Dutch Wars of Independence (1568-1648), also known as the Eighty Years’ War, the struggle of the Netherlands for freedom from rule by Habsburg Spain.

King Philip II of Spain inherited the 17 provinces of the Low Countries (now Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and part of northern France) in 1555. In 1559, hoping to suppress both Protestantism in the provinces and their rights of self-government under the Great Privilege of 1477, he appointed new Roman Catholic bishops, who were to be paid by him and to sit in the provincial States assemblies. Their leader was Cardinal Antoine Granvelle, Archbishop of Mechlin and a leading member of the Council of State under Philip’s regent, his half-sister Margaret of Parma. Philip left for Spain in 1560 and withdrew his troops in 1561.

Other councillors, led by William I of Orange and Lamoral, Comte d’Egmont, protested against these changes, forced Granvelle’s resignation in 1564, and, through a Compromise (or League) of Nobles, protested against religious persecution in 1566. One of Margaret’s advisers called them gueux (French, “beggars”): this became the nickname both of the nobles and of the Calvinists who attacked Catholic churches later that year. After their suppression in 1567 a new regent, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, brought Spanish troops to occupy the provinces and established the “Council of Troubles” (or the “Council of Blood”), which ordered the executions of more than 6,000 rebels, including Egmont, during 1568. In the same year Alva defeated an army led from Germany by William I of Orange.

In 1572 the rebels known as gueux de bois (“forest beggars”) began a guerrilla campaign while the gueux de mer (“sea beggars”) seized Brill, Flushing, and Antwerp, took control of Holland, Zeeland, and large parts of Friesland, Overijssel, Gelderland, and Utrecht, and invited William to return. Two years later Alva was replaced by Don Luis de Zuniga y Requesens, who was at first more effective, but the rebels scored a great victory by flooding the countryside and sailing to Leiden to save it from a Spanish siege. In 1576 Requesens died suddenly; the Spanish troops, who had not been paid for months, went on the rampage in several cities; and all the provincial States assemblies accepted the Pacification of Ghent, an agreement to remove the troops and suspend heresy trials. Although all the provinces, except Holland and Zeeland, signed the Perpetual Edict of Peace offered by a new regent, Philip’s half-brother John of Austria, in February 1577, the rebellion continued and John resumed fighting in July by attacking Namur.

In 1579 most of the southern, mainly Catholic, provinces withdrew from the States-General assembly of the Low Countries to join the Union of Arras in support of Philip, while the northern provinces, dominated by Calvinists, formed the Union of Utrecht against him. On July 24, 1581, the States-General, meeting at The Hague for the first time, appointed William regent and on July 26 they announced that Philip was no longer their king. Thus the rising of the Low Countries, which had begun in the south, became a war for the independence of the north.

Between 1580 and 1585 the States-General sought a new ruler. François, Duke of Anjou, made himself unpopular by trying to seize control of Antwerp from its citizens, then returned to France, but both his brother, King Henry III of France, and Queen Elizabeth I of England refused to replace him. Meanwhile, William was assassinated in 1584 and Antwerp was reconquered by the Spanish under yet another regent, Margaret of Parma’s son Alessandro Farnese, in 1585. In that year Elizabeth sent Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, to aid the rebellion, but his efforts to promote English commercial interests and to make peace with Philip alienated the Dutch. After his departure in 1587 the States-General appointed William’s son Maurice of Nassau Captain-General. While he spent the next ten years steadily reconquering Groningen, Overijssel, Gelderland, and the area now known as Zeeland Flanders, Jan van Olden Barneveldt, the leading politician of Holland (the richest and most populous province), negotiated an alliance with France and England, completed in 1596. Philip, who died in 1598, left the southern Low Countries (also known as the Spanish Netherlands) to his daughter Isabella and her husband Albrecht, Archduke of Austria. Ambrogio Spinola, the commander of their mainly Spanish forces, conquered Ostend in 1604 and pushed the Dutch back from Flanders in sporadic fighting up to 1609, when the two sides agreed on a 12-year truce.

The last of the wars, beginning in 1621, was at first inconclusive, but after Maurice’s death in 1625 the Dutch captured the entire Spanish silver fleet, carrying bullion from Spain’s American colonies, in 1628; and Frederick Henry, Maurice’s brother and his successor as Captain-General, used part of the proceeds to finance the conquest of the north-eastern areas still in Spanish hands, then of 's-Hertogenbosch in 1629 and Maastricht in 1632, as well as (outside Europe) part of Brazil, Curaçao, and the former Portuguese colonies in Asia, laying the foundations of the Dutch Empire. An alliance with France in 1635 for the purpose of conquering and dividing the southern Low Countries led only to the loss of Venlo, Roermond, and other towns to Spain, which then sought peace in order to concentrate its forces on the Thirty Years’ War then raging in Germany. After Frederick Henry’s death in 1647, Holland continued the negotiations, against the wishes of Frederick Henry’s son William II and of three of the other provinces. In 1648 the Treaty of Münster, part of the Peace of Westphalia which ended both the Thirty Years’ War and the Eighty Years’ War, gave international recognition to the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces.