Background
During the final two years of the regency of Margaret of Parma over the Habsburg Netherlands political (disaffection of the high nobility with its diminished role in the councils of state), religious (disaffection over the persecution of heretics and the reform of the organisation of the Catholic Church in the Netherlands, especially the creation of new dioceses), and economic circumstances (a famine in 1565) conspired to bring about a number of political and social events that shook the regime to its foundations. A League of Nobles (mostly members of the lower nobility) protested the severity of the persecution of heretics with a petition to the Regent, who conceded the demands temporarily. This may have encouraged the Calvinists in the country to follow the iconoclastic depradations on Catholic churches that also burst out in France in the summer of 1566. Though this iconoclastic fury was soon suppressed by the authorities, and the concessions to the Calvinists retracted, these "troubles" sufficiently disturbed the Court in Madrid to motivate Philip to send his trusted commander, the Duke of Alba, with an army of Spanish mercenaries to "restore order" in the Netherlands. When he arrived there, his first measures so offended the Regent that she resigned in protest in early September, 1567.
Read more about this topic: Council Of Troubles
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