I Take History With My Coffee

In October 1568, William of Orange crosses the Meuse with an army of about 25,000 to 30,000 men and attempts to retake the Netherlands. No one rises to join him. The Duke of Alba refuses to give battle and lets hunger end the invasion. By early 1569, Orange is sick, broke, and sneaking down the Rhine in a covered barge. Alba writes that he may be counted a dead man. Alba has won, but he can't sustain his victory. This episode follows both men from 1568 to the spring of 1572, as each strategy sl

Grand Place, Brussels. June 5, 1568. A scaffold draped in black. Three thousand Spanish troops encircle a silent crowd. Lamoral, Count of Egmont — Knight of the Golden Fleece, the man who broke the French at Saint-Quentin and Gravelines — kneels and removes the collar of his highest honor before the axe falls. Minutes later, Philip de Hoorn follows. This is the story of how it came to that: the Duke of Alba's arrival in Brussels with ten thousand troops, the creation of the Council of Trou

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