This 2001 book charts the history of the States General - the parliament - of the Netherlands and its relations with two phases of monarchical rule in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Unlike the English parliament, the States General was a composite body, representing the local estates of the separate provinces which were anxious to keep their autonomy. The history of the States General was determined by this structure, and by its relations with the monarchy: dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, and Spanish Habsburgs in the sixteenth. Ideally, everyone was meant to cooperate. In practice, there was already a major crisis by the 1480s, and divisions from the 1560s led to decades of civil war. By 1600 the Netherlands had split between the United Provinces - a parliamentary regime, governed as a republic by the States General - and the Spanish Netherlands.

'… the reader is rewarded … with a magisterial sweep and expert grasp based on many decades of uninterrupted research and reflection on the themes in question.' The Times Literary Supplement
'… he has not only helped to discover similarities between the States General before and after the Revolt of the Netherlands, but also put into sharper focus major differences between the two periods.' Parliaments, Estates and Representation
'… an important scholarly contribution …' Reviews in History

Professor H. G. Koenigsberger FBA is one of Britain's senior historians. German by birth, he has taught at Manchester, Nottingham, Cornell and London, and is now Professor of History Emeritus and Fellow, King's College London. Koenigsberger is also a Past President of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, and in 1987 Cambridge published a festschrift in his honour under the title Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Mack and Jacob. In the late 1960s Koenigsberger was a founder-editor (with Professor Sir John Elliott) of the 'Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History' series, where his book is now being published.