Authors: Mark Lamster
Gerbier remained upset about his treatment during the previous round of negotiations. He believed that the talks in Holland had been a ruse to allow Spain time to form an offensive treaty with France, behind England’s back.
Given that history, it was incumbent on Spain to offer a concrete proposal, and to officially authorize the infanta to negotiate with England.
Charles was using all his powers to bring the Dutch to heel. Their insistence on being described as “free states” in any formal documents—a nonstarter for Spain—could be circumvented by referring to the Dutch merely as “allies” of Great Britain.
Scaglia was to be kept as an intermediary. His political skill made him a useful ally to the negotiators and a potentially disruptive enemy, especially with the French working to undermine their efforts. Also, Scaglia’s Savoyard couriers could travel directly between Flanders and England, a useful convenience. (The English couriers they had been using were forced
to travel through Holland, a detour that sent their correspondence through enemy territory.)
Vosberghen, on the other hand, could be jettisoned. His plan to broaden the scope of the negotiation was pointless. “He who wishes to embrace the whole will succeed in nothing,” wrote Gerbier.
All negotiations would have to remain secret. This was of pivotal importance to the English king, who was already at loggerheads with a volatile Puritan opposition in Parliament that was absolutely against any treaty with Catholic Spain.
At the infanta’s instruction, Rubens sent a précis of the Gerbier correspondence along to Spinola in Madrid, as well as a few of the original letters. Most of the documents Rubens retained, figuring the marquis would have trouble deciphering the codes and translating Gerbier’s arcane Flemish grammar. He did not, however, shy from reproducing the hectoring, frustrated tone Gerbier had adopted in his correspondence. Frankly, he was entirely sympathetic to his English counterpart’s aggravation. He, too, was tired of the needless hurdles Madrid imposed while Flanders—and the rest of Europe—suffered. For his beloved but blockaded Antwerp, the situation was especially dire. “Our city is going step by step to ruin,” he wrote, “and lives only upon its savings; there remains not the slightest bit of trade to support it.”
Rubens was right, at least, in thinking that Spinola had more to worry about than the illegible correspondence of a British agent. When Spinola and Messia arrived in Madrid, in the last week of February, their coach was received outside the city by a large contingent of court functionaries anxious to meet the hero of Breda. The mood was jubilant. In just four days, Spinola would celebrate the marriage of his daughter to his traveling companion. That
affair, the social event of the season, would take place in the court of the Real Alcázar, with Philip IV and all the grandees of Spain in attendance.
For the moment, however, it did not go unnoticed that Spinola departed his glorious welcome in the private carriage of the king’s
valido
, the dour-faced Count-Duke of Olivares. It was the first time the two had met, and from the start it was an uncomfortable relationship. Their personalities, certainly, could not have been more different. Olivares was severe and punctilious, an intellectual, and, as Rubens would later note, a plotter of “great enterprises.” He reputedly kept a coffin in his chambers as a standing reminder of his mortality. Frightened visitors often wondered if theirs was at stake. An equestrian portrait by Velázquez shows the count-duke sneering over his shoulder on a rearing steed, the upturned ends of his mustache giving him an aggressively menacing, even villainous appearance. This was a far cry from the regal mounted portrait Rubens had made of Olivares’s predecessor, the Duke of Lerma—to say nothing of the painter’s stately depiction of Spinola in his gleaming armor. Those contrasting images of Olivares and Spinola, the former belligerent and the latter self-possessed, explained a good deal about the two men, and their antipathy. The count-duke was an emotional man, prone to fits of melancholy, and insistent on the maintenance of his image as a broker of Spanish power. Spinola, however, had little to prove; his military accomplishments conferred a natural authority. He was a soldier’s soldier, a man gripped by logistics and details, not especially eloquent but persuasively frank when the situation required, as it did now.
Bumping along the road into Madrid, Spinola had the unenviable task of informing the second-most-powerful man in Spain (the most powerful man, according to many) of precisely that which he did not wish to hear. As the commander of the Spanish army in
Flanders, Spinola had been the blunt instrument of the count-duke’s foreign policy—a policy he could no longer support. The war in the Low Countries was not going well. Spanish offensives had stalled. Their great canal project was but a ditch in the ground. The Dutch had taken Groenlo. There were no funds to pay the army. The prospect of widespread mutiny—for which there was ugly historical precedent—was dangerously close to becoming reality. The entire country was on the brink of catastrophic financial collapse. As Spinola saw it, there were but two options: substantially increase war funding from Spain or forge a peace with the Dutch. As the former seemed out of the question, there was no alternative—it was time to make peace. With the Habsburg forces of the Holy Roman Empire threatening in nearby Germany, the Dutch would be motivated to bargain.
From the comfort and safety of his apartments at Madrid’s royal palace, the count-duke had developed an entirely different vision of Spanish affairs. As far as he was concerned, this was no time for compromise. With the English humbled, France bogged down fighting the Huguenot rebellion at La Rochelle, and imperial troops ready for action in Germany, the time was right for Spain to press its advantages across Europe and to secure its colonial empire abroad. That the Dutch were making concessions at Roosendaal only hardened his resolve. “Never in history,” he said, “has there been such a favorable season for the Catholic cause.”
Spinola and Olivares’s heated, joyless ride into the city culminated in a private audience before His Royal Majesty Philip IV. Tall, gawky, and still a month shy of his twenty-third birthday, the conflict-averse “Planet King” stood pensively in his bedchamber, where he received his most important visitors. (The moniker alluded not to the breadth of his empire but to his celestial presence as the head of state.) Normally, he simply deferred to the advice of
the count-duke; the
valido
had been his mentor ever since Philip had ascended the throne at the tender age of sixteen. In that time, Olivares had orchestrated state policy while the young king received the rigorous physical and intellectual education appropriate for a Habsburg ruler. Now, however, his reflexive dependence on Olivares was tempered by the commanding presence of Spinola, the most distinguished military officer in his service. The hero of Breda was not a man who could be easily dismissed, especially when he was speaking with such insight and conviction. Inevitably, given Philip’s temperament, there was no resolution, and the debate moved on to the Council of State.
For better than a month, Olivares and Spinola vied for support within the council, making impassioned arguments behind closed doors over troop strength requirements, the costs needed to effectively prosecute a war, and the extent of Spain’s diplomatic and military leverage across Europe. It was, by any standard, a nasty fight between two political heavyweights. To Olivares, Spinola was an overly cautious obstructionist without the political vision to capitalize on Spain’s great hegemonic moment. Spinola, conversely, presented Olivares as an ideologue divorced from the ugly realities on the ground in the Low Countries—ugly realities generated by the count-duke’s failed policies.
Removed from the action and largely in the dark, Isabella’s Brussels court was consumed by anxiety as Spinola fought the battle of his political life. Indeed, the embroiled marquis had little time for correspondence describing the shifting allegiances within the council. In mid-April, Rubens wrote to his Parisian friends that Spinola was “gaining authority” with Philip and his ministers, but the truth was that this assertion was based more on hope than on fact. Two weeks later, with frustration setting in, the artist complained of Spanish intransigence, not to mention the “lazy and
indolent character” of its citizens, a slur that was well beneath his dignity. By summer, he was almost entirely disillusioned. “The Spaniards think they can treat this sagacious man as they are in the habit of treating all those who go to that court for any business,” he wrote. “All are dismissed with empty promises, and kept in suspense by vain hopes which are finally frustrated without having settled anything.”
As Rubens both feared and suspected, Spinola was putting up a valiant effort but fighting a losing battle. The end product was a Solomonic decision to authorize Isabella to negotiate with the Dutch, as Spinola wished, but to make demands so uncompromising and draconian that they would almost certainly be rejected. These were outlined in a twenty-three-article memorandum authored by Olivares, the key stipulations being: Dutch withdrawal from the Americas; the opening of the Scheldt; open Catholic religious practice in the provinces; and a full recognition of Spanish sovereignty in perpetuity. In exchange, the Dutch would be granted what they already had in practice—de facto political freedom. Moreover, Spinola was ordered to return at once to Brussels to begin a new military offensive aimed at increasing Spanish leverage. The Dutch would be forced to capitulate either in the field or at the bargaining table—whichever came first.
Isabella was informed of this new policy direction in a letter from her nephew Philip written on May 1, 1628. In addition, the infanta was ordered to supply the king with
all
of Rubens’s correspondence with Gerbier and Buckingham regarding a peace agreement with England, not just the letters Rubens had seen fit to forward along to Spinola. If the crown was to do business with England, the crown was to be fully informed of the conduct of its agents. How was Philip to be sure that Rubens—a mere artist—
had not misconstrued some important point or failed to capture some delicate nuance in Gerbier’s correspondence?
It was another in a string of condescending requests emanating from Madrid, but Rubens was by now inured to such affronts to the extent that he was aware of them, and being inherently positive in outlook, saw quickly how it might be turned to his own advantage. He was already planning the long journey he had hoped to take in the wake of his wife’s death. The brief trips he had made since then, first to France and then to Holland, had been all business, and not without stress. He was ready for something a bit grander. Rome had beckoned. After so depleting his cabinet of antiquities in the sale to Buckingham, a trip to the city he loved so much would allow him to restock his trove of classical statuary and medals. The potential patronage of the Vatican must also have been a draw. On the way south, he could stop to look again at his Medici cycle in Paris and then visit his old friend Peiresc at his home in Provence. Indeed, he had informed several of his friends, including the antiquarian Jan Caspar Gevaerts, of his intention to travel to Italy before the end of the year.
Now, however, he saw it would be expedient to change his itinerary. In place of Rome, why not go directly to Madrid, where he could personally translate Gerbier’s letters? There, he would have entrée to the collections of the Escorial, and if not the patronage of the pope, then of the king of Spain. Better still, his expenses would be paid, and he would have the opportunity to see to it that all of his diplomatic work would not be simply abandoned by Philip and his do-nothing Spanish court. An oft-quoted proverb came to mind: “He who wants something goes himself; he who does not sends another.” Rubens, perhaps in response to Philip’s foot-dragging, had even taken up the promise of opportunity as a subject for his art. While waiting for Madrid to take action, he repeatedly depicted
the allegorical figure Occasio, a typically refulgent maiden whose golden locks (representing the chance for peace) were grabbed not by a willing prince but by a sullen warrior. Given the situation, he could be forgiven for his pessimism. At the same time, with Antwerp suffering, he sketched out several more realistic images of human suffering: a bereaved woman sitting, head in hand, crumpled on the ground as battle is waged behind her; a pair of naked warriors placed back-to-back, their wrists lashed with an angry sea in the distance. So, yes, Rubens told Isabella, he would be happy to forward his correspondence along to His Majesty, but with the coding and the language barrier and Gerbier’s weird syntax, wouldn’t it be better if he delivered the letters in person?
Even this proposal was too much for the unsure king to resolve without consultation. On July 4, the Council of State decided—or rather did not decide—that negotiations with England “may be pushed forward or held back according as it be judged opportune. If they are to be continued, the advent of Rubens will be more useful than injurious.” Two days later, Philip sent off his answer to Isabella. “On the subject of Peter Paul Rubens,” he wrote, “since he has given us to understand that he will come to Madrid if bidden to do so, and will bring with him the letters in his possession on the subject of the negotiations with England, it will be well for your Highness to request him to do so, but after agreeing with him that he shall be careful to bring all the documents of the kind which he has in his hands … Nevertheless, we must abstain from insisting on it with him, but leave him to decide it according to his own convenience.”
That was good enough. Rubens, unlike Philip, never lacked for decisiveness. This was, after all, the man who liked “brief negotiations, where each party gives and receives his share at once.” On August 13, the infanta informed both the king and the count-duke
that Rubens would soon be on his way. Preparations began at once. A letter of recommendation for Deodate del Monte, the artist’s assistant of so many years, was notarized. During his absence, custody of the painter’s two boys would be jointly entrusted to their maternal grandfather and uncle. The education of his elder son, Albert, whom he called “my other self,” was left to Gevaerts, “the best of my friends and high priest of the Muses.” In the event some calamity might befall him, Rubens prepared a legal statement recording all of the worldly goods they would inherit. Looking at it all on one sheet, even Rubens himself must have been astonished by the scale of his accumulated wealth. Much of it was in real estate. There was his own home and workshop on the Wapper, of course, along with the adjacent houses, another a few blocks away on Jodenstraat, and seven more recently purchased with the profits from the Buckingham sale, which he leased out. Beyond the city walls, he had a thirty-two-acre farm, at Zwijndrecht, and a smaller tract at Ekeren, for which he annually received 400 guilders in rent. There were financial instruments as well, large annuities to be paid by the city of Antwerp and the state of Brabant. And finally there were the family jewels, not just his late wife’s gems—those were valued at 2,700 florins—but also Rubens’s paintings, those by his own hand and the many other works, large and small, old master and contemporary, he had purchased for his cabinet. Whatever the fate of their father, Albert and Nicolas Rubens would never want for material advantage.