Master of Shadows (8 page)

Conductive to devotion
. One could hardly imagine a vision more likely to incite the would-be iconoclast. Somehow, tempers were held in check for a day. But on the next an angry crowd gathered at the cathedral, and it became ever more rowdy the day after that. The Antwerp town council, on which Jan Rubens sat, sent out the civil guard in an effort to disperse the mob, but it was too late; the guard was forced to retreat to de Vriendt’s town hall. Inside the church, Herman Moded, the most reactionary of Calvinist preachers, took the podium, and as he excoriated the paganism of Catholic idolatry, his makeshift flock attacked those idols with axes and sledgehammers and crowbars. Sculptures were yanked down from upper stories with ropes and pulleys. When they were done, the most extravagantly decorated cathedral in northern Europe was a standing ruin.

Back in Spain, Philip was appalled when he learned of these events, and especially displeased to find that William, in his capacity as margrave (hereditary lord) of Antwerp, had granted Protestants the right of free practice in that city. Philip was absolutely unwilling to brook the open worship of a religion he considered heretic within his kingdom, and he was assuredly not prepared to stand by as an emboldened opposition flouted his authority and spread insurrection across the Low Countries. The king took action. Goaded by his most bellicose advisers, Philip ordered that an army of nearly ten thousand men, an overwhelming force, be drawn from his dominions and assembled at Milan, in Spanish-controlled Lombardy. Military engineers were dispatched to ready a route through the Alps to the Low Countries that would circumvent hostile France. This was no simple task. Moving troops from Spanish territory to the Netherlands was so notoriously difficult that the phrase “send a soldier to Flanders” (
poner una pica en Flandes)
became a sardonic euphemism for asking the impossible. Some three hundred engineers were sent to expand
the military corridor known as the Spanish Road, and their preparations continued through the winter and into early spring. In June 1567, the army finally departed under the command of Philip’s most militaristic counselor, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alva.

What followed was an object lesson in the dangers of an arrogant, insular, and incompetent occupation. The “Iron Duke” arrived with his troops in late August, and wasted no time in alienating the local population. His soldiers, hardened veterans in shiny battle gear, were a daunting vision as they marched in file through the Low Countries, trailing behind them an unruly horde of profiteers. Despite the objections of Margaret of Parma, the Spanish governor, the duke garrisoned his men in the loyal towns surrounding Brussels, where they were needed least and where their rough behavior was an affront that turned friends into foes. He then proceeded to decommission Margaret’s army, a public rebuke that prompted her resignation and left him with responsibility for both military and administrative governance. Undeterred, he dismantled her entire bureaucracy. “Putting in new men one by one is like throwing a bottle of good wine into a vat of vinegar,” he said. To see to his directives, he relied almost exclusively on his own staff of Italian and Spanish officers and functionaries. He even ordered that William’s son, a university student in Louvain, be abducted and packed off to Spain. When the boy’s professors complained about this outrage against their very conception of order and fairness, the duke’s councillor replied, “We care nothing for your privileges.”

In Antwerp, a hotbed of Calvinist insurgency, the duke saw to the design and construction of a fortified military compound. Just south of the city, and separated from it by a large open field that would leave would-be attackers fatally exposed, an enormous moated citadel—a “green zone”
avant la lettre
—was erected by the duke’s Italian military architects, who then rerouted the city
ramparts to enclose it. Pentagonal in form, but with wedged bastions and ravelins projecting from its corners and flanks, the fortress offered a menacing profile to the city it was ostensibly intended to protect, an unholy inversion of the typical fort-defends-town program. Inside was a veritable city within a city: barracks, armory, stores, tavern, chapel, all the necessities a battalion might require to withstand a prolonged siege, including—presumably for inspiration—a bronze statue of the unrepentant duke himself. Its inscription was dedicated to the man “who extirpated sedition, reduced rebellion, restored religion, secured justice, and established peace.”

With his army in place, the duke set about the subjugation of the local population, and did so using tactics honed during the Inquisition. “Everyone must be made in constant fear of the roof breaking over his head,” the duke wrote in a letter back to Philip. He seemed entirely immune to the commonsensical idea that his harsh rule might come back to haunt him, though Machiavelli, in
The Prince
, had warned specifically of the danger of such measures. “He who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it,” the Italian wrote in 1513, “for in rebellion it has always the watch-word of liberty and its ancient privileges as a rallying point, which neither time nor benefits will ever cause it to forget.”

The primary instrument of Alva’s terror was a secret court, the Council of Troubles. Flemings called it the Council of Blood. The tribunal prosecuted some twelve thousand citizens for heresy and treason, often on trumped-up charges and with evidence obtained via torture. Alva orchestrated mass arrests, midnight seizures, book burnings, a full catalog of horrors. More than one thousand were executed in gruesome public displays—live quarterings, burnings at the stake—designed to instill fear in the populace.

The duke’s terror was directed at body, mind, and wallet. “A goodly sum must be squeezed out of private persons,” he wrote. Maintenance of his new order, in particular his immense standing army, was an expensive proposition. Massive urban citadels didn’t just pay for themselves, and Philip had more pressing needs at home. Funds would have to be raised from the native population, and that meant a series of new taxes on those least willing and able to bear them. Public disdain for the duke, under these harsh conditions, was enormous, as reflected by a contemporary parody of the Lord’s Prayer:

Even the Lord couldn’t protect those caught reciting it.

JAN AND MARIA RUBENS
escaped the worst of Alva’s depredations, but just barely. Their days in Antwerp had been numbered from the moment the Calvinist preacher Herman Moded and his iconoclastic henchmen had forced their way into the Onze Lieve
Vrouwekathedraal, only to destroy it. In the wake of that catastrophe, but before Alva had taken control of the government, Margaret of Parma had ordered Antwerp’s aldermen to explain how they had allowed the great cathedral to be defiled. This was an almost unconscionable act of buck-passing, given her own failure, as governor, to take precautions against the iconoclasts. The aldermen, in lawyerly fashion, responded with an exculpatory brief. That might have been good enough for Margaret, but it was squarely rejected by the newly arrived Iron Duke when he found it sitting on his desk. In December 1567, he demanded a more comprehensive explanation from the town fathers, Jan Rubens among them.

The prospects for those aldermen were grim; their presence on Alva’s target list meant their very lives were in jeopardy. Antwerp’s burgomeester (mayor) had been executed the previous September on a heresy charge, and Jan’s name had already appeared on a manifest of suspected Calvinist converts. In January, he hired private counsel and submitted yet another pleading apologia for his conduct. (Yes, he had attended a Calvinist sermon or two, but he was curious and nothing more.) While his case plodded along toward an ugly conclusion, Jan Rubens packed up his family and sent them to a relation in Limburg. From there, Maria and the four children traveled to Cologne, safely beyond Alva’s reach. A few months later, with his case still pending, Jan Rubens quietly slipped out of the city gates and took to the road for the German border.

The Rubenses were among those in the first wave of a great diaspora from the Spanish Netherlands, and from Antwerp in particular. Over the following decade, the city’s population dropped from over 100,000 to fewer than half that number. Most of that migration would be to the north, to the seven provinces of the nascent Dutch republic, most prominently Holland, Utrecht, and Zeeland. That shift would eventually propel Amsterdam, the growing
colossus of Holland, past Antwerp as the trade capital of northern Europe. During the early exodus years, however, most refugees of the duke’s terror quit the Low Countries entirely. Cologne, reasonably tolerant and tied to the Netherlands through trade, was a convenient destination.

The distinguished leader of the fugitive horde was Silent William himself. Anticipating trouble, he had departed the Netherlands before Alva arrived with his Spanish army. On the lam, William established his base of operations at the gloomy Castle of Dillenburg, seat of the Nassau family dynasty, some thirty miles to the east of Cologne. He wasn’t to be found there often, however; most of his time was spent on the road, rallying opposition to Alva and occasionally engaging the duke’s troops in military action, to unfortunate effect. Proceedings on the home front didn’t fare much better for William. Anna of Saxony, his free-spirited young wife, had little patience for the family’s dank castle, or indeed for William himself. When they had married, in 1561, William had been one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Now he was an exile, and the good-time girl was sequestered in the hinterlands, where there was little fun to be had. While William was off on one of his expeditions, she ditched Dillenburg for the more cosmopolitan pleasures of Cologne.

Distressed by her husband’s penury, Anna engaged Jan Bets, a prominent attorney, to reclaim personal assets seized from her by the Spanish crown. (Philip had laid claim to all of William’s property, but she had possessions of her own that were, technically, separate.) This pursuit entailed a good deal of travel, so Bets required a deputy to manage the proceedings at home, ideally someone with a solid grounding in the property statutes of the Netherlands. He had just such a person in mind: an old professional acquaintance and former distinguished alderman of Antwerp who had recently arrived in the city and was anxious for work.

Jan Rubens may have appeared an inspired choice, but the hiring proved a disaster for all parties. In their long, intimate hours spent working together on her case, Jan and Anna, two exiles with seven children between them, found their passions inflamed. This was not an unusual state for Anna. Her reputation for debauchery was already the subject of local gossip, and had prompted a series of letters from her traveling husband pleading that she reform her behavior. Instead, she moved to Siegen, a small hilltop town encircled by a defensive wall a day’s ride east of Cologne. Perhaps the goal was to remove herself from the rumor mill. For that there was good reason: she was pregnant, and by the spring of 1571 she was beginning to show. William, long absent, was not a candidate for paternity.

The prospective father was Jan Rubens, and there was no covering up the fact. In early March, while he was traveling from his own family residence in Cologne to the hilltop aerie of his client and paramour, he was arrested and summarily tossed into the Dillenburg dungeon. The charge, levied under the authority of Johan of Nassau (William’s brother), was adultery with Her Royal Highness, a capital offense.

Maria Rubens, devoted wife and mother of four, suffered the mysterious disappearance of her husband for three weeks. Finally, on March 28, news of his situation arrived, first in an official notice that revealed the nature of his crime, and shortly thereafter in a missive from the prisoner himself. Stuck in a damp cell and with his life in jeopardy, Jan Rubens was a contrite and fearful man. He begged his wife’s forgiveness, and proposed she keep his embarrassing status quiet. She didn’t have much choice. A stranger in a strange land, with a reputation to maintain, a family to support, and no great means available to her, Maria had little recourse but to accept his apology, regardless of its sincerity. But it did seem sincere, and Jan
Rubens, to his great good fortune, had married a woman of extraordinary forbearance. Maria immediately sent off a pardoning letter to her husband, and followed it with another offering “every satisfaction on the subject of the forgiveness you ask me for, which I grant you now once again, and will ever grant you when you ask it of me, but on one condition—that you will love me as you used to.”