Master of Shadows

by Mark Lamster

  Having thus settled on the painter as his representative, in late April 1629 Philip composed a long dispatch to his aunt Isabella in Brussels, notifying her that he was sending Rubens to London. Upon his arrival in the English capital he would be empowered to establish a temporary armistice, and to pave the way for the formal exchange of ambassadors between the two countries, who would subsequently conclude the negotiation of a permanent peace. Rubens himself was supplied with two sets of formal diplomatic instructions written by Olivares—a standard protocol for traveling emissaries. The first, “ostensive,” set was to be shown to his English negotiating partners. “Whenever the king of England shall send to Spain a person authorized to negotiate the peace, our king, in turn, will send someone to England,” it said. “As for the interests of the relatives and friends of the king of England [that is, Frederick V, the Elector Palatine], His Catholic Majesty [Philip IV], with the [Holy Roman] Emperor and the Duke of Bavaria, will do what he can.”

  The second set of instructions was for Rubens’s eyes only, and outlined not just the above points but also several other responsibilities with which he was secretly charged. Principal among these was “to prevent as far as possible” an accord between England and France, rumored to be in the final stages of negotiation. Indeed, Cardinal Richelieu had taken definitive steps to outmaneuver his terminally equivocal Spanish counterparts. Successful campaigns at La Rochelle and in northern Italy had improved French standing on the international stage, and the cunning chief minister shrewdly reminded his English counterparts of the bonds of marriage between Charles I and his French bride, Henrietta Maria. He also made certain to note their shared interest in returning the Palatinate to English control—France had no desire to see unfriendly Habsburg troops along its border. For Rubens, Richelieu’s aggressive overtures to England presented an enormous challenge. In order to secure Spain’s demand for peace, he would have to win over Charles I without having his efforts undermined by France’s notoriously devious and far more experienced foreign minister. Indeed, Richelieu was well on his way to cementing his reputation as one of the more adept schemers in the history of European statecraft.

  The Frenchman was a formidable obstacle, but on a personal level Rubens was more concerned with the opposition of the Dutch, who also maintained an influential presence at the English court. The painter had always understood the primary benefit of an Anglo-Spanish treaty to be not so much the peace between the two principals as the pressure such an agreement would place on the Dutch to reach their own settlement with Madrid, and finally put an end to the hostilities that had so devastated his Flemish homeland, and Antwerp in particular. The Dutch, conversely, were naturally opposed to an Anglo-Spanish treaty, as it would undermine their position at the bargaining table with Spain.

  There was, then, a great deal for Rubens to overcome in London. To reinforce the painter’s standing as a diplomatic officer, Philip bestowed on him the title secretary to the Privy Council of the Low Countries. Among the many privileges of this office was an annual salary of nearly 1,000 florins, as well as the right to pass the position on to an heir. As a token of the king’s personal admiration, Rubens also received a gift from His Royal Highness, a ring of gold set with diamonds. It was just the kind of reward that pleased the painter—a physical affirmation of his aristocratic bearing—and he accepted it with pride. Two days later, he was on his way to London.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE CONNECTING KNOT

  We ought to consider that all the States of Europe have necessary ties and commerces one with another, which makes them to be looked upon as members of one and the same commonwealth. And that there can hardly happen any considerable change in some of its members, but what is capable of disturbing the quiet of all the others.

  —FRANÇOIS DE CALLIÈRES

  Leaving Madrid, Rubens retraced the route he had taken south eight months earlier, traveling north by land through Spain and then into France. Once again, the demands of his mission forced him to skip over Provence, and the chance to visit with his close friend Peiresc. He arrived in Paris on May 10, a Thursday, and lodged for the evening with the Flemish ambassador, Henri de Vicq. He managed to visit his own works at the Luxembourg Palace—he immodestly told his friend Pierre Dupuy he had seen nothing “so magnificent” in Madrid—but had time for little else. By the thirteenth he was in Brussels.

  At Coudenberg, news that de Vicq had almost certainly delivered in Paris was confirmed by Isabella: on April 20, more than a week before Rubens had departed Madrid, England and France had agreed to the basic terms of a mutual nonaggression pact. That must have come as a blow. Rubens’s orders from Olivares had specifically instructed him “to prevent as far as possible” the making of that agreement. Now he would have to keep that accord from flowering into a full-scale offensive alliance against Spain and its dependencies. And while dealing this setback to Richelieu, Rubens would have to establish Spain’s own treaty with England.

  Before discharging him, Isabella was kind enough to relieve Rubens of at least one duty. Based on the rather dubious political philosophy that the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend, Olivares had been supporting the Huguenot rebellion in France with an enormous annual subsidy, even as Catholic Spain, home of the Inquisition, had been waging war on the “heretic” Dutch provinces for decades in the name of religion. Before Rubens left Madrid, Olivares supplied him with letters of credit totaling some 30,000 ducats, which he was to deliver to the seigneur de Soubise, the Huguenot representative in London. The funds were to be used to recruit a mercenary army in England, and to resuscitate the beleaguered Huguenot cause in the wake of the capitulation of La Rochelle. (The Huguenots retained a few enclaves of support in France.) Given that England’s new armistice with France made it exceedingly unlikely that any recruiting would be permitted on British soil, Isabella chose to appropriate Soubise’s subsidy for her own needs. After all, she was the one fighting an underfunded war on Spain’s behalf, and against a Protestant enemy at that.

  The Dutch blockade of the Flemish coast meant Rubens could not risk a Channel crossing on a vessel running a Spanish flag—he was well aware of the fate of prisoners who fell into the hands of the hostile navy patrolling the waters separating the Continent from the British Isles. His mission, anyway, entitled him to travel on an English warship, which is exactly what he demanded of the English envoy, Hugh Ross, when he arrived at the port of Dunkirk. Ross sent that request up the chain of command. “His orders are not to hazard his mission or his messages except on an English ship, for he is mightily afraid of the Hollanders,” he wrote. Two days later, John Mince, captain of the HMS Adventure, received an urgent message from the royal palace at Whitehall, in London. Mince took the note, lifted its wax seal, and read. The text, composed in a sharp, authoritative hand, was concise: proceed across the Channel to Dunkirk; a gentleman would be waiting there, and he was to be “conducted into this kingdom with such servants & baggage as shall belong unto him.” No name was given: the mission was top secret. The note was signed, simply, “Charles K.” K as in “King.”

  The thirty-five guns Captain Mince commanded on the Adventure proved more than adequate protection for the painter-diplomat and his small entourage. (Rubens was accompanied by his brother-in-law Hendrik Brant, an Antwerp lawyer probably brought along as a sounding board, and several servants.) With the Rubens party aboard, the ship sailed from Dunkirk early on the morning of June 3, and that same evening safely deposited them on English soil under the chalk white cliffs of Dover. After a night on the coast, Rubens left for London.

  AS HIS EXCHANGE with the English envoy at Dunkirk suggested, Rubens was well versed in the finer points of diplomatic protocol. The first book on diplomatic practice, Ambaxiatorum brevilogus, was published in 1436. Most early texts on the subject focused on international law, as established through treaties and other covenants. Diplomatic conduct eventually became a subject of study in its own right. Rubens made a special point of keeping abrea
st of this literature. When the letters of the revered French cardinal and diplomat Arnaud d’Ossat were published, in 1624, the painter immediately arranged for a copy to be shipped from Paris by courier, and devoured it upon arrival. He also continued his correspondence with the Brussels-based diplomat Frederik de Marselaer, begun years earlier, when de Marselaer was editing his book on diplomatic practice. Indeed, in the very year Rubens traveled to England, a new edition of that book, Legatus, was published by the Plantin Press, then under the direction of Rubens’s friend Balthasar Moretus.

  Resident ambassadors did not become a standard feature of European diplomacy until the latter half of the fifteenth century. (The title “ambassador” is considerably older than that; its linguistic cousin “envoy” is derived from the Spanish verb enviar, “to send.”) In Renaissance days, the ambassador was understood to be the virtual embodiment of his monarch; he traveled in splendor and was treated with munificence. Since the ambassador was a “guest,” his sovereign host was expected to cover his lavish expenses. Predictably, these enormous costs became a point of contention. Spain went so far as to institute a scheme of annual stipends for foreign governments. Elaborate systems of protocol were developed to cover the rights and privileges of the entire diplomatic community, from the ambassador down. Petty grievances between representatives could escalate into major international incidents. Spain and France famously existed in a state of perpetual conflict over the “precedence” of their respective ministers at foreign courts—on one level, a technical argument about who was to be introduced first at ceremonial functions, but by extension a dispute as to the respective standing of the two nations in the world. While Rubens was in London, England’s ambassador in Paris caused a minor flare-up in relations by referring to Charles as the “Most Serene King” (rather than the “King of Great Britain”), which the French interpreted as a slight on the serenity of their own monarch. If an air of effortless grace characterized the successful diplomat, there was always beneath the surface a punctiliousness and exacting attention to detail—all traits Rubens possessed.

  Rubens’s rank as a privy councillor of Flanders entitled him and his entourage to a residence provided by the English crown during his stay in London. Accommodations were made at York House, primary home of the Duke of Buckingham before his assassination. This was actually not a single building but a compound of structures Buckingham had appropriated from another disgraced aristocrat, Sir Francis Bacon, who had been charged with public corruption in 1621. After taking possession, Buckingham spent much of his time and fortune renovating the place so he could entertain in suitably high style. The painter Orazio Gentileschi, one of Charles’s court artists, was granted residency on the property. And of course Rubens himself was the most famous beneficiary of the duke’s artistic program.

  When Rubens arrived in 1629, Buckingham’s widow still lived in the main building, but the place was overseen by his old friend Balthasar Gerbier, who occupied a large house on the property facing the Strand, the elegant Westminster avenue that was the city’s premier address. Part of that street’s appeal was access to the Thames. The river was London’s primary artery of transportation, and York House had its formal entrance on its water side. That gate, three arches of deeply rusticated Portland stone capped by a pediment ornamented with statuary, must have seemed strangely familiar to Rubens when Gerbier greeted his launch for the first time. The similarity to the portico he had built for his own home back in Antwerp was unmistakable; indeed, it may have been the inspiration for the designer of the York gate.

  Inside the compound, Rubens found a good deal more that was familiar. On the ceiling of the main hall was the allegorical painting Buckingham had commissioned from him at their providential first meeting four years earlier in Paris. The irony of that composition, in which Mercury and Minerva, the gods of diplomacy and wisdom, lead the duke to the “Temple of Virtue,” was surely not lost on the painter. Perhaps, he must have thought, his present mission might redeem some of that message. More happily, he was reunited with the collection of antiquities he had sold to Buckingham, all those marbles and medallions that so captured his imagination. In the garden was Giambologna’s Samson and a Philistine, which he had seen in the collection of the duke of Lerma on his first trip to Spain for Vincenzo Gonzaga. It had subsequently found its way into Buckingham’s possession after he and Charles made their brideless escape from Madrid in 1623.

  Rubens might have wished to fully explore the York collections during his first week in London, but he simply didn’t have the time. The morning after his arrival, he was summoned to an audience with Charles I at his palace in Greenwich, perched above the Thames a few miles to the east of London. Set on a restorative stretch of parkland, the picturesque redbrick castle known affectionately as the Palace of Pleasaunce was built in the early fifteenth century and first used as a royal getaway from the hubbub of the city center. Over the years, however, and through a series of expansions, it had lost a bit of its luster. By the time Rubens arrived, it was looking somewhat out-of-date and down-at-the-heels. Architectural fashion had passed it by, and the future could be seen across the expanse of its front lawn, where a shimmering Italianate box of a building was rising to its second story. That vision of elegance in bright white marble was the Queen’s House, designed by the architect Inigo Jones for Charles’s late mother, Anne of Denmark. After more than a decade’s work and the death of Queen Anne herself, it was still under construction.

  When Charles learned that Philip, his Spanish counterpart, had selected Rubens as his emissary, he was especially pleased. Francis Cottington, who had recently been promoted to the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer and remained one of Charles’s chief councillors, noted, “The king is very content, not only in respect to [Rubens’s] mission, but because he wants to know a person of such merit.” Indeed, Charles was known to delight in the company of artists, and he had a particular fascination with Rubens. The self-portrait he had commissioned from the painter—inappropriately, as far as Rubens was concerned—was installed just outside the bedchamber of Charles’s Whitehall Palace, where he could inspect it daily. Charles’s immense expenditure on the Mantuan art collection spoke to his interest in the arts. The king, a true aesthete, took considerable pride in his powers of connoisseurship and his discriminating taste. When a shipment of new paintings came in, he would have their labels removed and then test his ability to identify the artists who had created them. This made for an amusing intellectual challenge, but he was serious about his hobby. If Rubens had any question about that fact, he needed only to think back a few years earlier, when Henry, Lord Danvers had deemed a Rubens lion hunt intended for Charles’s collection unsatisfactory, and had demanded that the painter do something to “redeem his reputation.”

  Rubens’s status, at least as an artist, was no longer at issue when he was ushered into his first meeting with Charles. Indeed, his profession was once again the cover for his appearance at court. In the wake of his arrival in London, the Venetian envoy, Alvise Contarini, wrote back to the doge, “I do not know whether the king will see him, but he may under the pretense of pictures, in which he delights greatly.” This was not an altogether inaccurate report. Charles and Rubens did have an art project to discuss: the elaborate painting series to be installed in the ceiling of the new Banqueting House at Whitehall, designed by Inigo Jones. Rubens had first broached this commission back in 1621, when he had advertised that he was “by natural instinct, better fitted to execute very large works than small curiosities” and that his talent was such that no undertaking, “however vast in size or diversified in subject,” had ever surpassed his courage. If those claims seemed presumptuous at the time, he had by now proven them no exaggerations. The success of his cycle of paintings for Marie de’ Medici at the Luxembourg Palace, along with his many other royal commissions, made a forceful argument that no living artist was more skilled at delivering the kind of bombastic grandiosity demanded by those who claimed their
authority was a divine right. The preliminary program that had been established for the Banqueting House ceiling was especially well suited to Rubens. It was to be a celebration of the peaceful reign of Charles’s late father, James I, who in 1604 had signed a treaty with Spain. That accord was a model for the one Rubens had now come to negotiate. If he was successful in that mission, the new agreement would be signed in the very building in which the ceiling paintings would be installed. The Banqueting House was built to serve as a formal reception hall for just such important state occasions as the signing of international accords.

  Charles wanted Rubens for the commission, but discussion of that job was not on the agenda of their first meeting. For the moment, there was state business to attend to, and it took precedence over the artistic matters that, given the choice, the two men would surely have preferred to address. As it was, the king and the painter exchanged pleasantries, and Rubens offered Charles a copy of his instructions from Madrid, which he read with some dissatisfaction.

  “As God is my witness,” Charles said after an uncomfortable pause, “I desire peace with all my heart, but it will be necessary for your King to offer something from your side to facilitate the matter.” Philip’s rather vague offer to “do what he can” to restore Frederick V to the Palatine throne was hardly the concession Charles had hoped to receive. “Neither faith, conscience, nor honor permit me from entering into any accord with your Catholic Majesty without the restitution of the Palatinate,” he told the painter. In addition, he had been expecting a more substantial peace agreement than the temporary armistice that Rubens had been authorized to offer, pending a formal exchange of ambassadors. A truce, as far as he was concerned, was just another Spanish attempt to stall the peace process, a means of undermining English relations with the other European powers while Spain sacrificed nothing. He wouldn’t have it.