Spain, the Netherlands and the parting

History · 1556 to 1700

Spain, the Netherlands and the parting

The half of the house this family comes from

After 1556 there are two houses carrying one name. This page follows the western one: Spain, the Low Countries, and the long war between them. It is the half this family descends from, and it is the half that runs out of legitimate heirs in 1700 — which is where the usual histories stop, and where this site does not.

Philip II, and a country he did not understand

Philip II inherited Spain, the Low Countries, Italy and the Americas in 1556. Unlike his father he was Spanish by upbringing and instinct, and after 1559 he never left the Iberian peninsula again. He governed the Netherlands — nine hundred miles away, commercially sophisticated, and increasingly Protestant — through governors and through paper.

From 1568 the Low Countries were in revolt. The war that followed lasted, with truces, until 1648. It was fought over taxation, over local privilege, and over religion, and by the end of it the northern provinces were an independent republic and the southern ones were not.

John of Austria

In 1547, at Regensburg, Charles V had a son by Barbara Blomberg. The boy was brought up quietly in Spain, well away from the court. Charles acknowledged him in the codicil to his will; in 1559 Philip II received him into the House of Austria and gave him its name. He became John of Austria.

He commanded the fleet of the Holy League at Lepanto on 7 October 1571, in the largest galley battle ever fought, and he was Governor-General of the Netherlands from 1576 until his death near Namur on 1 October 1578. He was thirty-one.

The line this family carries continues through him. What happens next is set out on its own page, because it is the hinge of everything on this site.

A dynasty that married itself

The Spanish Habsburgs married their own relatives with a persistence that is difficult to look at squarely. Philip II married his niece; Philip IV married his niece. Over five generations the family tree stops widening and starts folding back on itself.

The last Spanish Habsburg king, Charles II, was severely disabled from birth, in near-constant ill health, and unable to father a child. He died on 1 November 1700, and the male line of the Spanish Habsburgs died with him. The war that followed over who should inherit Spain lasted thirteen years and involved most of Europe.

Historian’s note

The genetic explanation for the end of the Spanish line is well established and is set out on its own page. It is a matter of record and it is treated here as one — with sympathy for the people who lived it, who did not choose the marriages that made them.

And the line that did not end

What the standard histories record is that the Spanish Habsburgs ended in 1700 and the Austrian line went on as Habsburg-Lorraine after 1740. Both are true, and neither is the whole account.

The line descending from John of Austria quietly continued in the Low Countries through eleven generations. It is still here. That is what the rest of this site is about.

Sources

Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, Don John of Austria, or Passages from the History of the Sixteenth Century, 1547–1578, 2 vols (Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1883).
Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (Penguin, revised edition 1985).
Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (Yale University Press, 1997).
R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700 (Oxford University Press, 1979).
G. Alvarez, F. C. Ceballos and C. Quinteiro, ‘The Role of Inbreeding in the Extinction of a European Royal Dynasty’, PLoS ONE 4(4), 2009.