in favor of Catholicism. This he did, but he retained an essential tolerance for Protestantism, a fact that placed him very much at odds with the Spanish king, Philip II, who was his sovereign. That tolerance was balanced bya sense of propriety and steely resolve that Jan and Maria Rubens would come to know firsthand, and at great personal cost.
For the moment, however, William’s association with the Beggars gave their cause an essential credibility, and presented a grave challenge to the Spanish governor of the Low Countries, Margaret of Parma. A temporary acquiescence to Beggar demands followed, but the overall conditions in the Netherlands suggested trouble was far from over. The economy had turned bleak; a bitter winter, a trade squabble with England, and an unrelated war in the Baltics left state coffers empty and kitchen cupboards bare. When even the black bread and salt soup that were the daily nourishment for the less privileged became scarce, they found their frustrations released by agitating Calvinist sermonizers who, in turn, directed their anger at the Catholic Church.
The righteous fulminations of those preachers bred an iconoclasm that swept across the Netherlands in the heated summer of 1566. On August 13, a monastery near the French border was raided by an angry mob. In the ensuing weeks, a core of henchmen sacked the churches and cathedrals of the Low Countries, destroying the graven images Calvin had derided as presumptuous blasphemies. In Antwerp, the
beeldenstorm
(image storm) came on the Sunday following Assumption, a festival day that predictably exacerbated religious tension. By tradition, it was the day of the Ommegang, in which religious icons were paraded through the city streets to the gates of the Onze Lieve Vrouwekathedraal, or Cathedral of Our Lady. The artist Albrecht Dürer, a witness to the procession in 1521, described the amazing splendor of the event in his travel diary. “Twenty persons bore the image of the Virgin Mary and the Lord Jesus, adorned in the richest manner, to the honor of the Lord God.” All told, it made for a “delightful” spectacle, and one that was “very conductive to devotion.”
Conductive to devotion
. One could hardly imagine a vision more likely to incite the would-be iconoclast. Somehow, tempers were held in check for a day. But on the next an angry crowd gathered at the cathedral, and it became ever more rowdy the day after that. The Antwerp town council, on which Jan Rubens sat, sent out the civil guard in an effort to disperse the mob, but it was too late; the guard was forced to retreat to de Vriendt’s town hall. Inside the church, Herman Moded, the most reactionary of Calvinist preachers, took the podium, and as he excoriated the paganism of Catholic idolatry, his makeshift flock attacked those idols with axes and sledgehammers and crowbars. Sculptures were yanked down from upper stories with ropes and pulleys. When they were done, the most extravagantly decorated cathedral in northern Europe was a standing ruin.
Back in Spain, Philip was appalled when he learned of these events, and especially displeased to find that William, in his capacity as margrave (hereditary lord) of Antwerp, had granted Protestants the right of free practice in that city. Philip was absolutely unwilling to brook the open worship of a religion he considered heretic within his kingdom, and he was assuredly not prepared to stand by as an emboldened opposition flouted his authority and spread insurrection across the Low Countries. The king took action. Goaded by his most bellicose advisers, Philip ordered that an army of nearly ten thousand men, an overwhelming force, be drawn from his dominions and assembled at Milan, in Spanish-controlled Lombardy. Military engineers were dispatched to ready a route through the Alps to the Low Countries that would circumvent hostile France. This was no simple task. Moving troops from Spanish territory to the Netherlands was so notoriously
For the moment, however, William’s association with the Beggars gave their cause an essential credibility, and presented a grave challenge to the Spanish governor of the Low Countries, Margaret of Parma. A temporary acquiescence to Beggar demands followed, but the overall conditions in the Netherlands suggested trouble was far from over. The economy had turned bleak; a bitter winter, a trade squabble with England, and an unrelated war in the Baltics left state coffers empty and kitchen cupboards bare. When even the black bread and salt soup that were the daily nourishment for the less privileged became scarce, they found their frustrations released by agitating Calvinist sermonizers who, in turn, directed their anger at the Catholic Church.
The righteous fulminations of those preachers bred an iconoclasm that swept across the Netherlands in the heated summer of 1566. On August 13, a monastery near the French border was raided by an angry mob. In the ensuing weeks, a core of henchmen sacked the churches and cathedrals of the Low Countries, destroying the graven images Calvin had derided as presumptuous blasphemies. In Antwerp, the
beeldenstorm
(image storm) came on the Sunday following Assumption, a festival day that predictably exacerbated religious tension. By tradition, it was the day of the Ommegang, in which religious icons were paraded through the city streets to the gates of the Onze Lieve Vrouwekathedraal, or Cathedral of Our Lady. The artist Albrecht Dürer, a witness to the procession in 1521, described the amazing splendor of the event in his travel diary. “Twenty persons bore the image of the Virgin Mary and the Lord Jesus, adorned in the richest manner, to the honor of the Lord God.” All told, it made for a “delightful” spectacle, and one that was “very conductive to devotion.”
Conductive to devotion
. One could hardly imagine a vision more likely to incite the would-be iconoclast. Somehow, tempers were held in check for a day. But on the next an angry crowd gathered at the cathedral, and it became ever more rowdy the day after that. The Antwerp town council, on which Jan Rubens sat, sent out the civil guard in an effort to disperse the mob, but it was too late; the guard was forced to retreat to de Vriendt’s town hall. Inside the church, Herman Moded, the most reactionary of Calvinist preachers, took the podium, and as he excoriated the paganism of Catholic idolatry, his makeshift flock attacked those idols with axes and sledgehammers and crowbars. Sculptures were yanked down from upper stories with ropes and pulleys. When they were done, the most extravagantly decorated cathedral in northern Europe was a standing ruin.
Back in Spain, Philip was appalled when he learned of these events, and especially displeased to find that William, in his capacity as margrave (hereditary lord) of Antwerp, had granted Protestants the right of free practice in that city. Philip was absolutely unwilling to brook the open worship of a religion he considered heretic within his kingdom, and he was assuredly not prepared to stand by as an emboldened opposition flouted his authority and spread insurrection across the Low Countries. The king took action. Goaded by his most bellicose advisers, Philip ordered that an army of nearly ten thousand men, an overwhelming force, be drawn from his dominions and assembled at Milan, in Spanish-controlled Lombardy. Military engineers were dispatched to ready a route through the Alps to the Low Countries that would circumvent hostile France. This was no simple task. Moving troops from Spanish territory to the Netherlands was so notoriously
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