Master of Shadows

by Mark Lamster

  Writing back to a mutual friend, the Parisian antiquarian Pierre Dupuy, and perhaps unaware of the enormous sum the artist received, Peiresc noted that Rubens surely made the sale with “some regret,” especially as the buyer was the rather buffoonish Buckingham and not a more serious-minded individual. Collecting in the pursuit of scholarship was acceptable among the group of humanist academicians with whom Peiresc associated; collecting for the sake of status was a vanity to be discouraged. Rubens, for his part, considered his collection a form of currency, both intellectual and financial. Before the sale he had his studio assistants build plaster molds from which copies of all the most important works could be made for future reference and display. That greatly mitigated what sadness he felt at the loss of the originals. As his workshop practice indicated, the concept of authenticity was something Rubens approached with a great deal of latitude. With ill-intentioned Dutch invasion forces making regular appearances on the Scheldt, it was only prudent to convert his fragile collection into more secure assets. The cash received from Buckingham was rapidly shifted into real estate holdings in and around Antwerp, a more stable form of investment.

  After coming to an agreement in principle with Gerbier (the transaction would not be finalized for several months), Rubens spent an additional few weeks in Paris, not all of it happy. On New Year’s Day he once more found himself immobilized in that city with a foot problem, this time an attack of gout, an ailment that would nag him for the rest of his life. He was still gimpy when he finally made it back to Brussels in late January 1627, whereupon he was treated to a greater indignity. His unanticipated two-month absence from the scene, combined with the inaccurate rumor that he had been dealing with Charles I, left his spymasters suspicious that he had secretly traveled to England without having informed them of his intention to do so, at the very least a major breach of protocol and potentially an act of treason.

  Rubens managed to clear his name by mid-February—the essential charge was, indeed, false—but his protestations of complete innocence were somewhat disingenuous. While it was true that he had not traveled to England, it was also true that his conversations with Gerbier had not been restricted solely to matters of commerce. Rubens, of course, had initiated diplomatic conversations with Buckingham and Gerbier in Paris back in 1625, but those talks had been more probative than substantive, and undertaken with the tacit approval of Isabella. On this most recent trip to Paris, however, Rubens had taken up political matters with Buckingham’s agent on no authority but his own. The painter, in all sincerity, believed he was acting in the best interests of his sovereign, that he would be remiss to let such a rare opportunity slip by, and that his actions would meet with approval at home—at the worst, they could simply be rejected by his superiors. After all, Isabella had previously instructed him to develop his relationship with Buckingham, so he was really just following orders. Indeed, the maintenance of such contacts was one of the essential principles of contemporary diplomatic practice, and there was no greater champion of the approach than Cardinal Richelieu, who devoted an entire chapter of his Testament politique to the utility of continuous negotiations. “I may venture to say boldly,” he wrote, “that to negotiate without ceasing, openly or secretly, in all places, and that although no present benefit shall accrue from it, nor any prospect of future advantage present itself, is what is absolutely necessary for the good and welfare of States.”

  At his first meeting with Gerbier, Rubens had suggested that whatever animosities existed between Spain and England, his native Flanders remained a neutral party, and would always have an interest in forging a peace between those two crowns, especially if England could be counted upon to bring its Dutch ally to heel. Now, with Buckingham’s hopes of an English invasion of Spain foiled at Cádiz, and with his relations with France having degenerated as well, it seemed an appropriate time to once more begin peace talks in earnest. The infanta seemed a natural honest broker between Charles I and her nephew Philip IV. The two artist-diplomats Rubens and Gerbier could serve as the conduits of this negotiation. Rubens knew this idea would appeal to the ambitious Gerbier, whose eyes lit up at the very thought of finding himself in the middle of a grand international drama.

  Isabella and Spinola also latched onto Rubens’s audacious proposal. With the situation on the ground becoming progressively more desperate, something had to be done, and there weren’t many good alternatives. Whatever doubts there may have been about Rubens’s conduct were brushed aside. In an official letter to Gerbier, Spinola formally authorized Rubens as an intermediary. In the meantime, Gerbier was granted a passport into the Spanish Netherlands, where he delivered a letter from Buckingham offering a “Suspension of Arms for two, three, four, five, six, or seven years, restoring commerce to its original footing as in times of peace, during which time an accommodation [that is, a permanent accord] may be treated for.” The proposed truce would apply not just to England and Spain, however, but also to the Dutch and to Denmark, another Protestant ally engaged with Catholic forces under the Habsburg flag of the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II.

  England’s attempt to bring both its Dutch and its Danish allies into the negotiation may have appeared generous, but from a Flemish perspective their addition needlessly introduced all of the problems plaguing central Europe into what was already a complicated negotiation. England’s specific aim in broadening the field was the restoration of Charles’s brother-in-law Frederick V to the Palatinate. But Rubens knew that this offer would not pass in Spain, if for no other reason than that the situation in Germany was to a large extent beyond Philip’s control, never mind his shared Habsburg lineage with Ferdinand II. Rubens stated this in no uncertain terms in his reply to Gerbier: “England should be disabused of the ideas that the king of Spain can absolutely control the affairs of Germany.” It was the infanta’s adamant position that only Spain and England be included in the proposed armistice. Even the Dutch were to be removed from this negotiation, a demand that seemed almost counterintuitive, given that a truce with the Dutch was, in the end, the infanta’s top priority. Her fear, and Rubens’s, was that in any multilateral armistice agreement, the Dutch would demand language in which they would be described as “free states” among equals, terminology that would be categorically unacceptable in Madrid. With an agreement between Spain and England in place, however, the Dutch could be compelled to make a separate deal with Spain in which the Dutch would have their freedom, just not in name. Rubens concluded his message to Gerbier with an appeal for a kind of quid pro quo arrangement: “It would be thoroughly appreciated in Spain and by her Serene Highness [Isabella], if the king of Great Britain would interpose his authority and good-will to this accommodation, and by this means would greatly oblige the king of Spain to make reciprocal efforts to adjust the affairs of Germany.” In other words, following a treaty between England and Spain, England would press the Dutch to accept a peace with Madrid, and Spain would cajole its allies to restore Frederick V to the Palatine throne. But the treaty between England and Spain had to come first.

  Those terms were eventually passed on to Charles I, though not immediately, as Buckingham had seen fit to have Gerbier begin the negotiations while the king was hunting at Newcastle, lest he be opposed to the project. Upon Charles’s return to London, however, he gave his general approval to the direction of talks. It would be acceptable to restrict the scope of discussions—“a great undertaking never advances straight forward upon two roads,” Gerbier wrote—with the proviso that all negotiations proceed in absolute secrecy. Toward that end, Gerbier provided Rubens with a cipher to be used in all future correspondence.

  Gerbier’s missive was dated March 9, 1627. Rubens received two other letters with that same postmark, both directly from Buckingham, both suggesting that negotiations might not be quite so simple as Gerbier suggested. In the first, the duke affirmed Charles’s interest in a settlement, promising his support so long as it would not preclude Frederick V’s return to the Palatinate. In th
e second letter, presumably sent after some further deliberation, he ramped up the English demands. Now he indicated that any agreement would have to entail some accommodation of Dutch interests, and that the Spanish king would be obliged to use all his power to reestablish Frederick to his throne.

  Rubens passed the letters from Buckingham on to Isabella and Spinola, but continued negotiation was beyond even their authority. Further talks would require consultation with Philip IV and the Count-Duke of Olivares. A courier was dispatched to Madrid, but a month later there was still no word from the Real Alcázar, the royal palace. Rubens, as a matter of protocol, wrote apologetic letters to his English contacts. “As soon as the answer comes from His Catholic Majesty, I shall inform Your Excellency,” he told Buckingham in April, “for I wish as much as I ought to see the completion of this beau chef d’oeuvre.”

  It was not until June that Philip made his reply. The English overture pleased the Spanish king, but he was not at all happy about the central role Rubens had assumed in the negotiations. Yes, the artist had been ennobled, but there was no escaping his arriviste position and his tradesman’s status. He was a nobleman not by blood but de concession, and on the social ladder that placed him several rungs and a good distance below those of hereditary title. “I am displeased at your mixing up a painter in affairs of such importance,” Philip lectured his aunt. “You can easily understand how gravely it compromises the dignity of my kingdom, for our prestige must necessarily be lessened if we make so insignificant a person the representative with whom foreign envoys are to discuss affairs of such great importance.” With that caveat, he authorized Isabella to proceed with talks for an alliance with the English crown.

  RUBENS WAS SPARED the Spanish king’s condescending remarks. For his part, he wasn’t especially impressed with Philip’s role in affairs of state. While the painter had secured his own economic future with the sale of his collection to Buckingham, his native Antwerp had been left to suffer the dismal consequences of Spanish neglect and the twenty-two-year-old king’s childishly obstinate refusal to compromise with the Dutch. “We are exhausted and have endured so much hardship that this war seems without purpose to us,” he wrote. The storefronts and vendors along the Meir and in the Grote Markt—celebrated by artists during the city’s golden age for their overflowing abundance—were practically barren. Down at the waterfront, the docks stood idle. The painter Sebastian Vrancx, a Rubens confrere, made something of a specialty of scenes of Antwerp’s bustling harbor, but his nostalgic pictures captured that great port during its heyday in the sixteenth century, when the city was still a financial powerhouse. Now even the relative prosperity of the truce years—meager in comparison to the days of yore—was a distant memory. Antwerp was on the verge of wholesale destitution, and Rubens placed the blame squarely on the policies of Madrid. “If Spanish pride could be made to listen to reason, a way might be found to restore Europe,” he wrote. “We are exhausted not so much by the trials of war as by the perpetual difficulty of obtaining necessary supplies from Spain, by the dire need in which we constantly find ourselves, and by the insults we must often endure through the spitefulness or ignorance of those ministers, and finally by the impossibility of acting otherwise.”

  In May 1627, with Spain still weighing its options, a frustrated Rubens chose to take matters into his own hands. Opportunity had presented itself at the beginning of that month with the arrival in Flanders of the abbé Scaglia, ambassador of Savoy. The son of an Italian count, Cesare Alessandro Scaglia di Verrua was both a patron of the arts and a notorious political meddler—“a man of the keenest intellect,” according to Rubens. Scaglia, in turn, esteemed the painter as much for his sharp political mind as for his sure touch on a canvas. The two men had much in common. Like Rubens, who was fifteen years his senior, Scaglia had first traveled to the Spanish court in the year 1603, when he was just a boy, and later had a prolonged residence in Rome. Scaglia, too, had met with Buckingham in Paris at the proxy marriage of Henrietta Maria and Charles I, at which time he had appealed for the duke’s support on behalf of Savoy.

  Situated along the crucial military corridor that linked southern and northern Europe, Savoy existed in a state of perpetual anxiety, forced to constantly juggle its relations with the great powers. Scaglia’s trip to Paris had been prompted by the recent collapse of Savoy’s relationship with France, a situation that left Scaglia scurrying through Europe’s capitals shopping for allies. With France alienated, Scaglia was especially anxious to win the support of the Spanish king. (Philip and the Duke of Savoy were estranged brothers-in-law.) Scaglia’s latest mission had taken him to Flanders from London, where Buckingham had fully briefed him on the stunted negotiations Rubens had initiated between England and Spain. An accord between those two powers would be welcomed at Savoy’s court in Turin as it would provide a check to French power, and the meddlesome Scaglia was only too happy to throw his hat into the ring as yet another mediator.

  At best, Scaglia was an unnecessary interloper, but an astute Rubens seized on his presence as a means to reignite negotiations. On May 19, using the agreed cipher, he wrote to Gerbier proposing a secret summit in Holland. The attendees would be Carleton (English ambassador to The Hague), Scaglia, Gerbier, and himself, all of whom could be gathered on the pretext of their mutual interest in the arts. As a group, they could hash out the language of an accord. The key sticking point was going to be the Dutch demand for recognition of its independence. Always a pragmatist, Rubens believed that if the Dutch were granted that freedom in practice, they would be willing to renounce their formal claims. “I have friends there of high standing,” he wrote to Gerbier, “who will not fail in their duty.” Presumably he meant his cousin Jan Brant, though the suggestion of influence indicates there may have been other assets, pehaps even Frederick Henry, the Prince of Orange.

  Rubens would need Gerbier’s assistance in making his summit meeting happen, and in particular he would need Gerbier’s help if he was to be permitted to attend the proceedings—something he considered essential. He specifically asked that Gerbier have Buckingham write back, and in doing so state that “His Excellency desires that I be sent, with the permission of my superiors, to the place where I can meet you under the favorable circumstance of the presence of Carleton and Scaglia.” If Rubens had overstepped his authority in Paris, his conduct here was far out of line, and he knew it. The painter was, on his own and without any authority, orchestrating a meeting with an enemy power on a matter critical to the foreign policy of the Spanish crown, and he was surreptitiously requesting a foreign statesman demand his participation in the affair. “Keep this request of mine secret, so that no one may ever know that this was done at my instruction,” he wrote to Gerbier. In a postscript he added, “I beg you burn this letter as soon as you have made use of it, for it could ruin me with my masters, even though it contains no harm. But at least it would spoil my credit with them, and render me useless for the future.” At the very least.

  RUBENS’S DANGEROUS GAMBIT paid off. At the end of May, Gerbier and Carleton were dispatched to The Hague. Scaglia soon followed. On June 13, Carleton wrote to Edward Conway, the English secretary of state, assuring him that “Rubens pasport is graunted him, so we are likely to see him here quickly.” He later confirmed that the passport had been issued on the pretext that Rubens was traveling to deal in matters relating to his art.

  In fact, it would be more than a month before Rubens would make it onto Dutch soil. The delay was due, in part, to the anticipated arrival in Brussels of Don Diego Messia, one of Philip’s chief ministers. He was carrying with him news “of the greatest consequence,” according to the painter, ostensibly concerning the funding of the Spanish war effort against the Dutch. Messia, who was engaged to Spinola’s daughter, would also be coming with wide latitude and authority from Philip to orchestrate negotiations on behalf of Spain, though he would presumably defer to his future father-in-law, the hero of Breda.

  From an English perspect
ive, word of Messia’s pending arrival did not bode well. Carleton, an old diplomatic hand, was inherently wary of Messia’s intervention, and his own contacts in the Dutch diplomatic community confirmed those suspicions. At the beginning of July, he wrote to Conway in London to express his concern: “I must lett your Lord understand that such advises as are come of late dayes from Bruxells to the Prince of Orange from such secret intelligencers as they here relye upon, all concurre that howsoever there is good affection in those parts to pacification, out of Spayne comes no signe of any such intention.”

  By mid-July, with Messia delayed in transit—he had, supposedly, injured himself while stepping from a coach outside of Bordeaux—and the English growing impatient, Rubens was ordered to travel north to Spanish-controlled Breda. From his room at the Swan, he dashed off a letter to Gerbier in The Hague offering to meet just over the border in Zevenbergen; he was permitted to travel no farther into enemy territory. That didn’t sit well with Gerbier; Zevenbergen was too close to Flanders for his tastes. “My going thither would cause reports and suspicions,” he replied. Secrecy, as Charles had commanded, was essential, as there were any number of parties—in particular the French—who would be anxious to sabotage whatever progress they might achieve. “Choose whether you will come to Delft, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, or Utrecht, if The Hague does not suit you.” Later in the day, having had a chance to “ruminate” on the matter, Gerbier dispatched a second, badgering missive to Rubens, warning that the whole negotiation was in jeopardy. “I must tell you, as my friend, that I apprehend this business will end in smoke … If the Infanta and the Marquis are so zealous about this good business, why then render it subject to suspicions? … Do not let this business which took its rise upon the subject of pictures, end in smoke; our ancient friendship gives me liberty to speak freely.” The tone was grating, and Gerbier capped the message with a pestering comment about a few works Rubens still owed Buckingham. This was typical for Gerbier, who existed in a state of almost perpetual (and occasionally justified) aggrievement that was constitutionally anathema to the more self-secure Rubens.