Battle of Heiligerlee, 1568: the first victory of the Dutch Revolt

In 1566 the Netherlands, then ruled by King Philip II of Spain, had been shaken by Calvinist preaching and the wave of image breaking in the churches. Philip sent the Duke of Alba to restore order by force. William of Orange, the greatest noble of the Netherlands, went into exile in Germany and in 1568 planned to strike back with several invasions at once.²

Louis of Nassau in Groningen

One of them was led by William's brother, Count Louis of Nassau. On 24 April 1568 he crossed into the northern province of Groningen and surprised the castle of Wedde, a residence of the absent stadholder of Friesland, the Count of Aremberg. At Appingedam, on the tidal waters of the Dollard, he was joined by his younger brother Adolf with a small troop of horse, and volunteers began to gather to his banners. In the account of the 19th-century historian John Lothrop Motley, their watchwords were "now or never" and "freedom for fatherland and conscience".³

Alba ordered Aremberg, just back from France, to hurry north with his own companies, a small body of horse and the Sardinian legion of Gonzalo de Bracamonte, nearly 2,500 men. Count Meghem was to join him with about 1,500 more. Alba warned his generals not to underrate the rebels and to undertake nothing except together.⁴

The bog by the monastery

Aremberg was ill with gout and followed his troops in a litter. From Groningen he received six guns which the townspeople had named after the notes of the scale, ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la. On 22 May he drove the rebels from Appingedam, and that night Louis fell back south along a causeway through the marshes to the monastery of Heiligerlee, the only rising ground for miles around.⁵

Louis chose his ground with care. Motley describes his foot drawn up in two deep squares between a wood and a hill, with musketeers on the flanks, light troops on the hill and his few hundred horse facing the road. In front lay a stretch of old peat diggings, deep pools hidden under a green skin of turf. Aremberg, who knew the country, wanted only to skirmish until Meghem arrived the next day. But the Spanish veterans, contemptuous of an army of beggars, accused him of cowardice and demanded to attack at once. Stung, he gave way. The Leiden historian Judith Pollmann puts it plainly: the royal commander failed to wait for reinforcements and made an error of judgment that led his troops into a trap.⁶

When the rebel light troops fell back from the hill, as planned, the Spaniards charged. Their vanguard plunged into the bog and struggled in the pools while the rebel musketeers shot them down from dry ground and the pikemen drove back any who climbed out. The smaller rebel square came round the hill and broke the Spanish rear. Aremberg led his last horsemen into the fight. According to Motley he met Adolf of Nassau and shot him dead, before his own horse was killed under him and he fell, fighting on foot, already wounded. Adolf was 27 years old.⁷

Counting the dead

The losses are uncertain. Motley, writing in the 1850s, gives estimates of the royal dead ranging from 500 to 1,600 men. Meghem rode up that evening with only a few attendants, his tired infantry still hours away, and could do nothing but secure the city of Groningen. The contemporary print from Frans Hogenberg's workshop, shown above, places the battle by the windmills of Winschoten and dates it to 24 May; the anniversary, as Leiden University notes, is 23 May.⁸

What happened to Adolf's body is still a mystery. According to the University Museum Groningen, it was first laid out in the monastery, then buried at the castle of Wedde and later moved to a town in Germany. Emden has often been named, but recent research points rather to Oldenburg.⁹

A first victory, not a turning point

Heiligerlee showed that Spanish veterans could be beaten, and it gave the Revolt its first victory and its first Nassau martyr. Its practical results were small. Louis had no money and no siege guns to take Groningen, and his unpaid mercenaries were close to mutiny. Alba's revenge was swift. On 5 June the Counts of Egmont and Horn, held prisoner in Brussels, were beheaded; Motley calls it the only positive result of Louis's victory. Then Alba marched north with some 15,000 picked troops and on 21 July trapped Louis's army against the Ems at Jemmingen and destroyed it.¹⁰

Pollmann argues that Heiligerlee was not decisive: after the victory William of Orange still had no support in the cities, and his next military attempts all ended in failure. The battle became an epic of national history only later, as the memory of the Revolt took shape in the 17th and 19th centuries. The war it is said to have started lasted, with a truce, until 1648.¹¹