The Lordship of Utrecht was formed in 1528 when Charles V of Habsburg conquered the Bishopric of Utrecht, during the Guelders Wars.
In 1528, at the demand of Henry of the Palatinate, Prince-Bishop of Utrecht, Habsburg forces under Georg Schenck van Toutenburg, liberated the Bishopric, which was occupied by the Duchy of Guelders since 1521–22. On October 20, 1528, Bishop Henry handed over power to Charles of Habsburg. The Bishopric of Utrecht came to an end and was divided into the Lordship of Utrecht and the Lordship of Overijssel, both ruled by a Habsburg Stadtholder.
Between 1528 and 1584 the Stadtholder of Utrecht was the same as the Stadtholder of the County of Holland. The Lordship became part of the Burgundian Circle by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549, and one of the Seventeen Provinces.
During the Eighty Years' War, Utrecht joined the revolt against Charles's son Philip II of Spain from the beginning. It was at the center of the Union of Utrecht in 1579.
When the Batavian Republic was created in 1795, the Lordship of Utrecht was abolished.
History
Prince-Bishopric of Utrecht
George Edmundson wrote, in Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911 edition, that the bishops had no hereditary or dynastic interest in his land, and, as a temporal ruler, their powers were limited by the necessity of having to secure the goodwill of the higher clergy, of the nobles and of the cities, and also because of their relations to the Holy Roman emperors and the popes as ecclesiastical princes of the Holy Roman Empire. Edmundson also wrote that the bishops, in fact, as the result of grants of immunities by a succession of German kings, and notably by the Saxon and Franconian emperors, gradually became the temporal rulers of a dominion as great as the neighboring counties and duchies. Through the grants of land and privileges bestowed by these emperors the bishops of Utrecht became among the most powerful feudal lords of the north-western part of the empire.
Under the Habsburgs
Henry of the Palatinate who was also Bishop of Freising and Worms, resigned the see in 1528 with the consent of the chapter, and transferred his secular authority to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, who was also Duke of Brabant and Count of Holland. Thus Utrecht came under the sovereignty of the Habsburgs; the chapters voluntarily transferred their right of electing the bishop to Charles V, and Pope Clement VII gave his consent to the proceeding. The first bishop appointed by Charles V, Cardinal Willem van Enckevoirt, died in 1533 without having ever entered his diocese.
In 1548 the Lordship of Utrecht, together with Guelders, was transferred from the Lower Rhenish–Westphalian Circle to the Burgundian Circle, aligning it with the other Habsburg territories in the Low Countries in terms of imperial administration.
In 1550, at the insistence of Philip II of Spain, the church organization of the Netherlands was restructured by forming new dioceses and reorganizing the old ones. The Diocese of Utrecht was taken from Province of Cologne, in which it was a suffragan, and elevated to the rank of an archdiocese and metropolitan see. Its suffragan dioceses were Haarlem, Bois-le-Duc, Middleburg, Deventer, Leeuwarden, and Groningen. But the new ecclesiastical province had not a long existence.
In 1559, Utrecht was raised to the rank of an archdiocese and metropolitan see with six suffragan dioceses, but this new state of affairs did not last long. When the northern provinces of the Netherlands revolted, the archdiocese fell, with the overthrow of the Spanish power. According to the terms of the Union of Utrecht, the rights and privileges of the Roman Catholic religion were safeguarded, however a few years later, on June 14, 1580, the public practice of Catholicism was forbidden by the magistrates of Utrecht, who were by then mostly Protestant Calvinists or had been forced to profess Calvinism. On August 25, 1580, Archbishop Schenk died, and two successors appointed by Spain did not receive canonical confirmation, neither could they enter their diocese. Archbishop Schenk's unornamented funeral inside the Dom Cathedral of Utrecht, recently seized by the Protestants, saw a clash between Catholic sympathizers and a Calvinist mob disturbing the De Profundis chant and the Catholic Requiem. The Catholic funeral of the first (and for a long period last) archbishop of Utrecht in 1580 remained one of the last public exercises of Catholic worship in the city of Utrecht for the next three hundred years.