and now a little less specific, with some background

Because even in my first posts I sort of jumped right into the monarchy, you might be looking for some sort of background about how the Netherlands became Spanish in the first place. If so, to back up a century or so, in 1475ish, Mary of Burgundy married Maximilian of Austria (the Hapsburg Prince who in 1493 was elected emperor, effectively joining their lands into one vast empire. As the historian Anthony Bailey puts it in The Low Countries, “The Low countries were merely a small, if wealthy, selection of [Maximilian’s] vast domains, but they were involved willy-nilly in the long Hapsburg quarrel with France. Perhaps if the states had foreseen the results of what -- for some of the provinces – would be the three-centuries-long Hapsburg connection, they would never have pressed Mary into her marriage with Maximilian. Rubbing in that aboriginal mistake, Louis XV of France declared as he stood at Mary’s tomb in Bruges, ‘There lies the cradle of our wars.’”

According to the same source, in direct and indirect ways, Hapsburg policy, perhaps surprisingly, did much to draw the Low Countries together. Charles V continued the tradition of the dukes of Burgundy and his grandfather Maximilian in showing little respect or the ambitions of the towns and provinces to maintain their own rights and semiautonomous governments. The centralizing tendency of the Hapsburg government, seen in all levels of the administration, was a sort of blessing in disguise in that it helped define the entirety of the individual provinces as one cohesive whole as opposed to independent sections. Even the tendency towards stringency in discipline of the Low Countries proved to have a silver lining, as Bailey says: “The sense of being subjected to a foreign, mostly absentee ruler, inspired the development of patriotic sentiments.” (The Low Countries, page 62).