by Mark Lamster
Rumors had by then surfaced that England was intent on a major attack on Spain, and that the Dutch would collaborate. Despite his assurances to Rubens in Paris (and Gerbier’s more recent overtures in Antwerp), Buckingham had not put the debacle that was the Spanish Match behind him, and was out for revenge even now, two years after the fact. Indeed, he had spent much of his time in Paris, as he was waiting to escort Henrietta Maria back across the Channel, unsuccessfully trying to recruit Cardinal Richelieu to commit France to join England in a two-pronged offensive against Spain. Richelieu, however, resisted these entreaties, preferring instead a more passive form of aggression: financial support for Dutch military efforts.
Rubens, a shrewd judge of the political climate, could see just what was coming. “Should the English armada make a single move against the king of Spain,” he wrote in September, “believe me the world will see a bad game.” That prediction was accurate; Buckingham was no more adept a military commander than he was a wedding planner. Roughly a month after Rubens issued his warning, a combined English-Dutch fleet of one hundred ships, under English direction, sailed for the Iberian Peninsula, though without any concrete instructions on where to land. After a good deal of frittering about, they decided on Cádiz, a fortified city on Spain’s southern Atlantic coast. The expeditionary force was neither tactically nor logistically prepared for such a campaign. It managed to land, but on a barren island in the port, and without the matériel necessary to mount an assault on a well-armed Spanish garrison. Without potable water, the soldiers requisitioned local wine, which left them in something less than ideal fighting form. “The only prudence the English showed in this enterprise,” Rubens wrote, “was in retiring as speedily as possible, even though with great losses, and in disgrace.”
If there was any hope of a peace between Spain and England, the attack on Cádiz in October 1625 ended it. Ambassadors were recalled, and Buckingham traveled to The Hague in December to formalize a fifteen-year offensive and defensive alliance with the Dutch. “I have no doubt war will follow,” Rubens wrote. It was the day after Christmas, but he was not inclined to be generous. “When I consider the caprice and arrogance of Buckingham, I pity the young king who, through false counsel, is needlessly throwing himself and his kingdom into such an extremity. For anyone can start a war, when he wishes, but he cannot so easily end it.”
Rubens wrote that letter from a hotel in Laeken, a Brussels suburb. The artist moved there with his wife, Isabella, and their two sons when an outbreak of plague struck Antwerp at the end of the year. As Rubens had earlier advised Peiresc, the best precaution from contagious disease was flight. (In general, Rubens was suspicious of the bloodlettings, purgatives, injections, and other treatments that were the hallmarks of contemporary medical practice, remedies often “more grave than the illness itself.”)
The Rubenses returned to Antwerp at the end of February 1626, after they thought the worst of the epidemic had passed. In the summer, however, a new outbreak struck the city. Four months later, on June 20, Isabella Rubens died at her Antwerp home. It had been less than three years since Rubens had buried his only daughter. Visited by tragedy again, the grieving husband spent a small fortune on the traditional Flemish ceremony that followed his wife’s funeral.
“I find it very hard to separate the grief for this loss from the memory of a person whom I must love and cherish as long as I live,” he wrote of his wife. “Truly I have lost an excellent companion.” Isabella’s death put Rubens into an uncharacteristic depression, one that he could not overcome through immersion in his work or the Lipsian constancy that he had always used as a philosophical bulwark against adversity. “I have no pretensions about ever attaining a stoic equanimity,” he wrote. The only palliatives, he felt, were time and travel. “I should think a journey would be advisable, to take me away from the many things which necessarily renew my sorrow … The novelties which present themselves to the eye in a change of country occupy the imagination and leave no room for a relapse into grief.” Conveniently, diplomatic matters would demand just such a journey—one that would leave him with little time for mourning.
CHAPTER V
THUNDER WITHOUT LIGHTNING
I should like the whole world to be in peace, that we might live in a golden age instead of an age of iron.
—PETER PAUL RUBENS
A grieving Rubens was busy planning to remove himself from Antwerp in the summer of 1626, but a more pressing concern in that city was the arrival of unwanted guests from the north. Hostilities between Spanish and Dutch forces had only intensified in the wake of the Cádiz fiasco, and rumors of an impending Dutch offensive gathered momentum through the summer. The enemy finally materialized on a stifling morning at the end of August. The sentries at the Antwerp citadel got first look at the flotilla—four bristling warships and a convoy of support vessels sitting far off in the Scheldt estuary, looming and full of menace. Soon enough, the ships were visible from the docks down by the river and the rooftops of the city’s carefully tended houses. This was the Low Countries, after all; the land was flat as a stretched canvas. For the military commanders up in the citadel, that level topography was a mixed blessing. If there was no high ground to which they might safely retreat, at least they could see their enemy approaching and have time to prepare for the onslaught. That was the soldier’s perspective, anyway. It offered little consolation to the citizens of Antwerp, to say nothing of the city’s most illustrious resident. For Rubens and his neighbors, there was little defense but to stick within the city walls and hope for the best.
The assault commenced at dawn the following morning, when the Dutch flotilla began its ominous creep up the Scheldt toward the city. Antwerp, however, was not its immediate objective. Just northwest of the city, the Dutch shifted course, turning down one of the Scheldt’s several tributaries toward the small fort of Kieldrecht, a stronghold that was a critical command point for the all-important local dike system. It was a particularly vulnerable target. Defended by a small garrison and set on a narrow peninsula that jutted out into the water, it could be cut off from the mainland (and reinforcement) by a canal that transformed it into an island. This artificial wadi, which filled and emptied with the summer tides, would be the focus of the Dutch attack. If captured, the fort behind it would be subject to relentless artillery fire and siege. It couldn’t hold for more than a few days.
The Hollanders expected an easy surprise victory, but they had severely miscalculated. Spinola, whom Rubens considered a supremely gifted military tactician, had anticipated their strategy and prepared his forces accordingly. The previous day, as the enemy flotilla hove into view, he had a boat bridge formed across the Scheldt so his soldiers might quickly reach the Flemish plain. He then dispatched four regiments to reinforce the area. At Kieldrecht, six cannon were set up on a bluff overlooking the canal, with an infantry battalion lined up on one bank and the armed local peasantry positioned on the other.
At ten in the morning, with the tide running high and the sun already blazing, the Dutch ships pushed into the canal—and the teeth of Spinola’s trap. Taking heavy fire from both flanks, and baking under the sun, they spent two hours in a bloody, futile struggle to establish a foothold on the fort side of the canal. By noon, the extent of the rout was apparent. As winds began to pull the tide out of the canal, and with it the Dutch flotilla, the Hollanders began a hasty retreat. The order to fall back came too late for a pair of the Dutch ships, which lay grounded in the shallows along with their crews, munitions, and twenty-eight battle-ready horses. Rescue launches were repulsed by the Spanish guns.
For one day, the Dutch had been stopped. Still, there was little celebration in Antwerp. The Dutch fleet, while in retreat, was still visible out on the Scheldt. It was assumed that they would return, better prepared, in the not-too-distant future. Rubens was a stoic, but not a fatalist. “I assure you that in public affairs I am the most dispassionate man in the world, except where my property and my person are concerned,”
he once wrote. Now something had to be done.
THE CHOICE OF KIELDRECHT as a target illustrated the strategic importance of hydrological systems in the Low Countries. While the Dutch were planning that ill-fated attack, the Flemish military hierarchy was itself readying a massive engineering project designed to reorder the region’s waterways. This wildly ambitious scheme, the brainchild of Rubens’s antiquarian friend Jan van den Wouvere, would in theory return Antwerp to the glory it had known in the previous century while concurrently dealing a massive economic and military blow to Holland. Woverius’s grand scheme was to divert the course of the Rhine River before it entered Dutch territory, where it served as a commercial artery and a natural defensive barrier against Spanish incursion. To accomplish this, Woverius planned to link the Rhine with the Maas River, in Spanish-controlled territory, via a great canal of more than thirty miles running just below the Dutch border. The Maas would also be linked to the Demer River, which was to be fed by another canal into the Scheldt, thereby providing an unbroken navigable waterway from the economic heartland of western Germany straight through to Antwerp.
Plans for the Fossa Mariana (Canal of the Virgin) progressed rapidly over the summer of 1626. In June, the terrain was scouted by Woverius and the Italian engineer Giovanni de’ Medici, who was brought in to supervise construction. Rubens admired Medici, as did the cardinal Alonso de la Cueva, chief Spanish minister on the Brussels junta. There was no greater proponent of aggressive action against the Dutch than the cardinal, who happily endorsed the canal plan. In September, as work was set to begin, he wrote to Philip in Madrid, assuring the king that it was “an easy project” and that it could be “speedily done without any great cost.” Initial estimates put those figures at eight months and a half-million guilders.
Spinola, as commander of Spanish forces, was especially enthusiastic about the project. The drying up of the Dutch Rhine and its many tributaries would open up his enemy’s southern flank, providing unhindered access into the Dutch provinces as far as Utrecht. That kind of easy territorial expansion seemed a good deal more appealing than the slow and arduous siege warfare that had won him Breda at such a terrible cost. But beyond its strategic utility, Spinola understood the value of what was, in effect, a massive make-work project. In one of his weekly letters to Paris, Rubens neatly summed up Spinola’s motivations: “He fears to embark upon the siege of some strong place at the wrong time, without being certain of success, and yet, on the other hand, does not want to leave his soldiers inactive thus appearing to spend the king’s money uselessly. He has therefore undertaken this project to avoid doing nothing.”
The canal project was not without its detractors. The towns adjacent to the proposed route, fearing both enemy attacks and the predations of poorly paid Spanish troops, were unhappy at the prospect of becoming garrisons along what promised to be a new front line. Those fears were realized almost as soon as construction began, with Dutch forces under Frederick Henry, the Prince of Orange, persistently raiding the works in an effort to halt progress. The Dutch offensives, combined with the onset of foul weather and the overall scale and complexity of the project, inevitably set the timetable back and boosted the estimated price. Rumors of delays and cost overruns spread across Europe, but in Antwerp were met with denial. “Work progresses valiantly on the canal,” Rubens wrote to his Paris correspondent toward the end of October. A month later, he rejected the suggestion that things were not, in fact, progressing with alacrity. “Here we know nothing of the difficulty of which you write concerning the new canal; on the contrary it is affirmed that the work is proceeding with incredible activity.”
The massive expenditure on the Fossa Mariana was, in fact, a drain on finances already stretched to their limit. Throughout the fall and winter of 1626, Antwerp’s bankers were preoccupied with rumors of a possible Spanish currency devaluation, which would have had drastic consequences on the financial market and the local economy in general. Recession and exorbitant spending had left Madrid dependent on the exploitation of its colonial empire, which was as unreliable as it was prodigious. War on the seas combined with the inherent difficulties of navigation and the vagaries of weather made it hard for officials to count on the timely arrival of treasure. In November, fear of English piracy delayed a fleet carrying desperately needed gold from Peru. The idea that plunder might fall into enemy hands was a matter of grave concern. In the event of capture, the Spanish captains were ordered to scuttle their ships; they were even issued necklaces that carried a papal dispensation permitting suicide. Surrender would not necessarily have done them much good anyway, for there was little mercy to be found on the seas. That February, a Dutch warship captured seventy Flemish merchant marines, shackled them back-to-back in pairs, and summarily cast them overboard. Such treatment was common. When an appalled Rubens learned of the incident, he recommended reprisals in kind, “up to the same number of men.” The suggestion was intended more as a pragmatic deterrent than as a spiteful act of revenge, but its cold-blooded calculation illustrates the extent to which Rubens’s essentially moderate worldview was controlled by a sober realism about the nature and conduct of war.
Rubens paid careful attention to naval matters. Spain’s colonial possessions were critical enough to the crown that he was specifically instructed by Spinola to track developments on the seas. That order had paid off back in June, when Rubens dispatched an urgent, top secret message to Spinola about a pending threat on the Brazilian coast. One of Rubens’s informants in Zeeland had alerted him that a Dutch fleet had been sent to carry out a surprise attack on the Portuguese settlement at Bahia, a frequent target of the Dutch. “A warning of this obvious danger deserves to be sent to His Majesty by express messenger,” Rubens wrote to Spinola. “Perhaps there would be time to warn the Governor of Bahia by a special caravel, so that he might be on guard.” The alert was, in fact, passed on to Madrid, but it didn’t do much good. Nine months later, in March 1627, Dutch warships under the command of Piet Heyn—“that famous pirate,” as Rubens described him—raided the Spanish merchant fleet in Bahia harbor, carrying off more than twenty-five hundred chests of sugar. All around the globe, Dutch power was on the rise. Just a few months before Rubens had sent his warning about Bahia off to Spinola, the Dutchman Peter Minuit “purchased” the island of Manhattan from its native inhabitants for the equivalent of 60 guilders. That may have been history’s greatest real estate swindle, but in truth it was the immense expenditures on the East and West India companies that were making the Dutch, in Rubens’s estimation, the “masters of the other hemisphere.”
The upstart Dutch were off settling new continents on the other side of the world, but the Spanish couldn’t even dig a ditch in Europe. By April 1627, all construction on the Fossa Mariana had stopped. Rubens blamed an especially harsh winter that made work difficult, but admitted that even in the case of good weather, there would have been no money for the project. In May, edicts arrived from Madrid imposing the long-feared currency devaluation, or quarto. That, combined with the cumulative effect of so much war, left Antwerp in a pitiful state. “This city… languishes like a consumptive body, declining little by little,” Rubens wrote. “Every day sees a decrease in the number of inhabitants, for these unhappy people have no means of supporting themselves either by industrial skill or by trade. One must hope for some remedy from these ills caused by our own imprudence.”
Rubens made certain that his family would forever be safe from that kind of financial ruin. Toward the end of the previous November, after five months of mourning his wife’s death, he departed Antwerp on an unexplained journey, warning his Parisian friends to expect a hiatus of about a month in their correspondence. Leaving his sons behind with family, he traveled to the port of Calais, taking with him the better part of his collection of antiquities, crated up carefully to protect against the hazards of the road. That same month, in a letter to a patron in Rome, Jan Brueghel wrote that his friend Rubens was selling the contents of his cabinet to th
e king of England, and that he would receive the sum of 130,000 crowns in return.
Brueghel’s information was not quite correct. Rubens had yet to reach a final agreement on the sale of his collection, and the buyer was not Charles I but his impetuous favorite, the Duke of Buckingham. In Calais, Rubens was to meet with Balthasar Gerbier, and the two men would conclude the deal for Rubens’s antiquities that had been in the works since the painter first met the duke in Paris following the proxy marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. Rubens anticipated a strong return for his statues, given their intrinsic value and Buckingham’s profligacy, and thought his discussions with Gerbier might also be productive on the diplomatic front. Unfortunately, there was no sign of the duke’s master of the horse. Rubens waited for Gerbier in Calais for three weeks before word finally came that he was to meet him in the French capital.
The delay was frustrating, but Rubens always enjoyed Paris. He arrived in that city on Christmas Day and set himself up at the residence of Henri de Vicq, the infanta’s Parisian ambassador. (The antiquities remained in storage at Calais.) On short notice, de Vicq’s hôtel made for a nice pied-à-terre, and its use was one of the perks of his status and his friendship with the ambassador. It was, in any case, to be a brief stay. Within forty-eight hours, Rubens and Gerbier had finished their business. Rubens, always a good negotiator, had exceeded even his own high standards, and was justifiably elated with the arrangement: in exchange for the bulk of his antiquities, thirteen paintings by his own hand, and a few other works, he was to receive 100,000 florins from the duke. This was a truly staggering sum, and all the more impressive considering Rubens had acquired most of the antiquities from Dudley Carleton for the cash equivalent of just 6,000 florins—and Rubens had paid two-thirds of that not with cash but with his own paintings, which cost him only labor and materials. When it came to one-sided deals, Peter Minuit had nothing on him.
