Master of Shadows (29 page)

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.

Taken aback, Rubens noted politely that Spain was simply not in a position to guarantee the return of the Palatinate, which had been partitioned among the Holy Roman Empire, Bavaria, and Spain. Of course, Philip could
request
that his allies return their portions of the disputed territory to Frederick V, but without some carrot as an incentive they had little reason to do so. In any case, Rubens simply did not have the authority to treat with Charles on this matter. He would, however, be happy to forward Charles’s demand back to Madrid. In the meantime, he asked only one concession from the English king. Until there was an answer from Spain, he begged Charles not to extend the armistice he had signed with France into a more permanent, full-fledged alliance—to do so would surely doom any hope for a peace between their respective countries, England and Spain. Charles agreed. France could wait.

Rubens’s quick thinking had saved the day—securing that final concession from Charles was critical to moving the talks forward, and no small accomplishment—but Rubens still left Greenwich disheartened by his visit with the king. He should have expected Charles to be a demanding and difficult negotiating partner. What the king wanted, he expected to receive, and he was notoriously
petulant when it was not immediately forthcoming. The impetuous trip to Spain in search of a bride was a product of his rash temperament. Charles had repeatedly dissolved the obstreperous English Parliament over questions of his authority, most recently in March, when he had embarked on an autocratic period of “Personal Rule” that would last eleven years. He did so at considerable cost, however, both politically and financially. Without Parliament’s cooperation, raising capital for both his art collecting and his military adventures posed a considerable challenge. This, in turn, made it incumbent upon him to forge peace with his primary adversaries, France and Spain. He simply could not afford the alternative.

The days following that initial royal audience were a whirlwind for Rubens, though he was not entirely pleased with his treatment. Dudley Carleton, his old trading partner, threw him a fine dinner party—that was nice. More important, he had several meetings with Richard Weston, the lord treasurer, and Cottington, the two most powerful men at court and the chief proponents of the Spanish peace. For the most part, however, he was forced to keep a rather low profile in order to minimize speculation as to the true reasons for his presence in London. Both the general public and a large faction within the English court were adamantly opposed to any kind of peace with Catholic Spain, and there was no reason to antagonize them before the essential parameters of a deal could be established.

In fact, a certain sense of frustration characterized both the English and the Spanish camps during Rubens’s first week in London. Isaac Wake, a well-connected diplomat and figure at court, wrote that the king found the offer of truce meager to the point of being disrespectful, and now suspected Spanish motives. Conversely, Wake observed that Rubens was upset by the relatively cold welcome he had received at court. Spain’s enemies, meanwhile, had
figured out what Rubens was up to, and were making bold efforts to discredit him. The Dutch envoy, Albert Joachimi, informed his English counterparts that any negotiations conducted through the artist would be “contrary to their common interests” and damaging to Charles’s reputation. Contarini was especially harsh. “Rubens is a covetous man, so he probably aims at being talked about and some good present,” he wrote. That was surely one of the least generous appraisals of the artist committed to print during his lifetime.

While Rubens was struggling through the opening round of negotiations, his movements were closely tracked by another Spanish agent in London. Isabella had a mole in Charles’s inner circle, George Lamb, a secretary to one of the king’s longtime confidants, Sir John Coke. A week after Rubens had arrived, Lamb sat down at his desk and composed a report on the painter’s less than heroic arrival in London. This was painstaking work. After completing five double-sided pages in black ink, he switched to red and carefully translated each word into code in the space between the lines. The chosen cipher was something altogether more complicated than the simple numerical device Rubens had used in his correspondence with his Dutch cousin Jan Brant. (A good code, typically based on a phrase known only by the agent and his handler, was thought to be all but unbreakable.) When Lamb was finished going over the entire document, he copied the coded text onto fresh paper and addressed it to his Flemish contact “Jacques Han” of Antwerp. Eventually, it made its way to Brussels, and from there it was passed on to Olivares in Madrid.

Lamb’s report was not encouraging. He described the truce offer as falling “farre short” of English expectations, and noted that although Rubens had been entertained reasonably, Spain had few friends at court and “one of three named is not to be relyed upon.” Rubens was particularly worried about the volatility of his English
counterparts. “Rarely, in fact, do these people persist in a resolution, but change from hour to hour, and always from bad to worse,” he wrote of the English in a letter to Olivares, a man whose own constancy Rubens had often questioned in private. As far as the artist was concerned, the entire structure of Charles’s government was ill conceived. “Whereas in other courts negotiations begin with the ministers and finish with the royal word and signature,” he wrote, “here they begin with the king and end with the ministers.”

The difficulty of this method became readily apparent during Rubens’s second meeting with Charles, again at his Greenwich palace. The king received the painter warmly, but quickly shifted matters forward. “Let’s get down to particulars,” said the king. He had reconsidered his demand regarding the Palatinate and had a new offer for Rubens: Spain should surrender its garrisons in the Palatinate and in the meantime call an international conference in Madrid, at which the fate of the Bavarian and imperial strongholds would be resolved. That proposal took Rubens aback. He knew, based on his private conversations with both Weston and Cottington, that the two influential lords were specifically opposed to such an arrangement; they considered any partition plan unacceptable, as they believed that to accept only the Spanish garrisons would essentially guarantee they would lose the rest of the contested territory held by Spain’s Habsburg allies. With a peace signed, England would have no leverage at the bargaining table, as Spain would have fulfilled its duty. The other parties could simply bow out of the conference, having conceded nothing.

Following his audience with Charles, Rubens immediately informed Cottington and Weston of the king’s latest proposal. They were so incredulous that the artist actually requested a follow-up meeting with Charles, at which he asked the king to reconfirm his offer, which he did, in the presence of the two lords. Cottington and
Weston recapitulated their objection to the king’s proposal, and offered an alternative that would eliminate the leverage issue: they suggested a time limit be set for the complete restitution of the Palatinate. This, of course, was not going to pass muster in Madrid, as Rubens again pointed out. Spain could not be held responsible for any delays imposed by third parties, even if they were its allies.

Once more, it seemed Rubens had successfully held his ground, but that was where discussion ended for the day, and once again he found himself discouraged by a state of affairs that appeared to be caught at an interminable standstill. Indeed, he openly considered a return to Flanders, where he might consult with Isabella and await further instruction from Madrid in the comfort of his Antwerp home. Cottington, however, convinced him to stay. If Rubens were to leave now, Cottington advised him, all hope would be lost. Rubens was inclined to believe Cottington; in their short time together, the two men had developed a comfortable working relationship based on mutual respect, candor, and shared goals. Within the English court, no one was more committed to a peace with Spain. Cottington’s sincerity, Rubens informed Olivares, “could be no greater if he were a Councilor of State of our own king.” The artist, conversely, had won a reputation among the English for his integrity—a reputation that he had fostered through his dealings on the art market and sealed by his conduct in London. Writing to Cottington, the artist’s friend Dudley Carleton described him as “too honest a man to speak untruths contrary to his own knowledge.”

That was not entirely true. Rubens understood that the foreign representative was occasionally required by duty to stretch the boundaries of truth. Indeed, it was an English diplomat, Henry Wotton, who in 1604 had famously quipped, “An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” Wotton paid dearly for that remark; King James was not amused by the
implication that he was conducting a foreign policy based on lies and misinformation, and removed him from diplomatic service. Outright duplicity was condemned as a matter of crude tactlessness, but it was nevertheless well understood that ambassadors could not always be entirely honest, and for this reason they were given a blanket immunity when abroad—even, in Rubens’s words, when they were “assigned dolorous tasks.” For the most part, however, it was in the best interests of the diplomat to be trustworthy. “Confidence alone is the foundation of all human commerce,” Rubens wrote.

Rubens’s reputation for sincerity was one of his great strengths as a diplomat. Indeed, Cottington was especially concerned that Rubens remain in England and continue to work toward compromise, lest his departure leave the field open for a diplomat of less sterling character, namely, Charles de l’Aubespine, marquis de Châteauneuf. The French ambassador was scheduled to arrive in London within the week to formalize the nonaggression pact the French and the English had agreed to back in March. It was no secret that Châteauneuf had been charged with extending the terms of that treaty into a full-scale offensive and defensive alliance against Spain. In their last meeting, Rubens had raised this issue with Charles, who replied that he could hardly abide the French and that he was loath to make an agreement with them. A true Englishman, he considered the French an inherently untrustworthy people, never mind that he had married a Frenchwoman. If Spain hadn’t wasted so much of the last two years dithering, the king told Rubens, he would not have been forced to deal with France to begin with. As it was, he pledged again that he would conclude no further pact with France while the discussions with Spain were still pending. Unstated was an implied threat that he would make just such a league if Spain did not accede to his demands. In a letter to
Olivares, Rubens ruefully noted this, and claimed that if he had been given appropriate authority in the first place, he “could have broken off the French treaty in twenty-four hours.”

Charles did little to hide his essential antipathy to his Gallic suitors. He sent a fleet of royal carriages to meet Châteauneuf at the coast, as he was obliged to do by diplomatic tradition, but he did not make the trip himself. Rubens was happy to hear about the snub, and the ambassador’s icy reception at court. Châteauneuf, however, was fully prepared for this unpleasant eventuality, and the always cunning Richelieu had supplied him with just the means to remedy it: cash. “All the leading nobles live on a sumptuous scale and spend money lavishly, so that the majority of them are hopelessly in debt,” Rubens wrote to Olivares. “I know from reliable sources that Cardinal Richelieu is very liberal and most experienced in gaining partisans in this manner.”