Council of Troubles

The Council of Troubles (usual English translation of Dutch: Raad van Beroerten, or Spanish: Tribunal de los Tumultos, or French: Conseil des Troubles) was the special tribunal instituted on 9 September 1567 by Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba, governor-general of the Habsburg Netherlands on the orders of Philip II of Spain to punish the ringleaders of the recent political and religious troubles in the Netherlands. Due to the many death sentences pronounced by the tribunal, it also became known as the Council of Blood (Bloedraad in Dutch and Conseil de Sang in French). The tribunal would be abolished by Alba's successor Luis de Zúñiga y Requesens on 7 June 1574 in exchange for a subsidy from the States-General of the Netherlands, but in practice it remained in session until the popular revolution in Brussels of the summer of 1576.

During the final two years of the regency of Margaret of Parma over the Habsburg Netherlands, circumstances—political (disaffection of the high nobility with its diminished role in the councils of state), religious (disaffection over the persecution of heretics and the reform of the organisation of the Catholic Church in the Netherlands, especially the creation of new dioceses), and economic (a famine in 1565)—conspired to bring about a number of political and social events that shook the regime to its foundations. A League of Nobles (mostly members of the lower nobility) protested the severity of the persecution of heretics with a petition to the Regent, who conceded the demands temporarily. This may have encouraged the Calvinists in the country to follow the iconoclastic depredations on Catholic churches that also burst out in France in the summer of 1566.

Although this iconoclastic fury was soon suppressed by the authorities, and the concessions to the Calvinists retracted, these "troubles" sufficiently disturbed the Court in Madrid to motivate Philip to send his trusted commander, the Duke of Alba, with an army of Spanish mercenaries to "restore order" in the Netherlands. When he arrived there, his first measures so offended the Regent that she resigned in protest in early September 1567.

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