As a fellow Catholic, he supported the Spanish Habsburgs in their struggle against the northern insurgents following the Dutch revolt of 1568.

Following her first husband's death, she adopted Calvinism, but remarried into another Catholic noble family, this time of higher rank.

From there the couple moved to Calais, Vlissingen and finally Antwerp, where they joined William I. Marie de Brimeu separated from her husband in 1584, when he returned to Catholicism.

When they separated the States General on 13 September 1584 ruled that she had the rights to all her possessions, but this led to lengthy legal proceedings.

She found herself in good standing with the Earl of Leicester, whom Elizabeth I appointed as Governor General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands (1585–1587), and his followers, including Anna Walburgis van Nieuwenaer.

Efforts continued to achieve a reconciliation between her and her husband, and an agreement was reached in 1600, by which she returned to the south, settling in Liège, where she also established a garden.

Her last years were spent in ill health, and despite frequenting spas she died in Liège in 1605 at the age of 55, and was buried at the church in Megen.

[5] Marie de Brumeu was born into a French-speaking aristocratic Catholic family, the house of Meghem, in the Duchy of Brabant, which was one of the Seventeen Provinces of the Habsburg Netherlands.

Before she reached adulthood, Philip II had succeeded his father and the Netherlands had become plunged into turmoil in the Dutch Revolt.

[4] Despite the difference in their social status, Marie de Brimeu was Clusius' closest and almost lifelong woman friend,[9][10] and she reminded him that Justus Lipsius had called him "the father of all the beautiful gardens in this country".

[11][12] She developed an expertise in horticulture and creating gardens that attracted great interest throughout both the Southern and Northern Netherlands,[5] and was an example of the intellectual and humanist philosophies in the Dutch Republic at that time, in which beauty could be appreciated for its own sake.