Rubens and King Charles I

On Whit Monday 1629, Peter Paul Rubens, the most famous painter in Europe, disembarked at Dover from His Majesty’s ship Adventure and proceeded immediately towards London. He remained in England until the middle of the following March, a period of nearly ten months, during which he completed the preliminary negotiations for a treaty of peace and friendship between King Charles I and King Philip IV of Spain. He also visited the finest collections of paintings in the country, was lavishly entertained by the courtiers and ministers of King Charles, painted two or three original works and wrote a great number of official despatches and private letters, full of lively comment on the English scene.

The purpose of his visit was diplomatic. The Archduchess Isabella, daughter of Philip II, and ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, had shown her usual tact in selecting her Court- painter and trusted confidant for the delicate mission of approaching King Charles I, whose knowledge and judgment of painting was admitted to be much greater than his knowledge and judgment of foreign affairs. Her choice had caused some eyebrow-raising in Madrid, where her nephew, King Philip IV, felt that a painter was not a sufficiently aristocratic representative for the Crown of Spain. The problem was settled by giving Rubens authority only to smooth out the way for a treaty to be completed by a noble ambassador. He was also given the nominal office of Secretary to King Philip’s Privy Council, to invest him with a more official appearance. It was not that King Philip undervalued Rubens: he had a high respect for him, both as a painter and a man, and at an earlier time had given him a grant of arms; but, in the formal relations between European sovereigns, the Spanish King demanded a respect for his emissaries that a painter might not command. King Philip need have had no fears about Rubens. He was at this time fifty-two years old, an experienced, widely travelled and confident man of the world, valued in most of the Courts of Europe as a superb and prolific painter and as an expert on all aesthetic questions: a man who shone in any society and counted among his friends some of the most remarkable men and women of Europe.

The complex negotiations with King Charles by which Rubens secured the neutrality of England in the religious conflicts then raging in Europe, are not in the long perspective of history of outstanding importance: but the character of the two men involved - the greatest painter and the greatest connoisseur of the time - make them unique in the annals of diplomacy. The interest of Rubens in these diplomatic affairs, and especially in establishing peace between England and the Spanish Netherlands, of which he was a citizen, had begun some four years before his arrival in England; and his personal interest in King Charles I some years earlier still. Already as Prince of Wales, Charles had been an ardent collector; lie was undoubtedly behind the project, mooted as early as 1621, that Rubens should paint the ceiling of the new Banqueting House at Whitehall. A little later, he had sent the great painter a special request for a self- portrait, which, after a becomingly modest hesitation, Rubens had agreed to gratify.

His personal relations with King Charles were then already on a friendly footing. As to the political interest of Rubens in English affairs, this had begun in 1625, when he met the Duke of Buckingham. Early in that year he had received a summons to come to Paris with all speed, bringing with him the series of paintings commissioned by the Queen-mother for the Luxembourg Palace. Her youngest daughter, Madame Henriette, now betrothed to Charles of England, was expecting soon to leave for her new home and wanted very much to see the pictures before she left. Rubens, with long experience of Courts, knew that the journeys of royalty were usually subject to delays and did not hurry unduly; but he was glad to hear that the Princess showed an interest in painting for, he wrote, the King whom she was to marry was the greatest connoisseur in Europe.

He arrived in Paris in good time for the wedding of the Princess, which was solemnized in May, and for which he had a most advantageous seat on a balcony. Unhappily the balcony was overloaded and a section of it collapsed in the midst of the ceremony, though Rubens himself remained safe and sound on the extreme edge of the broken planks.

Chief of those who had come to Paris to fetch home the bride of King Charles was the Duke of Buckingham, his favourite and chief minister. As a patron of the arts and himself a collector, Buckingham did not lose the chance of meeting Rubens, from whom he ordered a superb equestrian portrait. He also discussed with him the extension of his fine collection of works of art. Amid all this interesting professional conversation, Rubens took the opportunity of sliding in some political hints.

He had long been a chief confidant of the Archduchess Isabella; and, as a resident of Antwerp, he knew the ill-effect that the war between England and Spain, that had broken out in 1624, was bound to have on the trade of the southern Netherlands; still more, how hampering it would prove in the contest with the Dutch in the northern part of the Netherlands. The Spanish Netherlands, though their government was independent, were under the Crown of Spain and were associated automatically with Spain in all matters of war and peace. Rubens, a good Catholic and a good Fleming, wanted to see a blessed peace restored to Europe, with Spain in command of the seas, and the rebellious Protestant provinces of the northern Netherlands, who had for the last sixty years asserted their independence under the leadership of the Princes of Orange, brought hack into harmony with Catholic Flanders and Brabant.

In 1624, the King of England, James I, who had for twenty years been in peaceful agreement with Spain, had declared var. This change of policy was well known to be the work of Buckingham and Prince Charles, who a few months later became King. But the war, undertaken in a spirit of easy arrogance, had gone badly. Buckingham was not Sir Francis Drake. There had been defeats by sea and land, and in the summer of 1625 Rubens found the Duke favourably disposed to the idea of a negotiated peace.

On his return to the Netherlands, Rubens gained the authority of the Archduchess to carry the exploratory discussions somewhat further. It was done under cover of a different matter-namely, the sale of numerous antiquities and works of art to the Duke. Buckingham sent over Balthasar Gerbier, a minor artist and a knowledgeable intriguer, whom he often employed to put through his purchases. But the sale of the art treasures moved more swiftly than the peace talks. Buckingham, whose foreign policy was almost equally silly and capricious, suddenly involved England in a war with France, without even waiting to bring the war with Spain to an end. Temporarily, Rubens gave up his project of engineering an Anglo-Spanish treaty. His criticisms were, however, confined to the Duke. He felt only sympathy for King Charles. “When I consider the caprice and arrogance of Buckingham,” he wrote, “I pity that young King who, through false counsel, is needlessly throwing himself and his kingdom into such an extremity.”

He had never met the King; but the tone of genuine regret and anxiety in his comment is unmistakable, though perhaps more so in the Italian, in which the letter is written, than in the English version. “Io ho compassione tie quel Re giovenetto.” He could not but like all that he had heard of Charles, since what he had heard - either through Buckingham or through Sir Dudley Carleton, the highly civilized English ambassador at the Hague - was principally about his excellent taste and his enthusiasm as a patron and collector.

In England, another year of unsuccessful and mismanaged warfare, with a restive and critical Parliament refusing the necessary grants of money to wage it, caused Buckingham in the spring of 1627 to re-open the exploratory talks through Rubens. “The reconcilement of Great Britain and Spain,” said the Duke, now full of ideas about international peace, “will be the best preparative and most assured means to pacify the Empire.” But the moment was not propitious. Spain and France, whose national enmity was almost a constant of European politics, were both Roman Catholic countries. Their rivalry caused France from time to time to ally with the enemies of the Church - the Turks, the Protestant Germans, or the Dutch. But there was a so-called “devout” party in France, that deplored these agreements and would have preferred an alliance with Spain, at least until heresy was defeated. King Charles, by declaring war on both of them at the same time, had given them at least one interest in common. There was a brief rapprochement between them, and some talk at Madrid of launching a new Armada, with French cooperation, that would effectively eliminate England from European politics. The danger was perhaps never serious, because neither Spain nor France had the resources to spare for such an undertaking; but, while this kind of plan was in the air, there was no immediate hope for an Anglo-Spanish peace.

Rubens was quietly persistent. In the summer of 1628, he took care to make much of the Earl of Carlisle, when he came through Brussels on his way to represent King Charles at the Court of Savoy. He even persuaded the Archduchess Isabella to receive him, and though she was not very cordial - his master was, after all, at open war with her - the gesture indicated that the renewal of peace talks was still a possibility.

By the late summer of 1628, King Philip of Spain was disheartened by the egoism of his French allies-their policy was being conducted by the subtlest and most ruthless practitioner of real politik in Europe, Cardinal Riehelieu. He began to think seriously of making peace with England, and Rubens was sent for to Madrid. In the same month, August 1628, the murder of Buckingham removed the most incalculable and the most influential figure in English policy. Things were likely to be easier.

In Madrid, Rubens received his instructions for England, while painting prolifically in the lengthy intervals between official decisions. He met the young Velasquez, who visited with him the great collection of pictures in the Escorial; he painted the King, some of the royal family and a number of subject pieces. He also had time to go in quest of exotic perfumes to satisfy the “exquise curiosité” of the Earl of Carlisle, with whom he had kept up friendly relations, and for whom he hoped to find something really unusual in the cargo of a merchant ship from Goa.

In April 1629, he was back in Brussels for a brief final consultation with the Archduchess; and at last, on June 4th, after four years of patient endeavour, he arrived in England charged with the task of making clear the way for a treaty of peace.

He was surprised and delighted with the country. “This island,” he wrote to a friend, “seems to me to be a spectacle worthy of the interest of every gentleman, not only for the beauty of the countryside and the charm of the nation; not only for the splendour of its outward culture which seems to be extreme, as of a people rich and happy in the lap of peace, but also for the incredible quantity of excellent pictures, statues and ancient inscriptions which are to be found in this Court.”

In the last generation, the study of antiquities and the collection of works of art had certainly wrought a great change in England. Rubens, who had assumed that this northern isle had relatively little to show him, was excited at the prospect of much pleasure and intellectual profit from his political mission. The two greatest collections of paintings were those of the King himself and of the late Duke of Buckingham, both rich in the works of Italian masters, many of which Rubens would have seen before in the great European collections from which they had recently been bought. There were also the Greek and Roman antiquities collected by the Earl of Arundel, including numerous important inscriptions of which the scholar John Selden had published the text with a valuable commentary. Ruhens was distressed to learn that this learned gentleman had recently been involved in politics, had opposed the King in the last Parliament, and was temporarily in prison as a result. He thought it a pity that Mr. Selden, with talents that could be so much better employed, had involved himself in an indecorous opposition to his sovereign.

Apart from these three great collections, there was also the library of Sir Robert Cotton, the famous antiquary, full of rarities. England indeed proved to be a land rich in scholars, connoisseurs and collectors, with some other odd and distinguished residents as well. There was Cornelis Drebbel, the Dutch philosopher and inventor, who is credited with having made the first navigable submarine. Rubens was struck by his appearance, when he met him in the street, and wished to see more of him.

During his mission, Rubens stayed at the house of Balthasar Gerbier, which was a centre for all those interested in the arts and sciences, and where he was well entertained. He was also frequently in the houses of the nobility and was surprised, and a little shocked, by the splendid manner in which the English aristocracy thought it essential to live. His old acquaintance, the Earl of Carlisle, was a byword in Europe for his extravagance, but the Earl of Holland was not far behind him; and all the principal courtiers of King Charles entertained with great sumptuousness. Sir Francis Cottington, the minister with whom Rubens had most of his dealings, lived, he said, like a prince. High living was no novelty to Rubens, who knew the splendid Courts of the Italian princes and whose countrymen had a reputation for lavish entertaining. But the English nobility in 1629 seem to have taken even his breath away. Few of them could afford it: he saw that at once. Most of them were deeply in debt and therefore open to corruption. Several were said to be taking bribes from Richelieu, he reported. He did not trouble to report that several more were taking bribes from Spain, because those to whom he addressed his despatches would be aware of that.

Now and again there were untoward accidents. Early in his visit, he was distressed at the loss of a priest in his suite, who had been given a lift in the barge of the ambassador of Savoy. The boat overturned, while shooting the rapids at London Bridge; the poor priest encumbered by his cassock was drowned, and the ambassador was saved with difficulty, because someone managed to drag him out of the water by one of his spurs.

Meanwhile, Rubens had been received by Charles on June 6th, 1629, as soon as possible after his arrival in London. The meeting was successful. His despatches to the Spanish first minister, Olivares, and his private letters alike make it clear that an instant sympathy was established. Charles had not the reputation of being easy. His stiffness and shyness were more often the subject of comment; he was said always to hold men at a distance. He made no such impression on Rubens; the warmth of the great painter’s personality thawed him completely, thawed him indeed into uttering several useful indiscretions as the weeks went by. Gerbier had noticed that Rubens had a gift, most useful in a diplomat, for making people talk without, on his side, committing himself. He certainly showed this in his conversations with the King.

A French treaty was also under discussion at this time; and Rubens had at first considerable apprehensions that the French ambassador would defeat him, There was a strong French party at Court, led by the Queen whose influence Rubens instantly noticed. The arrogant French ambassador also did all in his power to render the mission of Rubens difficult. But the King, in one of those bursts of confidence to which Rubens inspired him, told him that he detested the French, regarded them as wholly untrustworthy, and put no faith in any of their promises. After this, it was clear to Rubens that he had relatively little to fear from this rival negotiation. A treaty of peace would no doubt be signed with France, but it would be a peace and no more: the alliance directed at Spain, for which the French ambassador hoped, would not come into being. Spain, not France, was the monarchy with which King Charles really wished to be on terms of close friendship.

This was the first indiscretion of the King. His second was even more remarkable. The whole supposed purpose of his foreign policy, and more especially of his war with Spain, had been to help his only sister and her husband Frederick, a penniless exile who called himself King of Bohemia. This unfortunate German prince, originally Elector Palatine of the Rhine, had become involved in the revolt of the Protestants of Bohemia against the Habsburg Emperor, who was himself the cousin and ally of the King of Spain. Elected to the Crown of Bohemia in 1619, Frederick had been driven out in less than a year; the Emperor and his purpose of restoring his brother-in-law to his Spanish allies had taken the occasion to deprive him of all his lands, those on the Rhine being occupied by Spanish troops. King Charles had entered into war with Spain for the ostensible purpose of restoring his brother-in-law to his original dominions.

Now this precisely was what King Philip in Madrid and the Archduchess in the Netherlands wished to prevent. The Rhenish Palatinate lay right athwart the route by which troops were transported overland from the north Italian recruiting grounds to the battle- front in Flanders. The occupation of that country, either by the Spaniards or by their imperial allies, was vital to the successful prosecution of their war against the rebel Dutch, because it kept this most important line of communication open.

There was, however, another vital line of communication, this time by sea. Spanish ships, bearing bullion, arms and ammunition for the troops of the Archduchess, came up the English Channel and through the Narrow Seas to Antwerp. They would have been at the mercy of the English, if the English had had any effective sea-power at the time. They were actually at the mercy of the Dutch, who were dominant in those waters. But if England became an ally, instead of an enemy, or at least became neutral, Spanish ships would be able to take refuge from the Dutch in English waters, or even in English harbours, and there safely await a favourable moment to dart across to Antwerp. Thus what King Philip IV and the Archduchess wanted was to maintain both their life lines, to have peace with Charles and to keep the lands of his dispossessed brother-in-law. How could it be done?

Rubens soon found out. The King had begun by emphasizing his devotion to the cause of his dispossessed brother-in-law. Three weeks after the arrival of Rubens, he was asserting that “neither his faith, conscience, nor honour would permit him to enter into any accord with His Catholic Majesty without the restitution of the Palatinate.”

Rubens played his hand cautiously, accepting the King’s protestations at their face value but, for his part, indicating that the Palatinate was, after all, a part of Germany and under the ultimate jurisdiction of the Emperor. It was not in the direct power of the King of Spain to take decisions about it.

Six weeks later, the King, increasingly anxious for the Spanish alliance, and feeling every day more at home in the company of the most amiable and sympathetic envoy he was ever likely to encounter, had allowed it to become apparent that he found the whole business of the Palatinate a wearisome and unwelcome obstruction in his way. “I know for certain,” wrote Rubens to Olivares in August, “that in his heart he curses the day when the Elector Palatine crossed his path.” As for his alleged unwillingness to treat with Spain unless his brother-in-law were restored, “the King had protested to me more than once that if he could save his reputation and honour in any other way . . he would not postpone for an hour the conclusion of peace with Spain.”

What was needed, to buy the neutrality of England, was not any dangerous concession about the occupation of the vital stretch of the Rhineland. All that was needed was a clause that would save the King of England’s face. From this moment onwards it was clear that, if the King of Spain promised to intercede with the Emperor for the restoration of the Palatinate, Charles would be quite satisfied. The intercession, if it were ever made, would of course be unsuccessful.

Rubens had noticed other elements in the English situation that were favourable to the friendship of Charles with Spain. The Puritans, who, in his observation, seemed to be the greater part of the population, were critical of the King. The troubles in the last Parliament, of which Rubens heard much, had been largely their work. The Puritans were also in close contact with the Dutch. Rubens conceived it a possibility that, with this fifth column to help them, the Dutch might one day establish control over England. He was not entirely right in this opinion, because he based his ideas of the strength of the Puritans and of their close connections with the Dutch on what he saw of London, and he did not understand the extent to which Puritanism was also a manifestation of the English countryside and was often linked with an Elizabethan and aggressively nationalist outlook. He did not grasp that many English Puritans found it possible to have great religious sympathy with the Dutch, to applaud the strongly Calvinist government in power there, and yet to dislike and distrust them as commercial rivals.

He was, however, perfectly right in perceiving that the spiritual affiliations of the English Puritans to the Dutch made it logical for King Charles, whose crown was endangered by their pretensions, to align himself with Spain, the active enemy of the Dutch Republic, and seek Spanish help to bolster his own prestige.

The French ambassador, whose tactlessness was in sharp contrast to the good judgment of Rubens, stimulated the natural sympathies that were leading Charles towards friendship with Spain. He wanted the King to enter into an offensive alliance with France, and thereby to become one of the Protestant allies who, with French help, were fighting the Spaniards by sea and land. For such an alliance the King would naturally have to swallow his disagreements with his subjects, call a new Parliament and behave to it in such a way as to get a vote of money. Charles was not likely to forgive the French ambassador for uttering the hateful name of Parliament, or for trying to teach him how to govern his country.

In September 1629, the King did, indeed, sign a treaty with France, but it amounted to no more than the re-establishment of peace between the countries. Charles remained firm against all fresh attempts of the French ambassador to enhance its meaning or to gain him as an active ally for French policies in Europe. Indeed, his answer to this continued and distasteful pressure was to give orders that the ambassador he had selected to go to Spain should immediately set forth. His choice was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whom Rubens - puzzled like all foreigners by English titles - calls “Sir Cotrington.” Sir Francis Cottington had been a warm ally of Rubens throughout, although his advocacy of the Spanish treaty arose from no nobler motive than a very good idea he had for raising money for his King. In effect, when he got to Madrid, he made an agreement by which English shipping was to be put at the disposal of the Spanish government for transporting money to the Spanish Netherlands - later arms and men were also included in the arrangement. These ships, being neutral, could not be attacked by the Dutch on their journey to Antwerp. In return, the royal mint in London got a share of the bullion.

After Cortington had left for Spain, Rubens was ready and anxious to go home; but again he had to abide the interminable delays of the Spanish government. He could not leave until Don Carlos Coloma, the newly appointed ambassador, reached London; and this was not until January 1630. Even then, a few more weeks intervened before he could return to his home in Antwerp and his long-abandoned studio. At least, during the time he had spent in Spain in the previous year, he had been able to paint, but in England he had had little time for it. Much as King Charles may have wished to have his own or his Queen’s portrait from the hand of Rubens, etiquette hardly permitted him to sit for his picture to the emissary of a King with whom he was still at war. He did, however, confirm the plan made eight years before for commissioning Rubens to decorate the Banqueting Hall. The pictures could not, of course, be done until the painter was back in his studio in Antwerp. Meanwhile, he had painted a portrait of Madame Gerbier, the wife of his host, with some of her children, and he had presented to the King two subject pieces, the opulent “War and Peace”, now in the National Gallery, and a charmingly romantic landscape of the Thames valley, in which King Charles, in the person of Saint George, chivalrously rescues Queen Henrietta Maria from a dreadful dragon.

On February 21st, the King knighted him at Whitehall, and shortly afterwards gave him authority to carry the lion of England as an augmentation to his arms. More substantial gifts were also presented - a diamond chain to wear round his hat and a diamond ring. These two costly objects had been supplied by the efficient Gerbier, who was complaining a day or two later that he had been paid neither for these nor for the expenses he had sustained by accommodating Sir Peter Paul Rubens at his house during the whole of his stay in England. For once the money was fortheoming with surprising rapidity, and within a few weeks he received £500 for the jewelry and £128 25. 2s. 11d. for the board and lodging of Rubens and his suite.

Two enormous feasts were given by the extravagant Earl of Carlisle to speed Rubens on his way; and by the middle of March 1630, he was at Dover. Here he met his last diplomatic problem. A party of boys and girls, sons and daughters of Catholic gentry, had been stopped as they tried to leave England, the boys to be educated at Douai, the girls (each with her dowry) to become nuns in the English convents in the Netherlands. This practice, by which English money was carried abroad, was frowned on by authority and forbidden by the penal laws. The young people now sought permission to travel under the diplomatic protection of the departing envoy. He would gladly have taken them, but could not do so without authority from the King. Some days passed, during which he sent to his successor, Don Carlos Coloma, to use his influence. Unhappily at this point a gap occurs in our evidence, and we shall never know if Rubens, when at length he put to sea for his homeward journey, was or was not accompanied by a party of grateful and devout young people.

Admirably as he had fulfilled his task, Rubens received more criticism than praise from Olivares in Madrid. The haughty minister was inclined to suspect, at every step forward that Rubens made with the King, that he was overstepping his instructions, or his authority, or both. Rubens took all this very calmly. He had no resentment of the inferior position allotted to him as a mere forerunner of the more aristocratic Don Carlos Coloma. After the conclusion of the treaty, he received not only praise from King Philip but an urgent suggestion a year later that he should consolidate his work by becoming for a time the resident representative of Spain in England. This he would not do; for he was now fifty-four years old and did not feel hike sparing any more time for politics and diplomacy. A flattering offer from King Charles, to pay him an annual salary for regular bulletins of news and comment from the Netherlands, was also rejected.

Although he would not resume his diplomatic activity, Rubens must, as an artist who took pleasure in good craftsmanship, have felt satisfaction at the way in which he had engineered the Anglo-Spanish treaty, largely by patiently talking to the King and discovering where his true inclinations lay. In this he not only showed more perception than many other envoys to the Court of King Charles, but more perception than most later historians of the epoch have done. In his massive history of this period, S. R. Gardiner allowed himself to be deceived by the persistent protests of King Charles that his chief aim was to help his poor sister and her husband to regain their German lands. He builds his analysis of the King’s foreign policy on this idea; and his opinion has been consistently repeated. Gardiner used the letters of Rubens, but seems to have missed his comments on this point, or at least to have missed their significance. It is only when we grasp, as Rubens did, that the King’s protests about the Palatinate were merely for show that his foreign policy becomes clear: as a simple alignment with the dominating Habsburg power in Europe. The knowledge of this, more general in Europe at that time than it has been among English historians since, explains the contempt that was so often the fate of the envoys whom he sent out from time to time, with the apparent mission of helping his German relations and the Protestant Cause, but with no real power to do so.

In the setting of the European conflict, the policy of King Charles was weak and egotistical. In the setting of contemporary English politics, it was disastrous, because it offended too many sections of his people in both their religious and their commercial interests. This, of course, was not the fault of Rubens. He had been inspired throughout by a genuine desire for peace between two peoples, the English and his own, who had in the past enjoyed fruitful and friendly relations. He naturally assumed that the ultimate pacification of Europe through the dominance of Spain and her allies was preferable to a pacification that made France, the Dutch and the Protestant states dominant. He had served his patroness, the Archduchess, and his sovereign the King of Spain, with signal and lucid success. No one would have been more distressed than he, had he known that he was contributing, in the long run, to the ruin of the young King whose aesthetic judgment he admired, whose tastes he shared and whose conversation he enjoyed.