by Mark Lamster
Manipulating correspondence was one thing; disobeying a direct order was another. Traveling beyond Zevenbergen without permission was out of the question. Instead, Rubens returned to Brussels and formulated a plan that would satisfy all parties: As soon as arrangements could be made, he would embark on a multi-week tour of Holland on which he would visit with the most prestigious painters in that land, apprising himself of developments in the field and acquiring works for his own collection, now depleted. Gerbier, fellow artist and connoisseur, would meet him along the route, ostensibly to conclude the transaction with Buckingham. (That deal had always been the cover for their negotiations, and a few details remained outstanding, as Gerbier’s previous missive suggested.) This strategy was not without its perils. When Carleton heard of it, he wrote to the artist directly, warning that if he spent too long in Holland, he would be in serious jeopardy, subject either to the embarrassment of deportation or, worse, to arrest for treason.
It was risky, but Rubens was willing. His celebrity, he thought, would insulate him from the worst dangers. “I regard the whole world as my country, and I believe that I should be very welcome everywhere,” he once wrote. The infanta consented as well. Writing to her nephew Philip in Madrid, she defended her decision to allow Rubens to participate in the secret negotiation he had done so much to initiate. His status as an artist was not an issue. “Gerbier is a painter just as Rubens is,” she told Philip. “It matters little who takes the first steps; if they are followed up, direction will naturally be entrusted to persons of the highest rank.”
RUBENS VENTURED into enemy territory on July 20, stopping first in Rotterdam before meeting Gerbier at Delft the next day, the first of eight they would spend together. That quiet city of canals was just a short ride from The Hague. Rubens made it a special point to avoid the Dutch capital, where his presence would have engendered wild speculation among the political classes. Carleton, to avoid suspicion, chose to leave the proceedings entirely in the hands of Gerbier, even as he was the senior diplomat. “In this ombragious tyme and place there can not bee too much circumspection used to prevent inconveniences,” he wrote back to London. To avoid any misunderstandings, he secretly dispatched his nephew to inform Frederick Henry, the Prince of Orange, of the negotiations. The prince was thought to be amenable to some kind of accommodation with the Spanish, even as he was massing an army against them at Arnhem.
Delft was just the first stop on the itinerary of the two artist-diplomats, and given its proximity to the chattering hordes at The Hague and the relative paucity of artists worth visiting, it was not a good place for them to remain. Scaglia joined them there, but only briefly. To keep up appearances, the group probably visited the workshop of Michiel van Mierevelt, a distinguished portraitist and friend of Pieter van Veen, Rubens’s Dutch lawyer. When they had a chance to remove themselves from their hosts, they broached the subject that had brought them together, delicately at first. Rubens was effusive about the good intentions of his superiors and their receptivity to England’s overtures. But whenever Gerbier tried to draw from him some concession, the great Flemish painter parried. Rubens was a man accustomed to delivering the most tangible of miracles, but now he was placing the creative onus squarely on his English counterpart.
Carleton kept tabs on the two men, reporting back to London that the artists were “walking from towne to towne,” discussing politics and pictures. At Utrecht, the two men lodged at the Kasteel van Antwerpen. The name of that elegant boardinghouse along the Oudegracht must have been a comfort to Rubens. It was also the finest place for a visitor to lay his head in Utrecht, and it was just a short stroll west from its door to the center of town, where the painter Gerrit van Honthorst had recently purchased a decommissioned cloister on the Dom Square. It was an impressive home, one appropriate for the dean of the painters’ guild in a city that was then the capital of Dutch art.
Utrecht’s reputation as a haven for art made it a logical destination for a painter traveling from Flanders. That it was also known as a Catholic holdout in the increasingly pluralistic, or at least tolerant, United Provinces also made it appealing for a visitor who practiced that religion. Indeed, Utrecht could boast a long tradition as a center of Catholic learning. Adrian VI, a Utrecht native, had been elected pope in 1522. A century later, better than half of the city’s population of thirty thousand practiced the Roman faith, though not too publicly. Services were held in schuilkerken, underground prayer rooms, some resplendently ornamented. Rubens, who liked a morning mass, probably visited one during his stay.
Among its intellectuals, Utrecht’s Catholic history bred an interest in the classical tradition of Rome, heart of the Counter-Reformation. Honthorst himself spent at least four years honing his craft there. His dusky, candlelit genre scenes earned him an impressive following among Rome’s leading patrons (including the cardinal Scipione Borghese, also a Rubens client) and the nickname Gherardo della Notte—Gerrit of the Night. When he returned, he became the most visible of several Utrecht painters, the Caravaggisti, who made a business of fusing the Italian painter’s frank theatricality with a more domesticated Dutch sensibility.
Honthorst’s painting was indebted to Caravaggio, but his professional practice was quite consciously modeled on that of Rubens. Indeed, when Rubens walked into the Honthorst studio for the first time, it must have seemed quite familiar: a large open space, one hundred meters square, packed with student apprentices who paid a 100-guilder annual tuition to learn from the master. One student in particular caught Rubens’s eye: Joachim von Sandrart, an ambitious twenty-one-year-old from Frankfurt who was at work on a painting of the Greek philosopher Diogenes. According to Sandrart, Rubens was “well pleased” with the picture, and made a few encouraging suggestions.
As Honthorst was occupied with other affairs—in fairness, Rubens and Gerbier had arrived on short notice—Sandrart was deputized to escort the two men around Utrecht. Together, the group visited the studios of Abraham Bloemaert, éminence grise of Utrecht’s artists, and his son Hendrick, also a painter; Cornelis van Poelenburg, an old Rubens acquaintance from Rome, who commemorated the meeting with a portrait of himself and his old friend; and the Caravaggisti Jan van Bijlert and Hendrick ter Brugghen. Rubens especially admired Ter Brugghen. He also took a shine to the sycophantic Sandrart. When Rubens and Gerbier left Utrecht, the young German went along with them. Whether he had any idea of what exactly the two men were discussing when he was out of earshot is unclear. In his account of the experience, written years later, it seems he had accepted at face value Rubens’s explanation that the whole excursion had been intended “to forget his sorrows” following the death of his wife.
The enlarged group’s first destination, after Utrecht, was Amsterdam, the city that had become all that Antwerp was in its golden age. Sheltered by the Zuider Zee and defended by the fierce Dutch navy, Amsterdam was now the financial capital of northern Europe, and its commercial tentacles extended clear around the globe. Its population, when Rubens and company arrived, was already beyond 100,000 and growing at an astounding rate. Rubens must have seen in it the Antwerp his parents knew, a proud boomtown inventing itself daily. After a visit to the young metropolis just a few years earlier, Dudley Carleton had mused that forsaken Antwerp was a “towne withowt people” whereas in teeming Amsterdam there was a “people without a towne.” Pleasure, then, was not what attracted Rubens and Gerbier to the city. It was commerce that made Amsterdam great, and it was commerce that brought the two artist-diplomats there. During their brief stay, Rubens and Gerbier met with the art dealer Michel Le Blon, who was commissioned to ship the remaining works owed Buckingham back to England. Given the Dutch blockade of the Flemish coast, it was necessary to send the pictures through Holland.
Upon his return to Utrecht, with Gerbier back in The Hague and Sandrart still in tow, Rubens was treated to a ceremonial banquet at the Honthorst home. Catholics (like the Honthorsts and Bloemaerts) drank with Calvinists (like Bijlert and Ter Brugghe
n) in a convivial atmosphere of mutual respect, united by the arts. Matters of religion were discussed, if at all, with an air of intellectual decorum. For Rubens, it must have seemed almost a fantasy come alive, a tangible reproduction of the secularized Antwerp that his parents knew in their youth and that the city might even become again if the destructive war between the Spanish and the Dutch could be resolved. If that scene made a strong impression on Rubens, the artist similarly impressed his hosts, at least according to Sandrart. “As far as he is excellent in his art,” he wrote, “I also found him perfect in all other virtues, and I observed that he was highly esteemed by persons of the most exalted as well as the most humble rank.”
That hagiographic sentiment masked the reality that during their eight days together, Gerbier and Rubens had progressed no further in their negotiation than they had on their first afternoon together in Delft. Shortly after they separated, Gerbier wrote in frustration, “Rubens had brought nothing in black and white, and all that he said was only in words.” Rubens, of course, had been specifically enjoined by the infanta and Spinola not to put anything down in writing—even their hands were tied until Messia’s long-delayed arrival. This, however, did not preclude Rubens from requesting that Gerbier supply him with the draft of a formal agreement, a proposal flatly rejected by Buckingham’s agent. With Messia still en route and Spanish intentions unknown, England was not prepared to offer up terms, for fear of revealing its hand and then being undercut. When the two envoys parted, they had achieved nothing of substance, though Rubens had convinced Gerbier to remain in The Hague for another month while Messia, now reported to be healing his injury in Paris, made his way north to Brussels. When Carleton heard about that, his native skepticism only increased. Writing back to England, he noted drily that Messia’s “long abode there under pretense of sickness must needs cover somewhat else … Why could not Messia, though sick, come as well forward from Paris to Bruxells as he did in the same estate from Burdeaux to Paris?” That was a reasonable question, and the answer would prove displeasing to all parties.
BACK IN ANTWERP, Rubens found himself in an unpleasant limbo—in his words, “suspended between hope and fear.” A new Dutch offensive near the German border only amplified that sense of unease. Frederick Henry, the Prince of Orange, had placed his army in three siege camps around the fortified city of Groenlo, and rumors swirled through Brussels and Antwerp as to its fate. By the beginning of September 1627, the defenders had run out of ammunition and had taken to firing from their cannon whatever matériel could be requisitioned. The son of Maurice, the late Prince of Orange, was killed by a pewter spoon. Eventually, even Groenlo’s kitchen cupboards ran bare, and the town was forced to surrender. It was a victory for the Dutch, though not a major breakthrough in the war.
Another military campaign, however, was proving to be an even greater impediment to the prospects of an Anglo-Spanish treaty. Back in early July, just as Rubens and Gerbier were haggling over the location of their meeting in Holland, the Duke of Buckingham landed with an assault force of more than six thousand English soldiers at Île de Ré, a well-defended island guarding the French port of La Rochelle. Buckingham’s attack on Spain at Cádiz, two years earlier, had been an utter fiasco. Now, with Spain still a declared enemy, he was trying his hand as a military commander once again, this time in support of La Rochelle’s Huguenot population, then under siege by French forces. Even with the duke’s history of political and military bungling, reports of this mission came as a surprise within Europe’s diplomatic community. Rubens himself commented that he “never believed the English would have the boldness to make war on Spain and France at the same time,” and astutely speculated that the move would bring about an alliance of convenience between Spain and France, traditional foes.
Buckingham and his forces were still bogged down on the French coast when Rubens wrote to Gerbier, on August 27, to apologize for stranding him for so long in The Hague. While admitting Gerbier had cause to be upset, Rubens suggested that Messia was now, finally, on his way to Brussels and that this augured well for their plans. That report, however, was inaccurate. In fact, Messia would not arrive for another two weeks, and when he did he carried with him news that would dash the hopes of all those who had been working to broker an Anglo-Spanish alliance. As Carleton had suspected, Messia’s prolonged stay in Paris did indeed “cover somewhat else.” That, specifically, was news of just the alliance of convenience between Spain and France, the two great Catholic powers of western Europe, that Rubens had predicted. If that information wasn’t exactly shocking, what came next was: Spain and France had secretly agreed to their alliance a year and a half earlier, in March 1626. This was to be not merely a defensive pact, either, but an offensive treaty predicated on a joint invasion of England.
And so it was revealed that for the last several months Spain had been playing a double game, treating for peace with England through Rubens at the same time that it was planning to attack it with France. When Philip had granted his aunt Isabella permission to negotiate with England—albeit without Rubens—he simply backdated the authorization by fifteen months, to predate the already-agreed Franco-Spanish alliance. (So much for the “dignity” of his kingdom.) Messia’s mission, from the start, had been to travel to Paris to plan the joint Franco-Spanish invasion of England. Buckingham’s attack on the French coast, however, superseded the invasion plan. Instead of that grand operation, Messia agreed that the Spanish fleet would provide assistance to French naval and ground forces fighting Buckingham’s men at Île de Ré.
For Spinola and the infanta, this news came as a blow. Rubens reported that the two were “much grieved at the resolution” taken by Spain. For a week, the group worked to “disabuse” Messia of the error of Spanish policy, and to petition Madrid to continue the peace process with England. Their interest, of course, was primarily to end the war with the Dutch, which had such devastating consequences in Flanders. They strenuously objected to any close alliance with the French, who had been allies and financial supporters of the Dutch cause ever since the 1624 Treaty of Compiègne. In such straitened circumstances, with coffers so empty that work on the Fossa Mariana was already halted, it made more sense to forge peace rather than instigate a war. Rubens was particularly upset. “It appears strange that Spain, which provides so little for the needs of this country that it can hardly maintain its defense, has an abundance of means to wage an offensive war elsewhere,” he wrote. He chalked up the Franco-Spanish alliance to “an excess of ardor for the Catholic faith, and hatred for the opposing party.”
The objections of the Flemish leaders did not go unheeded; Messia had particular reason to take the counsel of Spinola, his future father-in-law. But for the moment there wasn’t much choice but to officially notify the English of the new alliance, if not its ultimate objective. Negotiations would have to be put on hold, at least temporarily. In an official letter written on the morning of September 18, Rubens reluctantly informed Gerbier of the new state of affairs. “It is thought for the present the business cannot be proceeded with,” he wrote, “because the arrival of the Lord Don Diego Messia has enlightened us on the union of the kings of Spain and France for the defense of their kingdoms.”
That was the official response. But after so many months working with him, Rubens clearly felt he owed Gerbier more of an explanation. His reputation not just as a diplomat but as a gentleman was dependent on his integrity, here thrown into question by forces beyond his control. The alliance with France, he tried to assure Gerbier, would “be like thunder without lightning, which will make a noise in the air without producing an effect, for it is a compound of diverse tempers brought together in a single body against their nature and constitution, more by passion than reason.” For his own part, he regretted their failure and pledged that his intentions had always been sincere and that he had devoted all of his energies to their negotiations.
Even that apologia, however, was not exculpatory enough to assuage the guilty consci
ence of a man not normally given to bouts of insecurity. Writing yet again on the same day, Rubens placed blame for the failed negotiations squarely on the shoulders of the Count-Duke of Olivares, Philip’s scheming and heedless valido:
The business is at an end, and the orders received from Spain cannot be altered. I will not deceive you under pretext of friendship, but speak the truth openly; the Infanta and the Marquis are resolved to continue our Treaty, being of the opinion that the “Concerts” between France and Spain will have no effect, and will not last, so that every wise man, be he a politician or a priest, laughs at it…no change can be promised, and some time must elapse before we can hope that Olivares will open his eyes and agree to it… In the meantime, if you are willing to maintain matters with us in their present state, and to keep Buckingham in good humor, this can do no harm. We do not pretend thereby to prevent or to retard any warlike enterprise, nor are we trying to conceal any plot. We do not wish to keep you any longer, by vain hopes, away from my Lord your master and from your dear wife.
Gerbier appreciated Rubens’s efforts, but there was no escaping the reality of the situation. “The game is at an end,” he wrote in a disillusioned letter to Edward Conway, the English secretary of state. At the beginning of October, he was recalled from The Hague.
ENCLOSED WITH THE FINAL LETTER of apology to Gerbier was a formal note of contrition from Rubens addressed directly to Buckingham, then still embroiled on the coast of France. “No change of fortune or violence of public destiny,” he wrote, “will be able to separate my affections from your very humble service, to which I have dedicated myself, and vowed once for ever to be.” With brush or pen, Rubens was a master of the grandiose gesture of flattery. In this case, however, the pledge of eternal allegiance was disingenuous. Barely a week later, he wrote to his Parisian friend Pierre Dupuy, telling him frankly that Buckingham’s “temerity” in attacking France was altogether inexcusable. “He seems to me, by his own audacity, to be reduced to the necessity of conquering or of dying gloriously. If he should survive defeat, he would be nothing but the sport of fortune and the laughingstock of his enemies.”
