Master of Shadows (19 page)

Buckingham was magnanimous in reply, assuring Rubens that
the joy Charles felt over his union with the French princess meant that all memory of the “unfruitful pretensions” of the past—that is, the failed Spanish Match—would be “buried in oblivion.” He did, however, indicate that the situation of the exiled Frederick V, who had been removed from his Palatinate throne by Habsburg forces, was still a “wrong” that “needed a cure.” Rubens countered that Isabella, as a neutral party to this situation, might serve as an honest broker in future discussions on the matter. With that, the sitting came to an amicable conclusion. Negotiations between Buckingham and Rubens regarding the painter’s collection of antiquities would henceforth be conducted through the duke’s capable deputy, Gerbier.

The infanta was pleased with Rubens’s overtures to Buckingham. Upon his return to Flanders she specifically commanded the painter to “maintain this friendship with the duke.” But reaching out to Buckingham was not Rubens’s only covert accomplishment during his time in Paris. Through the diplomatic rumor mill, he had learned that one of his most devoted clients, Wolfgang Wilhelm, the Duke of Neuburg, was on his way to that city from Madrid, and that his arrival posed a significant threat to the ongoing negotiations between Spain and the Dutch, the very negotiations that Rubens had been a party to through his cousin Jan Brant.

Neuburg, a knight of the Golden Fleece and a Spanish client, was in fact the unknowing pawn in an intricate and seemingly implausible conspiracy plot, an affair contrived by a notorious French aristocrat who hoped to promote his own status at the Parisian court at Spanish expense. To accomplish this coup, he had informed a known Spanish agent that France was anxious to serve as a mediator between Spain and the Dutch, and would do all in its power to end the war between them. This, of course, was patently false. France had no interest in mediating peace between Spain and
the Dutch. As Rubens would inform the infanta, the French abhorred the idea of that peace “more than anything on earth.” For Cardinal Richelieu, the French chief minister, keeping Spain terminally engaged in conflict was an essential principle of foreign policy, a fact amply demonstrated with the signing of the Treaty of Compiègne, in June 1624, by which France pledged financial support to the Dutch cause.

Neuburg, then, was walking into a trap, having been dispatched as an emissary from Madrid on the basis of false information. Upon his arrival in Paris, the revelation of France’s true intentions would provoke a political firestorm and undermine what progress had already been made with the Dutch through the secret negotiations in which Rubens had long been engaged. Indeed, the Prince of Orange had specifically warned Rubens—through Jan Brant—that even letting word of their negotiations reach French ears would bring an end to all talks.

Rubens reported all of this back to Isabella in a dispatch sent by urgent courier on March 15, 1625. “I hope Your Highness will not take offense if I express my opinion according to my capacity, and with accustomed freedom,” he wrote. He proceeded to adumbrate, with absolute precision, just how pointless it would be to draw France into the matter:

Rubens proposed that Isabella order Neuburg to bypass Paris on his travels, if at all possible, and in any case allow him to make no proposals without her explicit consent. If it was too late to divert Neuburg, Rubens wanted permission to keep the duke “from putting a finger in the pie.” Should Madrid still deem it necessary to make an overture to the French, he suggested it come from a neutral intermediary, ideally a representative of the Vatican, rather than from Neuburg, who was in the pocket of Spain and therefore inherently suspect. Moreover, the duke was known to be a vainglorious gossip and could not be trusted to keep the matter quiet. Rubens closed with a request that his letter be “thrown into the fire.” The duke made for a lousy diplomat but a good patron, and he did not wish to “arouse his animosity.” Still, he concluded, “the public welfare and the service of Your Highness move me more strongly than any other passion.”

Isabella took Rubens’s message to heart. Through his timely intervention, Neuburg was sidelined, and Rubens was able to resume negotiations with Brant where they had left off. Facts on the ground, however, had shifted. With Spinola’s putative victory at Breda, in May 1625, the Spanish had strengthened their negotiating hand. But finding a party to negotiate with, now that Maurice was dead, presented a problem. Frederick Henry, the new Prince of Orange, did not command the Dutch political apparatus with the
authority of his late brother. Instead, matters would have to be settled with the full States General—the fractious assembly of delegates from the seven members of the United Provinces—an onerous task.

Rubens left it to Brant to deal with that hydra, while offering him the consoling reassurance that the Spanish were not going to ramp up their demands. “It is up to you, on your side, to supply what is wanting,” he wrote to Brant a month after his return from Paris. “Our position, by God’s grace, is safe and secure, and it seems to me that the moderation shown on our side is by no means slight. For after so great a change, and with so considerable an advantage, we are keeping the same terms, without revising them in a single point … It now remains for you to make every effort to bring the desired answer as soon as possible, endorsed by the advice and orders of those who can maintain and carry it out; then it will be accepted at once by our side and put into effect.”

The letter was written in Italian, but Rubens and Brant had taken the measure of creating a secret numerical code to protect the identity of the persons and places named: Isabella was 3; Maurice, 11; Neuburg, 24; Spinola, 26. Such ciphers were typical of diplomatic correspondence of the period, but the essential transparency of the “Rubens code” suggests its intended purpose was as much to placate Brant’s neurotic mind as to disguise state secrets. As it was, Rubens made a special point to inform Brant that Balthasar Gerbier (14), Buckingham’s political agent, had recently visited the artist at his Antwerp home with a proposal to establish England as an intermediary between Spain and the Dutch, and that through Rubens’s deception Gerbier remained ignorant of their direct negotiation. Gerbier was ostensibly in Antwerp to look over Rubens’s collection of antiquities on behalf of the duke.

For Rubens, the offer to negotiate through England wasn’t much more appealing than Neuburg’s doomed plan to go through France,
and he was anxious to set aside Brant’s fears of being either exposed or sidelined in the future. “I believe he will probably be somewhat angry with me,” Rubens said of Gerbier, “but the way he pointed out is too long and does not correspond with our plans.” He advised his cousin that “as a good patriot,” it was now the time “to offer every service to the general welfare, for which we have worked so hard that I hope, with God’s help, our efforts will not be in vain.”

Unfortunately, not even God could help Brant secure a willing partner in the States General, or at least one deemed acceptable to Isabella. “I have once more spoken urgently with 3 [Isabella] and 26 [Spinola] in favor of your proposition,” Rubens wrote to Brant in August, using their code. “According to what 26 writes me, it was not received favorably by 3.” Meanwhile, the situation on the ground—or more accurately, at sea—made peace seem an illusory goal. In the late summer, Isabella shifted her court to the port of Dunkirk, where she and Spinola could manage the construction of a fleet to combat the Dutch navy.

Rumors had by then surfaced that England was intent on a major attack on Spain, and that the Dutch would collaborate. Despite his assurances to Rubens in Paris (and Gerbier’s more recent overtures in Antwerp), Buckingham had not put the debacle that was the Spanish Match behind him, and was out for revenge even now, two years after the fact. Indeed, he had spent much of his time in Paris, as he was waiting to escort Henrietta Maria back across the Channel, unsuccessfully trying to recruit Cardinal Richelieu to commit France to join England in a two-pronged offensive against Spain. Richelieu, however, resisted these entreaties, preferring instead a more passive form of aggression: financial support for Dutch military efforts.

Rubens, a shrewd judge of the political climate, could see just what was coming. “Should the English armada make a single move
against the king of Spain,” he wrote in September, “believe me the world will see a bad game.” That prediction was accurate; Buckingham was no more adept a military commander than he was a wedding planner. Roughly a month after Rubens issued his warning, a combined English-Dutch fleet of one hundred ships, under English direction, sailed for the Iberian Peninsula, though without any concrete instructions on where to land. After a good deal of frittering about, they decided on Cádiz, a fortified city on Spain’s southern Atlantic coast. The expeditionary force was neither tactically nor logistically prepared for such a campaign. It managed to land, but on a barren island in the port, and without the matériel necessary to mount an assault on a well-armed Spanish garrison. Without potable water, the soldiers requisitioned local wine, which left them in something less than ideal fighting form. “The only prudence the English showed in this enterprise,” Rubens wrote, “was in retiring as speedily as possible, even though with great losses, and in disgrace.”

If there was any hope of a peace between Spain and England, the attack on Cádiz in October 1625 ended it. Ambassadors were recalled, and Buckingham traveled to The Hague in December to formalize a fifteen-year offensive and defensive alliance with the Dutch. “I have no doubt war will follow,” Rubens wrote. It was the day after Christmas, but he was not inclined to be generous. “When I consider the caprice and arrogance of Buckingham, I pity the young king who, through false counsel, is needlessly throwing himself and his kingdom into such an extremity. For anyone can start a war, when he wishes, but he cannot so easily end it.”

Rubens wrote that letter from a hotel in Laeken, a Brussels suburb. The artist moved there with his wife, Isabella, and their two sons when an outbreak of plague struck Antwerp at the end of the year. As Rubens had earlier advised Peiresc, the best precaution from contagious disease was flight. (In general, Rubens was suspicious of
the bloodlettings, purgatives, injections, and other treatments that were the hallmarks of contemporary medical practice, remedies often “more grave than the illness itself.”)

The Rubenses returned to Antwerp at the end of February 1626, after they thought the worst of the epidemic had passed. In the summer, however, a new outbreak struck the city. Four months later, on June 20, Isabella Rubens died at her Antwerp home. It had been less than three years since Rubens had buried his only daughter. Visited by tragedy again, the grieving husband spent a small fortune on the traditional Flemish ceremony that followed his wife’s funeral.

“I find it very hard to separate the grief for this loss from the memory of a person whom I must love and cherish as long as I live,” he wrote of his wife. “Truly I have lost an excellent companion.” Isabella’s death put Rubens into an uncharacteristic depression, one that he could not overcome through immersion in his work or the Lipsian constancy that he had always used as a philosophical bulwark against adversity. “I have no pretensions about ever attaining a stoic equanimity,” he wrote. The only palliatives, he felt, were time and travel. “I should think a journey would be advisable, to take me away from the many things which necessarily renew my sorrow … The novelties which present themselves to the eye in a change of country occupy the imagination and leave no room for a relapse into grief.” Conveniently, diplomatic matters would demand just such a journey—one that would leave him with little time for mourning.

A grieving Rubens was busy planning to remove himself from Antwerp in the summer of 1626, but a more pressing concern in that city was the arrival of unwanted guests from the north. Hostilities between Spanish and Dutch forces had only intensified in the wake of the Cádiz fiasco, and rumors of an impending Dutch offensive gathered momentum through the summer. The enemy finally materialized on a stifling morning at the end of August. The sentries at the Antwerp citadel got first look at the flotilla—four bristling warships and a convoy of support vessels sitting far off in the Scheldt estuary, looming and full of menace. Soon enough, the ships were visible from the docks down by the river and the rooftops of the city’s carefully tended houses. This was the Low Countries, after all; the land was flat as a stretched canvas. For the military commanders up in the citadel, that level topography was a mixed blessing. If there was no high ground to which they might safely retreat, at least they could see their enemy approaching and have time to
prepare for the onslaught. That was the soldier’s perspective, anyway. It offered little consolation to the citizens of Antwerp, to say nothing of the city’s most illustrious resident. For Rubens and his neighbors, there was little defense but to stick within the city walls and hope for the best.