Qualla: Hoogstraten Castle

Hoogstraten Castle: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In April 1566, in a hall of a moated castle north of Antwerp, a group of Dutch noblemen sat down to write a letter to the king of Spain. They asked Philip II to halt the Inquisition and grant religious freedom in the Netherlands. The document was called the Smeekschrift der Edelen - the Petition of the Nobles - and the meeting at which it was drafted, convened by William of Orange, helped detonate the Eighty Years' War. The castle where the noblemen met is still standing, in its own moat, four and a half centuries later. It is also, today, a prison.

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Hoogstraten Castle: The Viking and the Tower

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Legend says that the first structure on this spot, a timber tower ringed by a moat fed by the River Mark, was built by a Viking named Gelmel in the ninth century, and the local name for the castle - Gelmelslot, the Castle of Gelmel - has carried his memory ever since. Whether Gel...

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Hoogstraten Castle: Elisabeth and Antoine

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Elisabeth of Culemborg, born 1475, was a dame d'honneur at the court of Archduchess Margaret of Austria - one of the most powerful women in the Habsburg Netherlands, spending most of her life close to the centre of imperial politics. In 1509 she married Antoine of Lalaing, a nobl...

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Hoogstraten Castle: The Petition That Started a War

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Antoine II van Lalaing, the third Count of Hoogstraten, was a friend of William of Orange. In April 1566, with Habsburg religious policy increasingly intolerable to the Protestant nobility, William called a meeting of high Dutch noblemen at Hoogstraten castle to decide what to do...

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Hoogstraten Castle: The Salm-Salm Years

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the castle passed through marriages to the Salm-Salm princely family, who shuttled between Hoogstraten, an abbey town in the Vosges called Senones, and Anholt Castle in Westphalia, never quite committing themselves to any one resid...

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Hoogstraten Castle: From Beggars' Asylum to Prison School

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

French revolutionary forces confiscated Hoogstraten in 1796 and stripped it. King William I of the Netherlands lifted the seizure in 1815, but kept the castle itself as Dutch state property - the Salm-Salm family went home to Schloss Anholt in Westphalia, where the family still l...

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