Master of Shadows (33 page)

This wasn’t quite the reception Rubens had been expecting, but he correctly surmised that he was being tested. After noting that he had come on a passport issued by Frederick himself, he composed a pleading note to the prince, begging the opportunity to speak with him and going heavy on the obsequiousness, as was his wont. Junius delivered it, and soon after there was another knock on his door. This time it was a page, and he was there to escort Rubens to the Oude Hof.

Late in the evening, with important business at stake, neither Rubens nor the prince would have broached the rather unsavory shared family history that made them distant familial relations, even if both men were surely aware of it. (Christina von Dietz, daughter of Jan Rubens and Anna of Saxony, was a stepsister of both men.) Instead, Rubens moved directly to the subject at hand: a truce that would bring peace to the Low Countries. He had been granted authority to strike a bargain with the prince, in which Spain would relinquish a series of Flemish cities, including hard-won Breda, in exchange for Pernambuco, the sugar-rich Portuguese colony on the coast of Brazil, captured by the Dutch in 1630. For Isabella, this was a considerable territorial sacrifice, but one that Olivares could live with back in Madrid, as it protected what was most vital to the Spanish crown—the colonial empire that filled its treasury. It was, perhaps, a generous offer, but Frederick Henry was in no position to accept it, at least on his own. Any treaty would have to win the
approval of the full Dutch States General, and after the long disputations of the
groote werck
he was not especially sanguine about the prospect of achieving it, even if he supported the Spanish proposal himself. With that, and a promise to keep channels open, Rubens was dismissed.

That meeting was somewhat less than hopeful, but Rubens didn’t give up on his efforts to rally the prince. A month later, at the beginning of February, he wrote to Frederick Henry, pressing him on the terms they had discussed, and he followed that up with another letter two weeks hence. The prince never replied. At the end of March, the frustrated painter wrote once more to The Hague, this time to Constantijn Huygens, an adviser to Frederick (he was also a great connoisseur, and Rembrandt’s first champion), inquiring in a rather passive-aggressive tone as to whether the prince had even received his letters. Frederick had read them, Huygens replied, but they were still subject to “deliberations.” Rubens got the message, and passed it on to Isabella. “I do not see that it is possible to make any further efforts on our side for now,” he wrote.

Frederick wasn’t interested in negotiating because, in the months after Rubens’s visit to The Hague, the run of the war had tipped heavily in his favor. In February 1632, just as Rubens was sending his pleading letters to Frederick, Isabella learned that her most distinguished and influential general, Henri de Bergh, had defected to the Dutch side, taking with him all of the troops under his command. Shortly thereafter, she uncovered a ring of aristocratic conspirators plotting her overthrow. Spain’s enemies, and even its allies, were quick to exploit this situation for their own benefit. Richelieu did all he could to encourage the plotters. They also received intelligence from Balthasar Gerbier, a man always happy to place himself at the center of an intrigue, never mind his
long-standing friendship with Rubens and his many years working to bring peace to Spain and England. Gerbier’s various enemies had always thought him shameless and unreliable, and his actions proved those judgments entirely valid. He even took to spying on Rubens, his erstwhile negotiating partner and houseguest, though without much success. “I got nothing out of him,” he wrote. Gerbier did, however, take the rather extreme measure of having the painter tailed. Rubens never found out.

Isabella managed to break up the plot to remove her from power, but at a significant cost to her political standing. Her aristocratic opposition, now led by Philippe Charles d’Arenberg, the Duke of Aarschot, insisted that she call a States General of the Flemish provinces, and that this body be allowed to negotiate a truce on its own terms with its Dutch counterpart. In her desperation to avoid this outcome, which would have been entirely unacceptable in Madrid, she turned to Rubens, her most trusted negotiator. In late August, she dispatched him to meet with Frederick Henry at Maastricht, recently captured by the Dutch prince after a three-month siege. Once more, Rubens was given “full power to give the fatal stroke unto Mars.” Once more, he was rebuffed, though the proceedings of their meeting remained veiled in secrecy.

That mission would prove to be the most controversial of Rubens’s political career. His failure to conclude a deal made it impossible for the infanta to resist Aarschot’s demand that the Flemish States General be allowed to independently negotiate with the Dutch. She was not, however, about to make it easy for them. In December 1632, when a team of Aarschot’s deputies traveled to The Hague, they found their ability to bargain undermined by their ignorance as to the precise terms Rubens had discussed with Frederick
Henry at Maastricht. Isabella could have sent a brief, but instead arranged a passport for Rubens so that he might join in the deliberations, on her behalf.

That move enraged Aarschot, a pompous, stubborn man of considerable arrogance. The last thing he wanted was Isabella’s oversight, and in the person of a painter, at that. The duke was heir to one of Europe’s most storied noble dynasties, and had little patience for those of lesser social station. He advised Isabella that Rubens would not be recognized by the Flemish delegation at The Hague, so there was no point in his making the journey north. Aarschot wanted Rubens’s papers, not Rubens. And so in early January, with talks stalled in The Hague, Aarschot excused himself from the deliberations and made a special trip to Antwerp to pry those papers directly from the artist’s hands, a task he considered well beneath his dignity. On the morning of his arrival, he sent a note to Rubens demanding that the artist deliver the documents to him, in person.

In the more obsequious days of his youth, Rubens might have complied without hesitation, but the artist was no longer a political neophyte, a man with no standing. He had a sure sense of his own importance, and patents of nobility from two kings that certified it. He didn’t take well to being summarily ordered around, especially by a man he considered just short of traitorous. Isabella was his patron, after all, and he had done nothing but follow her orders. With no alternative, however, he was forced to pack up his papers for the duke. But he wasn’t going to show up in person to hand them over. In an accompanying note, he defended his behavior with thinly disguised antipathy. “I stand upon firm ground and entreat you to believe that I shall always be able to give a good account of my actions,” he wrote. “I protest therefore before God that I have
never had any orders but to serve your Excellency, in all ways, in the conduct of this affair.”

Aarschot wasn’t interested in those excuses. “I might well have omitted to do you the honor of answering you, considering how grossly you have failed in your duty of coming to see me,” he wrote in a reply brimming with condescension. “It matters little to me upon what ground you stand on and what account you can render of your actions. All I can tell you is that I shall be greatly obliged if you will learn from now on how persons of your station should write to men of mine.”

That was enough. As far as Rubens was concerned, he had fulfilled his obligations to his sovereign. In his
Epistulae morales
, Seneca advised that the prudent citizen is wise to retreat to his own endeavors when the state becomes too corrupt for remedy. Petrarch later expanded on that point, emphasizing that a withdrawal from worldly affairs was all but necessary if one was to achieve “something great and veritably divine.” Rubens, trained in the Lipsian tradition of neo-stoicism, was well aware of these prescriptions. “I carried out negotiations of the gravest importance, to the complete satisfaction of those who sent me and also of the other parties,” he wrote to Peiresc. It was now time to “cut the golden knot of ambition” and return, full time, to his
dolcissima professione
. Having come to this decision, he made a final journey to Isabella’s palace in Brussels, to beg her permission to be relieved of his duties. Isabella was not anxious to give up her secret diplomatic weapon, but he was adamant, and after some convincing she relented. It was his last successful negotiation. In his letter to Peiresc, he wrote that his retirement had proven harder to win than any favor she had yet granted him.

Aarschot’s pride eventually got the better of him. Word of his
sharp exchange with Rubens soon was the talk of polite society in the Low Countries—and beyond. It was one thing to insult the Spanish king’s favorite painter, but Aarschot’s insistence on the prerogatives of the Flemish States General was an affront to Philip himself, and that would not pass. A new Spanish administrator was dispatched from Madrid with orders to rein in the duke and put a stop to all negotiations conducted by the States General. Under firm new leadership, and with Spanish military and economic power at its command, the Brussels junta reasserted the king’s authority, bolstering Isabella’s shaky regime. In November 1633, a frustrated Aarschot left for Spain to plead the case of the Flemish aristocracy before Philip. Isabella, still nervous about the precarious state of affairs in Flanders, advised her nephew to receive him “with as much courtesy as possible.”

Isabella was especially concerned, because she had recently been advised by Gerbier, the freelancing diplomatic gadabout, that Aarschot had been among the ringleaders of the unsuccessful coup to remove her from power. Gerbier himself had been implicated in that conspiracy, and its failure left his reputation in jeopardy. As an expedient, he turned informant against the very plot he had previously worked to foment. Ever duplicitous, he even called on Rubens to testify on his behalf before Isabella. Rubens responded with a lukewarm endorsement of the man who had been surreptitiously reporting on his comings and goings. If he wasn’t quite sure of Gerbier’s treachery, his antennae were perceptive enough to sense something wasn’t quite proper. Isabella remained unconvinced of Gerbier’s sincerity, but paid him a bribe of 20,000 crowns for the full details of the plot against her. Shortly thereafter, the pious infanta so esteemed by Rubens as both a patron and a sovereign died of natural causes at the age of sixty-seven. The marquis d’Aytona, the Spanish ambassador Rubens knew well through the
recent negotiations with Marie de’ Medici, was installed as interim governor.

In fact, Gerbier’s charge against Aarschot was bogus, and Philip might well have been inclined to follow his deceased aunt’s advice to let Aarschot off without any punishment were it not for the duke’s own insolence. Aarschot was offered a full pardon in exchange for testimony about the conspiracy and an oath of fidelity. His responses, however, were so lacking in candor that Philip had him jailed. The duke died in prison after seven years of captivity. He was never tried for the crime he did not commit.

Rubens, meanwhile, had become increasingly weary of Gerbier. Indeed, he had been forced to intervene on behalf of his old “friend” in the previous year, when Gerbier had initiated negotiations with Isabella to bring Rubens’s former pupil Anthony Van Dyck to London as a court painter to Charles I. The problem was that Gerbier had begun these discussions without even the courtesy of informing Van Dyck, who was quite understandably incensed. Rubens, ever the diplomat, managed to smooth over the hurt feelings, and Van Dyck eventually took the appointment. Gerbier later returned to England and, in 1638, was knighted for his service to the crown. His allegiance to Charles presented him with some difficulties during and after the English Civil War, but he managed to survive. That, always, was his primary skill. He died in 1663, at the age of seventy-one.

Only once more was Rubens compelled to return to diplomatic service, but the mission collapsed almost before it began. In the summer of 1635, with talk of conciliation in the air, he was recruited to travel through Holland to test the waters for yet another possible peace agreement with the Prince of Orange. The pretext for this trip would be a visit to Amsterdam to look at a few paintings requiring authentication—he had been invited by local dignitaries—while
en route to England to install his canvases at the Whitehall Banqueting House. The ruse was soon discovered in Holland, and the States General refused to grant him a passport, which was just as well. “I have preserved my domestic leisure,” he wrote to Peiresc, “and by the grace of God, find myself still at home, very contented.” The Whitehall paintings were sent to London by courier.

IN THAT SAME LETTER TO PEIRESC
, Rubens professed a “horror of courts.” In the final years of his life, he managed to avoid them almost entirely, even as his professional practice meant he was never far removed from political affairs and those who orchestrated them. His values, for all of his wealth and titles of nobility, would always be those of the burgher elite. He nevertheless remained a favorite of Philip IV, who commissioned him to provide a decorative program of more than sixty paintings, mostly mythological scenes drawn from Ovid, for the Torre de la Parada, the king’s hunting lodge outside of Madrid. (Rubens made oil sketches for the paintings, which were executed on canvas by his studio assistants.) Charles was so pleased with the Banqueting House ceiling, when it finally arrived, that he sent Rubens a gold chain as a reward. Even Frederick Henry, his implacable negotiating foe, begged the great painter for a work from his brush.