Since the English Reformation, the Hapsburgs had seen themselves as protectors of disenfranchised English and Irish Catholics. After the ascendancy of Queen Elizabeth and the reestablishment of Protestantism as the official state religion of England, Spanish King Philip II, the widower of Elizabeth's Catholic predecessor Mary, had an antagonistic relationship with his sister-in-law. Meanwhile, Philip was attempting to suppress a Protestant rebellion in the Netherlands led by William the Silent. A year after William's death, Elizabeth supported the Dutch rebels in the Anglo-Dutch Alliance, and in 1585, Spain treated it as a declaration of war.