BUCKINGHAM’S MAN: BALTHAZAR GERBIER
A RENAISSANCE MAN IN 17th CENTURY ENGLAND
By Lita-Rose Betcherman
Author of the acclaimed Court Lady and Country Wife
Published by Bev Editions at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-0-9867287-1-6
Copyright 2010 Lita-Rose Betcherman
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Buckingham's Man: Balthazar Gerbier
Artist and Architect * Connoisseur and Curator * Secret Agent and Diplomat * Promoter of Banking and Technological Schemes * Humanist and Educator * Explorer and Colonizer * Scoundrel
Contents
Chapter 1: An Immigrant Painter in England
Chapter 3: The Keeper of York House
Chapter 4: The Spanish Adventure
Chapter 5: Art Buying and Secret Diplomacy in France
Chapter 8: The Rubens-Gerbier Negotiations
Chapter 9: Death of Buckingham
Chapter 10: The Feud with the Gentileschi
Chapter 12: Conspiracy with the Flemish Nobles
Chapter 13: Marie de Medici and the French Exiles
Chapter 15: Master of Ceremonies
Chapter 16: Banking Schemes in France
Chapter 17: An Academy in Commonwealth England
Chapter 18: A Plethora of Projects
Chapter 19: The Search for El Dorado
Chapter 20: Architect After All
Arising first in certain Italian states during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Renaissance was a period of astonishing artistic flowering, a novel secularization of thought and conduct, with a natural affinity for the Italian past – antiquity. The revival of classical culture established canons of excellence in literature, philosophy, politics, painting, sculpture and architecture. But while looking backwards, the Renaissance also marked the beginning of the modern age. Renaissance Italy was the embryo of the world of science, banking and business. Antiquity and modernity were simply its different faces. Sixteenth-century France was very receptive to the new ideas wafting across the Alps, but apart from the literature these did not cross the Channel readily until the early seventeenth century. There were reasons beyond English insularity. Reformation England was naturally hostile to the Catholic continent. One need only mention the war with Spain, French support of Mary Queen of Scots, and the papal bull excommunicating Queen Elisabeth.
In 1604, however, the Anglo-Spanish war ended and the son of Mary Queen of Scots sat upon the English throne. Stuart England was in close touch with the Continent. Under these changed circumstances, a deferred reception of the Renaissance occurred in England. The specific manifestations of this late-blooming Renaissance spirit were recognizable in an Italianate taste embracing Vitruvian principals of architecture, in the collecting of classical sculpture and painting of the cinquecento, in a machiavellianism in diplomacy and politics, in new technology and banking schemes, in exploitation of the New World, in a cosmopolitanism expressed in the humanist maxim that “wherever a learned man fixes his seat, there is home.” Balthazar Gerbier, multilingual and an internationalist, was a carrier of all these ideas to England, which would not have been possible, had he not had the Renaissance Man’s ability to find a patron.
George and Balthazar
The two young men were the same age – twenty-four in 1616 – but there the similarity ended. The one, standing respectfully with his hat in his hands, was recognizably a foreigner in his outlandish suit and his heavily accented English. The other young man lounging elegantly on an enormous four-poster bedstead was by his nonchalant manner unmistakably a member of the English upper classes. George Villiers was King James’s new favourite, and with what that signified in power and prestige, courtiers and suitors attended his morning levee. When the young foreigner had his chance to reach the bedside, he introduced himself as one Balthazar Gerbier. He said he had recently come to England from Holland, and he humbly offered his services to His Lordship, the most honourable and estimable Sir George Villiers, whom he had the privilege of addressing. Surprisingly self-confident under the unequal circumstances, he launched into a recital of his skills which he said he had acquired in the French province of Gascony. “I excel not a little,” he declared, “in writing, limning, drawing, and in the mathematics, as geometry, architecture, fortifications, and in the framing of warlike engines.”1 To strengthen his appeal to Villiers who was King James’s Master of the Horse, he stressed his horsemanship and boasted that the gentlemanly art of manege was another of his accomplishments.
Lodgings at Whitehall Palace went along with the post of Master of the King’s Horse, and King James had ordered the royal surveyor, Inigo Jones, to build his new favourite a fine house of brick and stone overlooking the Privy Gardens. Balthazar Gerbier’s interview took place in the partially completed house against the background noise of saws and hammers.
George was in the process of setting up his household, and Balthazar’s skills made him a promising candidate for a position, perhaps as a secretary or painter. But first George put him to a test. He rose from his bed, and casually announcing that he had left five hundred pounds under the bolster, he commanded Balthazar to take the money and pay the workmen. Sensing a trap, the canny Balthazar boldly called for Villiers’ steward and told him to lock up the money to be delivered when the workmen put in their accounts.2 George laughed uproariously. Balthazar had passed the test of his probity and prudence with flying colours. From that moment the young Dutch immigrant had a patron.
Balthazar Gerbier was willing to wager his future that George Villiers would be the most powerful man in England next to the king himself. As the Great Duke of Buckingham, George would prove him right.
AN IMMIGRANT PAINTER IN LONDON
His name indicates his Huguenot ancestry and, in fact, his parents had fled the religious persecutions in France, settling in Middelburg in Zeeland where Balthazar was born in 1592. Not by chance did Balthazar’s father, Antoine Gerbier, choose the Dutch town of Middelburg. Like all refugees and immigrants he wished to start a new life where he had well-established relatives to smooth the way. In Middelburg he had a family connection in Balthazar de Moucheron, one of the most important businessmen in the United Dutch Provinces.
A half century before Antoine Gerbier arrived with his family, his grandfather, a Bordeaux wine merchant also named Antoine, had moved to Middelburg, the centre of the wine trade in the Netherlands. Drawing on his Bordeaux connections, his business had thrived and he had later expanded into the cloth trade. At that time, Middelburg had the cloth staple, which gave it the exclusive right to import raw English cloth, dye it, and re-export it to England as finished goods. Prospering as a wine and cloth merchant, he built an impressive house and advanced the family’s status by marrying his seventeen-year-old daughter Isabel to Pierre de Moucheron of the Norman nobility. De Moucheron had come to Middelburg around the same time as Gerbier and had likewise prospered in the wine trade. In the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam there is a painting of Pierre and Isabel with their eighteen children, seated around a table laden with fruit and rich dishes while a daughter plays upon a virginal. It is the picture of Dutch prosperity. In 1545 Pierre transferred his trading house to Antwerp, but he himself remained in Middelburg with his large family, taking over his father-in-law’s business when old Antoine died. 1
In 1567 Pierre de Moucheron too died and Balthazar, one of his younger sons, became the head of the family’s trading house. Although the Netherlands was in open revolt against its Spanish overlords by this time, Balthazar de Moucheron was making a fortune. A proto-capitalist, he was a shipowner and a promoter of joint stock ventures that financed trade routes to Russia and the East. When Antwerp fell to the Spaniards in 1585, de Moucheron moved the trading house back to Middelburg. Thus when the younger Antoine Gerbier arrived with his pregnant wife and several children, Balthazar de Moucheron was on hand to assist his co-religionist and relative on his mother’s side. At the christening of Antoine’s youngest son in the Walloon church in Middelburg on March 12, 1592, Balthazar de Moucheron stood up as witness. Naturally, the baby was named after this affluent relative.
There were no members of the Gerbier family left in Middelburg when the newcomers arrived. On old Antoine’s death, his son Lewis had quarrelled with the widow over his inheritance and had moved to Antwerp where the younger Antoine was born. At some point, Antoine made his way to France, the homeland of his grandfather, and there he and his family remained until driven out by the religious wars.
In Middelburg, Antoine went into the wholesale cloth business like his grandfather before him. He had the reputation of a successful, upstanding merchant, and little Balthazar would have spent his early childhood in a spotlessly clean, comfortably furnished household presided over by a good wife and mother such as we see in Dutch genre paintings of the period. But in 1598 Antoine Gerbier died bankrupt, owing a great deal of money to his de Moucheron relatives. The fatherless family, virtually penniless now, broke up, scattering to parts unknown. At six years of age, a footloose existence was thrust upon Balthazar. With his mother’s blessing, he was taken in tow by an elder brother, and the two set out on travels that took them first to Antwerp, then to Bordeaux, and finally to Gascony in southwest France.
As time went on Balthazar Gerbier would conceal his bourgeois beginnings, claiming that he came from French or Spanish nobility, to suit the occasion. He went so far as to appropriate the de Moucheron genealogy, asserting that his father was “a gentleman born with a barony in Normandy.” His mother’s name was Radegonde Blavet and, as his pretensions grew, he would claim that she was “daughter in heir to the Lord of Blavet in Picardie.”2 The unvarnished truth is that he came from a family in trade that had fallen on hard times.
Turbulent Gascony was a rallying point for adventurous youths of the Protestant faith. Since the 1560s French Protestants, known as Huguenots, had been in revolt against the Catholic monarchy. Gascony, the birthplace of the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre, was a hotbed of resistance and Balthazar’s elder brother may well have gone there to join in the Protestant struggle for religious freedom in France.
The long drawn-out Wars of Religion in sixteenth-century France were sporadic and regional. Fighting would die down in one region only to flare up in another. These domestic wars were carried on without great loss of life until August 24, 1572, when the French king, Charles IX, ordered a slaughter of Huguenots in Paris that became known as the St.Bartholomew Day Massacre. The massacre spread across the country, resulting in the exodus of thousands of Huguenots to Protestant Holland and England. Nevertheless, the Huguenots' armed revolt continued unabated. To stop the bloodshed in the war-torn country, Henry of Navarre converted to Catholicism in 1593 and ascended the French throne as Henri IV. His promulgation of the Edict of Nantes in 1598 granted the Huguenots freedom of worship and established Protestantism in two hundred towns.
Thus when the Gerbier brothers arrived in Gascony in 1600, the religious wars were over for the time being. No drums were beating to raise troops nor were any new fortifications under construction. However, the defences from the war years still encircled Navarre and the other Gascon cities, and young Balthazar developed a bent for military engineering. By the time he left Gascony in 1612, he could boast of expertise in "Fortifications and in the Framing of Warlike Engines." Of more practical use from his years in Gascony was acquiring the tools of the painter’s trade. He learned the art of limning - the making of miniature portraits on vellum – and drawing in pen and ink on parchment.
At twenty, Balthazar Gerbier was back in the land of his birth. For a time he apprenticed at the Haarlem studio of the master draftsman and engraver, Hendrik Goltzius.3 But he soon set out to gain a position in the service of Maurice of Nassau, the Stadtholder or chief of state of the de facto Dutch republic. Maurice, the triumphant general who had driven the Spanish out of the northern Netherlands, did not stand on ceremony. He was known to answer all petitions and “to shake hands with the meanest Boor of the country,”4 and Gerbier had no difficulty obtaining an interview. His knowledge of military engineering proved to be his passport to Maurice’s good graces. Although there was some satisfaction in knowing that Maurice “thought well” of him, because of a truce with Spain the Stadtholder had no present use for his knowledge of fortifications. He did, however, take Gerbier into his service as a calligrapher.5 Every court had need of penmen to produce official documents, and good penmanship was particularly prized by the House of Orange. For the ambitious Gerbier this was a lowly occupation and he was none too grateful.
After some months spent embellishing capital letters, he conceived the idea of making a miniature portrait of the popular Maurice and presenting it to the States General – the body of deputies from Zeeland and Holland and the five lesser provinces of the Dutch Netherlands that met at The Hague. The little picture was well received for in February 1615 the deputies voted him an honorarium of a hundred guilders6– not a bad reward compared with the two hundred guilders that was the going price for a full-length portrait. But to succeed as a painter in a land of painters required more than a minor talent. The newly independent Dutch provinces were swarming with painters, and although the town burghers and the country boors bought art as an investment, selling paintings was a highly competitive business. The guild shows presented an embarrassment of riches, while at the big, jostling fairs there were as many paintings for sale as cheeses. Restless, ambitious, and mindful of an astronomer’s prediction at his birth that he would not tarry in his native land but would find princely patrons abroad, Gerbier determined to follow his star and resume his travels.
At The Hague, he had gravitated quite naturally into the company of the English volunteers who lingered in Holland after the truce with Spain. As a child in Middelburg, he had listened to the talk of the English cloth traders who did business with his father, and later in the Huguenot cities of France he had become acquainted with many travelling Englishmen. He had picked up a more than adequate English that allowed him to converse freely with the people at the English embassy. The ambassador was Sir Dudley Carleton, an affable diplomat who dealt in art as a sideline. Carleton not only sent paintings and tapestries to English patrons; he also sent over Dutch artists. He would have encouraged Balthazar Gerbier to go to England.
A home visit by the Dutch ambassador to London, Noel de Caron, provided the opportunity. To travel with an ambassador guaranteed safe conduct on the way and introductions on arrival. Gerbier turned to Maurice who recommended his under-employed servant to de Caron and when the ambassador returned to England, Gerbier went in his train.7 He hoped that de Caron would find him sufficient patrons until he could better himself in his adopted country.
Without means or family, Balthazar Gerbier stepped foot on English soil in 1616, confident of finding patronage. His first sight of London was bound to be disappointing. Instead of the broad, clean streets, paved with brick or stone, and the well-kept buildings of Amsterdam and The Hague, here were tenements of timber or wattle with penthouses leaning crazily against each other across narrow dirt lanes running with effluent. Picking his way around the drunken bodies lying on the streets, he could be excused for comparing the English capital unfavourably with the cities of his native land where beggars were unknown. But on the broad thoroughfare called Cheapside were the goldsmiths’ houses with elaborately carved gables and mullioned windows, as fine as the stepped roof buildings that served the Dutch burghers as warehouses as well as living quarters. Strolling down the Strand, he passed by the palatial town houses of the nobility that backed on the River Thames. Towering over the slums and the mansions were the steeples of fifty-seven churches and the crumbling square tower of St. Paul’s Cathedral. To the east were the docks and the Tower of London and to the west, the palace of Whitehall.
Gerbier's first employment in London called upon his skills as a calligrapher. A contemporary recorded that his "first rise of preferment" was as “a common Pen-man, who pensil'd the Dialogue [Decalogue] in the Dutch Church London."8 (Two wooden tablets with the Ten Commandments written in gold in a florid script remained on the altarpiece of the Dutch Church at Austin Friars until the church's destruction in the Blitz of 1940.) As that employment shows, he lost no time in introducing himself to the Dutch immigrant community. Nevertheless, he had not come to London to swill beer with other newcomers and trade stories of life in Amsterdam or Leiden. Each day he hurried down to London Bridge and arranged with one of the watermen to row him to the King's palace of Whitehall that was open house to visitors and subjects alike.
King James had come to the English throne in 1603 on the death of the great Queen Elizabeth. Famed as the Virgin Queen, she had left no children to inherit the throne and her cousin James, then King James VI of Scotland, was the legitimate heir. The supreme irony was that James was the son of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth's mortal enemy whom she had executed. As James I of England, he and his consort, Anne of Denmark, introduced the new dynasty of the Stuarts. Although a terrible tragedy had befallen them in 1613 when their elder son, Prince Henry, died of typhoid at eighteen, a younger son, Charles, was on hand to secure the succession.
King James was very different from the approachable Maurice. Gerbier soon learned that to have an audience with him was impossible without bribing a favoured courtier to act as intermediary. At first, he could do no more than observe the king. What he saw was a middle-aged man of medium height, with brownish hair streaked with white and a wisp of a beard of the same pied colours, clothed not unlike a Dutch burgher in a padded suit with ballooning breeches. In contrast, his courtiers paraded like peacocks in tight-fitting, richly embroidered doublets and long hose.
Wandering around the sprawling buildings and gardens of Whitehall, Gerbier might come upon a rehearsal for a masque in the Banqueting House or a joust in the tiltyard. Sometimes the dashing George Villiers, the new royal favourite, was to be seen in glinting armour charging an opponent with a blunt lance or riding at the ring. At the palace the courtiers in the Long Gallery paced slowly in twos or threes in whispered discussions. It behooved an ambitious newcomer to know which of these men were in the King’s favour. Seeing Holbein's great mural of King Henry VIII and his family in the Presence Chamber, Gerbier like all hopeful young painters would have dreamed of playing Holbein to James's Henry, but he soon learned that art would not open the door to this king's patronage. Although a learned man (his subjects flattered him by calling him the British Solomon), James was indifferent to the visual arts and frankly antagonistic to French and Italian fashions. His tastes ran towards rowdy buffoonery and the outdoor life of the hunt.
While taking in the sights at court, Gerbier listened to even the most trivial talk of the courtiers. Gossip, fantastic or factual, fascinated him. He carefully stored the bits and pieces in his mind against the day they could prove useful. Security was loose at court. Gerbier heard that diplomats came home from abroad to find their unanswered despatches stuffing the urinal in Secretary of State Winwood's chamber. In James's court there was no shortage of gossip.
As well as resident ambassadors in their embassies, special ambassadors and foreign legates came and went continually. The parochialism of Elizabethan England had all but disappeared. Diplomatic relations were resumed with Spain, maintained with Venice and Turin, precariously balanced with France and the new Dutch republic. Foreigners abounded in Jacobean England. Gerbier had arrived at the propitious moment. This milieu provided infinite possibilities for a young man acquainted with foreign lands and with a knowledge of several languages. He talked to everyone, hoarding what they had to say like gold. Each courier arriving from distant parts found himself buttonholed by a little man eager to hear the latest news from Venice, The Hague, Madrid, Turin, or Paris. Gerbier piled all this on top of his own experiences in Holland and Huguenot France. He was becoming a mine of information. In later years he would say that "the many secrets he had gathered from diverse rare persons made him pleasing to the Great Ones.”
If gossip was more than a hobby with him, painting was less than a vocation. Though known around the court as a painter, in practice he made very few pictures. The British Museum has a pen and ink drawing on parchment, the size of a playing card, of Prince Maurice signed by Gerbier and dated 1616, and another of James’s son-in-law, Frederick V, the Elector Palatine: both are taken from well known engravings. The miniature of Prince Maurice shows him astride a prancing unicorn, with an array of troops massed in the background. Below the cartouche the versatile Gerbier has composed a poem lauding Prince Maurice’s military prowess. The Victoria and Albert Museum has a minia ture on vellum of an unknown young man by Gerbier dated 1616. He soon discovered that Nicholas Hilliard and the Oliver family enjoyed a virtual monopoly in his own specialty of miniature portraits.
Since Gerbier could look to no one but the Dutch ambassador to find him patrons, he haunted Caroone House across the Thames in South Lambeth. De Caron was an aged and eccentric bachelor who lived in great style, entertaining the nobility at his half-timbered mansion. He was an art collector, and the house boasted "a long and beautiful airy gallery, hung throughout with precious and fine paintings" - a pleasant place for Gerbier to cool his heels until the ambassador would see him. No doubt eager to rid himself of the importunate fellow wished upon him by Prince Maurice, de Caron discharged his obligation by presenting him to King James.9
We know that King James posed for the young painter introduced to him by de Caron because a 1638 catalogue of the royal collection lists "a picture of King James with a Hat by Sr. Balthazar Gerbier.”10 The cataloguer was the Dutchman Abraham Vanderdort; he would have known Gerbier and the attribution must be accepted. The king’s portrait has been lost but the Victoria and Albert has two miniatures by Gerbier of the heir to the throne, Prince Charles. One is a watercolour on vellum, the other a stippled drawing in pen and ink. The watercolour is signed and dated "Gerbier fecit 1616" and the drawing is signed "Balthazar Gerbier.”11 A Latin inscription in the cartouche surrounding the watercolour portrait identifies the sitter as the Prince of Wales. This illustrious commission would seem to have come to Gerbier through the good offices of the Dutch ambassador but another possibility will shortly be explored.
It was a sixteen-year-old beardless youth who posed for Gerbier. Charles had just been invested as Prince of Wales, and he has a bemused expression as if fearful of the future kingship awaiting him by the death of his elder brother. As Gerbier portrays him, he is far from handsome, with a high forehead and a rather large nose. He is clean-shaven, with short hair brushed behind his ears and sporting a large pearl earring. In the coloured miniature he wears a small stand-up ruff, but in the pen and ink monochrome he has the lace-trimmed, falling collar that was replacing the ruff. Gerbier's miniatures are bust portraits only but in full-length portraits of this period Charles stands awkwardly as if he did not know what to do with his teenage arms and legs. There was in him none of the easy bearing and unconscious distinction of the English aristocracy so apparent in the elegant person of George Villiers. Moreover, the Prince suffered from a speech impediment.
It did not take Gerbier long to realize that this stammering youth was not to be the second of the princes promised him by his horoscope. Having sat to Gerbier for his portrait, Prince Charles had no further use for his services at that time. Unlike his late brother Prince Henry, Charles showed no precocious interest in the arts. At this stage his attendants were the young sportsmen who hunted and hawked with him. Gerbier could not have foreseen that when Charles became king he would assemble one of the greatest art collections in history.
Gerbier wasted no time on unripe patrons. The rising man at court was George Villiers, a younger son of an old titled family in Leicestershire. Like many of the English nobility and gentry, he had been educated in France, in his case at an academy in Blois. There he had learned to fence and dance gracefully, to ride expertly, and to speak a fair French. On his return to England, he was sent to court by his ambitious mother to find a rich wife. At this time, a cabal of courtiers headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury was seeking a good-looking young man to replace King James’s current favourite, the Earl of Somerset. The direction of England’s foreign affairs was at stake. Somerset and his backers, the powerful Howard family, were the leaders of the pro-Spanish faction at court, and the cabal, which favoured alliances with the Protestant states, wished to end Somerset’s influence over the king. Although James had fathered four children on his Danish wife, Queen Anne, his sexual preference was for men. The cabal believed that the extraordinarily handsome newcomer from Leicestershire was just the man to appeal to James and supplant Somerset. And so he was. Archbishop Abbott’s protege completely captivated King James. George, a lover of women, obliged his promoters by making himself available sexually to secure the King’s affections.
King James knighted Villiers, conferred upon him the Order of the Garter, and made him his Master of the Horse. Gerbier applied to the new favourite. In his own words here is his description of this portentous interview with the future Duke of Buckingham:
At my very first application to him, when as the said Duke (happily [perhaps] to try me) had left five hundred pounds under his Bolster, which he commanded me to take as I waited on him at his rising, willing me to dispose of the same to the workmen; but on the contrary, I called for the Duke’s Steward, and wisht him to lock up the said monies for to bee delivered upon account.1
Impressed by Gerbier’s prudent refusal to handle the workmen’s wages, the favourite hired him on the spot.
It was soon apparent that Gerbier had made no mistake in choosing a patron. He relates that immediately upon entering his service, George Villiers became “Baron, Viscount, Earle, and afterwards created Marquis and Duke of Buckingham.” Since he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Villiers and Baron Whaddon on August 27, 1616, Gerbier’s employment would have begun sometime that summer. One of the Gerbier miniatures identifies Charles as the Prince of Wales and Charles was invested as Prince of Wales in November 1616, which raises the possibility that Gerbier’s miniatures were done after rather than before he entered Villiers' service, and on his recommendation. This would explain his problematic statement to Buckingham in 1625: "I swear to God I never painted before placing myself under your patronage after leaving the Prince of Orange." 2
On January 5, 1617, the King created his favourite Earl of Buckingham. Although Gerbier had been hired as a painter in the young nobleman's household, his tasks were left undefined. The seventeenth century preceded the age of specialization. Gerbier was simply one of Buckingham's "creatures" and his patron's needs determined his function. "My attendance was pleasing to him," Gerbier would later write, "bijcause of my severall languages, good hand in writing: skill in sciences, as Mathematicks, Architecture, drawing, painting, contryving of scenes, Masques, shows and entertainments for greate Princes, besides many secrets which I had gathered from divers rare persons, as likewise for making of Engins us full in warre.”3 Some of these skills Gerbier acquired on the job, but his beautiful handwriting and his linguistic versatility were immediately useful to his patron who entrusted his foreign correspondence to him.
Not long after retaining Gerbier, Buckingham appointed as his Master of the Horse a young man named Endymion Porter. The possessor of this poetic name was partly Spanish through his grandmother, and had spent his youth in Madrid as a page in the household of the Conde Olivarez whose son was now the King of Spain's chief minister. Porter made much of his connections with Spain, intimating to Buckingham that if he had any business with that country, he was the man to undertake it. Though Gerbier got along well with Porter he recognized his driving desire for preferment so similar to his own. To counteract Porter's advantage in all things Spanish, Gerbier began to dwell upon his French ancestry, consigning to silence his Dutch birth. Perhaps he was already claiming ties of blood with titled French families - the d'Ouvilly of Normandy and the Blavet of Picardy.4
Painting occupied a good part of Gerbier’s time. Early in 1618 he painted a miniature of his patron. Now in the Northumberland Collection, Buckingham is astride a prancing horse, holding a staff of office. The artist has fallen into the error of shortening the body and legs so that his subject looks like a handsome dwarf. But the youthful, clean-shaven face, shining with breeding and beauty, and the scarlet and gold of the horse's trappings give the little picture a vivacity and dash. Gerbier would never suffer criticism of this work. “I think that the portrait is esteemed a very good one – I know in my conscience that it is exceedingly like,” he defended it against a critic.”5 Nevertheless, to be Buckingham’s painter was little more gratifying for Gerbier than to be Prince Maurice’s calligrapher. Painters were regarded as nothing more than artisans in James’s England. Although scornful of the painter’s craft in his own day, Gerbier brought with him a keen appreciation of the great art of the past. This is evident from a poem he composed on the death in 1617 of the engraver, Hendrick Goltzius. Dedicated to Ambassador de Caron and written in Dutch, it displays his familiarity not only with the Netherlandish art scene but also with the Italian Old Masters.
To his disappointment he found an apathy to art in James's England, no doubt caused by the indifference of the King and the insularity of the English. There had been the beginnings of an English Renaissance in the arts under James’s elder son Prince Henry, but his early death had nipped it in the bud. A few years later, the Earl of Somerset had made an auspicious start as a patron of art by commissioning Sir Dudley Carleton to buy him Venetian paintings, but by the time Gerbier arrived in England in 1616 Somerset was in the Tower of London for murdering his secretary, Sir Thomas Overbury. Most discouraging of all was the low level of art appreciation. The English nobility merely thought of adding new faces to their ancestral galleries. The Earl of Salisbury was known as an art collector, but a 1611 inventory of Hatfield, his country house in Hertfordshire, lists mainly portraits, and the few religious and mythological pictures were by Netherlandish rather than Italian artists. Only Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, measured up to continental standards of connoisseurship.
Arundel House in the Strand was a mecca for visiting connoisseurs who came to admire the collection of sculpture and painting without peer or precedent in England. The collection was housed in a specially constructed two-storey gallery. The Earl of Arundel had taken Inigo Jones with him on a tour of Italy, and the architect had opened his eyes to the beauties of Andrea Palladio's classical buildings. Home in England, Arundel built these Palladian halls as a suitable gallery for his collection. In all likelihood, Inigo Jones drew up the plans because he worked for the Earl before becoming Surveyor of the King’s Works in 1616. In the painting gallery were many fine paintings by Hans Holbein, including portraits of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, but also by Raphael, Leonardo, and the Venetians. (The Tintorettos and Bassanos that Sir Dudley Carleton had purchased for the disgraced favourite, Somerset, were subsequently sold to the Earl of Arundel.6) Ascending the stairs, the favoured guest entered the vaulted sculpture gallery where several dozen marble statues of Ancient Greece and Rome stood along the walls. His lordship’s painter was Daniel Mytens whom Sir Dudley Carleton had sent over from The Hague. Perhaps Mytens showed Gerbier the portraits he was working on of the Earl and his Countess seated in their famed galleries. On his patron’s behalf, Mytens carried on a regular correspondence with Sir Dudley Carleton at The Hague. The Earl had a network of agents spread over the Low Countries, France, Italy, and Greece. It was their task to search out art treasures for him. Ambassadors and friends travelling abroad were also given special commissions.
Arundel House provided Gerbier with the answer to a worrisome problem. How could he make himself indispensable to his master? Many people could write letters in foreign languages (though assuredly not in such a beautiful script) and many could paint tolerable likenesses, but how many could do these things and at the same time build up an art collection to rival that of Arundel House? Like all the new rich, Buckingham wished to have the outward show of wealth. Subtly his painter directed this appetite towards art. For every horse Buckingham bought, Gerbier influenced him to purchase some "rarity.” The magnificence of Arundel House and its burgeoning collection were calculated to excite jealous emulation. Here was the perfect model to inspire the collector's urge in Gerbier's patron.
It had become imperative for Gerbier to establish himself securely. He had fallen in love and wished to get married. His intended was the beautiful daughter of a goldsmith-engraver named William Kipp who had emigrated from Utrecht around 1590. His daughter Deborah was born in England and baptised at the Dutch Church in Austin Friars in 1601.7 Despite Gerbier's pretensions, the Dutch community was in no doubt about his antecedents, and her father would not have allowed her to marry this recent immigrant and "common penman" had Gerbier not secured a place in the household of the King's favourite, now the Marquess of Buckingham. Balthazar married the lovely Deborah Kipp in 1618, and the young couple moved in with her parents on Candlewick Street. In the natural course of events a son was born to them. The new father did not hesitate in choosing a name. The baby was christened George. A baby girl followed and Elizabeth Deborah Gerbier was baptised at St. Dunstan's church in Fleet Street on January 14, 1620.8 The choice of an Anglican church rather than the Dutch Church at Austin Friars indicates that Gerbier was setting out to become an English gentleman. However while he remained a household servant, Endymion Porter had married a niece of Buckingham’s and had become a part of Buckingham’s entourage, following King James’s endless progresses from palace to hunting lodge to the great country houses of the aristocracy. Naturally, Endymion too named his first son George.
Meanwhile, Gerbier was making progress with his campaign to turn Buckingham into an art collector. In touch with the continental art market, he had learned that a Flemish collector, the Duke of Aerschot, was putting some Veronese paintings up for sale. Convincing his patron that acquiring these works would be the start of a collection to rival the Earl of Arundel’s in July 1619 Gerbier travelled to Hainault in Flanders and purchased nine canvases by the Venetian master.9
We know that Gerbier took the opportunity of being in Flanders to pay a visit to the neighbouring Dutch Provinces because in the Queen of Holland’s collection there is a very fine miniature in watercolour on vellum of Maurice of Nassau in golden armour, signed by Gerbier and dated 1619. It shows head and shoulders only but Gerbier has taken the pose from a full-length portrait of Maurice in armour by the leading Dutch artist of the day, Michiel van Miereveldt. Gerbier has not copied the face; that is drawn from life and is Maurice as he saw him. Gerbier obviously painted and sold the miniature while in Holland in 1619 and there it remained until purchased for the Dutch royal collection in 1902.10
In 1619 James bestowed upon his favourite the much sought-after post of Lord High Admiral though Buckingham knew nothing of the sea. Along with honour came its companion - wealth. Buckingham's doting benefactor showered grants and pensions upon him and entrusted him with the dispensing of patronage - the most priceless gift of all.
In May 1620 Buckingham married. His choice accountably fell on the richest heiress in England, Katherine Manners, only surviving child of the Earl of Rutland. Buckingham’s painter would have spent many hours thinking about this turn of events. What would happen to him if his new mistress did not like him? As it happened she did not. Right after her wedding she sat to him for her portrait.11 Aside from her passion for her husband, Kate Buckingham was too full of common sense (or wanting in imagination) to be anything but repelled by the hyperbolic turn of speech of Monsieur Gerbier. Still, she would have hidden her true feelings because she knew that he was almost indispensable to her husband - more so than she was herself, she often suspected. It was not long before poor Kate discovered that her adored husband had one great fault, that of loving women too much, as she told him frankly. But adultery accounted only in part for his frequent absence from the marriage bed.
From the time of his marriage Buckingham was an exceedingly busy man. By 1620 he was no longer simply the King's favourite but had become his chief minister, and into this sphere of state affairs he brought Gerbier. Buckingham realized that his enterprising Jack-of-all-trades had an even greater potential than he had guessed. Gerbier's resourcefulness, his savoir faire, and a cynical attitude beyond his years convinced his employer that he had the makings of a first-rate secret agent. Gerbier was already keeping the ciphers and conducting Buckingham's correspondence with his spies abroad, when (as he tells it) "I was sent by him (with the King his masters aprobation) in secret messages."12
In October 1620, we find him in Paris on some unidentified mission.13 But a manuscript autobiography discovered by the antiquarian Isaac Disraeli in the nineteenth century describes a highly secret mission that Gerbier was sent on in 1622.
There was a certain situation in Germany that Buckingham wished to probe as inconspicuously as possible. It concerned the King's daughter Elizabeth and her husband the Elector Palatine, a German princeling known in England as the Palsgrave. The Palatinate issue was the hub around which English diplomacy would revolve throughout the reigns of two kings. It all began with the trouble in Bohemia. Where was this Bohemia which was suddenly of such importance to the King's daughter and consequently to all Englishmen? One of the plays at the Globe theatre was supposed to take place on a seashore in Bohemia. To their surprise, theatergoers now learned that Bohemia was deep in central Europe.
Bohemia formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, that is to say it came under the sway of the Austrian Habsburgs whose suzerainty spread over the map of Europe like spilled paint. Nevertheless, the Catholic Habsburgs were being challenged in their domains by the rise of Protestantism, both Lutheran and Calvinist. When the King of Bohemia died, the Holy Roman Emperor Mathias managed to have the Catholic Ferdinand of Styria elected king. The Bohemian Protestants rebelled. Their leaders threw the imperial envoys out the window of the palace at Prague (they landed safely in the moat) and in the name of the Diet, or parliament, offered the crown to King James’s son-in-law Frederick, the Protestant Elector Palatine. Although he had his hereditary principality in Germany, Frederick foolishly accepted the Bohemian crown in spite of King James’s disapproval, and with his English princess-wife took up residence in Prague, the Bohemian capital, over the winter of 1620. Meanwhile, the Holy Roman Emperor (now Ferdinand of Styria) was getting ready to oust the audacious Frederick as soon as the snow was off the ground. The plight of the King's daughter created a furor in England. In an age of symbols she represented the spirit of Protestantism oppressed by the wrong-headed forces of Catholicism. To help the Palsgrave and the English princess became the popular cause: a war chest was started (largest donor, the Prince of Wales, followed by the the Marquess of Buckingham), a volunteer brigade was formed, poets wrote rousing marching songs, and tavern keepers repainted the signs swinging over their doors with a Palsgrave's Head. A fever gripped the nation. This continued unabated until in the autumn of 1620, the sad news reached England that on a hill outside Prague the Palsgrave had been routed decisively by the imperial forces. Nor could he fly home to the Palatinate because the King of Spain had stepped in to oblige his imperial cousin and sent General Ambrogio Spinola to take it away from him. Derisively called “the Winter King and Queen” at all the European courts, Elizabeth and Frederick were living in exile in Holland.
In the circumstances it might have been supposed that James would rush troops across the Channel and over to Germany. This is not what happened. James was the great pacifist of his age and even the loss of his daughter's home could not instil the martial spirit in him. James’s foreign policy was based on peace, trade, and a marriage alliance with Spain. Nor did his chief minister counsel war. Buckingham, a political weathercock, had swung around from the days of the war chest. He heartily endorsed James's peace-at-any-price policy and trumped up excuses not to give military assistance. James promised his daughter that he would get the Palatinate back for her by diplomacy. He and his favourite hoped to accomplish this with the help of one man. Ironically, this man was none other than the Spanish ambassador, Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, the Conde Gondomar. James leaned on his judgment with a child-like faith, and in the Long Gallery at Whitehall Buckingham paced up and down with him in intense discussion. Gondomar represented the country that had stolen the Palatinate and made the King's daughter an exile. Why was he still persona grata with the King and his chief minister? Partly it was the spell of his personality. His charm and wit were famous. He had an impudent tongue that did not gag on insulting the King of England. Gerbier relates an incident that he probably heard from Buckingham: One day the usually tractable James was railing at Gondomar over Spinola's capture of the first Palatinate town under the very eyes of the English ambassador. Gondomar answered that he wished Spinola had taken the whole Palatinate at once. Before the speechless James could recover from the shock, the smiling Spaniard continued, "For then the generosity of my master would be shown in all its lustre, by restoring it all again to the English Ambassador who had witnessed the whole operation."14 On this occasion, King James was not amused, but most of the time Gondomar's bold paradoxes delighted him.
The Spaniard's main hold over his English hosts, however, was a seductive plan he had unfolded to them. Why not revive the long-discussed match between the Prince of Wales and the King of Spain's youngest sister, with the Palatinate as Spain's wedding gift to England?15 To James he talked of negotiations, settlements, and trade concessions, but to Buckingham and an enthralled Prince Charles, in the course of their promenades in the Long Gallery, he whispered hints of an escapade that sent the young men's blood coursing wildly through their veins. When knighthood was in flower, breathed Gondomar to Charles, did a lover sit back in the countinghouse with his father, or did he gallop to his beloved and strum melodies beneath her balcony? He declared that in Spain it was still done that way. To Buckingham he insinuated that the person who could bring about such a romantic encounter between a prince and a princess in this colourless, modern world would be a hero, one who would live forever in the annals of love.
While scheming with Gondomar to restore his daughter's home by his son's marriage, James prided himself on taking other measures as well. A continuous parade of ambassadors was marched over to the Continent to entreat anyone who had any say in the matter to be so kind as to restore the Palatinate to the King's son-in-law. Not only did these English ambassadors go forth with the full knowledge of Gondomar, some even went at his suggestion. To Brussels, to Prague, to Heidelberg, to Vienna, flew Sir Gilbert Chaworth, Sir Richard Weston, Sir Edward Conway, Viscount Doncaster, and Sir Arthur Chichester, like a flock of doves. Meanwhile the English people were impatient for action. They could not understand why it was good kingcraft to conciliate those who had stolen the Palatinate instead of forcing them at sword-point to give it back. The Parliament that met in 1621 made it clear to James that they had no confidence in his methods.
This was the impasse at which matters stood when Buckingham launched his painter into the murky waters of secret diplomacy. Germany was a patchwork of principalities, some Protestant, some Catholic, and he felt it expedient to ascertain the attitude of the German Union of Protestant Princes on the Palatinate question. Were they willing to help their brother princeling in the cause of Protestantism? If they were not prepared to act as England's allies against the power of Austria and Spain, that fact could be used to subdue the war party in England. If they were, it would do no harm to apprise Gondomar of this - it could only increase Spain's ardour to ally with England. For public consumption, Sir Albertus Morton was despatched "to force and persuade the Princes of the Union to defend and recover the Palatinate."16 Privately Balthazar Gerbier was sent to test the true intentions of the German princes. No attention was paid to his going for who would believe that the Lord Marquess's painter was charged with such an important mission.
Going from one stuffy German court to another, Gerbier met with a universally cool reception. The German Protestants were far from united. Lutherans had little sympathy for the Calvinist Elector Palatine, furthermore their deep conservatism bound them to their imperial suzerain. The Calvinist princes were hampered by no such scruples, but they lacked any commitment to Frederick’s cause and would only fight on consideration of a large monthly subsidy from the King of England. Gerbier even sounded out some Catholic princes, but if he hoped to stir up latent animosity towards their Habsburg overlords he was disappointed. In an interview with the Elector of Treves, he found that prince-bishop incensed against the Elector Palatine for disturbing the public peace by grabbing at the Bohemian crown. He summarily dismissed his visitor with the statement that "God in these days did not send prophets more to the Protestants than to others, to fight against nations, and to second pretences which public incendiaries propose to princes, to engage them into unnecessary wars with their neighbours."17 From these talks Buckingham's secret agent concluded that if King James ventured to fight on his son-in-law's behalf, it would be "a war of no hopes." Rational and secular, Gerbier was patently unmoved by the plight of the Palatine family in exile in Holland or the blow to the Protestant cause.
Gerbier's report could not have failed to please his masters. The information he put at their disposal, the unwillingness of the German princes to get involved in the cause of the self-styled King and Queen of Bohemia, could be a useful weapon for stifling war cries from the Commons. On the other hand, had the secret envoy returned with a positive report, it could have been torn up and none the wiser.
Few people knew of Gerbier's adventures as a secret agent. If he left London mysteriously it was assumed he had slipped away to the Continent to buy pictures because Buckingham had become an enthusiastic art collector. In 1619 he had formally put Gerbier in charge of "the keeping of my pictures and other rarities.”1 This was the realization of Gerbier's dream, inspired by the Arundel galleries. An unforeseen event had helped Gerbier in his campaign to turn his patron into a patron of the arts. Buckingham had acquired York House, one of the great estates that bordered the Thames between the City of London and the centre of government at Westminster. Since the sixteenth century it had been the home of the Lord Keepers of the Privy Seal. The present Lord Keeper was Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, a brilliant lawyer who had acted as Buckingham’s mentor and friend in return for a peerage and high office. The son of a Lord Keeper, he had been born at York House and had a deep attachment to the place. Sir Francis lost his house at the same time as he lost his reputation. In a scandal that rocked the court, it was revealed that he had accepted bribes while sitting on the bench. Bacon took his misfortune like a philosopher, but a blow he could not sustain with philosophic calm was the loss of York House. He put off one prospective purchaser of the lease (technically this choice piece of real estate belonged to the See of York) with these words: "For this you will pardon me. York House is the house where my father died, and where I first breathed, and there will I yield my last breath, if it so please God and the King." Surprisingly, the one man he could not turn aside was his friend Buckingham who brought pressure to bear until Bacon could hold out no longer. Early in 1622 he sold the remainder of the lease to Buckingham for thirteen hundred pounds.2
Anticipating that York House would soon fall into his hands, in 1621 Buckingham sent Gerbier to Italy to buy art.3 In doing so, he gave Gerbier an assignment that perfectly suited his talents and inclinations. Italy was to shape him, and he, in turn, would contribute to the Italianizing process that was moulding English taste. The collection that he was to amass for Buckingham was predominantly Italian and the aesthetic doctrine he propagated all his life was Italianate.
Gerbier set forth that summer carrying 200l. and letters of exchange to be cashed in Venice.3 His first destination was Rome, the undisputed art centre of the world. There he went quietly about his business, careful to avoid the eye of authority for although cooling autumn breezes wafted into the city from the Alban Hills, Rome could be a hot place for a Protestant. The Jesuits were on the watch for heresy as keenly as the Inquisitors of Spain, and to stand one's ground, declaring oneself English or Dutch, was useless because there was no English or Dutch embassy for refuge. The only English institution was the English College of Jesuits, and the Protestant traveller usually gave a wide berth to that establishment. One group that Gerbier could have met with with impunity was the Dutch artists who clustered in lodgings at the foot of the Quirinal. They were harmless Bohemians, enjoying wine and endlessly analyzing the chiaroscuro technique of their idol, Caravaggio. An association with them would not have caused trouble for Gerbier since official Rome did not know they existed. But if Gerbier, or any other Protestant in the Rome of 1621, doubted that he was in danger, he had only to reflect on the fate of John Mole, a tutor who, accompanying his pupil to Rome in 1609, was arrested by the Inquisition and twelve years later still languished in a Roman prison. This chastening example did not stop Gerbier from buying art for Buckingham and seeing the sights of Rome for himself. Like tourists of every age, he could not contain his admiration: "The Capital, the Mount Cavallo and the Vatican, and the Temple (called Saint Peter) may be put to the miracles of the world." 4 He mused on Ancient Rome amid "broken marble columns, the Pantheon, some triumphal arches." He stood entranced by the sight of the "rare carved statues and pictures" of Renaissance Rome.
Gerbier worked out a special itinerary for the city that he later recommended to all travellers in a little guidebook entitled Subsidium Peregrantibus. Since there is no reason to suppose that he did not follow his own good advice, we can accompany him on his sight-seeing - provided he does not lose us with his eccentric spelling of names and places. It was the pictures that particularly claimed his attention. First, "(to view them in order) those of Perin del Vago in Castel St. Angelo, then proceed towards the plain (on which the famous St. Peter's Church is built) observe there the great Pyramid on the left side of that plain, and in the Church, the pictures of the Cavalier Balioni, Pormarancio, Passignani, Del Castello, the Piete (in marble) of Michel Angelo, the Day of Judgment by the same Angelo painted in the Pope's Chapel, the altar and sepulchre of St. Cecilia, all of jaspis and other rare stone; in the Pope's Chambers the matchless pictures of Raphael d'Urbin, thence make towards A Bel Vidor there see the Laocoon, the Apollo, Cleopatra, Lautino, and a Marble called el Torso." Next he advised a visit to St. Peter Montorio to see the famous Raphael Transfiguration above the altar, now in the Vatican Museum. Then on to the Capitoline Hill to admire the statue of "Marcus Aurelius on horseback ... Il Colosso and the triumphal Arch of Constantin." He did not overlook "the Farnese Palace, in the gallery (above stairs) the rare painting in white and black of Hannibal Carasa ... the great Market-place called Navonna ... the Church called Minerva, and therein the figure of Christ carved by Michel Angelo."5
Although primarily interested in Italian painting, Gerbier also paused to admire the masterpieces of Greek and Roman sculpture. "Concerning Venus, there's not a figure in the world more genteel and more accomplished than that of Medicis at Rome, and next to that nothing more manly than the Hercules of Farnese, nothing more noble than the Apollo, the Meleager, the Gladiator, and above all the incomparable Laocoon, whereof the lineaments, the circular strokes, the muscles, the nerves, and the veins are so well expressed that it seems to be a gathering of figures petrified, and who in former times must have been of flesh, as the child at the town house at Sens in France, which a mother had borne sixteen years, and which was found in her body after death.”6 Perhaps Gerbier made many drawings of these antique statues. We know that he copied the Hercules in the Farnese Palace, and that it was so "excellently drawn with a silver pen upon a large piece of Table-book leaf" that it was "the admiration of all the Italians that saw it."7
In his determination to see Buckingham established in the finest private residence in Europe, Gerbier was indefatigable in visiting the palaces and villas of Rome - each an inhabited monument to the glory of a family. Setting the standard of magnificence for the future Keeper of York House were the "Palaces of Borghese, Oldebrandini, Guisi ... the Garden of Pleasure of the Cardinal Borghese, all beset with rare antique statues and within garnished with many rare pictures."8 The visit to the richly ornamented, suburban Villa Borghese called for a comparative study of the rival Villa Ludovisi that another papal-nephew, the Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, was constructing in his vineyards. Gerbier's love of magnificent building took him farther afield, to the towns of Frascati and Caprarola where the Roman aristocrats, the Aldobrandini and the Farnese, had their summer villas.
One of his favourites was the Palazzo de Chigi ("Guisi" in Gerbier's peculiar orthography) to which he returned again and again to study the frescoes by the divine Raphael. In company with other artists, he spent hours in the charming entrance hall overlooking the garden, copying the Banquet of the Gods. Working near Gerbier was a Florentine who explained that he was making sketches for a copy of monumental proportions. The finished work was to be in two parts, each nineteen feet long. Gerbier must have visited this artist's studio to see the work in progress because he purchased "the two great histories which are in making" for the sum of 42l, arranging for them to be sent to London on completion. Well satisfied with this transaction, he settled down to finish his own copy in coloured chalk. Gerbier’s copy found an enthusiastic admirer. "The best Crayons that ever I saw,” Edward Norgate later wrote in Miniatura, “were those made by Sr Balthazer Gerbier after those so celebrated Histories done by Raphaell of the banquets of the Gods, to be seen in the Pallazzo de Gigi."9 Norgate may have been somewhat prejudiced because he was a close friend of Gerbier’s and connected with him by marriage.