Twelve Years' Truce
[1] While European powers like France began treating the Republic as a sovereign state, the Spanish viewed it as a temporary measure forced on them by financial exhaustion and domestic issues and did not formally recognise Dutch independence until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
[2][3] The Truce allowed Philip III of Spain to focus his resources elsewhere, while Archdukes Albert and Isabella used it to consolidate Habsburg rule and implement the Counter-Reformation in the Southern Netherlands.
After the fall of Antwerp in 1585, Spain's Philip II ordered Alexander Farnese to direct his military actions first towards the failed campaign of the Spanish Armada, then against France to prevent the succession of Henry IV, a Protestant.
In a series of campaigns, the Republic's army surprised Breda in 1590, took Deventer, Hulst and Nijmegen the following year and captured Groningen in 1594.
After the accession of Philip III in Spain and of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella in the Habsburg Netherlands in 1598, the Army of Flanders tried to regain the offensive against the Dutch Republic.
While it met with a tactical defeat in the Battle of Nieuwpoort on 2 July 1600, it did succeed in its strategic goal to repel the Dutch invasion of Flanders.
Ambrogio Spinola, who had succeeded Archduke Albert as commander in the field, eventually captured the town on 22 September 1604, but only at the price of accepting the loss of Sluis.
The Spanish did not deliver the knockout blow they had hoped for,[6] while the Dutch East India Company made serious inroads into the Portuguese spice trade, by setting up bases in the Moluccas.
The contacts were intensified when Albert instructed Father Jan Neyen in March 1607 to seek out the preliminaries that would have to be met for formal negotiations.
The ceasefire would be prolonged several times to allow for the negotiations that would eventually lead to the signing of the Twelve Years' Truce.
As Maurice declined to take part in the conference, the leadership of the delegation of the Republic was given to his cousin William Louis of Nassau, the Stadtholder of Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe.
They were assisted by Neyen, the Secretary of State and War, Don Juan de Mancicidor, and the Audiencier Louis Verreycken.
[13] The United Provinces likewise rejected the Habsburg demand that the Catholics in the Republic would be given freedom of religion, considering it an interference in their domestic affairs.
For their part, the Dutch agreed to end the blockade of the Flemish coast, but refused to allow free navigation on the Scheldt.
To protect their interests in the Baltic, the United Provinces signed a defensive pact with the Hanseatic League in 1614 that was intended to deter Danish aggression.
Temporary setbacks in the Indies caused the price of VOC shares on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange to fall from a high of 200 in 1608 to 132 after the truce began.
[24] Despite the truce, in 1614 the Dutch Captain Joris van Spilbergen sailed beyond the Strait of Magellan with an expedition of five ships, and raided the Spanish settlements on the coast of Mexico and South America.
The unity of the Dutch Reformed Church was threatened by a controversy that found its origins in the opposing views of Jacobus Arminius and Franciscus Gomarus on predestination.
They were also popular among the regents dominating the political life of that province, because they offered the prospect of an inclusive church controlled by the state.
They appealed to the industrious strata of the manufacturing towns as well as to exiles from the Southern Netherlands who were excluded from political power, adding an element of social conflict to the controversy.
[28] In many towns congregations split between Remonstrants seeking to moderate the Belgic Confession, and Counter-Remonstrants who were strict Calvinists, insisting on its rigid interpretation.
The political opposition to his actions imploded as van Oldenbarnevelt's Utrecht ally, Gilles van Ledenberg, advocaat of the Utrecht States, fled to Holland[33] On 29 August 1618 Maurice had Oldenbarnevelt and other leaders of the Remonstrants arrested and then proceeded to purge the Holland ridderschap[34] and the vroedschappen of a number of cities that had been governed by Remonstrant regents up to then.
[28] In Spain the truce was seen as a major humiliation – it had suffered a political, military and ideological defeat and the affront to its prestige was immense.
[38] For the time of its duration, however, the truce allowed Philip and Duke of Lerma to disengage from the conflict in the Low Countries and devote their energies to the internal problems of the Spanish monarchy.
The archducal regime encouraged the reclaiming of land that had been inundated in the course of the hostilities and sponsored the impoldering of the Moeren, a marshy area that is presently astride the Belgian–French border.
The archducal regime had plans to bypass the blockade with a system of canals linking Ostend via Bruges to the Scheldt in Ghent and joining the Meuse to the Rhine between Venlo and Rheinberg.
In order to combat urban poverty, the government supported the creation of a network of mounts of piety based on the Italian model.
Under the terms of legislation passed shortly after the truce, the remaining Protestant population was tolerated, provided they did not worship in public.
Through such measures and by the appointment of a generation of able and committed bishops, Albert and Isabella laid the foundation of the Catholic confessionalisation of the population.
The succession crisis over the duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg resulted in severe tensions during the siege of Jülich of 1610 and the confrontations that led to the Treaty of Xanten in 1614.
