Master of Shadows

by Mark Lamster

  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.”

  Châteauneuf was the public face of French diplomacy in London, but behind closed doors overtures were being made by another emissary, a shadowy figure named Furston who brought an offer directly from Richelieu. In a clandestine meeting, he informed Weston that France was secretly plotting to “attack the king of Spain from all sides.” The plan called for a simultaneous assault on Spain’s forces in Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries. France wanted England to join in this fight with a coordinated naval attack on the Iberian coast, to be undertaken in cooperation with the Dutch navy. In return for its support, England would receive “carte blanche” from France. The Palatinate would surely be recovered, in its entirety. Weston was offered an enormous personal bribe to rally his support.

  It was an ambitious plan, but it didn’t find traction with either Weston or his sovereign. Cottington informed Rubens of Charles’s reaction: “The king simply laughed at it and said he was well acquainted with the wiles and tricks of the Cardinal Richelieu, and that he would prefer to make an alliance with Spain against France than the other way around.” If there had been any hope for such an adventure, Châteauneuf bungled it by grievously overstepping the bounds of diplomatic protocol, in the process terminally alienating the king to the French cause. In his zeal to conclude an alliance with England (and to prevent Spain from doing the same), he had become insistent that Charles call Parliament to session so it could weigh in on the matter. This was a desperate wedge move, one intended, in Rubens’s words, to “gain the good will of the people,” and in so doing force the king’s hand. The Puritan-led Parliament was categorically opposed to any deal with Catholic Spain, and that body assuredly would have supported a French alliance over that offered by Rubens.

  The Frenchman’s gambit, however, was doomed from the outset. Châteauneuf might have known from recent history that appeals to Parliament would not sit well with the king, who had disbanded the body just a few months earlier. Charles was intransigent when it came to questions of his own authority. Moreover, it was considered entirely inappropriate for a visiting diplomat to interfere in the internal affairs of his host country. In a letter back to Madrid, Rubens happily notified Olivares that Châteauneuf had undermined his own cause with his “insolence.”

  While the French contingent was stumbling, Rubens was making significant headway. At the beginning of July, he convinced Charles to name the ambassador he would send to Madrid to finalize negotiations, and also to set a date for this ambassador’s departure. The selection naturally fell to Cottington, and the chosen day was August 1. The only stipulation from the English was that Spain reciprocate with its own ambassador, and that Charles be assured that the two countries could reach acceptable terms. To be absolutely clear on this front, Rubens asked that Charles put down his terms in writing, so that he might forward them on to Madrid.

  In the long course of the Anglo-Spanish negotiation, both sides had been resistant to that request, always afraid it might be used against them. Gerbier, after the failed summit in Holland, had all but broken off discussions with the complaint that Rubens “had brought nothing in black and white, and all that he said was only in words.” But now, thanks to Rubens’s persistence, Charles acceded. On the principal subject under discussion, the restitution of the Palatinate, he was willing to settle only for the return of the Spanish garrisons, with the pledge that Philip merely intercede in good faith with his Habsburg allies regarding their respective claims. Cottington was stunned. “A miracle has been wrought in obtaining this document from the king of England,” he told Rubens.

  Charles understood just what a coup this was for the painter, and how potentially dangerous it would be for him if word of the agreement were to become public. Opposition to Catholic Spain within England was rabid. Precautionary measures were therefore required before the terms outlined in what the parties were now calling “The Document” could be disclosed. With that in mind, the king absolutely forbade Rubens to show the letter to anyone but his handlers overseas. (He also told Rubens that he would never have given such a letter to Richelieu.) The language of “The Document” was also somewhat less than straightforward. In an accompanying cover letter to Olivares, Rubens had to explain that Charles was “unwilling to express himself as clearly in writing as he had done orally.” Nevertheless, it was all there—the count-duke would just have to read between the lines. For the sake of security, Rubens only sent a ciphered copy. He retained the original on his person in London.

  A month later, he followed up with another letter to Olivares. “I consider this peace to be of such consequence that it seems to me the connecting knot in the chain of confederations of Europe,” he wrote. Rubens had the vision to see, as the French diplomat François de Callières would later write, that the “necessary ties and commerces” between European states bound them together into a single, intertwined unit. “I admi
t that for our King the peace with the Hollanders would be most important,” Rubens wrote, “but I doubt that this will ever come to pass without the intervention of the King of England.”

  Rubens may justifiably have considered himself a diplomatic miracle worker, but his handlers in Spain, and the count-duke in particular, were not initially pleased with his performance. The painter had discharged his responsibilities with an alacrity foreign to the terminally diffident Spanish crown. Even before learning that Rubens had secured the secret document from the English king, Olivares had dispatched a brusque letter admonishing Rubens for exceeding the authority he had been granted in Madrid. Rubens responded with a spirited defense of his actions in which he claimed that he had served merely as an honest intermediary, and that he had—against considerable opposition—convinced Charles to choose peace with Spain over peace with France. In addition, he had seen to it that Charles name a sympathetic ambassador, that a date be set for that ambassador’s departure, and that he be provided with instructions that would be considered acceptable in Madrid. “I do not feel that I have employed my time badly since I have been here,” he told Olivares, “or that I have overstepped in any way the terms of my commission.” Enclosed with his apologia were letters of support from both Weston and Cottington that praised his performance. In all, Rubens made a convincing argument. In August, his response was read before the Council of State at the Real Alcázar. It was enough to satisfy their concerns. In the minutes to that meeting it was noted that the council gave Rubens “approbation and thanks for what he has done and written, and for the tact with which he has acted.” So informed, Rubens told Olivares that those kind words were “to be attributed not so much to any ability of mine, as to the goodness and the generous disposition of Your Excellency in appreciating even the slightest talent in others.” In paint or print, the artist knew how to lay the praise on thick.