later 16th century was a when many feared and fought against outside agitators, subversives, quislings, assassins, terrorists, as well as enemies of God, apostates, blasphemers, and Great Satans.

The religious wars in France were part of a phenomenon that affected much of Europe.  And one man stood at the center of the storm:  Philip II of Spain.  He was in much the same position as his father Charles V had been in the first half of the century.  He owned territory and had interests all over western and southern Europe, and thus many enemies.  As the greatest ruler of his time, he attracted envy and rivalry.  But Philip was even more dedicated to Charles than to the religious goals of restoring the unity of the Catholic church, and preserving Christendom from the Ottoman Turks, who were still advancing in the Mediterranean.  With his universal goals, Philip was unavoidably involved in every dispute of the century.

One of the most significant of these conflicts was the revolt in the Netherlands.

The name Netherlands means a lot of different things.  Today's kingdom of the Netherlands is the country most of us think of as Holland, though Holland is really just one province.  I am using it  to mean all of the Low Countries, modern Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.      The whole area had been acquired by the Burgundian dukes and Charles V as their heir, and was one of the jewels in the Habsburg crown.

In the 1550s, the Netherlands was barely conscious of itself as a country.  The area had two languages, Dutch and French, and it was divided into seventeen different provinces, each with its history, laws, and assembly (each assembly being called the States).  The rule of the Burgundian dukes and of Charles V, however, had given the area some common institutions, including a federal assembly, the States General.  The higher nobility in particular were intermittently aware of the common interests of all the provinces, but most people thought of their provinces as being separate countries with a single prince.

In the early 1560s, when the religious wars were just starting in France, the Netherlands too were unhappy, and for much of the same reason.  Some of the biggest campaigns of the Valois-Habsburg wars had been fought on the Netherlands-French boundary, with similar economic effects.  The debts of Philip's Netherlands governments were so big that even the interest could not be paid out of normal revenue, not if the government's current bills were also to be covered.  So Philip's council in Brussels was putting pressure on the local taxpayers to dig deep, in a time, you'll remember, when the economy was not in good shape anywhere in Europe.

Among the nobles, dissatisfaction was increased by the Spanish flavor of Philip's Netherlandish government.  Philip had left for Spain right after taking on his father's titles, and never returned.  His absentee landlordism gave the great Netherlandish nobles opportunity and, on occasion, even just cause to agitate against royal policy.

Philip's ecclesiastical policy was particularly unpopular in the Netherlands.  The area had a long history of reform sentiment -- remember Erasmus, whose religious attitudes, including unusual tolerance and a dislike for rigid dogma, were typical of the whole Netherlands.  By the 1560s, the Netherlands quite naturally held many Protestants and Protestant sympathizers.   Philip, in fact, thought the Netherlands a hotbed of heresy, and he was installing new bishops and the Inquisition there to deal with the problem.

Dissatisfaction with Philip's government came to a head in 1566.  It was religion that caused the crisis.  There were two protests against Philip's repressive stance, one moderate and noble, the other radical and popluar.  The moderates were 300 members of the nobility, almost all of them Catholics, who assembled in Brussels to ask the regent, Philip's sister Margaret, to abolish the Inquisition.  This request was met by scorn.  A royal official, the Count of Barlaimont, contemptuously said of the petitioners, "This is nothing but a crowd of beggars."  Downcast and smarting from the rejection, the nobles, on the advice of one of their leaders, William the Silent, Prince of Orange, adopted the name beggar, and began wearing beggar's purses pinned to their cloaks.  The noble resistance to royal government consolidated.

A few months later, a quite separate group of Calvinists went on a rampage in the south, smashing religious statues in churches.  This wave of iconoclasm was not indicative of general feelings; it was the act of radicals hoping to provoke the government into doing something rash and alienating public opinion.  It succeed.  Margaret, who had no troops and no money to hire them, asked Philip for direction.  Philip, who keenly felt the insult to the church,decided on a harsh policy. The Duke of Alva was sent with a tough Spanish army to reduce the Netherlands to obedience.

Alva treated the Netherlanders like rebels.  He instituted a special council which he called the Council of Troubles but which everyone else soon called the Council of Blood.  Setting aside all local laws and customs, Alva attempted a clean sweep of all rebellious and heretical elements:  over 12,000 were condemned, though many escaped punishment by fleeing the country.  Those executed included some of the most respected members of the noble opposition.  When the Beggars launced a revolt, led by William of Orange, Alva easily defeated them.   With his huge army, Alva and his master Philip seemed entirely in control.

But the shock of the Council of Blood had only temporarily repressed dissent, not destroyed it.  Indeed, people were angry about the terror, and angry about the new government that Alva had created:  it imposed permanent, arbitrary taxes.  Eventually the exiled members of the Beggar party, returned under William of Orange and seized the coastal provinces of Holland and Zeeland.

The return of the Sea Beggars, as they were called on this occasion, was the real beginning of the revolution, but it took a slow and uncertain course.  First, the Sea Beggars were a smaller, poorer, and less prominent group than the ones who had petitioned the Regent Margaret six years earlier.  The Beggar cause was now much more influenced by Calvinists, noble and lower-ranking alike, who were irreconcilable to Philip for religious reasons.  They had to make do with determination for a long time, too, because there was no general rising in their favor when they showed up in Holland.   The Sea Beggars were fortunate that Alva did not have the ships necessary to retake the two maritime provinces. Their command of the sea and the canals allowed them to hold out.

By 1575, the Spanish campaign had ground to a halt.  The Spanish Army of Flanders and the separate war against the Turks were so expensive that by 1575, the Spanish government declared bankruptcy once again.  Instantly, Philip's credit was destroyed, and his Army of Flanders, which had not been paid recently in any case, lost hope that it would receive anything soon.  In the next year the unpaid troops went wild, sacking several cities, including the metropolis, Antwerp.  National feeling was fueled by anger and revulsion, even among the majority who were not Calvinists.

For a little while, the entire country went over to the rebels, including the provincial states and the federal States General.  Philip was forced to negotiate with the States General more or less as an equal.  But it was a false dawn.  The Netherlanders were far from unified.  Most influential people were looking for a quite moderate settlement, something that would return the country to the good old days before the Council of Blood.  But Calvinists, especially those who had done the bulk of the fighting, wanted to abolish Catholicism throughout the country; this was already happening in Holland and Zeeland, where the Sea Beggars were in control.  The Calvinists were also well-represented in the big cities of the south (now Belgium), such as Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent, where popular war councils attempted to displace the ordinary civic magistrates.  In more agrarian areas, especially French speaking ones, the moderate or even reactionary nobles dominated.

Despite the best efforts of William the Silent, these different interests could not work together.  The southern nobles became
increasingly alarmed by the radicalism of the urban parties, especially after an illegal Calvinist dictatorship was set up in Ghent.  Eventually the Netherlands pulled apart into two sections.  A southern union of provinces soon came to terms with Philip; they returned to their allegiance and to official Catholicism in return for a guarantee of their ancient provincial privileges.  The northern provinces and the big towns formed their own union, and by 1578 they were fighting Spain again.

It was a tough fight.   In 1581, William the Silent he and the (northern) Estates General officially deposed Philip and offered the leadership of the United Provinces to the Duke of Anjou, the younger brother of Henri III of France. This would be the basis of an alliance with the Huguenots and politiques of France against Spain.  But Anjou was more interested in becoming an absolute ruler than in Dutch priorities.  After an attempted coup to accomplish this, he died  in June of 1584.

You will recall that it was this event that made Philip ally himself with the Holy League in France.  Once Anjou was dead, Navarre the Huguenot was the heir apparent in France.  So Philip's intervention was a preventive measure to keep France out of the Protestant camp, a camp that, by virtue of Anjou's role in the Netherlands, it had already half been in.  But Philip was not just worried about defeat; he had high hopes of victory.  A month after Anjou died, in July of 1584, Philip's most steadfast Dutch enemy, William of Orange, was assassinated by a man motivated both by religious fervor and the huge reward Philip's government had promised for the rebel's death.  (The assassin died but his family got the money.)  When Philip signed his treaty with the Holy League, he hoped to paralyze France long enough to defeat his own Netherlandish enemies.

But the two deaths also braced the Protestants.  Now was the time for standing fast against Philip.  The danger that he might end up dominating both France and the Netherlands frightened Elizabeth of England into doing things she had avoided for years.  First, she made an open commitment to the Dutch rebels.  She refused sovereignty over the Netherlands (which was
also offered to Henri III), but allowed her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, to accept the post of Governor-General of the Netherlands and lead an army over to Flanders.  This help was not very effective; Spanish armies made great gains, taking Antwerp in 1586.

 The next year, Elizabeth finally allowed her cousin, Mary of Scotland, to be executed.  Mary, a staunch Catholic and a relative of the Guises, had been ejected by the Protestant Scots in the 1560s and fled to England.  Mary had been kept captive there ever since, because she was the closest heir to the throne.  For years, Elizabeth's advisors had been telling her
that Mary was too dangerous to live; in an era of fanatical assassins, Elizabeth's life was endangered by her Catholic cousin's existence.  Besides, Mary was actively involved in plots against the throne.  In early 1587, the queen let her councillors have their way.   Mary was executed at the castle of Fotheringhay on February 18, 1587.

This actually played into Philip's hands.  He had an excuse to attack England.  All of western Europe was in the balance now.  Protestants in England, France and the Netherlands were opposed to him, and potentially or actually allied with each other.  The situation in the Netherlands was good, and the League in France was doing his work by fighting against the
succession of Navarre to the French throne.  A blow against the third enemy, England, might destroy the last of the Protestant powers.  Philip had hopes that English Catholics would support a Spanish invasion if it took place.  And now that Mary of Scotland was dead, Philip considered himself the best candidate to be next king of England, once the heretic
Elizabeth was eliminated.  He had actually held that title for a while, thirty years previously.

It was in this situation that Philip took a fateful decision:  to launch the Enterprise of England, better known to us as the Spanish Armada.  In the next lecture, we will look at that great gamble, which was to determine the fate of political and religious fate of three countries.

    BIBLIOGRAPHY

H.G. Koenigsberger and George L. Mosse,  Europe in the Sixteenth Century

Garrett Mattingly,  The Defeat of the Spanish Armada

Geoffrey Parker,  Spain and the Netherlands, 1559-1659

J.H.M. Salmon,  Society in Crisis:  France in the Sixteenth Century
 

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.