Master of Shadows (9 page)

Jan Rubens had some difficulty coming to terms with his wife’s unusually large generosity of spirit. His replies to her betray a justifiable sense of self-loathing and a sullen pessimism as to his future. Maria, now fully responsible for the household and her children, tried to rally the spirits of her self-described “unworthy husband” with a series of emotionally charged letters:

The heavily offended lords in question, namely William and his brother Johan, were not nearly so forgiving as Maria Rubens. In cuckolding the Prince of Orange, champion of the Dutch rebellion, Jan had committed an act of apocalyptic foolishness. But he did leave his wife with a political lever as she bargained for his life. The mysterious cause of Jan’s arrest, though a subject of gossip as far away as Antwerp, remained a secret convenient to both the Rubenses and the Oranges. A trial and subsequent execution would have exposed the truth, and the last thing William needed was a public embarrassment just as he was building his reputation as a great man of action; far better to let the transgressor rot in a dank German cell, out of sight and out of mind. Anna was also removed from public visibility, to the town of Dietz, where she gave birth to a daughter, Christina “von Dietz,” in August 1571. William refused to acknowledge her.

Maria, meanwhile, made a business of seeking clemency on behalf of her incarcerated husband. She moved the family to Siegen so that she might be closer to him, but was repeatedly turned away from the Dillenburg gates. Eventually, she was allowed to visit. In a series of pleading letters, and later in person, she begged Johan and William to restore her family, “for the sake of my poor children, who have seen not only the ruin of their father but their mother’s distress of her senses.” Eventually, they relented. On May 10, 1573,
after more than two years behind bars, Jan was paroled, though he remained under house arrest. Johan credited Maria’s heartfelt pleas for their reconsideration.

Circumstances for the Rubenses were difficult. Because of his arrest, Jan was unable to practice law. Compounding the family’s already considerable problems, Jan then ran afoul of local authorities for violating the terms of his parole. He had been seen walking about the city and mingling with friends, among other precluded activities. Bereft of Jan’s earning power, the family survived on its meager savings and on interest paid out of the large sum left as his bail. Matters improved after Anna’s death, in 1577. Few mourned her loss, and with William now remarried, the entire sorry episode of her affair was swept under the rug. Rubens was allowed to return to his profession, though he was forever banished from William’s territories in the Netherlands and similarly barred from coming within sight of the prince himself. Christina, referred to derisively as “the little girl,” was raised by members of William’s family at Dillenburg. With Jan working again, the legitimate Rubens family expanded. In 1574, Maria gave birth to a boy, Philip. Three years later, in 1577, with the family still residing in Siegen, she gave birth to another son. He arrived on June 28, the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul, and was named in their honor: Peter Paul Rubens.

The expanded Rubens brood eventually moved back to Cologne and began the slow process of resurrecting the family name. Changing circumstances in Antwerp allowed them to recover some of their property, even if a permanent return was impossible given Jan’s banishment. Their misfortune was not yet over, however. The grim specter of disease, so little understood, haunted the family. In 1580, Jan and Maria’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Clara, succumbed to some malady that could not be restrained. Three years later her brother Hendrik, aged sixteen, passed away. Between their deaths, Maria had
lost a third child, an infant named for Jan’s father, Bartholomeus. The oldest of the Rubens siblings, Jan Baptist, no doubt embarrassed by his father’s “situation,” had long since left home to embark on a now entirely forgotten career as a painter. In 1587, the withered paterfamilias passed on himself. At fifty-six, Jan Rubens was not a young man by the standards of the day, and his time in the Dillenburg dungeon and the straitened circumstances that followed had taken their toll. But with his death, he had granted his family freedom. Maria and her three remaining children—Blandina and her precocious younger brothers, Philip and Peter Paul—were finally free to return to Antwerp, their ancestral home.

Back in the city she so missed, Maria Rubens set her family up in a house on the Meir, Antwerp’s primary commercial boulevard. It was a good address, but then real estate was easy to come by at the time. Through its troubles, Antwerp had remained an open city populated by Catholics and Protestants in equal number. But a recent executive order had forced Protestants either to return to the Catholic faith or to liquidate their holdings and leave altogether. For Maria Rubens, this ultimatum posed no great moral challenge. The flirtations she and Jan had with Protestantism were, from the outset, more political than they were dogmatic. After so bitter an exile, the chance to remain at home surrounded by family and friends easily trumped whatever religious imperatives she might have felt. She was primarily interested in providing her two precocious sons education and opportunity. The Jesuit training of Rombout Verdonck’s private academy would suit them well. The Rubenses, however, were an anomaly. The population drain spurred by that convert-or-leave directive cost Antwerp many of its leading citizens and correspondingly invigorated the intellectual and commercial life of the nascent Dutch republic to the north.

Indeed, the difficult years the Rubens family spent shuttling
back and forth from Cologne to Siegen had been especially hard on their Flemish homeland. Back in 1568, when Maria had rushed off with the family for the putative safety of Germany, Alva’s terror was only just beginning. In 1572, France and England, frustrated by the Iron Duke’s militancy, signed a truce of convenience and began plotting a joint invasion of Flanders with William the Silent as the standard-bearer. The attack began in April, and for a while it looked as if the Low Countries would fall. But Alva patiently massed his troops and then moved to regain his losses in a campaign of extraordinary vindictiveness. At Harlem, his soldiers massacred more than two thousand men, women, and children. Alva hoped to break the rebellion through fear, but his plan backfired. Knowing the atrocities in store, the residents of every city in his path stiffened in resistance.

In November 1573, the Iron Duke, out of funds, was unceremoniously relieved of his duties. Conditions, however, did not improve. Alva’s unpaid Spanish troops held Antwerp hostage until they received 1 million florins in back pay. It was an ugly harbinger of trouble. Attempts to disband the mutinous soldiers failed. On the morning of November 4, 1576, an unpaid army descended from Alva’s citadel and ransacked the city. More than eight thousand
sinjoren
were murdered during the “Spanish Fury,” and over one thousand homes burned. Floris de Vriendt’s magnificent town hall, barely a decade old, was torched.

The Spanish Fury’s viciousness brought the entire population of the Low Countries together—albeit briefly. With the Pacification of Ghent, signed just four days after the Fury began, the provinces of the Catholic south and the Protestant north united in their demand that Philip remove his forces from the Low Countries in their entirety. The Spanish troops eventually departed, and Antwerp was soon under the control of its hereditary master,
William the Silent. But the harquebus marriage of north and south was headed for divorce. In January 1579, the increasingly militant northern provinces signed a mutual defense treaty, the Union of Utrecht, and later the Oath of Abjuration, by which they renounced the Spanish crown entirely. The southern provinces, led by a Catholic nobility still loyal to Spain, signed a pact of their own, the Treaty of Arras.

This crisis eventually precipitated decisive action in Madrid. Philip dispatched Alessandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma, to restore order and put an end to the Dutch rebellion. The duke proved a shrewd choice. Unlike his disgraced mother, Margaret of Parma, he never lacked for resolve, and his skill as a military tactician was rivaled only by his reputation for bravery, proven against the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto, in 1571. Farnese began his campaign to retake the Low Countries for Spain in 1582, sweeping north and west from his base in the loyal southern provinces of Hainaut and Artois. His effectiveness as a commander was soon readily apparent. He kept his army well supplied, and pressed it forward with methodical efficiency. One by one, the cities of Flanders fell to his men. By the autumn of 1584, Antwerp was surrounded, and the Scheldt under blockade. The besieged
sinjoren
, loyal to William, held out heroically for months, but it was to be a losing effort. A last-ditch attempt to blast through Farnese’s river cordon failed. By August 1585, Farnese had his prize, along with 1 million florins in cash to keep his troops from sacking what remained.

Farnese’s success in securing Flanders had the unfortunate effect of drawing England into the conflict in the Low Countries. The English queen, Elizabeth I, had established Protestantism in England, and now feared that Spain might try to restore Catholic primacy within her very domain. Flanders, just across the Channel,
would make for a convenient staging ground for an attack on the English homeland. Faced with that reality, Elizabeth signed the Treaty of Nonsuch, by which she agreed to provide both military and financial support to the Protestant Dutch rebels. Terms of that agreement also left England in control of several key defensive positions within the Dutch provinces.

Philip considered the English intrusion into this territory an act of war, and in response chose the drastic course of action Elizabeth most feared: an invasion of the British Isles with forces drawn from Flanders. Under his direction, Spain marshaled its resources for attack, and in May 1588 the great Spanish Armada set sail from Lisbon. The plan was for it to rendezvous with Farnese’s expeditionary army of seventeen thousand men at Dunkirk. From there, the combined force would cross the Channel for the English coast and a march on London. Of course, it never came to that. As the armada plowed its way north from the Iberian Peninsula, it was dogged by the more nimble English navy. In August, it was finally broken at the Battle of Gravelines, off the Flemish coast.

The loss of the fleet was a devastating blow to Spain, and left matters in the Low Countries at an impasse. Farnese, in particular, well understood the plight of the long-suffering Flemish population, and had few illusions as to their prospects. “It is the saddest thing in the world to see what these people are suffering; this country is ravaged by the king’s troops as well as by those of their enemies,” he wrote. Sensing the moment for compromise, he dispatched a key adviser, Jean Richardot, to meet with Philip back in Madrid. His mission was to press the Spanish king to entertain a peace proposal with the Dutch, a proposal that would have given the Dutch the right to freely practice the Protestant faith in exchange for an end to their rebellion. Richardot would remain an influential figure within Flanders for years—and a patron of both
Rubens brothers—but in this task he was not successful. Philip was not prepared to negotiate with the Dutch. Time, he thought, was on his side. If the Dutch felt they could win a prolonged battle of attrition with the superior military and financial resources of Spain, surely they were fooling themselves.

IN FACT, THE DUTCH
were more than capable of holding off the forces of Spain. Two decades after the Spanish fleet had been routed in the icy waters off the Flemish coast, the situation in the Netherlands remained at a stalemate, even as the players in the drama had, for the most part, changed. In 1584, William of Orange was permanently silenced by an assassin’s bullet while puttering down the stairs of his home in Delft. Maurice, his son with Anna of Saxony, Jan Rubens’s old paramour, took control of Dutch forces. With frigid blue eyes and a strawberry shock of a beard, he was an intimidating figure, and quickly proved himself to be a far more able commander than his father.