92: The Rope Around Her Neck: Mary of Hungary and the Habsburg Netherlands

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Pragmatic Sanction, 1549
“Charles, by divine mercy always august Emperor of the Romans, King of Germany, Castile, Leon, Granada, Aragon etc.
Let it be known to all those present and those to come, that as we have always carefully and inquisitively taken care of everything that concerned the good, rest and tranquility of our Lands over there…we have considered that it was of great importance to our said lands for the whole safety and establishment of these, that for the future they will always remain under a same Prince.”

Over the past four episodes, we’ve been exploring the cultural world of the Burgundian Netherlands. We wandered through the court at Mechelen, the humanist networks, and the art that Margaret of Austria sponsored and collected. We studied the world these people created — the libraries, the paintings, and the cosmopolitan cities where Erasmus corresponded and du Fay composed magnificent music.

That wasn’t a detour. That was the foundation.

Because the political story we’re about to return to — the one about governors, rebellions, and constitutional crises — is closely connected to that cultural world. The cities that will oppose Habsburg centralization are also the ones that created the art. The privileges that the guilds will fiercely defend are woven into the same civic fabric as the processions and feast days. The Netherlands Charles V aims to govern isn’t just an administrative area. It’s a civilization with its own memory.

We left the political story in December 1530 at Margaret of Austria’s deathbed in Mechelen. We pick it up now — two months later, February 1531 — with a very different woman riding northwest through a winter landscape toward a job she claimed she didn’t want.

February 10, 1531. A small court departs Krems on the Danube — stripped down, most members left behind on Charles’s orders. Among the few allowed to go is a Hungarian secretary named Miklos Olah, one of the last remnants of a nearly disbanded household. The woman at the center of this small procession is thirty-four years old. She is Mary of Hungary — Queen of Hungary, widow of the Battle of Mohács, and for the past four years, a woman without a country, moving between Habsburg courts on unstable revenues, financially fragile, and largely without a clear purpose.

She is traveling to Brussels to become Regent of the Netherlands.

She turns the obligation into a hunting expedition.

This is the first thing you need to know about Mary: Margaret of Austria ruled from her study, her council chambers, and the intricate social circles of the Mechelen court. Mary ruled on horseback. The English ambassador in Brussels later reported, with both admiration and frustration, that she hunted every day regardless of the weather, that her doctors despaired for her, and that she seemed to consider damaging her own health an acceptable cost for the one part of her life that was entirely hers. She arrived in a land she had left seventeen years earlier as an eight-year-old girl. She returned on horseback, with her dogs, as its potential ruler.

What Charles privately told her was that he believed she was better suited for the regency than even Margaret herself. What she told him — carefully, through an intermediary, before his offer — was that she had no desire to remarry, that her Lutheran-leaning courtiers would be left behind, and that her Catholic faith was not in question. Jane de Longh, her most perceptive biographer, reads this exchange sharply: the reluctance Mary showed throughout her tenure — poor health, inexperience, preference for a quiet life — was a political tool, not a confession. It gave her the only leverage available against a brother whose authority over her was absolute. A born ruler doesn’t say so. She claims she’d rather be elsewhere and earns the moral high ground.

She arrives in Louvain in early March. Charles is waiting.

Charles spends months walking Mary through what she’s inheriting. It is not a comfortable tour.

The treasury is empty. The debts are massive. Guelders remains unresolved on the northern frontier — French-backed and militarily active — a situation Margaret has managed for twenty years without ever resolving. France is testing the southern border. Religious persecution is creating resentment across the provinces — the first Protestant martyr was burned in Brussels in 1523, and the repression has not stopped. The exiled Danish King Christian II is rampaging through Holland with mercenaries. Her own appointment is openly criticized from Rome to Paris — too young, too inexperienced, and possibly Lutheran.

On October 1, 1531, Charles established three councils: the Council of State, the Privy Council, and the Council of Finance. On October 7, Mary’s authority is officially proclaimed before the Estates General.

Charles had observed Margaret, later in life, sideline her own council, relying more on personal judgment and informal favorites. He wouldn’t let that happen again. The three councils act as both a support system and an unseen leash.

This is where two very different ways of interpreting Charles V come into view. Karl Brandi, writing as Charles’s biographer, views the council structure as carefully planned imperial statecraft — the emperor designing a system suited to the territory’s complexity and his sister’s strengths and vulnerabilities. Wim Blockmans counters: Charles was operating within structural pressures he only partly controlled. The councils were as much a response to the Netherlands’ own institutional reality — its entrenched provincial assemblies, its tradition of representation and consent — as they were deliberate designs. The line between wise statecraft and improvised management is thinner than biography tends to suggest.

Either way, Charles starts the machine and then leaves.

Charles is rarely present. The Italian Wars, the Schmalkaldic crisis unfolding in Germany, the Ottoman threat in the Mediterranean, and France at nearly every border — the Netherlands is one piece of a web he's constantly trying to hold together. The provinces are his financial engine. Mary is the keeper of that engine, and her governance will be judged mostly on how well she manages the crises he causes elsewhere.

Guelders had been a persistent problem since the 1490s—strategically located along the major river systems of the northeast, backed by France, and militarily aggressive under the Egmond dynasty. In the 1510s and 1520s, Guelders raiders operated near the walls of Haarlem and Amsterdam. Margaret managed it. She never fully solved it.

Charles of Egmond died in 1538 without an heir. His eventual successor was Duke Wilhelm of Cleves, who united Guelders with Cleves, Jülich, Berg, and Marck — forming a significant Protestant bloc wedged between the Netherlands and the Empire along the Lower Rhine. Wilhelm converted to Lutheranism in 1541 and allied with the Schmalkaldic League, France, and Denmark. Guelders was no longer just a border annoyance; it had become a key entry point for the Reformation into the Low Countries. The strategic importance of the unresolved northeastern frontier suddenly seemed critical.

Meanwhile, Holland was developing its own grievances. By 1536, the States of Holland formally reminded Mary that for thirty years their province had funded wars against Guelders, Friesland, and Utrecht while also contributing to the defense of Flanders and Brabant against France. Charles’s response was typical: he refused to incorporate Utrecht into Holland as a reward for their efforts, built a citadel at Utrecht, funded by Holland, to intimidate Utrecht’s own guilds, and then moved on. Jonathan Israel describes this growing Hollander fiscal resentment as an early sign of the north-south fault lines that would eventually fracture the Netherlands after 1566. 

The Guelders crisis would be resolved — but not before one more explosion closer to home, one that cuts deeper into the political soul of the Netherlands than any border dispute ever could. The city was Ghent. And before we get to what Ghent did, we need to establish what Ghent was.

It was the largest city in the Low Countries outside of Paris. But that’s the least important fact about it. Ghent had a centuries-old tradition of armed resistance to centralized authority — and a track record to prove it that living memory could reach back and touch.

We have already met Maximilian in the political narrative. It's worth remembering what Ghent did to him. In 1488, the citizens of Ghent and Bruges didn’t just resist imperial authority. They imprisoned Maximilian himself—held the future Holy Roman Emperor captive for months, forced him to negotiate, and extracted concessions at knifepoint before releasing him. He repudiated every concession the moment he was free. That was barely forty years before the events of 1539. It was a living memory for the city's oldest aldermen.

And Maximilian wasn’t even the first. In 1453, Philip the Good—Charles’s great-great-grandfather, the duke who built the Burgundian state—crushed a Ghent revolt at the Battle of Gavere and carried out an expiation ceremony almost identical in structure to the one Charles would stage in 1540.

Ghent did not view its privileges as mere legal technicalities that a sovereign decree could alter. Instead, it saw them as fundamental constitutional guarantees — as much articles of faith as articles of law. Geoffrey Parker’s phrase deserves to be spoken aloud: in the Netherlands, “whoever touches the privileges cuts to the quick.”

Keep that in mind. Now see what happens.

The French war ended in 1539. Mary, encouraged by the peace, seizes this moment to press Ghent for its share of military funding — a debt the city had been refusing to pay. Her calculation: the armistice gives her breathing room. Her mistake: she acted without enough force and failed to consider the depth of Ghent’s long-standing resentments. As long as an external threat required internal unity, Ghent’s non-compliance could be tolerated. The peace removed that requirement, leaving nothing to soften the impact. 

As the dispute grew, popular suspicion hardened into a legend: a document called the “Repurchase of Flanders,” supposedly guaranteeing the city lasting exemption from unauthorized taxes. The document could not be found. Rumors spread that it had been stolen from the city’s Secret Archives. A conspiracy theory took hold — specific and detailed, pointing at a particular alderman who had once lost an archive key, and a deacon named Lieven Pijn who had permitted a copy to be made.

The artisan guilds captured Pijn. They tortured him repeatedly, but he refused to confess. Despite that, they executed him by beheading in the public square. The crowd, fired up by the execution, called for the destruction of the “Calfskin” — the 1492 treaty where Maximilian limited Ghent’s freedoms, later confirmed by Charles in 1515. The aldermen produced the document under duress. They cut it apart with a knife, tearing it into pieces. Some fragments were swallowed, others worn in hats, and some trampled on the ground. The revolutionary group, the Creesers, announced that Ghent was free.

This was not vandalism. This was a political theology in action. In the Low Countries, chartered privilege was not just an administrative idea — it was a core part of civic identity. The Habsburg response — dismissing privileges as “vicious” and overriding them by imperial decree — was not merely authoritarian. From the Netherlandish viewpoint, it was sacrilegious. And Mary, watching from The Hague, seemed to sense — as she later recorded — that powers were beginning to manifest themselves to which Habsburg would ultimately prove unequal.

Ghent was not alone. Courtrai, Bruges, Ypres, Lille — armed guilds seizing magistrates, demanding privilege-readings, resisting government troops. Ghent addressed Mary in correspondence simply as “A la royne” — “To the Queen” — the most deliberate possible slight to her authority as regent. She offered to melt down her own silverware to fund troops.

And then she signed documents under pressure — authorizing a new College of Aldermen to stop the bleeding — but hid her coerced consent beneath a wax seal before presenting the document to the city. The hidden note read: By force and to avoid greater evil, I have consented to this commission.

 Ghent’s demagogues were publicly calling for her to be placed in a convent.

In February 1540, Charles traveled through France — through the territory of his great rival. Upon arrival in Ghent, the armed procession took six hours to pass through the streets. The Creesers badly misjudge the moment: they expected vindication and thought Charles would listen to their case and side with them against Mary’s misrule. They didn’t even bother to hide.

On Charles’s birthday, the sentence was read. All privileges were permanently revoked. Ghent’s privilege documents were surrendered; referencing them was forbidden under threat of forgery. Financial penalties reached hundreds of thousands of gold guilders. The Rijkkanal was filled in. A fortress was built at St. Bavo from demolished gates and walls. A government appointed by the sovereign replaced all elected municipal structures. Every trace of civic autonomy was erased.

The expiation ceremony took place on April 30—city leaders in black, beltless, bareheaded. Fifty Creesers in linen rags, barefoot, with ropes around their necks, processed two by two to the inner court of the Terwalle Palace. When the town pensionary finished reading the supplication for forgiveness, Charles sat in deliberate silence. It was Mary’s voice that broke the silence — asking him to grant the pardon because Ghent was his birthplace.

When the aldermen came to Mary seeking intercession, she responded with elaborate sarcasm about their belated welcome, mentioned that she had already been in Ghent for a month, and promised to do what she could. Every word was a formality. No one in the room was fooled.

Karl Brandi, following the logic of imperial biography, largely accepts the judge-advocate’s framing: Charles acted as a sovereign must when rebellion threatens the entire structure. Wim Blockmans takes a more structural approach: the sentence reflected a system that could suppress civic autonomy but could not replace it with anything more lasting than fear. Jonathan Israel notes the long-term damage — eliminating Ghent as a counterbalance to Habsburg power ultimately weakened the Netherlands’ ability to govern itself. The English ambassador’s letter to Henry VIII warned that the sentence would “go nigh to undo all the town.” Ghent never fully recovered. Antwerp’s later commercial rise is partly Ghent’s decline.

Geoffrey Parker highlights a structural pattern. The sequence — fiscal demand, privilege confrontation, popular mobilization, imperial suppression — is not unique to Ghent. He notes thirty-five urban revolts across the Netherlands during this period. These are not anomalies; they represent the usual pattern of governance in the Low Countries. The 1540 sentence did not resolve the underlying tension. Instead, it pushed it underground, where it remained waiting.

The revolt required Charles’s personal presence to suppress. A regent, no matter how capable, cannot resolve what only an emperor can — at least temporarily — contain.

During July 1542, the anti-Habsburg coalition launches a coordinated attack from four directions simultaneously.

From the north: the Danish fleet threatens Holland and Zeeland — scattered by storms before it can land. From the south, French forces under the Duke of Orléans overrun most of Luxembourg. From the east: Maarten van Rossum — “Black Martin,” general of Guelders — leads fourteen to fifteen thousand troops through Brabant, burning farms, massacring peasants, and advancing to the walls of Antwerp. Antwerp has no garrison.

Charles is in the Mediterranean. He launched a naval expedition against Algiers despite Mary’s urgent warning three years earlier—advice she gave because she foresaw what would happen if the fleet failed while the northern coalition remained intact. Autumn storms destroyed it. News of the Algiers disaster sparked the assault almost immediately. Mary could not determine whether the decisive blow would come from Denmark, Guelders, France, or Luxembourg. The entire country went into a state of siege.

Mary ordered the Prince of Orange to reach Antwerp via a specific water route, avoiding van Rossum’s forces. Orange ignored her, took the overland road, was betrayed, and arrived at Antwerp with barely a thousand men. Van Rossum burned every village around the city, then tried to cross the river Duffel—the bridge was destroyed on Mary’s orders. His troops dragged themselves across in vats and barrels using church bell ropes. He moved toward Malines, then toward Louvain, but broke off when scouts warned him imperial troops were converging on his rear, and left Brabant burning behind him.

In the south, Orléans voluntarily withdrew from Luxembourg, and his retreat turned into a rout as imperial troops converged. Mary moved to Namur, asserted her authority as deputy commander-in-chief, and ordered retaliation in Guelders, Jülich, and Cleves, with instructions to destroy, burn, and refuse all negotiations.

The campaign clearly revealed the limitations of regency governance. Mary acted with genuine competence and independence, but she could not replace the emperor’s direct authority during a crisis of this magnitude. The coordination failures and disobeyed orders were not personal failures; they were systemic.

Charles returned in 1543 with forty thousand troops from Spain, Italy, and Upper Germany. Duren fell on August 24. Roermond surrendered within a week. Wilhelm of Cleves capitulated shortly after. Under the terms of the Treaty of Venlo, Guelders was ceded to Charles, the seventeenth province.

Wim Blockmans’s judgment is worth considering: the Transaction of Augsburg and the Pragmatic Sanction were “post-hoc rationalisations of a political geography achieved by force, not planned constitutional engineering.” The seventeenth province was not added because it naturally belonged with the Netherlands. It was taken.

The consolidation happened in two steps. First, in 1548: the Transaction of Augsburg. Charles convinced the Imperial Diet to detach the northeastern provinces from the Westphalian Circle and move them to the Burgundian Circle — exempt from imperial law and free from the Empire’s military and tax duties. His dual role — as emperor and as prince of the Low Countries — made this jurisdictional transfer possible. No other ruler could have achieved it.

Then, on November 4, 1549, the Pragmatic Sanction was issued. It established uniform succession rules for all seventeen provinces, perpetually. All seventeen provincial assemblies swore to it. Charles’s son, Philip, was recognized as the heir of the Netherlands, united and indivisible.

That’s what it seemed to be. Here is what it truly was.

Charles still held different titles in each province: Duke of Brabant, Count of Flanders, and Lord of Friesland. The Pragmatic Sanction aimed to promote unity, but it still left the region largely confederal. Liège was entirely outside Habsburg control. Dozens of enclaves maintained connections to the Holy Roman Empire. Groningen and Overijssel were barely governed from Brussels. The court continued to operate in French in an area where most people spoke Dutch. Jonathan Israel’s verdict is clear: the unification was “superficial, more apparent than real.”

And the tensions that would eventually tear it apart were already at work. The wars of the 1540s forced Charles to rely on the provincial States to raise funds, and emergency-delegated tax power is hard to relinquish. The States managed larger flows of public money, building institutional strength they hadn’t had before.

At the same time, the long-standing campaign to suppress Protestant heresy forced dissidents into exile — artisans, ministers, and merchants scattered throughout England, Germany, and Swiss cities. Unintentionally, this created an organized Calvinist diaspora, more connected and institutionally cohesive than anything that could have survived underground at home. After 1555, that diaspora started returning.

And everywhere, the memory of Ghent persisted. Every city in the Netherlands had observed what happened when a city’s privileges were not just reduced but completely wiped out. 

Wim Blockmans concludes his account of the Seventeen Provinces with a simple, quiet sentence: “Thirty years later the Revolt was to cause a definitive break between North and South.”

The unity the Pragmatic Sanction declared was real enough on paper to matter. And delicate enough in practice to break.

Mary of Hungary had a phrase to describe how the regency felt. She used it at the start when she accepted the appointment and again years later in a private memo to Charles. She called it the rope around her neck.

That image stays with you because what she was describing wasn’t just her own situation — it reflected the situation of the Netherlands itself. A territory caught in an imperial system not of its own creation, governed in the name of a ruler who was rarely there, asked to fund wars fought on other people’s frontiers, and expected to accept all of this within a civic culture that had spent centuries insisting that authority required consent.

Margaret of Austria managed that tension brilliantly for twenty-three years through accumulated knowledge and collaborative instinct. Mary handled it with discipline and courage — and by 1549, she had kept the Netherlands united through a coordinated military assault, a major urban rebellion, and the incorporation of a duchy that had resisted Habsburg control for half a century. That is a real achievement. The Pragmatic Sanction was signed. The provinces were, on paper, one.

But listen to what the historians hear in the silence beneath the ceremony. Karl Brandi hears the culmination of a deliberate imperial project. Wim Blockmans hears something more provisional: a man managing pressures he couldn’t fully control, whose authority was decisive when physically present and structurally limited when he wasn’t. Jonathan Israel hears the revolt already approaching — not because of anything Philip II would later do, but because the Netherlands’ role in the Habsburg system made escalating demands inevitable, no matter who sat on the throne. And Geoffrey Parker hears the material that will eventually catch fire: a privilege culture that stores grievance like tinder, a fiscal resentment that compounds year by year, a religious underground that is quieter than it looks.

The Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 was not the end of the story; it was just the moment before the noose tightened.

We've watched Mary ride between military camps, seen van Rossum's troops drag themselves across a river in vats and barrels, watched Charles arrive in Ghent with a procession that took six hours to pass. All of that happened inside a military world that was transforming faster than anyone fully understood. Next time: the Military Revolution, and what it meant for the Netherlands specifically.

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