Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de

Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de (1517-1586), Burgundian Cardinal and Archbishop, a leading adviser to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain. Cardinal Granvelle, as he was to be known, was born Antoine Perrenot in Besançon in the Duchy of Burgundy (now part of France) on August 20, 1517. His father Nicolas Perrenot was an adviser to Charles V, Duke of Burgundy and King of Spain, who was also to rule the Holy Roman Empire from 1519 to 1555. Having studied law at the University of Padua and theology at the University of Louvain (Leuven), the younger Perrenot became a priest, and was appointed Bishop of Arras in 1538. Perrenot served as a diplomat from 1544 and succeeded his father as one of Charles's two secretaries of state in 1550. He retained this office under Charles's son Philip II of Spain until 1559, when he joined the Council of State for the Low Countries (now Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and part of northern France). Following Philip's reorganization of the Church hierarchy there Perrenot became Archbishop of Mechlin in 1560, and a Cardinal, with the noble title of de Granvelle, in 1561, but he was forced to return to Madrid in 1564 because of the opposition of William I of Orange and other members of the Council to his and the King's policy of persecuting Protestants and centralizing the administration of the 17 provinces.

Granvelle was Viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples in southern Italy from 1571 to 1575, then a diplomat in Rome until 1579, when he returned to Madrid once again to take charge of the administration of Philip's Italian territories. Although he was appointed Archbishop of Besançon in 1584 he remained in Madrid, where he died on September 21, 1586. He has since been both praised as an example of the efficient administrator and diplomat and critized for personifying the religious intolerance of his times.