by Mark Lamster
RUBENS CONSIDERED HIS WORK done and wished to return home, but he was once again compelled to stay by his English counterparts. He had, perhaps, been premature in advertising the success of his mission. Cottington’s departure remained contingent on Spain’s reciprocating with an ambassador of its own, and on Madrid’s willingness to accept the terms outlined in “The Document.” But by the time that text made it all the way to the count-duke’s desk in Madrid, Cottington’s scheduled departure date of August 1 had come and gone, and Charles was becoming impatient for a reply. Cottington was rescheduled to leave a month later, but even that plan was scuttled as Rubens awaited word from Madrid. Finally, at the end of August, he learned that Don Carlos Coloma had been appointed Spanish ambassador to England. That was enough to temporarily alleviate the fears of his negotiating partners, but there was a caveat: Coloma was presently in command of the Spanish army in Flanders, a position he had inherited when Spinola left for Madrid the previous year. Now, with the Prince of Orange on the offensive and ’s Hertogenbosch still under siege, he was in no position to leave his post.
Rubens used the delay to his advantage. When Joachimi, the Dutch envoy, sought an audience with Charles to request a subsidy for the Dutch military campaign against Spain, the artist-diplomat made sure Charles refused the appeal. Rubens was well armed to make a case before Charles against support for the Dutch. “All the kings and princes of Europe, in the interests of self-preservation, ought to conspire to bring them down,” he noted. In the span of a few decades, the nascent Dutch republic had become a maritime superpower, its tentacles reaching clear around the globe. Dutch naval power and colonial expansion posed a serious international threat, and not just to Spain. Charles was especially vulnerable, given the close alliance between the Dutch and members of the Puritan opposition in his own country. Rubens played on the English king’s fears of insurrection, warning him that the Dutch were well placed to make a run at his crown, and soon. Now was the time to press them, before it was too late. Charles, he argued, should “employ his authority to induce the Hollanders to some reasonable accord with Spain, and if they refuse, threaten to abandon them entirely, or even aid our king against them.”
Rubens was prescient in this regard. In 1688, a Dutch invasion force linked up with English partisans to force Charles’s son, James II, from his throne. The “Glorious Revolution” left William III, great-grandson of William the Silent, as the new English king. For the moment, however, Rubens did not realize that just as he was making his case against an Anglo-Dutch treaty, Spain was achingly close to signing its own treaty with the Dutch, and without recourse to any outside intervention. This development had been precipitated by a shift on the ground in the Low Countries. A Spanish offensive into the Dutch heartland had pushed the Dutch back to the bargaining table at Roosendaal, and the negotiating parties had agreed on the principal terms of a truce. Those conditions, and whether they should be accepted, became the subject of intense debate—known as the groote werck, or “great affair”—that would occupy the Dutch political leadership into the New Year and in the months that followed.
Rubens, meanwhile, had managed another coup. Already, he had blocked Richelieu’s scheme to have France join forces with England to wage a multipronged war against Spain. Working in tandem with Cottington, he had actually turned that very idea back on its creator. Rubens happily informed Olivares that Cottington, as Charles’s ambassador, would now travel to Madrid with full authority to make an offensive alliance with Spain against France. This was accomplished despite the fact that Charles had recently formalized the nonaggression pact with France that had necessitated Châteauneuf’s trip to London. Neither the French nor the English were particularly enthusiastic about that accord, which they had formally agreed to back in April. At the banquet celebrating it, at Windsor Castle, Charles didn’t even break out the best royal dishes. The next day, word arrived that French naval units in the Caribbean had taken by force seven English vessels and an island owned by the Earl of Carlisle. So much for the armistice.
WITH HIS PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES filled and nothing left for him but to await the arrival of Coloma, Rubens finally had an opportunity to take some pleasure in his time in England. As a moneyed widower with a reputation for genius and the king’s ear, he must have made an alluring target for the unattached women at court. Rubens wasn’t known for indulging in pleasures of the flesh, except on canvas, but as Callières would write in his primer on diplomatic conduct, if the “opportunity of conversing with the ladies” should present itself, the ambassador “ought not neglect to get them on his side by entering into their pleasures, and endeavoring to render himself worthy of their esteem.” Of course, Callières was French.
Rubens, at least in public, led a respectable life. In late September he traveled to Cambridge, where he received a tour of the colleges and an honorary master’s degree from the university chancellor. A budding Anglophile, he described England as “a spectacle worthy of the interest of every gentleman, not only for the beauty of the countryside and the charm of the nation; not only for the splendor of the outward culture, which seems to be extreme, as of a people rich and happy in the lap of peace, but also for the incredible quantity of excellent pictures, statues, and ancient inscriptions which are to be found in this court.” It should come as no surprise that he liked all of that artwork: he had either owned or created a good deal of it, especially the works he found at York House. Rubens was particularly impressed by the collection of antique marbles assembled by Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel. The artist claimed he had “never seen anything in the world more rare.” He visited the earl’s house on the Strand, also known for its luxurious garden, several times. It didn’t hurt that Howard was also a Rubens client. The portrait Rubens had made of the earl’s wife, Aletheia Talbot (with her dog, her midget, her jester, and Dudley Carleton), was one of the prizes of the Howard collection. Before Rubens left London, he completed a bust-length portrait of the bearded earl dressed in a suit of armor to serve as a complement.
That was just one of the many paintings Rubens began in the studio he set up for himself at York House. With so much free time, he was able to rededicate himself to his art. Though Balthasar Gerbier had been essentially removed from the negotiating process, he had been a fine host, and as a token of respect Rubens painted a portrait of Gerbier’s wife, Deborah, and their four children. The women of the Gerbier family also served as models for the first of two canvases destined for the collection of Charles I. Both were allegorical works that made allusion to the peace process that had drawn Rubens to England. In the monumental Allegory of Peace and War, the goddess Minerva wards off an armor-clad Mars, who furiously charges at a lovely nude maiden and a huddled family. This was not one of Rubens’s more opaque constructions; the meaning was undisguised. Minerva, representing wisdom, restrains a war god bent on the destruction of innocence and prosperity. It was a sobering theme, but a magnificent picture: nearly ten feet wide and brimming over with color and figures and objects that allowed Rubens to fully demonstrate his technical virtuosity. The theme had been gestating for some time, dating at least to his compositions of 1628 focused on the figure Occasio, the golden-haired female who represented the opportunity for peace. That the familial grouping in the foreground was modeled on the Gerbiers added a sense of personalization. As a gift, it was a rather extraordinary physical and symbolic representation of the rewards of the very peace Rubens had come to negotiate.
The second of those allegorical works, a Saint George and the Dragon, was considerably smaller than the first, but its subject matter was closer to Charles’s heart. The king had a special fondness for Saint George, the patron saint of the Order of the Garter, the most prestigious chivalric order of his realm. In 1627, he traded a book of drawings by Hans Holbein for a Raphael painting of Saint George, which immediately became one of his prized possessions. Rubens exploited the king’s special interest in this subject; his Saint George was clearly set in an English
landscape (the London skyline is visible in the background), and the hero himself appears to have been given the facial attributes of the king. It was not too much of a leap to read in it a celebration of Charles’s role as a peacemaker, slaying the metaphorical dragon of war. Rubens liked the painting so much that he chose not to give it to the royal patron it so evidently represented. Instead, he sent it back to Antwerp, ostensibly as a pleasant reminder of his time in England. When he got home, months later, he expanded the canvas and darkened its mood. Desiccated corpses were added to the foreground and frightened onlookers to the background. The alterations suggest the fate of conflict’s innocent victims. Rubens, back home in beleaguered Antwerp, may well have been thinking of his Flemish countrymen when he put in those unhappy figures. They were not enough, however, to dissuade an art dealer working for Charles from purchasing the painting for the King and returning it to London just a few years later.
The crowning artistic glory of Rubens’s stay in London was the ceiling of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, the commission for which he had begun campaigning in 1621. Few documents remain describing the circumstances of the ceiling’s invention, but it seems certain that the program was developed in close collaboration with Inigo Jones, the architect of the building and Charles’s chief adviser on artistic matters. (His official title was surveyor of works.) It is unfortunate so little is known of the interaction between the men, two of the brightest minds of their time. They were of roughly the same age (Jones was just four years Rubens’s senior), and both had come into their artistic maturity after formative study of antique and Renaissance works in Italy. Indeed, Jones was a member of that small circle of minds capable of a sustained intellectual engagement with Rubens in the fields in which he was chiefly interested, art and classical history, at his own level. They undoubtedly discussed Jones’s study of Stonehenge; the architect believed, wrongly, that the monoliths were Roman ruins, and had led excavations there to investigate this hypothesis.
For the ceiling of the Banqueting House, the two men arrived at a design of immense complexity, a rectangular grid of nine paintings that celebrated the career of James I, Charles’s father. The inspiration was Veronese’s ceiling for the Church of San Sebastiano, in Venice, with its gilded coffers and similarly elaborate program. Rubens’s Whitehall ceiling was to be even more magnificent. Its enormous central panel, an oval, depicted James’s apotheosis, with the king rising overhead as if he’d been drawn straight up into the heavens. That panel was flanked, in the central column, by a pair of rectangular canvases, The Union of the Crowns (Scotland and England) and The Peaceful Reign of James I, the latter installed directly above Charles’s throne at the south end of the hall. Here, as in The Allegory of Peace and War, Minerva wards off a charging Mars. The implication was that Charles had inherited his father’s mantle as a divinely graced peacemaker. That allusion would have been fairly clear to the typical connoisseur of the period, but, as with Rubens’s paintings for Marie de’ Medici, the ceiling’s iconography was largely abstruse, a condition compounded by the installation of the paintings a distant fifty feet above the heads of those who would interpret their meaning. Their readability would be further compromised by soot (the room was lit by candle) and water damage. Before long, they were all but obscure except in their broad strokes—it was enough for distinguished visitors to know they were by Rubens. In any case, they were soon obsolete. Rubens’s ceiling celebrated British unity, but Charles’s disdain for Parliament brought on the English Civil War. In January 1649, he was beheaded on a scaffold erected directly in front of the Banqueting House.
Rubens never saw the Banqueting House canvases in place. Though he produced several studies for the ceiling during his stay in London, the scale of the job required that it be completed back in his Antwerp studio, which he was beginning to miss sorely by the late fall of 1629. “I should be happier over our peace or truce than over anything else in this world,” he wrote to his friend Gevaerts at the end of November. “Best of all, I should like to go home and remain there all my life.” By that time, Cottington had left for Madrid. Coloma, however, was still stuck in Flanders. A tired Rubens, now the target of English frustration, took out a bit of his own in a letter to the infanta Isabella. “I curse the hour I set foot in this country,” he told her.
Coloma did finally make it to London. At a ceremony on January 13, 1630, beneath the ceiling that would soon hang with his own paintings, Rubens watched as the ambassador was introduced to the king. Over the next two months, Rubens remained in London as an adviser to Coloma. It would be another eight months before the Anglo-Spanish peace would finally be signed, in mid-November 1630. Two months after that, in Madrid, Cottington and Olivares put their signatures to another document, a secret treaty that called for a joint Anglo-Spanish offensive against the Dutch. This was a critical development, and a direct result of the measures Cottington and Rubens had taken together in London to turn Richelieu’s anti-Spanish scheme back on France. What precise role Rubens had in forging this new, anti-Dutch alliance is unclear, but it is hard to imagine he did not have some significant hand in it during its incipient stages. By the terms of the deal, Charles would receive a monthly stipend from Spain during the hostilities, and the rights to occupy Zeeland after a successful invasion.
Had England and Spain succeeded in that joint campaign, they might have radically altered European borders. But the plan, whatever its advantages, grew to such complexity that it collapsed under its own weight before it could be implemented. Beyond logistical issues, Olivares was saddled with the uncomfortable reality that both his treasury and his military were overextended. Charles, for his part, was happy merely to have his peace with Spain, and he appreciated Rubens’s efforts in bringing it to fruition.
Before the artist’s return to Antwerp, in March 1630, the king knighted the painter at a Banqueting House ceremony, presenting him with a jewel-set sword and a diamond-studded hatband purchased from Gerbier for 500 pounds. Not to be outdone by his Spanish counterpart, Charles pulled a ring from his finger and slipped it onto the artist’s hand. The royal patent certifying his peerage didn’t arrive at the artist’s Antwerp home until the following December, but when Rubens finally received it, he must have been pleased. It read, “We grant him this title of nobility because of his attachment to our person and the services he has rendered to us and to our subjects, his rare devotion to his own sovereign, and the skill with which he has worked to restore a good understanding between the crowns of England and Spain.” Mission accomplished. Or was it?
CHAPTER VIII
THE HORRORS OF WAR
I am a man of peace, and I flee quarrels and lawsuits like the plague; I hold that an honest man’s desire ought to be above all to enjoy perfect tranquility of mind in public as in private life, performing all the services he can, without injuring anyone.
—PETER PAUL RUBENS
On his penultimate day in London, Rubens paid a call at the Chelsea residence of Albert Joachimi, the Dutch envoy who had spent so much of the preceding nine months working to block his every move. It was an unlikely meeting between political adversaries, and one Rubens had undertaken on his own initiative, without authorization from his superiors in Brussels or Madrid. The pretext for the visit was a bit of minor diplomatic business: thirty Flemish sailors had recently been captured off the English coast by the Dutch navy, and Rubens was hoping to win their release. That would have made for a satisfying feather in the already well-plumed and jewel-encrusted cap he would be wearing upon his return home.
But Rubens also had something greater in mind: the peace with Holland that had been his goal from the very moment he had undertaken diplomatic work on behalf of Spain. The primary benefit of the accord with the English, as he had recently advised Olivares, was that it would force the Dutch to the negotiating table. Rubens, however, was no longer prepared to sit and wait for Olivares to take up this cause. Impatient with the constant delays from Madrid, he was ready to test the efficacy
of the plan he had devised with Cottington—but without permission from any higher authority.
Sitting with Joachimi, he now proposed a truce that would “bring quiet and rest after long war to all the seventeen provinces.” Rubens was not content, however, to make this offer merely on behalf of Spain. He suggested as well that an armistice between Spain and the Dutch was the express will of Charles I. Implicit was the threat that if the Dutch failed to comply, they would find themselves at odds with England. Rubens had no authority, either from Charles or from his own monarch, to make such a loaded offer—or any offer at all—even if his reasoning was sound and his intentions pure. Dutch militancy, he knew, was an increasing concern for Charles; that Cottington had been authorized to make an offensive treaty with Spain upon his arrival in Madrid only reinforced this belief. Joachimi, however, wasn’t fooled by Rubens’s ploy. “I cannot believe the king has made any such motion,” he told the painter. What’s more, after months of debate over the peace terms already proffered at Roosendaal—the so-called groote werck—Joachimi knew that hard-liners within the Dutch political establishment would be opposed to any settlement, regardless of the English king’s pressure. The Roosendaal talks were dead. If there was to be peace in the Low Countries, he told Rubens, there was “but one way feasible: chasing the Spaniards out.” Adding insult to injury, Rubens got no traction on the release of the captured sailors.
