The Compromise [1] of Nobles (Dutch : Eedverbond der Edelen; French : Compromis des Nobles) was a covenant of members of the nobility in the Habsburg Netherlands who came together to submit a petition to the Regent Margaret of Parma on 5 April 1566, with the objective of obtaining a moderation of the placards against heresy in the Netherlands. This petition played a crucial role in the events leading up to the Dutch Revolt and the Eighty Years' War.
The ruler of the Habsburg Netherlands, a conglomerate of duchies and counties and lesser fiefs, was Philip II of Spain. He had appointed his half-sister Margaret of Parma as his Regent. She ruled with the assistance of a Council of State which included a number of the high nobility of the country, like the Prince of Orange, Egmont, Horne, Aerschot, and Noircarmes. From time to time (whenever she needed money)[ citation needed ] she convened the States-General of the Netherlands in which the several estates of the provinces were represented, such as the lesser nobility and the cities, but most of the time the States-General was not in session and the Regent ruled alone, together with her Council.
Like his father Charles V, Philip was very much opposed to the Protestant teachings of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the Anabaptists, which had gained many adherents in the Netherlands by the early 1560s. To suppress Protestantism he had promulgated extraordinary ordinances, called placards, that outlawed them and made them capital offenses. Because of their severity, these placards caused growing opposition among the population, both Catholic and Protestant. The opposition, even among Catholics, was generated because the placards were seen as breaches of the constitutional privileges of the local authorities and the civil liberties of the people, like the Jus de non evocando , as enshrined in the "Joyous Entry", the constitution of the Duchy of Brabant, to mention a prominent example. For that reason local authorities regularly protested against the placards and the way they were implemented in 1564 and later years. That these protests were systematically ignored and the placards stringently enforced only helped intensify the opposition. [2]
This unrest motivated the Brussels government to send Lamoral, Count of Egmont, to Spain to plead for relaxation of the ordinances. Philip replied negatively in his Letters from the Segovia Woods of October 1565. That led to a gathering of some members of the lesser nobility at the house of Floris, Count of Culemborg, in December 1565. There, they drew up a petition containing a protest against the enforcement of the placards. It was probably drafted by Philips of Marnix, Lord of Saint-Aldegonde, and it was initially signed by Henry, Count of Bréderode, Louis of Nassau and Count Charles of Mansfeld. [3]
The draft was widely circulated and gathered a large number of signatures. The magnates of the nobility at first kept aloof (though Orange must have been in the know through his brother Louis). On 24 January 1566, however, Orange addressed a letter to the Regent, as a member of the Council, in which he offered his unsolicited opinion that moderation of the placards would be desirable, given the toleration now practiced in neighboring lands, like France. He also pointed to the social unrest caused by the famine that scourged the country in that year and remarked that the placards were bound to cause trouble in this context. For good measure, he threatened to resign if something along these lines was not done. [4]
The leaders of the association that supported the draft petition met in Breda at the house of Antoine II de Lalaing, Count of Hoogstraten (another member of the Council of State) to work out a way that was acceptable to the government to present the petition. Finally, on 5 April 1566, a long procession of 300 signers of the petition walked through Brussels to the Regent's court. There Brederode read the petition aloud to the Regent, who became very agitated. Afterward, when the Regent met with the Council of State, Orange tried to calm her, and another member, Charles de Berlaymont, allegedly remarked: "N'ayez pas peur Madame, ce ne sont que des gueux" (fear not madam, they are nothing but beggars). [5]
In the petition, the nobles, who presented themselves as loyal subjects of the king, asked him to suspend the Inquisition and the enforcement of the placards against heresy. They also urged the convening of the States-General so that "better legislation" could be devised to address the matter. [6]
On the advice of the moderates in the Council, like Orange, the Regent replied to the petitioners that she would forward it to the king and that she would support its requests. Brederode handed over a supplementary petition on 8 April, in which the petitioners promised to keep the peace while the petition was being sent to Spain, a journey that could take weeks. He assumed that meanwhile, the requested suspension of enforcement would be in effect. That evening the petitioners held a banquet at which they toasted the king and themselves as "beggars". Henceforth the Geuzen would be the name of their party. [7]
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The king took a long time to react to the petition, and when he finally did, he rejected its requests. Meanwhile, a large number of Protestants had returned from exile, and other Protestants now dared come out into the open. Large numbers of Protestants, especially Calvinists, started holding prayer meetings outside the walls of many cities. These open-air sermons by Calvinist preachers, though initially peaceful, caused much anxiety for the local and central authorities. In August 1566, in the depressed industrial area around Steenvoorde a rash of attacks on Catholic church property started, in which religious statuary was destroyed by irate Calvinists, for whom those statues contravened the Second Commandment against graven images. Soon this Beeldenstorm or Iconoclastic Fury engulfed the entire country. Though the central authorities eventually suppressed this insurrection, it led to severe repression by the Duke of Alba that would precipitate the Dutch Revolt and Eighty Years' War.
William the Silent or William the Taciturn, more commonly known in the Netherlands as William of Orange, was the leader of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs that set off the Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) and resulted in the formal independence of the United Provinces in 1648. Born into the House of Nassau, he became Prince of Orange in 1544 and is thereby the founder of the Orange-Nassau branch and the ancestor of the monarchy of the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, he is also known as Father of the Fatherland.
Beeldenstorm in Dutch and Bildersturm in German are terms used for outbreaks of destruction of religious images that occurred in Europe in the 16th century, known in English as the Great Iconoclasm or Iconoclastic Fury and in French as the Furie iconoclaste. During these spates of iconoclasm, Catholic art and many forms of church fittings and decoration were destroyed in unofficial or mob actions by Calvinist Protestant crowds as part of the Protestant Reformation. Most of the destruction was of art in churches and public places.
Geuzen was a name assumed by the confederacy of Calvinist Dutch nobles, who from 1566 opposed Spanish rule in the Netherlands. The most successful group of them operated at sea, and so were called Watergeuzen. In the Eighty Years' War, the Capture of Brielle by the Watergeuzen in 1572 provided the first foothold on land for the rebels, who would conquer the northern Netherlands and establish an independent Dutch Republic. They can be considered either as privateers or pirates, depending on the circumstances or motivations.
The Eighty Years' War or Dutch Revolt was an armed conflict in the Habsburg Netherlands between disparate groups of rebels and the Spanish government. The causes of the war included the Reformation, centralisation, excessive taxation, and the rights and privileges of the Dutch nobility and cities.
The County of Holland was a state of the Holy Roman Empire and from 1433 part of the Burgundian Netherlands, from 1482 part of the Habsburg Netherlands and from 1581 onward the leading province of the Dutch Republic until the Batavian Revolution in 1795. The territory of the County of Holland corresponds roughly with the current provinces of North Holland and South Holland in the Netherlands.
Louis of Nassau was the third son of William I, Count of Nassau-Siegen and Juliana of Stolberg, and the younger brother of Prince William of Orange Nassau.
The Pacification of Ghent, signed on 8 November 1576, was an alliance between the provinces of the Habsburg Netherlands. The main objectives were to remove Spanish mercenaries who had made themselves hated by all sides due to their plundering, and to promote a formal peace with the rebellious provinces of Holland and Zeeland.
Henry (Hendrik), Lord of Bréderode, also styled Count of Brederode, was a member of the Dutch noble family Van Brederode. He was the leader of the allied Dutch nobles, the so-called Compromise of Nobles of 1566 and the Geuzen at the beginning of the Eighty Years' War. Van Brederode was named the "Grote Geus" or the "Big Beggar".
The Council of Troubles was the special tribunal instituted on 9 September 1567 by Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba, governor-general of the Habsburg Netherlands on the orders of Philip II of Spain to punish the ringleaders of the recent political and religious troubles in the Netherlands. Due to the many death sentences pronounced by the tribunal, it also became known as the Council of Blood. The tribunal would be abolished by Alba's successor Luis de Zúñiga y Requesens on 7 June 1574 in exchange for a subsidy from the States-General of the Netherlands, but in practice it remained in session until the popular revolution in Brussels of the summer of 1576.
The Battle of Oosterweel took place on 13 March 1567 near the village of Oosterweel, near Antwerp, in present-day Belgium, and is traditionally seen as the beginning of the Eighty Years' War. A Spanish mercenary army surprised a band of rebels and killed or captured almost all of them.
Geuzen medals, Beggars' or Sea Beggars' medals were minted early in the Dutch Revolt and during the first half of the 16th-century Eighty Years' War. During that period, many medals, tokens and jetons with a political message were minted. The earliest Geuzen medals date from the mid-16th century to 1577.
Willem IV, Count van den Bergh (1537-1586) was the Dutch Stadtholder of Guelders and Zutphen from 1581 until his arrest for treason in 1583.
Philippe René Nivelon Louis de Sainte-Aldegonde, Lord of Noircarmes was a statesman and soldier from the Habsburg Netherlands in the service of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and Philip II of Spain. He gained notoriety during the suppression of Calvinist insurrections, especially at Valenciennes in 1566-7, and as a member of the Council of Troubles at the start of the Eighty Years' War. He was stadtholder of Hainaut from 1566, and of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht from 1573 until his death.
The Letters from the Segovia Woods denote two sets of letters Philip II of Spain sent to his Regent Margaret of Parma, rejecting requests to abolish the ordinances outlawing heresy in the Habsburg Netherlands on 17 and 20 October 1565, and 31 July 1566. His intransigence in this matter contributed to the outbreak of the Eighty Years' War.
The siege of Valenciennes took place between 14 December 1566 and 23 March 1567 at Valenciennes, then in the Spanish Netherlands. It is sometimes considered the first siege of the Eighty Years' War. Following the Beeldenstorm, which reached the city on 24 August 1566, Calvinists under the leadership of Pérégrin de La Grange and Guido de Brès fortified themselves within Valenciennes' walls. The acting stadtholder of Hainaut, Philip of Noircarmes, subdued the city after months of failed negotiations, starvation, and finally an artillery bombardment.
The Malcontents in the context of the Eighty Years' War or the Dutch Revolt were a faction of Catholic nobles in Hainaut and Artois who openly opposed William the Silent, also known as William of Orange, the leader of the States General of the Netherlands in the Union of Brussels of the Habsburg Netherlands during the period after the adoption of the Pacification of Ghent. They formed the Union of Arras in January 1579 and negotiated a separate peace with the Spanish Crown, represented by the royal governor-general Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, in the form of the Treaty of Arras (1579), signed on 17 May 1579.
The Ten Years were a period in the Eighty Years' War spanning the years 1588 to 1598. In this period of ten years, stadtholder Maurice of Nassau, the future prince of Orange and son of William "the Silent" of Orange, and his cousin William Louis, Count of Nassau-Dillenburg and stadtholder of Friesland as well as the English general Francis Vere, were able to turn the tide of the war against the Spanish Empire in favour of the Dutch Republic. They achieved many victories over the Spanish Army of Flanders, conquering large swathes of land in the north and east of the Habsburg Netherlands that were incorporated into the Republic and remained part of the Netherlands into the present. Starting with the important fortification of Bergen op Zoom (1588), Maurice and William Louis subsequently took Breda (1590), Zutphen, Deventer, Delfzijl, and Nijmegen (1591), Steenwijk, Coevorden (1592) Geertruidenberg (1593), Groningen (1594), Grol, Enschede, Ootmarsum, and Oldenzaal (1597)., recovering territories lost in 1580 through the treachery of George de Lalaing. Maurice's most successful years were 1591 and 1597, in which his campaigns resulted in the capture of numerous vital fortified cities, some of which were regarded as "impregnable". His novel military tactics earned him fame amongst the courts of Europe, and the borders of the present-day Netherlands were largely defined by the campaigns of Maurice of Orange during the Ten Years.
The years 1579–1588 constituted a phase of the Eighty Years' War between the Spanish Empire and the United Provinces in revolt after most of them concluded the Union of Utrecht on 23 January 1579, and proceeded to carve the independent Dutch Republic out of the Habsburg Netherlands. It followed the 1576–1579 period, in which a temporary alliance of 16 out of the Seventeen Provinces' States–General established the Pacification of Ghent as a joint Catholic–Protestant rebellion against the Spanish government, but internal conflicts as well as military and diplomatic successes of the Spanish Governors-General Don Juan of Austria and Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma split them apart, finally leading the Malcontent County of Artois, County of Hainaut and city of Douai to sign the Union of Arras on 6 January 1579, reverting to Catholicism and loyalty to the Spanish crown.
The period between the start of the Beeldenstorm in August 1566 until early 1572 contained the first events of a series that would later be known as the Eighty Years' War between the Spanish Empire and disparate groups of rebels in the Habsburg Netherlands. Some of the first pitched battles and sieges between radical Calvinists and Habsburg governmental forces took place in the years 1566–1567, followed by the arrival and government takeover by Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba with an army of 10,000 Spanish and Italian soldiers. Next, an ill-fated invasion by the most powerful nobleman of the Low Countries, the exiled but still-Catholic William "the Silent" of Orange, failed to inspire a general anti-government revolt. Although the war seemed over before it got underway, in the years 1569–1571, Alba's repression grew severe, and opposition against his regime mounted to new heights and became susceptible to rebellion.
The origins of the Eighty Years' War are complicated, and have been a source of disputes amongst historians for centuries.