By the middle of the sixteenth century, the whole of the Low Countries including what is today the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and considerable portions of northern France (Lille-Arras-Cambrai and Dunkirk) but excluding the independent prince-bishopric of Liège had been brought together to form a single political entity under the Habsburg emperor, Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor, 1519-56; king of Spain, 1516-56). The seventeen provinces of the Netherlands, one of the most urbanized and economically developed parts of Europe, represented the bulk of one of main components of Charles V?s empire - the Burgundian legacy which also included the Franche-Comté and the Burgundian claims to additional areas of France. The Burgundian lands, together with the two other great legacies which were inherited by Charles V - the Habsburg lands and the Spanish Monarchy - formed what was then the world?s greatest empire.

Charles V. grandson on one side of the emperor Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, and Mary of Burgundy, heiress to the Burgundian legacy, and, on the other of Frederic and Isabella, king and queen of Aragon and Castile, had an unchallengeable right, in terms of dynastic legitimacy, to rule the Habsburg Low Coutries - that is the whole of the Netherlands except Liège - at the same time that he was king in Spain and Holy Roman Emperor in the German lands. That unchallengeable right he passed on to his son Philip II who did not inherited the Habsburg lands in central europe or the title of Holy Roman Emperor but was simultaneously king of Spain (1556-98), ruler of the Netherlands, and ruler also of the Spanish viceroyalties in Italy and the Americas. In 1580, Philip II also inherited the Portuguese crown and empire both of which were to be attached to Spain until 1640. Thus the Habsburg Netherlands in the third quarter of the sixteenth century remained an integral part of what was still the largest and most powerful empire in the world. In terms of the accepted conventions and practices of the time Philip II?s title to rule in the Low Countries was thus immaculate. Nor did the rebels against Habsburgs authority in the Netherlands ever question that Philip - and after him his son and grandson, Philip III (reigned 1598-1621) and Philip IV (1621-65) were, in dynastic terms, the legitimate and rightful rulers of the Low Countries.

The inexorably growing tensions between the Spanish crown and its subjects in the Netherlands which led to the outbreak of the Dutch revolt in the tumultuous years 1566-68 had two principal causes. There was, on the one hand, and especially since the 1540s, a widespread resentment over the king?s effort to expand the royal administration, subordinate local judicial, municipal and fiscal organs increasingly to royal control, and raise taxation so as to render the Low Countries a more effective base for Spanish power, especially in the context of Spain?s virtually permanent confrontation with France. By the 1560s there was a widespread feeling in the Low Countries that the Spanish crown was attempting to subvert and suppress the complex web of freedoms, privileges and rights which the towns and provinces had acquired from their medieval rulers and which were the basis of their political autonomy. But had the crisis in the Low Countries consisted solely of this clash between a centralizing monarchy and a stubborn resistance to such centralization, especially on the part of the three largest provinces - Flanders, Brabant and Holland - in all probability compromises would have been reached and adjustments made which would have avoided anything remotely like the tremendous conflict which in fact ensued. What prevented such compromises being negotiated was the second factor: the escalating strife over religion which had held the Low Countries in its grip since the 1520s. [1] The impact of the Lutheran Reformation had been strongly felt from an early stage at any rate in the urbanized Dutch-speaking provinces. But if the Reformation in the Netherlands began early and was originally Lutheran in flavour, it rapidly lost its specially Lutheran character as first Zwinglian, Buceran and Anabaptist influence and then, from the 1550s onwards a powerful current of Calvinist doctrine and activity penetrated deeply especially into the urban part of Dutch society and among sections of the nobility. Moreover, while the earlier movements had made little impact in the French-speaking provinces, the so called ?Walloon? provinces in the southern part of the Netherlands, during the 1550s Calvinism penetrated deeply there too.

To counter this Protestant upsurge Charles V, backed by the church and judicial authorities in the Netherlands but without much co-operation from the towns and nobility, resorted to book burnings, searches, and soon also executions, on a scale which represented the most severe religious persecution to be found anywhere in Europe at that time outside of Spain and Portugal. The repression, the activities of the inquisition which Charles V had set up in the Low Countries, and the confiscation of property which by the middle years of the century was proceeding on a substantial scale, caused a great deal of resentment not only among Protestant sympathizers but also among large sections of the nobility and the country?s other elites which greatly disliked the political and legal innovations and intrusion which the persecution entailed. Consequently when, in 1566, the Habsburg government temporarily lost its grip over the country Protestant groups came out of royal policy, expressed in part in the form of pamphlet propaganda. When the ?beeldenstorm? broke out - a wave of attacks on church altars, images, paintings and vestments which swept Flanders, Brabant, Zweeland and Holland - and in Antwerp, then the largest city in the Low Countries, led to the ransacking of all forty-two churches in the city - little attempt was made in most places to repulse the iconoclasts. Generally speaking, except in some of the French speaking areas (most notably in Lille) there was little of that militant popular Catholicism avid to fight the Protestants which one found at that time in France. It is certainly true that only a minority of the population of the Netherlands were active Protestants during the early stages of the revolt against Spain. But it is also true that Catholic allegiance among the populace was generally rather weak and that for an uncompromising, doctrinally rigourous Catholicism of the type being propagated by the incipient European Counter-Reformation was, at that stage, mainly a religion of state and church officials rather than of the people in the Netherlands.

Philip II reacted vigorously to the challenge to his authority and to the Catholic Church. Although in the late 1560s Spain was locked in gruelling struggle with the Ottoman Turks in North Africa, and the Mediterranean more generally, and despite the heavy costs of financing this war by land and sea in the south, Philip decided to send a powerful army, commanded by the duke of Alva to force the Low Countries into a more submissive attitude. [2] Despite, or perhaps because of the difficulties and obvious fragility of Spanish authority in the Netherlands, the king allowed himself to be swayed by the hard-line views of Alva and to resolve on the taking of drastic measures. It was clear in any case that the huge financial burden of supporting two major armies, one in the south and one in the Netherlands, could not be sustained for long so that it must have seemed that the taking of harsh steps to crush all resistance quickly whilst the army was available was the only realistic course.

Alva arrived with 10.000 Spanish and Italian troops, having marched overland from Genoa and Milan, in August 1567. His severity in the Low Countries certainly had a spectacular impact and by no means only in the Low Countries. Altogether 8.950 persons, from all social strata, were accused and convicted of treason or heresy, or both, during the years 1567-72, and over one thousand of these were publicly executed, in many cases burnt at the stake. [3] Numerous noble and other residences were searched and ransacked including the various residences of William of Orange (1533-84), the richest and most important nobleman in the Low Countries who, though he had not yet taken up arms against the king, was regarded both at the Escorial and among royal officials in Brussels as the chief instigator if the opposition to royal policy and would-be protector of the Protestants. To avoid the repression large numbers of political and religious refugees fled the Low Countries especially during spring and summer of 1567 and again over winter of 1567-68. Many took refuge in England. But the largest numbers settled temporarly, or in some cases permanently in Emden, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfurt and other towns of north-west Germany. A not insignificant number migrated to Denmark and the Baltic. A majority of these the 60.000 or so refugees who fled the Netherlands at this time were non-Lutheran Protestants, that is Calvinists in the main with a sprinkling of Mennonites, Spiritualists and others. Consequently this dramatic exodus which included a considerable number of nobles, officials, and other highly placed men, had the effect not just of reinforcing the Reformation in north-west Germany, a region where there were numerous ecclesiastical princes who were striving their hardest to defend the old Church in alliance with Spain but also of adding significantly to the diversity and fragmentation of Protestantism throughout the Lower Rhine area and Westphalia. [4] As a result of this infusion from the Low Countries the Calvinist minotrity such as Hamburg and Frankfurt became a much more formidable group than they would otherwise have been.

Alva?s severity then for a time thoroughly intimidated the population of the Netherlands and had intimidating effect also over princes and city governments of the Lower Rhine and Westphalia but, at the same time, created a large pool of exiled Netherlands based nearby who could only regain their homes and confiscated property by forming a politico-religious liberation movement against Spanish authority in the Low Countries. The two pre-eminent German princes of the Lower Rhine at this time were the Archbishop-elector of Cologne and Duke Wilhelm, ruler for over half a century (1539-92) of the three duchies of Jülich, Cleves and Berg as well as the counties of Mark, Ravensberg and Ravenstein. Duke Wilhelm had been Lutheran and anti-Habsburg early in his reign but modified his stance after the coming of Alva and now professed to be a Catholic. [5] Nevertheless he was suspected by Spanish officials in Brussels of being one of those German princes who not only sympathized with but was actively supporting William of Orange who after fleeing to Dillenburg shortly before Alva?s arrival, entered into armed revolt against Philip II in 1568, putting himself at the head of the liberation movement in exile. William of Orange could count on the help of his relatives and the resources of the little state of Nassau-Dillenburg, his family?s domain in Germany and a Calvinist state, but it was the largest pool of exiles from the Netherlands, and the Lutheran and crypto-Lutheran princes of Germany, which enabled him to gather enough funds and troops to mount a credible challenge to Spanish power in the Low Countries, a challenge mounted by sea, from Emden, as well as by land from north-west Germany.

In 1572 large parts of the Netherlands erupted in open revolt against Alva?s harsh procedures, insistent tax-raising (the Tenth-penny) and disdainful treatment of the constitutional privileges of the provinces and towns. The revolt of 1572 was partly spontaneous and partly the result of invasion from the sea, on the part of the Sea-beggars, and by land from Germany and France. Initially, it looked as if the Spanish regime was about to be overwhelmed. But Alva was an experienced and effective military commander who knew how to use his troops to maximum advantage and was prone to resort to calculated ruthlessness in order to intimidate whole regions. After a few months several horrific massacres - notably those at Mechelen (September 1572), Zutphen (14 November 1572) and Naarden (2 December 1572) in the last of which the Spaniards killed virtually every man, woman and child, the larger part of the Low Countries had been thoroughly subjugated and pacified. But a tenacious resistance continued in the towns of Holland and Zeeland except for Amsterdam and Middelburg where royalist, pro-Catholic governments held out for the king (in the former case until 1578). The tenacity of the rebels, stiffened by the ferocity of the religious conflict and the knowledge of how they would be treated if they fell into Alva?s hands, prevented Alva from suppressing the revolt in 1572-73. Nevertheless, Philip II and his supporters could still reasonably have expected eventually to win a conclusive victory over the rebels during the period down to the famous siege of Leiden in 1574. For month the siege hung in the balance. William of Orange only just succeded, by flooding the surrounding areas, in forcing the Spaniards back and relieving the town. But it was a crucial defeat which led to the Spaniards abandoning the whole of South Holand and falling back on their bases in Haarlem, Amsterdam and Utrecht, albeit (as they and their royalist and Catholic supporters hoped and expected) with the intention of returning.

The relief of leiden in 1574 and the now chronic condition of the royal finances meant that there could be no speedy solution of the conflict in favour of Spain. On the contrary, during the years 1574-76 both the political and still more the financial position of the Spanish crown in the Low Countries deteriorated to such a point that the army (which was made up of German and Walloon as well as Spanish and Italian troops) mutinied for lack of pay and began to disintegrate leading to the virtual collapse of Spanish authority in most of the provinces. A horde of mutinious Spanish troops subjected Antwerp, the largest and richest city of the Low Countries, to a horrific sack in November 1576 in which thousands were massacred and much of the city pillaged. In order to protect their towns from similar treatment, the nobles and town governments in most of the provinces signed the agreement known as the pacification of Ghent (November 1576) where by they agreed to collaborate politically and militarily with the two rebel provinces, Holland and Zeeland, which had been fighting the king since 1572, to drive out the Spanish soldiery and bring the war to an end. However, there was no agreement between these two provinces and the provinces which had been under Spanish control between 1572 and 1576 over ultimate political goals or the thorny question of religion.

From 1576 until the Spanish recapture of Antwerp 1585 there were in fact three different political entities in the Low Countries each striving for a different solution to the conflict. [6] In the first place there was the area right in the south - mainly Luxemburg and Namur - which remained under Spanish control and loyal to Spain when the rest adhered to the Pacification of Ghent. Secondly, there was the rebel regime which had been set up in Holland and Zeeland in 1572, headed by William of Orange, determined to force the king to abandon much of his power in the Netherlands, officially Calvinist and a regime which, since 1573, had banned Catholic worship. But in the middle and dominant initially in a majority of the provinces, including the two largest and most populous - Flanders and Brabant as well as most of the Waloon area - there was a middle group which certainly whished to reduce Spanish power and remove the Spanish soldiery but also wished to achieve a workable compromise with the king as soon as possible and, in part of this very reason, was determined to uphold the supremacy of the Catholic Church and not to permit the public practice of Calvinism, Lutheranism, or any other form of Protestantism. The inevitable result was that behind the continuing military conflict between the two groups of rebel provinces, on the one hand, and the Spaniards and loyalist provinces on the other, erupted an inexorable triangular politico-religious conflict in which revolutionary groups of Calvinists, allied to William of Orange, and the Revolt Holland-style, captures control first of Ghent and Bruges and later of Brussels and Antwerp, but at the cost of alienating most of the nobility and patrician classes of Flanders and Brabant from the Revolt from the revolt. Calculating that the continued support of the nobles and patricians in the south was more important that the further advance of Protestantism, William of Orange rapidly turned against these radical Calvinist elements in the southern cities, rendering the overall situation more complex and convoluted than ever. [7] The prince was forced into an insuperable contradiction whereby he sought to impose a policy of ?religious peace? south of the rivers, bridling the Calvinuists and protecting the public practice of Catholicism while in the north he headed a regime which upheld the exclusive supremacy of the Reformed Church and banned Catholicism.

The spread and intensification of the conflict in the Low Countries inevitably spilled over into, and intensified the religious and political conflict in, north-west Germany. The numerous secular and ecclesiastical states of this region formed together with Alsace, Lorraine and the France-Comté an immense power vacuum which, throughout the early modern period, tended to be dominated either by France or Spain (replaced after 1700 by Austria) or a mixtures of both. At this point however, France was immobilized by her Wars of religion, while Spain was partly immobilized be their chronic financial situation and the spreading revolt in the Low Countries. Since the 1550s north-west Germany had been the scene of a spiralling and increasingly bitter triangular struggle between Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist factions. As the struggle in the Netherlands deepened so did the fight for dominance on the Lower Rhine and in Westphalia. Moreover, however difficult it was for Spain at this juncture to intervene in German affairs, the close interdependency of the Spanish court simply could not afford to stand aside.

By the early 1580s when the Spaniards in the south of the Low Countries were again gaining ground and the middle entity in Netherlands politics was being increasingly squeezed between Spanish successes in the south and Protestant gains in the north and centre, the struggle in north-west Germany was also entering its most crucial phase. Since the 1550s the position of the ecclesiastical states of the Lower Rhine (Cologne, Münster, Osnabrück and Paderborn) had tended to become weaker as Catholic allegiance at any rate among the urban population had waned and both Lutheran and Calvinist allegiance stronger. It was perhaps only a matter of time before one of the ecclesiastical princes was tempted to abandon Catholicism and attempt to build a new dynastic and political base relying on Protestant support. This happened in 1582 when Archbishop-elector Gebhard Truchsess van Waldburg of Cologne, renounced his allegiance to the papacy, announced his conversion to Protestantism and tried, with the help of Dutch rebels, to force through the Reformation in his electorate. In April 1583, the pope deposed him, opening the way to the election of a new archbishop elector in the shape of Ernst of Bavaria. In the ensuing War of Cologne (1583-89), the Protestants initially had upper hand but the tide turned, from January 1584, when a group of Catholic nobles, backed by Spanish Troops captured the electoral Residenz, the city of Bonn. During subsequent months, Archbishop-elector Ernst conquered most of the electorate and, in 1585, also secured election as prince-bishop of Münster, the largest of the Westphalian ecclesiastical states and the most crucial strategically. Ernst?s double victory in Cologne and Münster marked the effective beginning of the Counter-Reformation on the Lower Rhine and in Westphalia, the slow rolling back of the tide of Protestantism and the counter-offensive of an increasingly confident and vigorous Catholicism nurtured not least by a spate of new Jesuit colleges for educating sons of nobles, officials and merchants. Ernst of Bavaria?s double triumph in north-western Germany was, it should be noticed, not just simultaneous with, but also politically, strategically and logistically closely linked to, the duke of Parma?s triumphant reconquest of Flanders and Brabant in the years 1584-85 in the name of Philip II. the success of Alexander Farnese, duke of Parma in the Low Countries culminated with the recapture of Antwerp for Spain in 1585. When the city fell, Parma garrisoned the citadel with crack Castilian troops. Protestants who refused their faith and reconvert to Catholicism were obliged to sell their homes and leacve. Thousands left mostly migrating to Holland and Zeeland but with substantial numbers settling also in the towns of north-west Germany.

Yet after Antwerp the Spanish counter-offensive in the Netherlands ground to a half (though Parma did capture Nijmegen, Deventer and Zutphen), leaving most of the territory of the Seven Provinces which had signed the closer defensive alliance known as the Union of Utrecht in 1579 still in rebel hands while likewise in north-west Germany, the ecclesiastical princes and their allies were unable to complete their victory. Spanish troops capture Neuss for the elector, massacring local Protestants in July 1587 but in December 1587 a Dutch-backed Protestant force successfully stormed Bonn. In March 1588, as the Invincibly Armada was preparing to sail against England from Corunna and Lisbon, a Spanish army sent by Farnese encircled Bonn and, after a six month siege, forced the town?s surrender. In September 1589, Farnese sent another Spanish force to besiege the important Rhine fortress town of Rheinberg, a predominantly Protestant town at the northern end of the electorate of Cologne which was garrisoned by the Dutch. The starving garrison surrendered in February 1590. The Spaniards then put their troops into Rheinberg. [8] This was the first of the network of fixed garrisons which the Spanish crown built up on german soil from 1590 onwards and which served to underpin the precarious hegemony which Spain achieved in north-western Germany from the middle of the 1580s down the 1630.

What turned out to be the permanent halt to Spanish advance in the Low Countries after 1585 was chiefly the result of the increasing consolidation and resilience of the Dutch rebel state based on the provinces of Holland, its rapidly growing economic strength, and not least the increasingly formidable ring of sophisticated fortifications which the new Dutch regime, following the assassination of William of Orange by a Catholic fanatic in 1584, constructed in order to seal off the infant rebel state from Spanish-held territory to the south and east. This massive defensive ring ran from Sluis on the Scheldt estuary, in the south, via the great rivers and the IJssel line to Coevorden, in Drenthe and then on the Delfzij on the Ems estuary.

The overall strategic position both of the Dutch rebels and the Protestant factions in north-west Germany suddenly was much strengthened in 1590 following Philip II?s decision to use the in Spanish army of Flanders to intervene in the civil wars France where the Catholic League was now on the defensive and it appeared that Henri IV, then still a protestant, might succeed not only in firmly establishing himself as king of France but also as the first Protestant king of France. Philip was determined to prevent both the one and the other.

But the price of Spanish intervention in France during the years 1590-98 down to the Peace of Vervins (1598) was that the Spanish forces in the Netherlands and north-west Germany were obliged to turn their back on their enemies to the north and concentrate their attention and energies on France. The running down of the Spanish garrisons along and north of the great rivers and on the Lower Rhine which was the inevitable consequence of this situation provided both the infant Dutch state now under the leadership of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547-1619) in his capacity as ?Advocat of Holland?, and the anti-Spanish factions in Westphalia and on the Lower Rhine, with a golden opportunity to gain ground at Spanish and Catholic expense.

In 1591 the Dutch offensive, led by Maurits of Nassau (Stadholder 1585-1625) ejected the Spaniards in rapid succession from Zutphen, Deventer and Nijmegen and consolidated the Dutch grip on the southern bank of the Ems estuary. In the 1594 the Dutch captured the city of Groningen, the last major Spanish base in the north-eastern Netherlands. In his second major offensive, that of 1597, Maurits sought to evict Spanish power from north-west Germany, at least from the Rhine northwards, as well as from the eastern fringes of the Dutch Republic and was triumphantly successful in achieving both goals. On 10 August 1597, Maurits appeared before Rheinberg with 8.200 men and an impressive artillery train which had shipped up the Rhine from Holland on a fleet of Dutch barges. [9] After only ten days of an unprecedentedly fierce bombardement the experienced but battered Spanish garrison surrendered. Having secured his rear by capturing the main Spanish crossing-point over the Rhine, Maurits then captured Grol (Groenlo), Oldenzaal, Enschede, Bredevoort and the second major Spanish fixed garrison on German soil, that of Lingen, in rapid succession.

Once the Franco-Spanish war of 1590-98 was over, however, the new king of Spain, Philip III and the new Habsburg rulers in the Catholic Netherlands - the Archduke of Austria and his wife, Isabella Clara Eugenia, eldest daughter of Philip II, to whom the dyeing Philip II had decided to allocate the Netherlands, could think seriously about restoring Spanish hegemony in the north-eastern Netherlands and on the Lower Rhine and in Westphalia. But several years elapsed before the rule of the Archdukes in the Southern Netherlands was sufficiently consolidated, Ostend the last remaining major Dutch base in Flanders, could be captured, and the Spanish finances and army of Flanders sufficiently revived, for this to be achieved. But by 1605 the circumstances were right and the brilliant new commander of the army of Flanders, the Genoese Ambrogio Spinola (1569-1630) mounted two campaigns during the summer of 1605 and 1606 which effectively restored Spanish mastery on the Lower rhine and in western Westphalia. In 1605, Spinola captured Oldenzaal and Lingen, a major fortress town on the Ems. In 1606 he reconquered Grol, Bredevoort and, after a fierce bombardement, Rheinberg which by this time had changed hands so many times that Spinola nicknamed in the ?whore of war?.

By 1606, however, Philip III and his favourite, the duke of Lerma, had decided to bring Spain?s long struggle in the Low Countries and the adjoining parts of Germany to an end, partly owing to renewed financial difficulties and partly because they whished to use Spain?s imperial resources elsewhere. Secret negotiations began which ended with the signing of the Twelve Years Truce (1609-21) in April 1609. A major factor in the king?s and Lerma?s thinking was the recent progress which the Dutch had made in the East Indies, in 1605 capturing Amboina and two other ?Spice Islands?, Ternate and Tidore, from the Portuguese who, since 1580, had been subjects of the Spanish crown. It was obvious that Spain could not match the sea-power which, since 1602, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had built up in Asian waters. The most practical way to halt Dutch colonial expansion in the East Indies, and recover the lost bases for the Portuguese empire, seemed to be to do a deal with the Dutch whereby the Spanish crown would recognize the rebel provinces as ?free-provinces? over which the king of Spain had nmo claim from the East Indies and the Caribbean, and to cease their navigation to the Indies east and west alike. [10] Philip III and Lerma were ready to agree to a full and permanent peace, were the Dutch to respond to this offer, but Dutch refusal to disband the VOC as well as abort the projected new Dutch West India Company (which Oldenbarnevelt did agree to do) meant that there could be no peace. In the end the device of a Twelve Years? Truce proved mutually acceptable.

But the truce which Lerma and perhaps also Oldenbarnevelt hoped would pave the way to a permanent peace proved self-defeating. In every theatre, in the East Indies, West Africa and the Caribbean, as well as in the Low Countries and in north-west Germany, tension between Spain and the Dutch rapidly resumed, Indeed never was the independency of the situation in north-west Germany and that in the netherlands more clearly demonstrated than during the Twelve Years? Truce. When the duke of Jülich-Cleves died in 1609 leaving no direct heir a major international crisis blew up over the succession. Politically, strategically, and from a religious point of view the question of who was to succeed the three duchies and three counties was percieved as one of vital importance not only in the Netherlands and Germany but in much of the rest of Europe. The deceased duke has been pro-Spanish and Catholic but both the rival claimants for the duchies in 1609, the elector of Brandenburg and the duke of Neuburg, were at this stage Lutherans. Accordingly, Spain oppesed both and initially supported the Emperor?s policy of seeking to impose an imperial administrator until all aspects of the question had been thoroughly investigated and the Emperor could decide how best to satisfy all the interests involved. The French king, Henry IV, however, refused to accept this and, together with the Dutch, and with support of the predominantly Protestant nobles and towns of Jülich, Berg and Mark invaded Jülich, the only duchy where most of the nobles supported Spain, the emperor and the imperial administrator. In September 1610, the heaviliy fortified town of Jülich surrendered to a combined Franco-Dutch army. But the assassination of Henri IV in May 1610 led to the early removal of the french from the scene and subsequently Jülich was garrisoned by the Dutch on their own.

The removal of the French from the scene also encouraged Spain to play a morte active role on the Lower Rhine and reassert her dominance though both Lerma and the Archdukes remained very cautious. Outmanoeuvred in 1609-10, Spinola and the Archdukes were determined to act with speed and vigour when the crisis over the succession resumed in 1614. The duchies had been partitioned for the interim between the claimants but this did nothing to lessen the underlying tension which intensified in 1613 when the elector of Brandenburg converted himself and his court to Calvinism, and drew closer to Dutch, whilst his rival, Wolfgang Wilhelm of Neuburg, having married a sister of the duke of Bavaria and become a Catholic, drew closer to the emperor and Spain. The new crisis erupted when, with help of some Spanish officers, Neuburg, seized Düsseldorf, the capital of the duchy of Berg, ejecting the officials and troops and of the elector, and war seemed about to break out. At this point Spinola appeared at the head of a powerful Spanish army of 22.500 men, toppled the Calvinist city government of Aachen [11], replacing it with a Catholic city government and generally intimidated the whole of the Lower Rhine region of Germany. He occupied Düren and a number of other places in Jülich and Berg, reinforced the Spanish garrison in Düsseldorf, and then invaded Cleves where he seized Duisburg, and Orsoy and finally the key Rhenish fortress town of Wesel. Wesel, then a town of 6.000 inhabitants, had been predominantly Protestant for over seventy years and was one of the chief Calvinist centres in Germany. To impress the Spanish public, a Spanish news sheet which appeared in Seville at this time accounted Wesel ?much worse than Geneva?. Spinola quartered 1.200 troops in the town, around 1.000 of which were Spanish and named a Castilian officer to be the town?s new military governor. Spain now posessed an extensive network of fixed garrisons on the Lower Rhine in Germany and, from 1614 down to 1629, continued to garrison dozens of small towns and villages on German territory as well as the several large fortress towns of which Wesel, Rheinberg and Lingen were the most important. [12]

The Eighty Years? War between Spain and the Dutch resumed in the expiry of the Twelve Years? Truce in April 1621. Meanwhile, the Thirty Years? War had begun in the empire three years before with a Spanish-backed offensive by the Emperor Ferdinand II to suppress the Dutch-backed, anti-Habsburg, and predominantly Calvinist rebellion in Bohemia and Moravia. From the outset the two conflicts, in the Holy Roman Empire and in the Low Countries, were inextricably entwined. For the Dutch Stadholder, Prince Maurits, the German war was a politico-strategic instrument chiefly useful as a means of deflecting Spanish man and money away from the Low Countries to be used up in the morass of the German struggle. But, at the same time, it was vital to the Dutch that the anti-Habsburg elements in the empire should not be utterly overwhelmed by the emperor and Spain. For if the result were a Habsburg hegemony established throughout Germany the consequence would be that the United provinces would be boxed in between Spain and the emperor and the republic?s strategic position gravely weakened. Until his death in 1625, Maurits was in fact the most important ally of the anti-Habsburg factions in the empire and not least of Friedrich V of Palatinate. Since the overthrow of Oldenbarnevelt in 1618, Maurits had been able to shape the foreign policy of the Dutch Republic virtually as he pleased. He was in any case an uncle of Friedrich V, the latter?s mother, Louise Juliana, being a daughter of William of Orange by his third wife, Charlotte de Bourbon. But it was less the family link which in any case was not especially close since Maurits did not have the same mother as Louise Juliana, being a child of William?s second marriage, to, Anna of Saxony, but deep considerations of policy which induced Maurits - albeit often secretively and behind the scenes - much to provide positive encouragement and support in callenging the Habsburgs in Bohemia than did Friedrich?s peace-loving father-in-law, king James I of England. When Friedrich prematurely abandoned the war in Bohemia and left his capital and lands in Germany, it was natural that he, his wife, ?Queen? Elizabeth of Bohemia, and his court should flee to, and settle in, the Calvinist court of the Dutch Stadtholder at the Hague.

Similarly for the Spanish court in Madrid the struggle in Germany, and the resumed conflict in the Low Countries, were two parts of a singly and immensely complex political and military chess-board. It was by no means the Spanish strategy in the early 1620s to invade the core territory of the Dutch Republic and try to overrun it. Given the condition of warfare at that time and the fact that the Dutch possessed a much more formidable line of defensive fortifications than anything to be found in any part of Germany, Philip IV?s chief minister, first Don Balthasar de Zuñiga (d. 1622) and then the conde-duque de Olivares, both of whom were known enthusiasts for close collaborarion between Madrid and Vienna, took the view that it was simply not realistic, and that it would be too costly to overwhelm the Dutch defences and conquer the Seven Provinces. It was not their aim to try to reintegrate the northern Netherlands into the Spanish empire. Their purpose was to put such pressure on the Dutch Republic by squeezing her defences with a large Spanish army and by turing the tables on her in Germany - pressure military, economic and political - that the Dutch could be significantly weakened and compelled to cease their support for the enemies of Habsburgs in Europe as well as forced to disband the East and West India Companies and cease their colonial expansion. Weakening the Dutch was intended to pave the way to an untroubled imperial dominance by Spain and Portugal in the Americas, Africa and Asia and to consolidating the southern Netherlands, Spain?s main strategic base in northern Europe. Helping the emperor to triumph in Germany and the Czech lands was a way of securing and making more to enduring Spain?s hegemony in Europe by defeating the international Calvinist coalition, overdrawing France and boxing in the Dutch. A by product of these vast shifts, it was hoped in Madrid, would be the commercial and financial revival of Antwerp, and the whole Spanish Netherlands, built on a diversion of trade away from Amsterdam.

It was as a consequence of this strategy that the Spanish army of Flanders was used in the early 1620?s whilst Spain was still in a comanding position not in any attempt to push deep into Dutch territory but rather to cut the lines of communication between the Dutch Republic and the interior of Germany, to capture outlying Dutch fortresses, and pile as much pressure as possible - financial as much as military - on the Dutch defensive ring and on the Dutch state itself. [13] It was a strategy designed to force the Dutch to sustain an army larger than they could afford while simultaneously damaging the Dutch economy by means of trade embargoes, a maritime privateering campaign based on Dunkirk and Ostend to Dutch shipping, and later, in the years 1625-29 also a river blockade in the Low Countries. It was a strategy which had some logic to it and it is evident that it was fairly successful initially. By the time of the siege of Breda (1624-25), Spinola?s most famous exploit, the Dutch finances were stretched to the limit and Dutch morale did sink to a low point. In 1624-25 foreign observers in the republic, auch as the French ambassador at The Hague, were extremely pessimistic about the prospects of the United Provinces.

An essential part of the Spanish strategy was to roll up the Dutch outpost in north-west Germany and extend Spain?s hegemony over the whole of the Lower Rhine and Westphalian regions. The Spaniards captured Jülich, putting a strong garrison into the town early in 1622. Later that year Spanish troops captured and occupied the fortress of Pfaffenmütze which the Dutch had constructed a few years before on a small island in the Rhine, north of Bonn, in order to overwave the Archbishop-elector of Cologne and safeguard their communications with the Palatinate. [14] After the defeat of the Protestant army of Christian of Brunswick by Tilly, at Stadtlohn, near the Dutch border, on 6 August 1623, Spanish troops advancesd into the county of Mark and one by one captures the towns which the Dutch had been garrisoning since 1614 in the name of the elector of Brandenburg. By December 1623, Spanish trops were securely in control of Lippstadt, Hamm, Unna, Camen and at one point had established outposts as far as the River Weser, having also ovcerruzn the county of Ravensberg and seized Herford, By late 1623 Spain was thus unchallenged as the dominant power throughout the region from Aachen and Jülich in the west to Herford in the east and as far north as Lingen on the Ems. [15]

This unchallenged Spanish hegemony in north-west Germany remained intact until 1629. The dozen most important Spanish garrisons in north-west Germany are given below together with their recorded troop-strength as March 1627, the figures coming from the Spanish royal archives at Simancas in Old Castile.

(Table)

But if Spain?s strategy in the Low Countries and Germany proved on the whole, rather effective at least down to around 1626 it had one fatal weakness: it depended for its success on the assumption that Spain could afford to deploy more troops and concentrate greater resources that the Dutch were able to do. This in turn depended on Spain being able to concentrate her full attention on and pour the bulk of her available resources into, this part of Europe. The United Provinces were a miniscule republic of less than two million inhabitants. The Spanish Monarchy was a world empire with viceroyalties and dependencies scattered all around the globe and with over sixteen million inhabitants in Europe alone. By the standards of the time it seemed impossible that the world empire should not possess more than enough resources to stifle an infant republic so utterly inferior in extent. But the world had never before seen so flourishing a commercial and maritime republic and it was difficult for contemporaries to grasp what this meant in terms of financial and logistical as well as technical capability. In the end the Spanish strategy failed because Spain?s resources were insufficient and this became disastrously evident at the end of the 1620s when Spain was sucked into the War of the Mantuan Succession (1628-31) in northern Italy.

The politics of the Mantuan Succession and Spain?s extensive interests in Italy led to Olivares? committing substantial troop-strength there at a particularly crucial juncture. A great risk was taken in order to prevent a situation which might well have enabled the French to undermine Spain?s dominance in northern Italy. By the spring of 1629 the Spanish army of Flanders was, as a consequence, severely weakened in terms of manpower and utterly starved of funds. From the Habsburg point of view the curring back of Spain?s involvement in the north could not have happened at a worse moment. The Infanta Isabella who, since the death of Albert in 1621, and the reversion of the southern Netherlands to direct Spanish sovereignty, had been Philip IV?s regent in Brussels, was reduced to a state of near panic. For the new Dutch Stadtholder, Frederik Hendrik (1625-47), helped by some easing of the Dutch economic recession and the lessening of Spanish pressure, was able to increase the Dutch forces just at this very time. By early 1629, for the first time in the Eighty Year?s War, the Dutch army was larger as well as better organized and financed than that of Spain.

The disaster which the Infanta Isabella foresaw in her letters to her nephew the king quickly materialized. Having no need to fear any likely Spanish counter-offensive at that point, Frederik Hendrik amassed a huge force and calmly set siege to the second most vital Spanish stronghold in northern Europe after that of Antwerp - namely the heavily fortified town of ?s-Hertogenbosch which commanded a large and fertile region of northern Brabant, and which formed the lynch-pin, the strategic pivot, connecting the Spanish bases in Flanders and Brabant with the entire network of Spanish strongholds on the Maas, Rhine and north of the Rhine inside Germany. Without ?s-Hertogenbosch there was a gaping hole in the middle which made nonsens of the entire Spanish strategic position in the Low Countries and Germany alike.

With its massive and highly sophisticated fortifications and numerous outer forts, ?s-Hertogenbosch was no easy nut to crack. the siege, one of the most vital events of the second part of the Eighty Years? War dragged on for many months. In their panic and weakness the Spanish authorities in Brussels pleaded with the emperor to come to their assistance. An imperialist army arrived under the command of Count Raimundo Montecuccoli (1609-80) and a joint Spanish imperialist diversionary invasion was launched across the IJssel which penetrated as far as Amersfoort in the province of Utrecht. But the Dutch Stadholder refused to be dislodged from his siege of ?s-Hertogenbosch and stayed where he was.

The eventuall fall of ?s-Hertogenbosch (and also Wesel) to Dutch forces in 1629 not only did immense damage to Spain?s ?reputación? in Europe, constituting the largest Spanish defeat in Europe between the failure of the Armada against England in 1588 and the battle of Rocoi in 1643, it had far-ranging strategic implications which seriously undermined Spain?s grip on the Maas Valley, on the Lower Rhine in Germany and on the Spanish-dominated areas north of the Rhine. [17] As the Mantuan War was still in progress and nothing could be done in the foreseeable future to restore Spain?s military superiority in the Low Countries, the new Spanish commander of the army of Flanders, the marqués de Aytona wrote to Madrid early in 1630 advising that Spain should withdraw her garrisons from Hamm, Lippstadt, Unna, Camen, Herford, Pfaffenmütze and even Lingen and transfer the troops back to the Netherlands. [18]Olivares was much troubled by the loss of ?reputación? involved in revealing to the entire world the king of Spain lacked the resources to hold on to places of such evident strategic importance as Lingen and Pfaffenmütze but there was simply no alternative.

In 1630 Spain withdrew from all her posts in Germany north the Rhine but remaines entrenched at several key Rhine crossing-points. [19] Wesel had been lost but Rheinberg, Orsoy and also Jülich and Geldern were all heavily reinforced. But still the new imbalance of power told heavily against Spain. The defeats of 1629 were followed by the scarcely less humiliating setbacks suffered by Spanish arms in the north in the year 1632 when Frederik Hendrik advanced triumphantly up the Maas valley capturing Venlo, Roermond and Sittard in rapid succession and then setting siege to the great Spanish fortress city of Maastricht. [20] Again the Spaniards called in an imperialist army to assist but even together the Spanish and imperialists were unable to break the siege. The fall of the city virtually cut geldern and the Spanish bases on the Rhine off from the main torso of the Spanish Netherlands. The following year the Dutch captured by Rheinberg and Orsoy, the Spaniards retaining only Geldern and Jülich.

After the conclusion of the Mantuan War, however, Spain succeded in restoring her shaken grip over the provinces of the southern Netherlands and in building up the army of Flanders again. Especially after the arrival late in 1634 of the king of Spain?s younger brother, Don Fernando, the Cardinal-Infante who was to be the new governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands down to his death in 1641, Spain once again - and for the last time before the Peace of Münster - possessed a formidable force with real offensive capability in the Low Countries.

Historians have almost always assumed that with Franco-Spanish relations now rapidly deteriorating and the entry of France into the war against both the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs in 1635, the conflict between Spain and the Dutch now receded into background as the Spaniard focused their attention on the French. This notion sounds plausible but in fact is completely incorrect. From the French entry into the struggle in 1635 down to 1640 when Spain lost her remaining offensive capacity following the revolts if Catalonia and Portugal which gravely weakened the Monarchy, the Spanish strategy constantly instisted on by Olivares, and largely accepted (except briefly with the thrust to Corbie in 1636) by the Cardinal-Infante, was to fight defensively against the French and to fight ?guerra ofensiva? - offensive war - against the Dutch. [21] There were two main reasons for this choice of strategy at this crucial juncture. On the one hand there was the realization that the key cities of Flanders and Brabant, the provinces which formed the core of the Spanish Netherlands, cities such as Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges were much more vulnerable to attacks from the north than to the French and that, by contrast, French inroads into Artois and Hainault (while Spain hammered at the Dutch) would be inherently less damaging and more easily sustainable. On the other hand, there was also the belief which again was probably correct, that it would be inherently easier to break the Franco-Dutch alliance against Spain by getting the Dutch to settle seperately than vice versa. For the Dutch cities which paid for the Republic?s armies had few reasons for wanting to continue with the war now that the Republic?s security was assured and her territory enlarged with the acquisition of northern Brabant and the Maas valley while the only urgent Spanish demand at this late stage in the Eighty Years? War on the Dutch was that they should withdraw from the parts of Brazil which the West India Company had occupied since 1630. Once Spain had shown that the Dutch had nothing further to gain but rather would lose ground if they continue, and had reached a seperate peace or truce with the United Provinces, then Spanish arms could with advantage be turned upon the French.

Consequently, the Cardinal-Infante?s offensive of late 1635 was launched not against the French but against the Dutch and directed towards the Rhine. Spanish troops overran much of the duchy of Cleves and captures the vital border fortress of Schenkenschanz situated on a small island in the Rhine. Olivares? hope soared but after a bitter siege over the winter of 1635-36, Frederik Hendrik managed to retake Schenkenschanz. Much to Olivares? distress, Spain was again ejected from Cleves and the Lower Rhine. Nevertheless, the conde-duque continued to urge the Cardinal-Infante at every opportunity to bend every effort to restoring Spain?s lost grip both on the Mas valley and the Lower Rhine. At the very least, he considered it vital that Spain should recover one of the main crossing-points on the Rhine, preferably Rheinberg or Orsoy for without such a base Spain would have no window on the interior Germany.

In fact Spain was never to recover any of her lost posts on the Rheine though in 1637 Don Fernando did successfully break back into the Maas valley, recapturing Roermond and Venlo. After the double catastrophe of 1640 in Catalonia and Portugal, all further hopes of regaining lost ground lingering in the minds of Spain?s statesman had to be abandoned at any rate until after the signing of the seperate peace with the United Provinces which was finally attained in 1648 and the onset of the troubles known as the Frondes (1648-53) in France gave Spain a new opportunity to rebuild her European influence. In the years around 1650, Spain still kept garrisons at Jülich and Frankenthal and had not altogether abandoned thoughts of dominating the patchwork of small states strung out along the Rhine from Alsace to Cologne. Final defeat and abandonment of the Spanish dream of hegemony in Europe came only with the signing of the Peace of the Pyrenees with France in 1659.

FOOTNOTES