I Take History With My Coffee

In the autumn of 1566, two of the most powerful men in Europe fall mysteriously ill at the same time — and a rebellion three hundred miles to the north waits for their recovery to decide what happens next. This episode traces the path from Philip II's sickbed in Madrid to the Duke of Alba's arrival in Brussels on August 22, 1567: a stormy council meeting that ends in a shouting match, a letter written four months before the crisis it will supposedly justify, and the astonishing 700-mile march t

On August 10, 1566, a crowd gathers outside a friary near Steenvoorde to hear a former hatmaker preach. By the time the sermon ends, twenty people have stripped the building of every painting, statue, and altarpiece. It takes less than an hour. Three days later, it happens again. Then again. Within two weeks, the wave has reached nearly every province of the Low Countries — culminating in a single, staggering night at Antwerp's Cathedral of Our Lady, where six thousand people break in and gut o

Eighteen months after Cardinal Granvelle's fall, the men who thought they'd won the Netherlands discover they've only bought themselves a brief pause. As Philip II fixates on Malta and grain prices spike, the grandees restored to the Council of State find they're governing a country that has stopped waiting for Brussels. Egmont rides to Madrid, convinced he's won a hearing on the heresy laws — only to be undone by instructions written before he even arrived. When the senior nobility's ...

In October 1555, a twenty-two-year-old William of Orange holds up an emperor at his abdication — proof, if anyone needed it, that this German count's son had become the Habsburg system's favorite. Ten years later, he's still within that system: a Council member, a wealthy magnate, a man with everything to lose. But something has been shifting since a French king let slip a secret that Philip II had kept from his own negotiators. This episode traces William's formation — the inheritance that rem

Brussels, 1562. A cluster of noblemen's servants arrives at court in matching gray livery — a fool's cap stitched with a red hood that, if you squint, looks uncomfortably like a cardinal's hat. Everyone gets the joke. So does the man it's aimed at: Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, Cardinal and chief minister to Margaret of Parma, the most powerful — and most resented — man in the Netherlands. What follows is a three-year campaign by the Netherlandish nobility to force Philip II to remove him: j...

In the summer of 1559, Philip II left the Netherlands for the last time — leaving behind two very different sets of instructions. To the great noblemen William of Orange and Lamoral of Egmont, he promised that nothing would be decided without them. To his half-sister Margaret, whom he was making regent, he issued a private order to consult only three men, cutting the nobility out entirely. Margaret of Parma inherited a title once held with real authority by two formidable women — Margaret of Au