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Authors: Mark Lamster
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orchestrated mass arrests, midnight seizures, book burnings, a full catalog of horrors. More than one thousand were executed in gruesome public displays—live quarterings, burnings at the stake—designed to instill fear in the populace.
The duke’s terror was directed at body, mind, and wallet. “A goodly sum must be squeezed out of private persons,” he wrote. Maintenance of his new order, in particular his immense standing army, was an expensive proposition. Massive urban citadels didn’t just pay for themselves, and Philip had more pressing needs at home. Funds would have to be raised from the native population, and that meant a series of new taxes on those least willing and able to bear them. Public disdain for the duke, under these harsh conditions, was enormous, as reflected by a contemporary parody of the Lord’s Prayer:
Thou takest away daily our daily bread,
While our lives and our children lie starving or dead.
No man’s trespasses thou forgivest;
Revenge is the food on which thou livest.
Thou leadest all men into temptation;
Unto Evil hast thou delivered this nation.
Our Father, in heaven which art,
Grant that this Devil may soon depart;
And with him his Council, false and bloody,
Who make murder and plunder their daily study;
And all his savage war-dogs of Spain,
O, send them back to the Devil again
.
Even the Lord couldn’t protect those caught reciting it.
JAN AND MARIA RUBENS escaped the worst of Alva’s depredations, but just barely. Their days in Antwerp had been numbered from the moment the Calvinist preacher Herman Moded and his iconoclastic henchmen had forced their way into the Onze LieveVrouwekathedraal, only to destroy it. In the wake of that catastrophe, but before Alva had taken control of the government, Margaret of Parma had ordered Antwerp’s aldermen to explain how they had allowed the great cathedral to be defiled. This was an almost unconscionable act of buck-passing, given her own failure, as governor, to take precautions against the iconoclasts. The aldermen, in lawyerly fashion, responded with an exculpatory brief. That might have been good enough for Margaret, but it was squarely rejected by the newly arrived Iron Duke when he found it sitting on his desk. In December 1567, he demanded a more comprehensive explanation from the town fathers, Jan Rubens among them.
The prospects for those aldermen were grim; their presence on Alva’s target list meant their very lives were in jeopardy. Antwerp’s burgomeester (mayor) had been executed the previous September on a heresy charge, and Jan’s name had already appeared on a manifest of suspected Calvinist converts. In January, he hired private counsel and submitted yet another pleading apologia for his conduct. (Yes, he had attended a Calvinist sermon or two, but he was curious and nothing more.) While his case plodded along toward an ugly conclusion, Jan Rubens packed up his family and sent them to a relation in Limburg. From there, Maria and the four children traveled to Cologne, safely beyond Alva’s reach. A few months later, with his case still pending, Jan Rubens quietly slipped out of the city gates and took to the road for the German border.
The Rubenses were among those in the first wave of a great diaspora from the Spanish Netherlands, and from Antwerp in particular. Over the following decade, the city’s population dropped from over 100,000 to fewer than half that number. Most of that migration would be to the north, to the seven provinces of the nascent Dutch republic, most prominently Holland, Utrecht, and Zeeland. That shift would eventually propel Amsterdam, the growingcolossus of Holland, past Antwerp as the trade capital of northern Europe. During the early exodus years, however, most refugees of the duke’s terror quit the Low Countries entirely. Cologne, reasonably tolerant and tied to the Netherlands through trade, was a convenient destination.
The distinguished leader of the fugitive horde was Silent
The duke’s terror was directed at body, mind, and wallet. “A goodly sum must be squeezed out of private persons,” he wrote. Maintenance of his new order, in particular his immense standing army, was an expensive proposition. Massive urban citadels didn’t just pay for themselves, and Philip had more pressing needs at home. Funds would have to be raised from the native population, and that meant a series of new taxes on those least willing and able to bear them. Public disdain for the duke, under these harsh conditions, was enormous, as reflected by a contemporary parody of the Lord’s Prayer:
Thou takest away daily our daily bread,
While our lives and our children lie starving or dead.
No man’s trespasses thou forgivest;
Revenge is the food on which thou livest.
Thou leadest all men into temptation;
Unto Evil hast thou delivered this nation.
Our Father, in heaven which art,
Grant that this Devil may soon depart;
And with him his Council, false and bloody,
Who make murder and plunder their daily study;
And all his savage war-dogs of Spain,
O, send them back to the Devil again
.
Even the Lord couldn’t protect those caught reciting it.
JAN AND MARIA RUBENS escaped the worst of Alva’s depredations, but just barely. Their days in Antwerp had been numbered from the moment the Calvinist preacher Herman Moded and his iconoclastic henchmen had forced their way into the Onze LieveVrouwekathedraal, only to destroy it. In the wake of that catastrophe, but before Alva had taken control of the government, Margaret of Parma had ordered Antwerp’s aldermen to explain how they had allowed the great cathedral to be defiled. This was an almost unconscionable act of buck-passing, given her own failure, as governor, to take precautions against the iconoclasts. The aldermen, in lawyerly fashion, responded with an exculpatory brief. That might have been good enough for Margaret, but it was squarely rejected by the newly arrived Iron Duke when he found it sitting on his desk. In December 1567, he demanded a more comprehensive explanation from the town fathers, Jan Rubens among them.
The prospects for those aldermen were grim; their presence on Alva’s target list meant their very lives were in jeopardy. Antwerp’s burgomeester (mayor) had been executed the previous September on a heresy charge, and Jan’s name had already appeared on a manifest of suspected Calvinist converts. In January, he hired private counsel and submitted yet another pleading apologia for his conduct. (Yes, he had attended a Calvinist sermon or two, but he was curious and nothing more.) While his case plodded along toward an ugly conclusion, Jan Rubens packed up his family and sent them to a relation in Limburg. From there, Maria and the four children traveled to Cologne, safely beyond Alva’s reach. A few months later, with his case still pending, Jan Rubens quietly slipped out of the city gates and took to the road for the German border.
The Rubenses were among those in the first wave of a great diaspora from the Spanish Netherlands, and from Antwerp in particular. Over the following decade, the city’s population dropped from over 100,000 to fewer than half that number. Most of that migration would be to the north, to the seven provinces of the nascent Dutch republic, most prominently Holland, Utrecht, and Zeeland. That shift would eventually propel Amsterdam, the growingcolossus of Holland, past Antwerp as the trade capital of northern Europe. During the early exodus years, however, most refugees of the duke’s terror quit the Low Countries entirely. Cologne, reasonably tolerant and tied to the Netherlands through trade, was a convenient destination.
The distinguished leader of the fugitive horde was Silent
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