Hans Cools
In May 1559 Pope Paul IV Carata (r. 1555–59) issued the bull Super Universas, an act that thoroughly changed the ecclesiastical map of the Low Countries.1 Before that date all these lands (an area roughly corresponding to modern Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and northern France), an area of roughly 90,000 square kilometers and with a population of about three million people, were divided into only six bishoprics. Utrecht, the youngest of these sees, had been created in the eighth century. Its territory corresponded more or less with the actual kingdom of the Netherlands. The five remaining sees, Arras, Cambrai, Liège, Thérouanne, and Tournai, dated back to late antiquity and they were all situated at the southern edges, if not across the borders of the Netherlands. Four of the six Low Countries bishoprics (Arras, Cambrai, Tournai, and Thérouanne) were part of the French archbishopric of Reims. The other two, Liège and Utrecht, were under the authority of the German archbishop of Cologne. The proclamation of Super Universas can be considered as the apogee of a century-long struggle by the Burgundian dukes and their Habsburg successors to create a “national” church for their Netherlands dominions. Since the early fifteenth century and in [47] the wake of conciliarism, they had gradually succeeded in providing ever more benefices and had obtained the right to intervene in the electoral processes of most monastic houses in the Low Countries. By then, they finally controlled the hierarchy of virtually all ecclesiastical institutions.2
After May 1559, the Habsburg Netherlands was divided into three archbishoprics: Mechelen, Cambrai, and Utrecht. Fifteen episcopal sees, most newly created, completed the ecclesiastical structure of the Low Countries. Under Super Universas,3 the Habsburg prince obtained the privilege of proposing nominees for each of these sees. After that time, the papal administration only had to ensure that the candidates met the canonical requirements and then could effect their nomination.4 The introduction of this new bishopric scheme met with huge resistance. Aristocrats feared that their scions would lose access to ecclesiastical wealth, and abbots objected that their revenues would be used to provide the new bishops with an income. Both groups feared the loss of political influence. Within society at large, many thought the bishopric scheme prepared the ground for the introduction of a Spanish-styled inquisition.5 The fact that the Habsburg ruler filled several vacant bishoprics with men who had previously acted as inquisitors contributed to that fear.6
Thus the introduction of the new bishopric scheme was one of the causes for the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt (1566). Due to that revolt, the scheme was only partially successful. Since the 1580s, all sees within the territories of the United Provinces had remained vacant. Catholic communities in those territories were administered by so-called apostolic vicars, who for many decades resided in exile, first in Cologne and later in Brussels.7 Nevertheless, the new bishopric scheme was of vital importance for Catholic renewal in provinces that had stayed loyal or had returned to Habsburg obedience.
[48] In recent decades, several biographies of Counter-Reformation bishops in the Habsburg Netherlands have been published.8 Although the social origins and career paths of these men varied, all of them conformed to the image of the post-Tridentine prelate as university-trained and zealous. As these bishops had been selected by Habsburg rulers and their officials, relationships with government circles could be tense from time to time, but most often both parties cooperated well.9 Jointly they strived to transform the Habsburg Netherlands into an exemplary outpost of the worldwide Catholic community.10
In contrast, far less is known about the men who preceded the first generations of Counter-Reformation bishops. Where did they come from? To which social groups did they belong? To what extent were they government nominees? This essay will address these questions and briefly compare the results with research that has been carried out on the French episcopacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thereby, this essay focuses upon the twenty-two bishops who served in the Netherlands between 1515 and 1559, and thus between the start of Charles V’s personal rule and the proclamation of the bull Super Universas.11
Just as the medieval border between the Holy Roman Empire and France had straddled the Netherlands, the six old bishoprics belonged to these various polities. Cambrai, Liège, and Utrecht were part of the empire. At the start of the period under investigation, the prelates who resided in these cities were not only spiritual pastors, but they also administered some territories as secular princes. However, these territories were vulnerable possessions. Already in the 1470s, the Burgundian duke Charles the Bold had plundered the city of Liège and incorporated its principality into his lands.12 That bond was severed in the turmoil that followed the duke’s untimely death, but the principality of [49] Liège continued to exist, until it was suppressed in the wake of the French Revolution.13 The two other ecclesiastical principalities in the Low Countries, however, did not maintain their independence. In 1528, Emperor Charles V annexed the principality of Utrecht14 and in 1543 the emperor also integrated the small ecclesiastical duchy of Cambrai into the Netherlands.15 By order of Charles V, both Utrecht and Cambrai were provided with citadels that served to keep their populations at bay.16
In contrast, the cities of Arras, Thérouanne, and Tournai were situated within the borders of the French kingdom and, at least in theory, the Concordat of Bologna (1516) applied to episcopal nominations to these sees.17 In practice, Arras had been firmly under Habsburg control since the Treaty of Senlis, which was concluded in 1493.18 Moreover, in 1521 Habsburg armies conquered the enclave of Tournai and the surrounding twelve villages, which originally comprised a fief that the bishops held from the French crown.19 Finally in 1553, the city of Thérouanne, until then most of the time firmly in French hands, was completely destroyed and never rebuilt, on the express orders of Charles V. Until that moment the French kings had approved all elections to the episcopal see of Thérouanne. In 1521 for instance, Pope Leo X had confirmed the nomination of Cardinal Jean de Lorraine to that see. The cardinal’s close friendship with Francis I made him the richest prelate in France. During his lifetime he occupied twelve different episcopal and archepiscopal sees.20 After the city was destroyed in 1553, the bishopric of Thérouanne was split into two different sees, a French one at Boulogne-sur-Mer and a Habsburg one at Ypres.21
Therefore, in the five other places here under study—Arras, Cambrai, Liège, Tournai, and Utrecht—local canons were, in theory, free to choose the bishops they preferred; however, throughout these territories the Habsburg government had considerable influence. Where the canons failed to present a candidate that suited government officials, elections were contested and local schisms erupted. Government interference was especially great where bishops also acted as secular princes. After the death of Louis de Bourbon, bishop of Liège, in 1482, Maximilian, king of the Romans (and grandfather of Charles V), and his agents in Rome lobbied for the suppression of the see of Liège and its replacement with two new bishoprics, one in Namur and one in Louvain or Maastricht; all three of these cities [50] were under Habsburg control. Eventually, the plan failed when Maximilian’s chief lobbyist, Cardinal Ferry de Clugny, died prematurely in 1483. For the next eight years, a civil war raged in the principality of Liège between the supporters of the various candidates.22 That war was closely interwoven with the wider Habsburg-Valois conflict and with the rebellions in the western parts of the Low Countries, primarily in Flanders and Holland. In the cities of Ghent and Bruges, the magistrates, together with some high-ranking noblemen, opposed Maximilian’s authority.23 However, in the end, just as had happened in Flanders, Maximilian’s candidate, Jan of Horn, won the office due to the fact that after 1489 the French withdrew their support from his opponents.24
In Tournai, various claimants to the episcopal see opposed each other nearly continuously between 1484 and 1525.25 Most of the time, there was one claimant who administered the French part of the bishopric and one claimant who controlled the Habsburg part of the bishopric. But matters were complicated further when English troops took the city of Tournai in 1513. The English stayed there for six years and introduced a new candidate to the see, royal confidante Cardinal Thomas Wolsey26 Only in 1525 did Charles V succeed in removing the French-sponsored claimant, Bishop Louis Guillard, by forcing him to accept a complicated compromise that brought Guillard to Chartres.27 Charles V then made sure the local canons chose Charles de Croÿ, a member of one of the most prominent noble houses in the Low Countries, as bishop of Tournai.28 At that time the young Charles de Croÿ was still studying in Italy, but a few years earlier he had already been appointed administrator of the Hainaut abbey of Hautmont. In 1529 he was elected as abbot of Saint-Ghislain and only a decade later, in 1539, Charles de Croÿ was installed effectively as bishop of Tournai.29
As becomes clear from these examples, controlling nominations to all sees were vital to the Habsburg government: bishops either administered (smaller) ecclesiastical principalities, in addition to their (larger) bishoprics, or their sees [51] were situated in border regions where the threat of French influence loomed. For these reasons, government officials everywhere wanted to install bishops who could be trusted politically. Therefore, the twenty-two individuals who, between 1515 and 1559, were promoted to one of the episcopal sees in the Netherlands came from a very limited social group.
Two of these bishops were illegitimate descendants of the Burgundian-Habsburg princes. In 1517 Philip of Burgundy, an illegitimate son of the Burgundian duke Philip the Good, was elected bishop of Utrecht.30 In that city, near relatives of the Burgundian dukes had governed since the mid fifteenth century; however, their successes were limited. David of Burgundy, a younger half-brother of Philip the Good, had been trapped by an endless series of revolts against his authority. He was opposed especially by the Utrecht guilds, factions of the local nobility, and smaller cities in his principality. In 1481, David was forced into exile and had to be rescued by Habsburg troops. Two years later, Maximilian laid siege to Utrecht and eventually forced the inhabitants to reinstate David to his see.31 After David’s death in 1496, Maximilian (then Holy Roman Emperor) made sure that the canons elected his cousin Friedrich von Baden as bishop; however, this nomination turned out to be another disappointment to the Habsburg government. In 1514 Friedrich threatened to pass on his see to a candidate favourable to King Louis XII of France, and officials in Brussels reacted by forcing Friedrich to abdicate.32 Their new nominee, Philip of Burgundy, until then admiral of the Netherlands, had no particular religious vocation, but he was well acquainted with the tense political situation in Utrecht and the surrounding territories. Philip, however, was also unsuccessful in pacifying the region. Therefore, in 1528, four years after Philip’s death, Charles V annexed the principality of Utrecht and ordered the construction of a citadel in its capital.
In Liège, George of Austria, bishop from 1544 until 1557, and an illegitimate son of Emperor Maximilian, did not leave a deep impression on the collective memory. As bishop, George did, however, timidly promote Catholic renewal in his diocese by reforming the ecclesiastical tribunals and by requiring his clergy to conform to the standards of canon law.33
[52] Apart from these two members of the princely family, pre-Tridentine bishops in the Netherlands were for the most part members of the aristocracy.34 Eleven out of the twenty-two bishops under consideration here came from that group. Especially prominent are the Croÿ and the Glymes-Berghes families,35 which between them provided no fewer than eight bishops. The dominance of the Croÿ family in the southwestern part of the Netherlands was especially strong.36 Between 1502 and 1556 they provided three consecutive bishops of Cambrai: Jacques, Guillaume, and Robert. As noted already, Robert could not prevent his small secular territory from being absorbed into the Habsburg Netherlands in 1543. Nevertheless, the see of Cambrai retained an exceptional status after 1559. According to Super Universas, the see was promoted to the rank of an archbishopric; moreover, it became the only see where the pope could directly nominate candidates without interference of the Habsburg government. This privilege provided the local canons with enough latitude to regularly present their own candidates.37
At Tournai, Charles de Croÿ was bishop from 1525 until his death in 1564. Another member of that family, Eustache de Croÿ, administered the see of Arras for fifteen years between 1523 and 1538.38 His magnificent funeral monument, sculpted by Jacques du Broeucq, has been preserved in the Saint-Omer church of Sainte-Marie (today the local cathedral), where he had been a canon. In addition, the Croÿ family provided abbots to the most prestigious religious houses in the region, such as Saint-Amand on the river Scheldt.39 In the same years, Eustache’s older brother, Adrien de Croÿ, the count of Roeulx, occupied the position of provincial governor of Flanders, Walloon Flanders, and Artois.40 Therefore it would be no exaggeration to label the southwestern Netherlands in the first half of the sixteenth century as Croÿ country. In fact, in these territories, different members of the family occupied the positions that wielded the most influence in the various secular and religious administrations. Obviously, the Habsburgs were keen to exploit such connections. In the mid-1540s, regent Mary of Hungary, sister [53] of Emperor Charles V, sent Philippe de Croÿ41 to convince his brother Robert, bishop of Cambrai, to let her troops occupy his city. Elsewhere, governor Adrien de Croÿ was pressuring Eustache, bishop of Arras and speaker for the bench of clerics, to make the Artois estates accept some tough compromises.42
The case of the Glymes-Berghes family is interesting as well. In the late fifteenth century, the learned Henry of Glymes-Berghes had already served as bishop of Cambrai and chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece. In the 1480s and ’90s, Henry and his brothers had staunchly supported the cause of Maximilian of Austria.43 However, Henry’s anti-French sentiments had brought him into conflict with Maximilian’s son the young Philip the Fair, who hoped to appease Louis XII in order to safeguard his ambitions to the Iberian crowns.44 Under Charles V, the Glymes-Berghes family regained prominence.45 In 1538, Charles V assured the promotion of Corneille de Glymes-Berghes to the see of Liège, hoping that he would protect the imperial interests in this border region, which was constantly under French pressure.46 Although as bishop, Corneille never left Brussels, ensuring that Habsburg interests were privileged in his principality, he showed very little interest in the religious administration of his diocese. In the end, the emperor and his sister, regent Mary of Hungary, forced Corneille to abdicate in 1544 in order to make room for George of Austria.47 Corneille’s nephew Robert de Glymes-Berghes succeeded George of Austria as bishop of Liège in 1557. But this administration too was a failure. Suffering from insanity, Robert was forced to abdicate in 1564.48
More successful was Robert’s cousin Maximilien de Glymes-Berghes, who had been elected bishop of Cambrai in 1559 and two years later became the first archbishop of that see. The redrawn borders of the vastly reduced (arch)bishopric nearly coincided with those of the county of Hainaut, where Maximilien’s relative Jean de Glymes, marquis of Bergen op Zoom, served as governor from 1560 until his death in 1567.49 Although Maximilien de Glymes-Berghes organized a provincial [54] synod, assisted at the opening of the University of Douai, and allowed the Jesuits to establish themselves in his archdiocese, he proved rather reluctant to staunchly prosecute Calvinists.50 Therefore, when Maximilien died in 1579, the Duke of Alba was pleased to see him succeeded by the more zealous Louis de Berlaymont.51
A final group of bishops are the career clerics. William of Enckenvoirt, born in 1464 and bishop of Utrecht between 1529 and his death in 1534, is the only person of humble descent in that group. William had studied theology at Louvain and was sent from there to Rome, where he made a career at the curia. Upon his election, Pope Hadrian VI Floriszoon (r. 1521–23), who most likely had lectured William in Louvain, chose this fellow Dutchman to become his most trusted adviser in Rome and bestowed honors upon his client. William succeeded Adrian as bishop of Tortosa in Spain and was the only cardinal created during Hadrian’s brief pontificate. Such papal favor detained William in Rome, and he never visited the dioceses to which he had been nominated.52
Although Érard la Marck and Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle were the only two other persons out of this group who were created cardinals, the social origins of William of Enckenvoirt can hardly be compared with that of those two men.53 Érard de la Marck belonged to an aristocratic family that claimed to hold its vast lands—which stretched around the upper Meuse valley and where the French kings and the dukes of Lorraine and Burgundy vied for power—directly from the German emperors.54 The troops that murdered the bishop of Liége Louis de Bourbon in 1482, as part of an effort to stop the expansion of Habsburg successors to the Burgundian claims, were under the command of Érard’s uncle, Guillaume de la Marck.55 For the next few years, Guillaume tried—unsuccessfully—to get his son Jean accepted as the new occupant of the episcopal throne. But at the next occasion, in 1505, Guillaume’s cousin Érard de la Marck was elected bishop, in a large degree thanks to the support of King Louis XII of France.56 Two years later, Érard acquired as well the rich and prestigious French diocese of Chartres. However when in 1518 Érard had not yet received the desired red hat, he shifted [55] his allegiance to the Habsburgs. In 1520, Érard acquired the Iberian archdiocese of Valencia, and his promotion to the cardinalate followed a year later.57 Although Érard shared Charles V’s dislike of Lutheranism and took a seat in the successive privy councils of the regents Margaret of Austria and Mary of Hungary, the two men and their advisers continued to quarrel over the precise borders of their respective territories.
Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the son of Charles V’s principal minister, Nicolas, later became the principal advisor to Charles’s son, Philip II. Therefore Antoine’s nomination to the see of Arras in 1543 has to be considered above all as the starting point of his brilliant career. As first archbishop of Mechelen, Antoine was one of the main beneficiaries of Philip II’s new bishopric scheme, and therefore his adversaries often considered him, in a way not entirely justified, to be the malign genius behind that scheme.58
That scheme, however, entirely changed the social composition of the episcopate in the Netherlands, as bishops would no longer be recruited nearly exclusively from among the ranks of the nobility. Nevertheless it is striking that the first pastors of new archbishoprics all three descended from the highest ranks of the aristocracy. Around the same time that Maximilien de Glymes-Berghes and Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle were made bishops of Cambrai and Mechelen, respectively, in 1560, Frederik van Schenk Toutenburg was promoted to the newly created archepiscopal see of Utrecht. In the 1520s and 1530s, his father, Joris, had played a crucial role in the conquest of Friesland, Drenthe, and Groningen, the three northernmost provinces of the Netherlands.59 Joris’s main rewards were election as a knight of the Golden Fleece in 1531 and appointment to the governorship of those provinces. Moreover, in 1538, two years before Joris’s death and with explicit reference to the services he had rendered to the dynasty, his son Frederik had been received in the Utrecht chapter of Oudmunster.60 Frederik was a learned canon and civil lawyer, with a vivid interest in Renaissance thought. His library contained, among others works, the works of Erasmus and those of the classical authors Cicero and Ovid. He also fathered at least two illegitimate children. Frederik’s ministry as an archbishop did not prove successful. At the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt, he failed to adequately negotiate between the Spanish garrison that occupied the local citadel and the Utrecht population. Once the city [56] was in the hands of the rebels, the public exercise of Roman Catholic worship was prohibited. A few weeks later, in August 1580, Frederik died. The city magistrate then granted exceptional permission to stage a simple funeral according to the Catholic rite in the local cathedral; this would prove the last service of this nature for about a century, until 1672/73 when the Utrecht Minster was briefly returned to the Catholic community during the French occupation.61 Also, throughout the next generations after Frederik, the old and prestigious sees of Cambrai and Liège would remain firmly in the hands of aristocrats, whereas men of humbler stock directed the newly created archbishopric of Mechelen.
Obviously this changed recruitment strategy had a lasting impact upon the nature of the Catholic renewal in the Netherlands. Indeed, the public perceived the first generation of reform-minded bishops appointed after 1559 as being very tied to the hugely unpopular government circles of Philip II and his successive regents. Three of those, including Franciscus Sonnius, had served as inquisitors, and therefore it was often years before they could take up their posts. Sonnius, for instance, could make his way to ’s-Hertogenbosch only in 1562, and even then his installation was boycotted by the local guilds, the confraternities, and the civic militia. Four years later, in 1566, on the eve of a wave of iconoclasm, six bishops had still not yet made a public entry into their cathedrals.62
These developments were in line with, although for somewhat different reasons, what happened in neighbouring France, where after 1438, the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges had established a practice similar to the one that existed until the middle of the sixteenth century in the Netherlands. Originally French canons had elected their bishops, but these elections hardly ever went smoothly. The system produced an endless series of contested elections that fostered political instability.63 But in contrast to Charles V, who remained dependent upon struggling chapters, Francis I had obtained in 1516, through the Concordat of Bologna, the right to appoint bishops. However—and this is often overlooked—the Concordat of Bologna had already laid down various requirements for prospective bishops, so that in theory, French bishops were supposed to be at least twenty-six years old and hold an academic degree.64 The changed regulation at first did not alter the social composition of the French episcopate. Just as had happened in the past, Francis I and his successors recruited “their” bishops overwhelmingly out [57] of the upper strata of the nobility;65 however, the religious crisis, the ensuing civil wars, and the loss of royal authority in the second half of the sixteenth century resulted in many vacancies—in 1595 about one-third of all French bishoprics had no bishop at all—and made other dioceses, especially those with large Protestant populations, wholly inaccessible to their bishops. During the five decades from the outbreak of the wars of religion in the 1560s until the death of Henry IV in 1610, one-third to one-half of French bishops were from non-noble descent.66
In the Netherlands, on the other hand, the first generation of bishops who served in the freshly created archdioceses of Mechelen and Utrecht after the promulgation of Super Universas were university-trained clerics. Among these men, Louvain theologians were dominant, and apart from Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, who was transferred from Arras to the new archbishopric of Mechelen, and Frederik van Schenk Toutenburg, who was appointed as the first archbishop of Utrecht, none of them was a nobleman.67
Also in France, the number of university-trained bishops gradually rose, but well into the seventeenth century, they had predominantly studied law rather than theology, as was the case in the Low Countries.68 This difference may account for the fact that French bishops seem to have concentrated somewhat later than their colleagues in the Netherlands on the need for reform. This explains why later seventeenth-century religious developments in France, such as the spread and the perceived threat of Jansenism, were profoundly marked by theological currents that had surfaced earlier in the Habsburg Netherlands.69
In conclusion, government involvement in the selection of bishops was not new in seventeenth-century France, just as it had not been new in the Habsburg Netherlands. Nonetheless, what did change with the introduction of the new bishopric scheme of 1559 was the government’s expectations of the bishops. After that time, the bishops did not only have to support the monarch’s strictly secular policy goals, but their religious objectives as well.
[58] Table 1: Bishops in the Netherlands, 1515–59
Arras (archbishopric of Reims)
François de Melun (bp. 1510–13) (†Nov. 22, 1521)
Pietro Accolti (bp. 1518–23)
Eustache de Croÿ (bp. 1523–38) (†Oct. 3, 1538)
Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (bp. 1538–61) (†Sep. 21, 1586)
Tournai (archbishopric of Reims) (schism from 1484 until 1505)
Louis Guillard (bp. 1513–25)
Thomas Wolsey (administrator of the diocese between 1514 and 1518) (†Nov. 29, 1530)
Charles de Croÿ (bp. 1525–64) (†Dec. 13, 1564)
Cambrai (archbishopric of Reims)
Jacques de Croÿ (bp. 1502–16) (†Aug. 15, 1516)
Guillaume de Croÿ (bp. 1517–19) (†Jan. 6, 1521)
Robert de Croÿ (bp. 1519–56) (†Aug. 31, 1556)
Maximilien de Glymes–Berghes (bp. 1556–70; in 1559 his see was elevated to an archbishopric) (†Aug. 29, 1570)
Thérouanne (archbishopric of Reims)
François de Melun (bp. 1516–21) (†Nov. 22, 1521) [see also above under Arras]
Jean de Lorraine (bp. 1521–before Nov. 8, 1535)
François de Créqui (bp. 1535–52) (†Feb. 28, 1552)
Antoine de Créqui (bp. 1552–59)
Liège (archbishopric of Cologne)
Érard de la Marck (bp. 1505–38; cardinal since 1521) (†Feb. 16, 1538)
Corneille de Glymes-Berghes (bp. 1538–44) (†1545)
George d’Autriche (bp. 1544–57) (†May 4/5, 1557)
Robert de Glymes-Berghes (bp. 1557–64)
Utrecht (archbishopric of Cologne)
Philippe de Bourgonge (bp. 1517–24) (†April 7, 1524)
Henry of Bavaria and the Palatinate (bp. 1524–29) (†Jan. 3, 1552)
William of Enckenvoirt (bp. 1529–34) (†July 19, 1534)
George of Egmond (bp. 1534–59) (†Sept. 26, 1559)
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