In April, Margaret of Parma, the Regent offered Protestants what was later known as the Compromise of the Nobility. In the years leading up to this Protestants had grown in number within the Low Countries which made suppression as difficult and disruptive as permitting its spread. 

Far away in Spain, the new sovereign of the Low Countries Philipp II refused to moderate existing heresy laws despite the pleas of Margaret of Parma in 1564 and 1565. Stugglng to cope with rising religious and nationalistic issues Margaret was forced to temporarily suspend heresy laws and the Inquisition which resulted in the Compromise of the Nobility. 

This concession inspired a mass movement of open-air Protestant preaching in the summer of 1566. As the movement gathered momentum violence erupted in what was later known as the Iconoclastic Fury. This particular movement began outside a monastery in East Flanders where angry mobs looted churches and destroyed images. This ill-advised move, much like the Affair of the Placards in France, led to royal retaliation by Philip II and opened the way for the Dutch revolt with 80 years of intermittent warfare between Spain and the Netherlands. 

One of the outcomes of these volatile years was the formation of Dutch political thought which progressed from admonition to passive disobedience finally ripening into active resistance against an ungodly ruler.