Master of Shadows

by Mark Lamster

  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.

  Through all of his travels, Rubens remained a devoted servant of his beloved Antwerp. When the beleaguered city needed him most, at the close of 1634, he was ready and willing to lend it his aid. The occasion was the ceremonial entry into the city of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, the strong-willed younger brother of Philip IV. Rubens had painted Ferdinand on his most recent trip to Madrid, a half-length portrait in his clerical habit. The prince had been made a cardinal as a matter of political expedience, but he was by nature a man of action disinclined to the ascetic life of a church elder. “Rid me of these cardinal’s robes, that I may be able to go to the war,” he demanded. He got his chance. It had long been planned that he should succeed his aunt Isabella as governor of the Spanish Netherlands. When he received the sad news of her passing, in 1633, he was brushing up his administrative and martial abilities in Milan. From there, he marched north with an army, taking a detour along the way to rout the Protestant forces of Sweden at the Battle of Nördlingen, in Germany. By November 1634 he was ensconced in Brussels, having relieved d’Aytona of command.

  The arrival of a new prince was traditionally grounds for a civic celebration of welcome. Antwerp, its economy weak and its citizens still doleful about their prospects, chose to roll out the red carpet for the cardinal-infante, and to do so in the grandest style. All of the struggling city’s financial and intellectual muscle would be leveraged in the rather desperate hope that Ferdinand would be moved to come to its rescue. Who better to oversee this grand project than the city’s favorite son, Peter Paul Rubens? There was no one, anywhere, more skilled at orchestrating a massive decorative program designed to impress a royal patron.

  Rubens dutifully accepted the commission, and set to work planning a reception that might embarrass a Roman emperor. In December 1634, he presented his ideas to the city magistrates. Three triumphal arches would be thrown up on the route Ferdinand would follow through the city. A series of stages, each with an allegorical scenic program, would be constructed at key civic sites. An elaborate portico, more than two hundred feet long, would be built along the Meir. There would be flags and bunting and statues and three hundred lampposts capped with tar-barrel torches to keep the city ablaze at night, when a spectacular pyrotechnics show would enliven the sky above.

  It was an extraordinary vision, and the initial schedule required it to be ready in a single month—and during winter no less, when construction would be most difficult. The Rubens workshop, accustomed to large projects and tight deadlines, now became the headquarters for an operation of unprecedented scale. Architects, artists, craftsmen, suppliers, and bureaucrats came in and out in waves, all hoping for a moment with the master, who sat in the center of it all, making sketches, interviewing subordinates, delegating jobs, and granting approvals. The press of work challenged even his famed ability to manage a great many tasks at once. “I am so overwhelmed with work,” he wrote in the midst of the preparations, “that I have not time to write, or even to live.” (Being Rubens, he found the time.) All of Antwerp’s resources were marshaled and placed at his disposal. The cost was enormous. The city raided its meager treasury and even then had to impose a special tax on beer to pay for it all—no small sacrifice for the average sinjoor, who drank three pints per day and considered it his birthright.

  When the day of reckoning arrived, the city ramparts were packed with spectators, and trumpeters played from its ceremonial gate, which had been gilded for the occasion. At four o’clock, Ferdinand marched down from Alva’s old citadel, a troop of his best horsemen before him, to be greeted by the burgomeester and a salvo from the civic guard. A young girl draped with flowers presented him with a laurel crown and a golden salver. So equipped, Ferdinand began his procession through the city toward the first of Rubens’s stages, where a large painting depicted a maiden of Flanders kneeling before the new prince. If there was any question as to its meaning, a Latin inscription, written by Gevaerts, made it clear: “To thee we look for our salvation; the days which the plagues of war have made evil will through thee become better days; the road lies open before thee, and Victory flies on snowy wing to greet thee.” For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, Ferdinand was guided along Rubens’s scripted path, the message of civic desperation drummed home with an insistent determination. On Nieuwstraat, Ferdinand saw his victory at Nördlingen, and with it a request that he return peace to the troubled land of Flanders. At the Stage of Mercury, on the plaza before the Church of St. John, there was a prayer for the reopening of the Scheldt. Above it, Rubens illustrated the city’s plight with a personification of the river collapsed over a barren urn. Abandoned ships, a destitute sailor, and a starving child were added for emphasis.

  Rubens was not there to greet Ferdinand at the city gate, nor did he accompany the cardinal-infante on his procession through the many installations he had designed and seen to completion. The superhuman effort required to produce the great spectacle precipitated an acute case of gout that left Rubens bedridden in his Antwerp home. Ferdinand, who stayed eight days in the city, made a special point to call on the recuperating painter to express his compliments and gratitude. When Rubens recovered, he painted a new portrait of the infante, with his cardinal’s robes exchanged for a shining suit of armor and the red sash of a military commander. Ferdinand, in turn, granted Rubens the sinecure of court painter, as Albert and Isabella had done before him.

  The armor suited Ferdinand, who soon found himself embroiled in a two-front war with France and Holland that left him in no position to offer financial assistance to Rubens’s beloved city. Spain’s two enemies had agreed on a pact of mutual aggression, their aim being to squeeze Flanders from above and below and then to divide it between them, with the Dutch-speaking north handed over to Holland and the Francophone south delivered to France. (Back in Madrid, Olivares may well have cursed himself for not taking Rubens’s prescient advice, given just a few years earlier, to remove Richelieu from power at any cost.) Ferdinand, however, proved an able defender of his adopted homeland. In 1635, he made forays deep into enemy territory, to both the north and the south. His most impressive performance came in defense of Antwerp, in June 1638, when he routed a Dutch offensive at Kallo, just a few miles from the city walls. He captured more than twenty-five hundred prisoners and eighty river transports in what he claimed to be the greatest victory in the long history of the conflict with the Dutch. The Franco-Dutch alliance was left to flounder.

  The good sinjoren were grateful for the rescue, and demonstrated
that sentiment at their annual fair. A decorated chariot in the shape of a boat, designed by Rubens and drawn by a pair of white horses, carried an enormous trophy in honor of the warrior hero. Ferdinand appreciated the gesture, if not the ardor, of the local celebrants. “The great festival they call the kermis took place here yesterday,” he wrote. “It is a long procession with many triumphal carts … and after it has all passed by, they will eat and drink and get thoroughly drunk, because without that it’s not a festival in this country. There’s no question that they live like beasts here.”

  Rubens was familiar with the boisterous, coarser aspects of the Flemish character, but he looked upon them with a native’s sympathy that Ferdinand, a foreigner of noble blood, could never quite understand. In his later years, the kermis was a subject Rubens would happily take up, just as Pieter Brueghel had before him. Rubens’s paintings, classically inspired compositions in bucolic settings bathed in warm light, suggest a certain romanticized pride in Flemish custom, notwithstanding its occasional boorishness and vulgarity.

  As Rubens grew older, he gave in more and more to his pastoral impulse, both on canvas and in his daily life. In May 1635, he traded in his modest country house in nearby Ekeren for a massive estate outside of Mechlin. The Castle Steen was built of stone and enclosed by a moat. Orchards and rolling meadows stretched as far as the eye could see, and one could see a good long ways from the crenellated guard tower adjacent to the big manor house. Rubens paid nearly 100,000 florins for it, and the right to call himself the Lord of Steen.