Editing Beeldenstorm (section)

==Consequences==
[[File:Kreuz von stadelhofen.jpg|thumb|300px|Later depiction of the destruction of a wayside cross in [[Zürich]] in 1523]]
On 23 August [[Margaret of Parma]], the Habsburg Regent or Governor-general, whose capital of [[Brussels]] was unaffected by the movement, agreed to an "Accord" with the group of aristocratic Protestant leaders known as the "Compromise" or ''[[Geuzen]]'' ("Beggars"), by which freedom of religion was granted, in exchange for allowing Catholics to worship unmolested and an end to the violence. Instead, "the outbreak of the iconoclastic fury began an almost uninterrupted series of skirmishes, campaigns, plunder, pirate-raids, and other acts of violence. Not all areas suffered violence at the same time or to the same extent, but practically none remained unscathed."<ref>Lesger, 110</ref>

Many elite Protestants were now alarmed by the forces unleashed, and some of the nobility began to shift towards support of the government. Implementing the somewhat vague terms of the agreement led to further tensions, and [[William the Silent|William of Orange]], appointed by Margaret to resolve the situation in Antwerp, tried and failed to produce a wider settlement that all parties could live with. Instead unrest continued and the episode fed into the [[causes of the Dutch Revolt]] which was to erupt two years later.<ref>Elliott, 91–93; Petegree, 132–134; Wells, 89–91; Arnade, 100</ref>

On 29 August 1566 Margaret wrote a somewhat panicked letter to Philip, "claiming that half the population were infected with heresy, and that over 200,000 people were up in arms against her authority".<ref name="auto2">{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JxK_O5IclRIC&dq=Iconoclasm+1566&pg=PA106|title=Immigrants and the Industries of London, 1500-1700|first=Liên|last=Luu|date=25 March 2018|publisher=Ashgate|isbn=9780754603306|via=Google Books}}</ref> Philip decided to send the [[Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba|Duke of Alba]] with an army; he would have led them himself but was kept in Spain by other matters, especially the increasingly evident insanity of his heir, [[Carlos, Prince of Asturias]].<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hXK2fxzn2lAC&dq=iconoclasm+Beeldenstorm&pg=PA38|title=The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555-1590|first=Martin van|last=Gelderen|date=3 October 2002|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=9780521891639|via=Google Books}}</ref> When Alba arrived the following year, and soon replaced Margaret as Governor-general, his heavy-handed repression, which included the execution of many convicted of iconoclastic attacks the summer before, only made the situation worse.<ref name="auto2"/>

Antwerp was then Europe's largest financial and international trading centre, taking as much as 75 or 80% of English exports of cloth,<ref>Ramsay, 62–63</ref> and the disturbances created serious and well-justified fears that its position as such was under threat. Sir [[Thomas Gresham]], the English financier who arranged [[Elizabeth I of England|Elizabeth I]]'s borrowings, and whose agent in Antwerp was Clough, left London for Antwerp on 23 August, only hearing about the Antwerp attacks ''en route''; he needed to roll-over 32,000 Flemish pounds and borrow another 20,000 to finance her expenses in Ireland. Dining with William of Orange on his arrival, he was asked if "the English were minded to depart this town or not", and wrote to [[William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley|William Cecil]], Elizabeth's chief minister, "in alarm that he "liked none of their proceedings" but "apprehended great mischief", and urged that the English government "should do very well in time to consider some other realm and place" for marketing English products. It was a message that helped shape the course of events."<ref>Ramsay, 50</ref>

The English had found the Antwerp [[money market]] short of funds since earlier in the year, and now made use of [[Cologne]] and [[Augsburg]] as well, but as events unfolded in the next year, and the personal position of some leading lenders became precarious, the English found to their surprise that repayments were no longer pressed for, probably as the lenders were happy to keep their money abroad on loan to a secure borrower.<ref>Ramsay, 50–51</ref> The Dutch Revolt, which from 1585 onwards included a Dutch blockade of the River [[Scheldt]] leading to the city, was to finally destroy Antwerp as a major trading centre.

[[File:Dirck van Delen - Beeldenstorm in een kerk.jpg|thumb|300px|The painting ''Beeldenstorm in een kerk'', painted by [[Dirck van Delen]] in 1630]]
In many places there were attempts by Calvinist preachers to take over the ransacked buildings. These were usually repulsed in the period after the attacks. In the months afterwards there were attempted negotiations in many cities, by William of Orange and others, to allocate certain churches to accommodate the local Protestants, often divided into [[Lutheran]]s and Calvinists. These had mostly failed within a few weeks, not least because Margaret's government rejected them; she had already had an earlier attempt at compromise overruled by Philip a few months earlier, and been embarrassingly forced to retract a decree.<ref>Ramsay, 48</ref> Instead there was a wave of building or adapting Calvinist "temples", though in the end none of these were to remain in use by the following year, and their layouts, which seem to have echoed early Swiss and Scottish Calvinist designs, are now largely unknown.<ref>Spicer, 110–118</ref>

Once the revolt proper had started, there were many further instances of clearing churches, some still unofficial and disorderly, but as cities became officially Protestant, increasingly undertaken by official order, like the Amsterdam [[Alteratie]] ("Alteration") of 1578. Altars, to which Calvinists, unlike Lutherans, took strong exception, were typically completely removed, and in some large churches, like [[Utrecht Cathedral]], large tomb monuments put where they stood, partly to make their return more difficult if political conditions changed. As the Eighty Years' War concluded, in the cities and areas that had become Protestant, the old Catholic churches were nearly all taken over by the new [[established church|established faith]], the Calvinist [[Dutch Reformed Church]], while other congregations were left to find their own buildings.<ref>Spicer, 116–124, and following pages</ref>

The bare and empty state of those churches left in Catholic hands after the hostilities eventually ended prompted a large programme of restocking with Catholic art, which had much to do with the vigour of [[Northern Mannerism]] and later [[Flemish Baroque painting]], and many Gothic churches were given [[Baroque]] makeovers.<ref>Vlieghe, 4, 13</ref> In the north, now strongly Protestant, religious art largely disappeared, and [[Dutch Golden Age painting]] concentrated on a wide range of secular subjects, such as [[genre painting]], [[landscape art]] and [[still-life]]s, with results that might sometimes have surprised the Protestant ministers who initiated the movement. According to one scholar, this "was not only a dramatic change in the function of art, it was the context in which our present concept of art, what the literary critic [[M. H. Abrams]] called "art as such", first began to take shape", replacing a "construction model" where art theory concerned itself with how makers created their works, with a "contemplation model" concerned with the effect of finished works on a "lone perceiver" or viewer.<ref>Wagner (short quotes from Abrams), 131</ref>