Séminaire de recherche The Decade of Possibilities in the Low Countries (1566-1581)

The 1570s marked a turning point in the history of the Low Countries. While civil war raged, a range of ideas and plans for potential socio-political change emerged, coexisting with those that would ultimately determine the region’s long-term future.

 

The way historians view this period is still influenced by Belgian and Dutch national narratives. In Belgium, this moment is seen as a turning point that led inevitably to the restoration of a Catholic monarchy and the creation of a centralised state, reflecting the model adopted by the newly formed Belgian state in 1831. In contrast, these years are still understood in the Netherlands as inevitably leading to the independence of a Protestant nation and decentralized republic – a prerequisite for the country’s emergence as a great power in the 17th century, epitomized by the “Dutch Golden Age”.

 

However, the division between the Northern Low Countries, republican and dominated by Calvinists, and the Southern Low Countries, monarchist and Catholic, was by no means inevitable in the 1570s. Other avenues remained open to those involved. Consider Philippe Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, for example, who, at the Imperial Diet of Worms in 1578, sought to persuade the princes of the Empire to support the Low Countries within a kind of imperial league. His recommendation of Matthias of Habsburg as the new governor-general could ultimately have led to the region being re-anchored within the Empire. We should also remember Maximilien Vilain, the governor of Lille, who, at the time of the diplomatic meeting in Breda (1575), proposed a project of minimal religious tolerance to King Philip II in order to restore the country’s prosperity. Vilain suggested that the king’s Calvinist subjects would be permitted to resettle with the status of foreign merchants. Also, in 1578, William of Orange drafted a plan for religious coexistence, hoping that this would keep his broad coalition against Habsburg authority intact. Eventually, the States-General left it to the discretion of the cities to introduce a religievrede. Between 1578 and 1581, about thirty cities did so, although these arrangements were short-lived.

 

The period’s key players had to be both intellectually and politically resourceful; they did not want to see their “country” destroyed by foreign armies and economic crisis. While the brutal policy of the Duke of Alba polarised Calvinists and Catholics, it also created a need for both sides to find a political solution to end the devastation. Attributing the root of violence to foreigners, often the Spanish, was one way to find common ground. This also pushed the actors to devise plans to end the crisis and restore the country’s liberties and economic vitality. Also crucial in this respect is the role of Protestant exiles, many of whom returned to the Low Countries after the Pacification of Ghent (1576), which had promised a settlement of both military and religious affairs.

 

We consider “the Decade of Possibilities” in a chronologically broad sense, as a period beginning with the iconoclastic wave of 1566 and ending with the Estates General’s act of abjuration in 1581, which declared Philip II forfeited of his sovereignty over the Low Countries. We will therefore examine the multiplicity of political possibilities that emerged during this period in terms of ideas, discourses and actions (assemblies of the Estates, diplomatic meetings and missions, initiatives at the local and regional level). This will involve exploring these possibilities and assess the motives and backgrounds of the individuals and groups involved, as well as outlining the forms of their projects and examining why they did not come to fruition.