Qualla: Egmont Castle

Egmont Castle: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FrDr, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 7 September 1566, in the Knights' Room of a castle in the small Flemish town of Zottegem, Lamoral - Count of Egmont, governor of Flanders, hero of the Battle of Saint-Quentin, godfather of the future King Philip II's son - sat down to write a letter to William of Orange. The two men were old friends and political allies, both Knights of the Golden Fleece, both alarmed by the religious crackdown the Spanish crown was preparing for the Low Countries. Lamoral was 43. He thought he could reason with Madrid. Eighteen months later he was kneeling on a black cloth in the Grand Place of Brussels while the executioner of the Duke of Alba lifted a sword over his neck.

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Image: FrDr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Egmont Castle: From Motte to Mansion

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FrDr, CC BY 4.0. The castle at Zottegem began as a motte-and-bailey - earthwork and timber - in the eleventh century, raised by a local lord called Rothardus who first turns up in a charter from 1083. Around 1150 the timber was replaced with a stone keep, with a small Romanesque parish church and...

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Image: FrDr | CC BY 4.0

Egmont Castle: Lamoral Inherits

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FrDr, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1530 the castle passed to the House of Egmont, who began turning it into a Renaissance country seat. Lamoral, born in 1522, inherited it from his elder brother in 1541. He fitted out the Knights' Room (the Ridderzaal) with a Renaissance oriel window and floor tiles shipped in ...

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Image: FrDr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Egmont Castle: The Letter From Zottegem

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FrDr, CC BY-SA 4.0. The 1560s brought iconoclastic riots through the Netherlands - Calvinist mobs smashing statues, Catholic processions stoned in the streets. Philip II in Madrid was determined to crush the unrest and the heresy that fed it. Lamoral, Catholic himself but Flemish first, urged modera...

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Image: FrDr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Egmont Castle: Goethe and Beethoven

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FrDr, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two centuries later, the German imagination claimed Lamoral as a martyr of liberty. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote his tragedy Egmont in 1788 - a play that turned the Flemish count into a Romantic hero who chooses honourable death over flight. In 1809, when Napoleon's armies we...

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Image: FrDr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Egmont Castle: What Survives

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. After Lamoral's death the castle was confiscated by the Spanish until 1577. The Eighty Years' War damaged it in 1570, 1579, and 1580. French troops occupied it during the wars of the late seventeenth century. From 1707 the Pignatelli family - relations through Lamoral's sister Ma...

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Image: Public domain