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upper classes into renewed support for Spain, and Margaret regained the allegiance of most nobles – with the principal exception of the country’s greatest landowner, Prince William of Orange-Nassau, known as William the Silent, who prudently slipped away to his estates in Germany. Meanwhile, Philip II was keen to capitalize on the increase in support for Margaret and, in 1567, he dispatched the Duke of Albe, with an army of ten thousand men, to the Low Countries to suppress his religious opponents absolutely. One of Albe’s first acts was to set up the Commission of Civil Unrest, which was soon nicknamed the “Council of Blood”, after its habit of executing those it examined. No fewer than twelve thousand citizens were polished off, mostly for taking part in the Fury. Initially the repression worked; in 1568, when William attempted an invasion from Germany, the towns, including Amsterdam, offered no support. William withdrew and conceived other means of defeating Albe, sponsoring the Protestant privateers, the so-called Waterguezen or sea-beggars, who took their name from the epithet provided by Margaret’s advisor. In April 1572, the Waterguezen entered Brielle on the Maas and captured it from the Spanish in the first of several commando-style attacks. At first, the Waterguezen were obliged to operate from England, but it was soon possible for them to secure bases in the Netherlands, whose citizens had grown to loathe the autocratic Albe and his Spanish army.

After the success at Brielle, the revolt spread rapidly. By June the rebels controlled all of the province of Holland except for Amsterdam, which steadfastly refused to come off the fence. Albe and his son Frederick fought back, but William’s superior naval power frustrated him and a mightily irritated Philip replaced Albe with Luis de Resquesens. Initially, Resquesens had some success in the south, where the Catholic majority were more willing to compromise with Spanish rule than their northern neighbours, but the tide of war was against him – most pointedly in William’s triumphant relief of Leiden in 1574. Two years later, Resquesens died and the (unpaid) Habsburg garrison in Antwerp mutinied and assaulted the town, slaughtering some eight thousand of its people in what was known as the Spanish Fury. The massacre alienated the south and pushed its peoples – including the doubting Thomases of Amsterdam – into the arms of William, whose troops now swept into Brussels, the heart of imperial power. Momentarily, it seemed possible for the whole region to unite behind William and all signed the Union of Brussels, which demanded the departure of foreign troops as a condition for accepting a diluted Habsburg sovereignty.

History | The revolt of the Netherlands |

The formation of the United Provinces

Philip was, however, not inclined to compromise, especially when he realized that William’s Calvinist sympathies were giving his newly found Walloon and Flemish allies (of modern-day Belgium) the jitters. The king bided his time until 1578, when, with his enemies arguing among themselves, he sent another army from Spain to the Low Countries under the command of Alessandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma. Events played into Parma’s hands. In 1579, tiring of all the wrangling, seven northern provinces agreed to sign the Union of Utrecht, an alliance against Spain that was to be the first unification of the Netherlands as an identifiable country – the United Provinces. It was then that Amsterdam formally declared for the rebels and switched from Catholicism to Calvinism in what became known as the “Alteratie” of 1578. The rebels had conceded freedom of religious belief, but in Amsterdam, as elsewhere, this did not extend to freedom of worship. Nonetheless, a pragmatic compromise was reached in which a blind eye was turned to the celebration of the Mass if it was done privately and inconspicuously. It was this ad hoc arrangement that gave rise to “clandestine” Catholic churches (schuilkerken) like that of the Amstelkring on Oudezijds Voorburgwal.

The assembly of these United Provinces