by Mark Lamster
Rubens’s prognostication, in the coming months, would prove deadly accurate. On November 8, after a summer of futility, Buckingham sailed in disgrace from Île de Ré, having lost nearly two-thirds of his 6, 884-man expeditionary force. By that time, he had also lost the respect and control of his men. The final English retreat was a chaotic, disorganized massacre, with the duke’s soldiers cut to pieces as they crossed an open, unprotected bridge. Upon his return to England, the duke was bitterly lampooned in barroom lyrics that expressed the national frustration:
And art return’d again with all thy faults,
Thou great commander of the al-goe-naughts;
And left the Isle behind thee; what’s the matter?
Did winter make thy teeth begin to chatter?
Charles nonetheless treated the duke to a hero’s welcome, commending his bravery while blaming the loss on foul weather, which prevented the king from sending in reinforcements. Few believed that story, either at home or abroad. “Most impudent lies” was Rubens’s response. In fact, Charles had left his favorite high and dry. It was not wind and rain that had held up Buckingham’s reinforcements—it was paintings, and paintings Rubens knew well.
Just as the duke was bogged down on the coast of France, his sovereign was completing a two-year negotiation that would net him the finest fruits of the unrivaled Mantuan art collection, which had been put up for sale by the reduced Italian duchy. Charles, a connoisseur among princes, could hardly resist such an opportunity. But he’d been forced to make a choice: the paintings or the reinforcements for Buckingham. He could not afford both. The king was already in debt to the tune of 125,000 pounds, and his Italian banker, Filippo Burlamacchi, was ready to cut him off. “If it were for £2,000 or £3,000 it could be borne, but for £15,000”—the cost of the paintings—“besides the other engagements for his Majesty’s service, it will utterly put me out of any possibility to do anything in those provisions which are so necessary for My Lord Duke’s relief,” wrote the financier. “I pray let me know his Majesty’s pleasure.” His Majesty chose the Raphaels and Titians of Mantua, his friend be damned. When Rubens later found out about the purchase, he was appalled. “This sale displeases me so much that I feel like exclaiming,” he wrote. But it was the fate of those beloved Mantuan masterworks that concerned him, not the life of the duke. He hated to see the old city lose its artistic legacy.
The rout of Buckingham was actually a disguised blessing for those interested in an Anglo-Spanish alliance. A month after the duke’s return to England, an express messenger showed up at the door of the Rubens house in Antwerp carrying with him an urgent letter from Gerbier. Though he had declared, barely three months earlier, “The game is at an end,” he was now desperate to retake the field. “It is a fact well known to everyone that help from England was detained by unfavorable winds, and that was the sole reason for the unfortunate outcome,” Gerbier informed an incredulous Rubens. “It is the usual stratagem of great leaders to retire in order to take up the same enterprise soon after with greater force and advantage.”
There was no mistaking the intention of Gerbier’s missive. From his private office, Rubens immediately drafted a note to Spinola: “The English are so embittered by their poor success against the French that they will do anything to enable them to take up that war again without the hindrance of the Spanish,” he wrote. England was prepared to bargain and was practically throwing itself at Spain’s mercy. As it was, Spinola was already planning a trip to Madrid, both to give his daughter away in marriage to Messia and to argue the case against the French alliance before Philip and the Count-Duke of Olivares. The king had granted him a three-month leave of absence from his duties in Flanders to make the trip, on which he would be accompanied by his prospective son-in-law. A renewed overture from England, an overture that carried with it the possibility of a resolution to Spain’s economically catastrophic war with the Dutch, would only support their cause.
The game, indeed, was very much alive.
CHAPTER VI
MORE USEFUL THAN INJURIOUS
The interests of the whole world are intimately connected at this moment, but the kingdoms are governed by men without experience, indisposed to follow any advice but their own, incapable of carrying out their own schemes and unwilling to accept other people’s.
—PETER PAUL RUBENS
Spinola and Messia left for Madrid on January 3, 1628, with a hard rain lashing down that transformed the road south into a rutted, porridge-like quagmire. They had only just begun their journey when their baggage cart tipped over in the wind. It was not the start they had hoped for, but they were still happy to be traveling together. There was urgent state business to attend to in Madrid, of course, and the two men could plot their strategy at court on the long ride to the Spanish capital. Better yet, they could get to know each other as father and son. Messia, the young lion of Spain, would be marrying Polyxenia Spinola, daughter of the hero of Breda, the very week of their scheduled arrival in Madrid.
Before their damp and windswept departure from Flanders, both men visited Rubens at his Antwerp home, and not just to confer on political matters. The artist hadn’t had much time to practice his true calling during the previous year—his constant travel on both personal and state business had severely curtailed the studio’s output—but the breakdown in negotiations following his trip to Holland had at least allowed him the freedom to get back to the work he enjoyed best. Among the projects that engaged him were portraits of the two soldier-diplomats heading south.
Messia’s sitting began with a portrait drawing. On a thick sheet of cream paper, Rubens set up a faint grid of regulating lines, and began the quick work of drafting the marquis in black and white chalk. Beneath a head of unruly hair, he sketched Messia casting a forbidding, almost cruel glance at some unseen subordinate off to his right. When the artist was satisfied, he went over it with more chalk, adding a bit of red for color and black ink for emphasis. In the finished painting that followed, Messia stands ramrod straight in a gleaming suit of armor. The marquis had a reputation to uphold as a man of formidable martial ability, and Rubens treated him accordingly. The portrait was probably commissioned to celebrate Messia’s recent elevation to the title of marquis, and he was justifiably proud to own it. In the future, he would acquire additional works from Rubens, purchased both from the artist himself and on the open market. Indeed, he considered himself a “grande aficionado” of Rubens’s work. Rubens, in turn, judged Messia among the “greatest admirers” of the art of painting in the world.
Ambrogio Spinola, on the other hand, was no one’s idea of a great connoisseur. According to Rubens, he had “no taste for painting” and understood “no more about it than a janitor.” This, however, had not kept Rubens from developing a genuine and abiding affection for him. In a time of grandiloquent verbosity, Spinola played his cards close to the vest, a trait Rubens particularly admired. “He is the most prudent and the most sagacious man I have ever met,” wrote the artist. That fondness is evident in Rubens’s portrait. As with his future son-in-law, Rubens pictured Spinola wearing a gleaming suit of armor, a plumed helmet resting by his side. But Spinola’s ruddy-cheeked countenance is gentle and knowing rather than foreboding and severe. There is almost—but not quite—a smile issuing from the beatific face above his well-starched ruff collar.
Rubens was still working on that portrait of Spinola in late January when he received another visitor at his residence on the Wapper: Josias de Vosberghen, Denmark’s ambassador to The Hague. Unlike the two marquises, Vosberghen had no interest in commissioning art from the painter; he had come south from Holland for one reason only: to conduct clandestine state business with Rubens. An eccentric prone to flights of exaggeration, Vosberghen introduced himself as an intimate of Frederick Henry, the Prince of Orange, and a confidant of Dudley Carleton, his English counterpart in the Dutch court. Through Carleton, he had learned of the failed negotiations between Spain and England, and he was now presenting
himself as yet another mediator capable of resurrecting them. Most crucially for Rubens, he offered a path to reconciliation with Holland and an end to the war of attrition that had such terrible consequences on the artist’s beloved Antwerp.
As a representative of Protestant Denmark, Vosberghen was not a disinterested party to the state of affairs in the Low Countries. In 1625, sensing an opportunity to exploit what was already a chaotic situation in neighboring Germany, Denmark’s king had sent an invasion force south into Saxony. Two years later, that army had been thoroughly vanquished by Habsburg troops loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor, and those Catholic forces had subsequently occupied the entire Jutland peninsula, that thumb of land separating the North and the Baltic seas that makes up much of Denmark’s territory. Denmark, then, had much to gain from a peace with Habsburg Spain, and Vosberghen was there to suggest a bit of diplomatic quid pro quo.
Walking along the carefully tended paths of Rubens’s handsome garden, Vosberghen got straight to his point. “If the king of Spain deals directly with the Dutch, he will never attain his purpose,” he explained. On the other hand, if Spain could compel its Habsburg allies to return Jutland to Denmark and the Palatinate to Frederick V, the Danes and their English allies would push the Dutch to relinquish their claim of independence. As Rubens took that in, the ambassador added, “Is it not unjust that, for the sake of a mere name, all Europe should live in perpetual war?”
Rubens may have agreed with that last assertion, but he knew Vosberghen’s demands were beyond the control of his sovereign. “The claims of England and Denmark concern Spain only because of its blood-relationship with the house of Austria,” he replied. Indeed, this was precisely the argument he had made a year earlier when the Spanish negotiating team had insisted that, in Gerbier’s words, “a great undertaking never advances straight forward upon two roads.”
Vosberghen countered that Spain was so influential that its mere insistence would overcome any opposition among its Habsburg allies. That was probably wishful thinking, but the Dane was undeterred. He informed Rubens that he would be making similar overtures in London, his next port of call, and wanted permission to use the painter as a conduit to the infanta after his arrival there. Before departing, he even left Rubens a secret code to cover their future correspondence.
The artist duly reported his conversation with the Danish diplomat to Isabella and, via dispatch, to Spinola, then still en route to Madrid. The two were not especially pleased to have yet another interloper meddling in their affairs. They had similarly looked askance at the efforts of Savoy’s Abbé Scaglia to introduce himself into negotiations a year earlier. (He had since been sidelined, despite his best efforts.) And as of February 1628, it didn’t seem as if they needed any help, for they were already conducting secret peace talks with the Dutch on their own: negotiations had been under way for several months at Roosendaal, some thirty-five miles north of Antwerp in Dutch territory. Indeed, the infanta’s representative at those talks, Johan Kesselaer, had made substantial progress, with the Dutch conceding that their title as “free states” need not be a precondition to further negotiations with the Spanish crown. It is quite probable that Rubens himself was a party to these talks, at least in their early stages. The previous October, Rubens had made an unexplained and undocumented trip into Holland, presumably on diplomatic business.
With the Roosendaal talks in mind, Vosberghen was kept cooling his heels in Antwerp until directions arrived from Madrid, in late March 1628. “His Royal Majesty of Spain is very well disposed to make peace with those with whom he is at war” was Spinola’s predictably tepid response. Vosberghen would have to be officially authorized by the allied parties he claimed to represent (that is, the English and the Dutch) before Spain would deign to treat with him. It was just the kind of noncommittal committal that had so aggravated Gerbier in the past, and it was no doubt meant to dispose of the Danish agent without formally rejecting his offer. It was left to Rubens to inform Vosberghen of this development. “There cannot be any basis for negotiation until you obtain your powers in good form,” he wrote to the Dane. At least, Rubens added sympathetically, Spinola’s presence in Madrid suggested that progress was imminent. “His diligence will overcome all delays on the part of Spain,” he wrote. That, he might have guessed, was promising too much.
VOSBERGHEN DID MAKE IT to London, but he was no more successful there than he was in Flanders. Gerbier thought him a “strange microcosm” and was not inclined to trust him one way or another. “To speak the truth,” he told Carleton, “I am of opinion that his alchemy will bring forth nothing but smoke, seeing the inconstancy of his mind and of his imagination.” In the meantime, Gerbier had retaken correspondence in earnest with a party he always believed to be, at the very least, sound of mind: Rubens.
In fact, the two men had never been out of touch, even when relations between their respective crowns were at a nadir. The previous December, just before Christmas, Rubens had written to Gerbier, informing him of Spinola’s impending departure for Madrid—a hopeful development. But he enclosed with his own letter one from the marquis that he knew Gerbier would not receive with pleasure. In that note, Spinola demanded Gerbier explicitly spell out English conditions for a prospective peace deal with Spain. “When any one thinks of agreeing with another, it is well to propose a thing that is much to the purpose, that thus they may agree,” he wrote.
That phrasing must have struck hard at Gerbier, who had recently spent a good four months marooned in Holland explicitly waiting for just that kind of firm commitment from Rubens but receiving nothing even remotely concrete. His aggravation pent up, he dispatched a series of replies to Rubens expressing both the English position and his upset personal feelings. It was a measure of Gerbier’s flustered disposition that they were written in several languages and that some were coded and others not, a state that compounded the already difficult challenge of deciphering his rather creative grammar and handwriting. These papers arrived in packets at Rubens’s rooms at the Golden Swan, his usual residence in Brussels, over the course of a single day at the end of March. (The long wait for Gerbier’s response was due to the death of a courier en route, one of the hazards of seventeenth-century correspondence.) Rubens, who had presumably come to the capital to facilitate negotiations, immediately took Gerbier’s letters to Coudenberg Palace, where he was given a private audience with the infanta. Only Rubens could translate Gerbier’s awkward, coded messages. From the mess, he went over the salient points with Isabella:
Gerbier remained upset about his treatment during the previous round of negotiations. He believed that the talks in Holland had been a ruse to allow Spain time to form an offensive treaty with France, behind England’s back.
Given that history, it was incumbent on Spain to offer a concrete proposal, and to officially authorize the infanta to negotiate with England.
Charles was using all his powers to bring the Dutch to heel. Their insistence on being described as “free states” in any formal documents—a nonstarter for Spain—could be circumvented by referring to the Dutch merely as “allies” of Great Britain.
Scaglia was to be kept as an intermediary. His political skill made him a useful ally to the negotiators and a potentially disruptive enemy, especially with the French working to undermine their efforts. Also, Scaglia’s Savoyard couriers could travel directly between Flanders and England, a useful convenience. (The English couriers they had been using were forced to travel through Holland, a detour that sent their correspondence through enemy territory.)
Vosberghen, on the other hand, could be jettisoned. His plan to broaden the scope of the negotiation was pointless. “He who wishes to embrace the whole will succeed in nothing,” wrote Gerbier.
All negotiations would have to remain secret. This was of pivotal importance to the English king, who was already at loggerheads with a volatile Puritan opposition in Parliament that was absolutely against any treaty with Catholic Spain.
At the infanta�
�s instruction, Rubens sent a précis of the Gerbier correspondence along to Spinola in Madrid, as well as a few of the original letters. Most of the documents Rubens retained, figuring the marquis would have trouble deciphering the codes and translating Gerbier’s arcane Flemish grammar. He did not, however, shy from reproducing the hectoring, frustrated tone Gerbier had adopted in his correspondence. Frankly, he was entirely sympathetic to his English counterpart’s aggravation. He, too, was tired of the needless hurdles Madrid imposed while Flanders—and the rest of Europe—suffered. For his beloved but blockaded Antwerp, the situation was especially dire. “Our city is going step by step to ruin,” he wrote, “and lives only upon its savings; there remains not the slightest bit of trade to support it.”
Rubens was right, at least, in thinking that Spinola had more to worry about than the illegible correspondence of a British agent. When Spinola and Messia arrived in Madrid, in the last week of February, their coach was received outside the city by a large contingent of court functionaries anxious to meet the hero of Breda. The mood was jubilant. In just four days, Spinola would celebrate the marriage of his daughter to his traveling companion. That affair, the social event of the season, would take place in the court of the Real Alcázar, with Philip IV and all the grandees of Spain in attendance.
