by Mark Lamster
Thou takest away daily our daily bread,
While our lives and our children lie starving or dead.
No man’s trespasses thou forgivest;
Revenge is the food on which thou livest.
Thou leadest all men into temptation;
Unto Evil hast thou delivered this nation.
Our Father, in heaven which art,
Grant that this Devil may soon depart;
And with him his Council, false and bloody,
Who make murder and plunder their daily study;
And all his savage war-dogs of Spain,
O, send them back to the Devil again.
Even the Lord couldn’t protect those caught reciting it.
JAN AND MARIA RUBENS escaped the worst of Alva’s depredations, but just barely. Their days in Antwerp had been numbered from the moment the Calvinist preacher Herman Moded and his iconoclastic henchmen had forced their way into the Onze Lieve Vrouwekathedraal, only to destroy it. In the wake of that catastrophe, but before Alva had taken control of the government, Margaret of Parma had ordered Antwerp’s aldermen to explain how they had allowed the great cathedral to be defiled. This was an almost unconscionable act of buck-passing, given her own failure, as governor, to take precautions against the iconoclasts. The aldermen, in lawyerly fashion, responded with an exculpatory brief. That might have been good enough for Margaret, but it was squarely rejected by the newly arrived Iron Duke when he found it sitting on his desk. In December 1567, he demanded a more comprehensive explanation from the town fathers, Jan Rubens among them.
The prospects for those aldermen were grim; their presence on Alva’s target list meant their very lives were in jeopardy. Antwerp’s burgomeester (mayor) had been executed the previous September on a heresy charge, and Jan’s name had already appeared on a manifest of suspected Calvinist converts. In January, he hired private counsel and submitted yet another pleading apologia for his conduct. (Yes, he had attended a Calvinist sermon or two, but he was curious and nothing more.) While his case plodded along toward an ugly conclusion, Jan Rubens packed up his family and sent them to a relation in Limburg. From there, Maria and the four children traveled to Cologne, safely beyond Alva’s reach. A few months later, with his case still pending, Jan Rubens quietly slipped out of the city gates and took to the road for the German border.
The Rubenses were among those in the first wave of a great diaspora from the Spanish Netherlands, and from Antwerp in particular. Over the following decade, the city’s population dropped from over 100,000 to fewer than half that number. Most of that migration would be to the north, to the seven provinces of the nascent Dutch republic, most prominently Holland, Utrecht, and Zeeland. That shift would eventually propel Amsterdam, the growing colossus of Holland, past Antwerp as the trade capital of northern Europe. During the early exodus years, however, most refugees of the duke’s terror quit the Low Countries entirely. Cologne, reasonably tolerant and tied to the Netherlands through trade, was a convenient destination.
The distinguished leader of the fugitive horde was Silent William himself. Anticipating trouble, he had departed the Netherlands before Alva arrived with his Spanish army. On the lam, William established his base of operations at the gloomy Castle of Dillenburg, seat of the Nassau family dynasty, some thirty miles to the east of Cologne. He wasn’t to be found there often, however; most of his time was spent on the road, rallying opposition to Alva and occasionally engaging the duke’s troops in military action, to unfortunate effect. Proceedings on the home front didn’t fare much better for William. Anna of Saxony, his free-spirited young wife, had little patience for the family’s dank castle, or indeed for William himself. When they had married, in 1561, William had been one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Now he was an exile, and the good-time girl was sequestered in the hinterlands, where there was little fun to be had. While William was off on one of his expeditions, she ditched Dillenburg for the more cosmopolitan pleasures of Cologne.
Distressed by her husband’s penury, Anna engaged Jan Bets, a prominent attorney, to reclaim personal assets seized from her by the Spanish crown. (Philip had laid claim to all of William’s property, but she had possessions of her own that were, technically, separate.) This pursuit entailed a good deal of travel, so Bets required a deputy to manage the proceedings at home, ideally someone with a solid grounding in the property statutes of the Netherlands. He had just such a person in mind: an old professional acquaintance and former distinguished alderman of Antwerp who had recently arrived in the city and was anxious for work.
Jan Rubens may have appeared an inspired choice, but the hiring proved a disaster for all parties. In their long, intimate hours spent working together on her case, Jan and Anna, two exiles with seven children between them, found their passions inflamed. This was not an unusual state for Anna. Her reputation for debauchery was already the subject of local gossip, and had prompted a series of letters from her traveling husband pleading that she reform her behavior. Instead, she moved to Siegen, a small hilltop town encircled by a defensive wall a day’s ride east of Cologne. Perhaps the goal was to remove herself from the rumor mill. For that there was good reason: she was pregnant, and by the spring of 1571 she was beginning to show. William, long absent, was not a candidate for paternity.
The prospective father was Jan Rubens, and there was no covering up the fact. In early March, while he was traveling from his own family residence in Cologne to the hilltop aerie of his client and paramour, he was arrested and summarily tossed into the Dillenburg dungeon. The charge, levied under the authority of Johan of Nassau (William’s brother), was adultery with Her Royal Highness, a capital offense.
Maria Rubens, devoted wife and mother of four, suffered the mysterious disappearance of her husband for three weeks. Finally, on March 28, news of his situation arrived, first in an official notice that revealed the nature of his crime, and shortly thereafter in a missive from the prisoner himself. Stuck in a damp cell and with his life in jeopardy, Jan Rubens was a contrite and fearful man. He begged his wife’s forgiveness, and proposed she keep his embarrassing status quiet. She didn’t have much choice. A stranger in a strange land, with a reputation to maintain, a family to support, and no great means available to her, Maria had little recourse but to accept his apology, regardless of its sincerity. But it did seem sincere, and Jan Rubens, to his great good fortune, had married a woman of extraordinary forbearance. Maria immediately sent off a pardoning letter to her husband, and followed it with another offering “every satisfaction on the subject of the forgiveness you ask me for, which I grant you now once again, and will ever grant you when you ask it of me, but on one condition—that you will love me as you used to.”
Jan Rubens had some difficulty coming to terms with his wife’s unusually large generosity of spirit. His replies to her betray a justifiable sense of self-loathing and a sullen pessimism as to his future. Maria, now fully responsible for the household and her children, tried to rally the spirits of her self-described “unworthy husband” with a series of emotionally charged letters:
How could I have the heart to be angry with you in such peril, when I would give my life to save you if it were possible? And were it not so, how could so much hatred have succeeded so quickly to our long affection, as to make it impossible for me to pardon a slight trespass against myself, when I have to pray God forgive me the many grave trespasses I commit against him every day … I find nothing in your letter to console me, for it has broken my heart by showing me you have lost courage and speak as if you were on the point of death. I am so troubled that I know not what I am writing. One would think that I desired your death; since you ask me to accept it in expiation. Alas how you hurt me by saying that! In truth it passes my endurance … I hope still that the Lord will have pity upon me; if not they will surely kill me in putting you to death, for I shall die of grief, and my heart would cease to beat at the moment when I heard the fatal news … My God! I could not survive it! My soul is so bound
up and made one with yours, that you cannot suffer but that I must suffer as well… Alas! It is not justice that we ask it is pity, and if we can by no means obtain it, what shall we do! O heavenly Father, father of mercy, deign to aid me! Thou desirest not the death of a sinner, but rather that he should be converted and live! Oh! Send forth thy mercy upon the soul of these good lords whom we have so heavily offended that we may soon be delivered from this great pain and sorrow. For thou seest how long it has endured!
The heavily offended lords in question, namely William and his brother Johan, were not nearly so forgiving as Maria Rubens. In cuckolding the Prince of Orange, champion of the Dutch rebellion, Jan had committed an act of apocalyptic foolishness. But he did leave his wife with a political lever as she bargained for his life. The mysterious cause of Jan’s arrest, though a subject of gossip as far away as Antwerp, remained a secret convenient to both the Rubenses and the Oranges. A trial and subsequent execution would have exposed the truth, and the last thing William needed was a public embarrassment just as he was building his reputation as a great man of action; far better to let the transgressor rot in a dank German cell, out of sight and out of mind. Anna was also removed from public visibility, to the town of Dietz, where she gave birth to a daughter, Christina “von Dietz,” in August 1571. William refused to acknowledge her.
Maria, meanwhile, made a business of seeking clemency on behalf of her incarcerated husband. She moved the family to Siegen so that she might be closer to him, but was repeatedly turned away from the Dillenburg gates. Eventually, she was allowed to visit. In a series of pleading letters, and later in person, she begged Johan and William to restore her family, “for the sake of my poor children, who have seen not only the ruin of their father but their mother’s distress of her senses.” Eventually, they relented. On May 10, 1573, after more than two years behind bars, Jan was paroled, though he remained under house arrest. Johan credited Maria’s heartfelt pleas for their reconsideration.
Circumstances for the Rubenses were difficult. Because of his arrest, Jan was unable to practice law. Compounding the family’s already considerable problems, Jan then ran afoul of local authorities for violating the terms of his parole. He had been seen walking about the city and mingling with friends, among other precluded activities. Bereft of Jan’s earning power, the family survived on its meager savings and on interest paid out of the large sum left as his bail. Matters improved after Anna’s death, in 1577. Few mourned her loss, and with William now remarried, the entire sorry episode of her affair was swept under the rug. Rubens was allowed to return to his profession, though he was forever banished from William’s territories in the Netherlands and similarly barred from coming within sight of the prince himself. Christina, referred to derisively as “the little girl,” was raised by members of William’s family at Dillenburg. With Jan working again, the legitimate Rubens family expanded. In 1574, Maria gave birth to a boy, Philip. Three years later, in 1577, with the family still residing in Siegen, she gave birth to another son. He arrived on June 28, the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul, and was named in their honor: Peter Paul Rubens.
The expanded Rubens brood eventually moved back to Cologne and began the slow process of resurrecting the family name. Changing circumstances in Antwerp allowed them to recover some of their property, even if a permanent return was impossible given Jan’s banishment. Their misfortune was not yet over, however. The grim specter of disease, so little understood, haunted the family. In 1580, Jan and Maria’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Clara, succumbed to some malady that could not be restrained. Three years later her brother Hendrik, aged sixteen, passed away. Between their deaths, Maria had lost a third child, an infant named for Jan’s father, Bartholomeus. The oldest of the Rubens siblings, Jan Baptist, no doubt embarrassed by his father’s “situation,” had long since left home to embark on a now entirely forgotten career as a painter. In 1587, the withered paterfamilias passed on himself. At fifty-six, Jan Rubens was not a young man by the standards of the day, and his time in the Dillenburg dungeon and the straitened circumstances that followed had taken their toll. But with his death, he had granted his family freedom. Maria and her three remaining children—Blandina and her precocious younger brothers, Philip and Peter Paul—were finally free to return to Antwerp, their ancestral home.
Back in the city she so missed, Maria Rubens set her family up in a house on the Meir, Antwerp’s primary commercial boulevard. It was a good address, but then real estate was easy to come by at the time. Through its troubles, Antwerp had remained an open city populated by Catholics and Protestants in equal number. But a recent executive order had forced Protestants either to return to the Catholic faith or to liquidate their holdings and leave altogether. For Maria Rubens, this ultimatum posed no great moral challenge. The flirtations she and Jan had with Protestantism were, from the outset, more political than they were dogmatic. After so bitter an exile, the chance to remain at home surrounded by family and friends easily trumped whatever religious imperatives she might have felt. She was primarily interested in providing her two precocious sons education and opportunity. The Jesuit training of Rombout Verdonck’s private academy would suit them well. The Rubenses, however, were an anomaly. The population drain spurred by that convert-or-leave directive cost Antwerp many of its leading citizens and correspondingly invigorated the intellectual and commercial life of the nascent Dutch republic to the north.
Indeed, the difficult years the Rubens family spent shuttling back and forth from Cologne to Siegen had been especially hard on their Flemish homeland. Back in 1568, when Maria had rushed off with the family for the putative safety of Germany, Alva’s terror was only just beginning. In 1572, France and England, frustrated by the Iron Duke’s militancy, signed a truce of convenience and began plotting a joint invasion of Flanders with William the Silent as the standard-bearer. The attack began in April, and for a while it looked as if the Low Countries would fall. But Alva patiently massed his troops and then moved to regain his losses in a campaign of extraordinary vindictiveness. At Harlem, his soldiers massacred more than two thousand men, women, and children. Alva hoped to break the rebellion through fear, but his plan backfired. Knowing the atrocities in store, the residents of every city in his path stiffened in resistance.
In November 1573, the Iron Duke, out of funds, was unceremoniously relieved of his duties. Conditions, however, did not improve. Alva’s unpaid Spanish troops held Antwerp hostage until they received 1 million florins in back pay. It was an ugly harbinger of trouble. Attempts to disband the mutinous soldiers failed. On the morning of November 4, 1576, an unpaid army descended from Alva’s citadel and ransacked the city. More than eight thousand sinjoren were murdered during the “Spanish Fury,” and over one thousand homes burned. Floris de Vriendt’s magnificent town hall, barely a decade old, was torched.
The Spanish Fury’s viciousness brought the entire population of the Low Countries together—albeit briefly. With the Pacification of Ghent, signed just four days after the Fury began, the provinces of the Catholic south and the Protestant north united in their demand that Philip remove his forces from the Low Countries in their entirety. The Spanish troops eventually departed, and Antwerp was soon under the control of its hereditary master, William the Silent. But the harquebus marriage of north and south was headed for divorce. In January 1579, the increasingly militant northern provinces signed a mutual defense treaty, the Union of Utrecht, and later the Oath of Abjuration, by which they renounced the Spanish crown entirely. The southern provinces, led by a Catholic nobility still loyal to Spain, signed a pact of their own, the Treaty of Arras.
This crisis eventually precipitated decisive action in Madrid. Philip dispatched Alessandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma, to restore order and put an end to the Dutch rebellion. The duke proved a shrewd choice. Unlike his disgraced mother, Margaret of Parma, he never lacked for resolve, and his skill as a military tactician was rivaled only by his reputation for bravery, proven against the Ottoman
Empire at the Battle of Lepanto, in 1571. Farnese began his campaign to retake the Low Countries for Spain in 1582, sweeping north and west from his base in the loyal southern provinces of Hainaut and Artois. His effectiveness as a commander was soon readily apparent. He kept his army well supplied, and pressed it forward with methodical efficiency. One by one, the cities of Flanders fell to his men. By the autumn of 1584, Antwerp was surrounded, and the Scheldt under blockade. The besieged sinjoren, loyal to William, held out heroically for months, but it was to be a losing effort. A last-ditch attempt to blast through Farnese’s river cordon failed. By August 1585, Farnese had his prize, along with 1 million florins in cash to keep his troops from sacking what remained.
Farnese’s success in securing Flanders had the unfortunate effect of drawing England into the conflict in the Low Countries. The English queen, Elizabeth I, had established Protestantism in England, and now feared that Spain might try to restore Catholic primacy within her very domain. Flanders, just across the Channel, would make for a convenient staging ground for an attack on the English homeland. Faced with that reality, Elizabeth signed the Treaty of Nonsuch, by which she agreed to provide both military and financial support to the Protestant Dutch rebels. Terms of that agreement also left England in control of several key defensive positions within the Dutch provinces.
Philip considered the English intrusion into this territory an act of war, and in response chose the drastic course of action Elizabeth most feared: an invasion of the British Isles with forces drawn from Flanders. Under his direction, Spain marshaled its resources for attack, and in May 1588 the great Spanish Armada set sail from Lisbon. The plan was for it to rendezvous with Farnese’s expeditionary army of seventeen thousand men at Dunkirk. From there, the combined force would cross the Channel for the English coast and a march on London. Of course, it never came to that. As the armada plowed its way north from the Iberian Peninsula, it was dogged by the more nimble English navy. In August, it was finally broken at the Battle of Gravelines, off the Flemish coast.
