Act of Abjuration - Background

Background

The Seventeen Provinces of the Habsburg Netherlands had only been united in a personal union by Charles V with the incorporation of the duchy of Guelders in his Burgundian territories in 1544, and been constituted as a separate entity with his Pragmatic Sanction of 1549. His son Philip II of Spain became overlord of these provinces on Charles' abdication in 1555. But this actually meant that he assumed the feudal title of each individual province, like Duke of Brabant, or Count of Holland. There never was a single, unified Netherlands state, though the provinces had been represented by a States-General of the Netherlands since the Great Charter or Privilege of Mary of Burgundy of 10 February 1477. With the Dutch Revolt a number of these provinces rose against Philip. At first they pretended just to have revolted against his viceroys, successively Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba, Luis de Zúñiga y Requesens, John of Austria, and Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, while their self-appointed Stadtholders continued to pretend they represented Philip. This pretense was wearing thin, however, by the time of the Pacification of Ghent of 1576. When Don Juan attacked Antwerp and Namur in 1577 the States-General, in like manner as the non-royalist stadtholders, appointed archduke Matthias, Philip's nephew, as viceroy, without Philip's consent. Matthias was young and inexperienced. He had the added disadvantage that he did not bring his own resources in the battle with Philip. This became a serious problem, after Parma started to make serious inroads against the tenuous unity of the Pacification with his Union of Arras of a number of southern Provinces, which the rebellious northern provinces answered with their own Union of Utrecht, both in 1579. William the Silent, the leader of the Dutch Revolt, therefore decided that the rebellious Netherlands should look for an overlord who could bring useful foreign allies. François, Duke of Anjou was such a man. He did not wish to be someone else's viceroy, especially not of the Habsburg king. The States-General therefore offered him the sovereignty of the Netherlands, which he accepted by the Treaty of Plessis-les-Tours. (Meanwhile, Matthias was bought off with a generous annuity).