Part 14

“A lady of great birth and virtue being in the power of her friends, was by them married against her will unto one against whom she did protest at the very solemnity and ever after; between whom, from the first day, there ensued continued discord, although the same fears that forced her to marry constrained her to live with him. Instead of a comforter, he did study in all things to torment her; and by fear and fraud, did practice to deceive her of her dowry.”

Sidney was always writing of Stella’s marvellous black eyes and their shining rays:

“When nature made her chief work, Stella’s eyes, In color black, why wrapt she beams so bright? Would she in beauty black, like painter wise, Fame daintiest lustre, mixt of shades and light? Or did she else that sober hue devise In object best to knit and strength our sight; Least, if no veil these brave gleams did disguise, They, sunlike, should more dazzle than delight? Or would she her miraculous power show, That, whereas black seems Beauty’s contrary, She even in black doth make all beauties flow? Both so, and thus--she, minding Love should be Placed even there, gave his this mourning weed To honor all their deaths who for her bleed.”

There is every reason, therefore, why the subject of this picture should be so handsome, so distinguished, and so fascinating.

[Illustration:

_Collection of Mr. Jules S. Bache_

ROBERT RICH, EARL OF WARWICK

--_Sir Anthony Van Dyck_]

Robert Rich was born in 1587 and was admitted to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1603 and in that year was created a Knight of the Bath. He was quite old enough to have remembered the exciting days of the Essex conspiracy, the part his mother took in this, her imprisonment and release, and his uncle’s execution in 1601. At the age of twenty-three he was elected to Parliament and was again elected in 1614. In 1619 he succeeded to the title.

Robert Rich was one of the original members of the Company for the Plantation of the Bermudas in 1614 and was granted a seat on the Council of the New England Company in 1620, which two great enterprises connect this handsome lord with our own country. Also in 1624 Robert Rich was made a member of the Council of the Virginia Government. Yet this was not all. Warwick’s Colonial interests brought him into close relation with the leading men of the Puritan Party and link his name with the early history of the New England Colonies. He was closely associated with the origin of Connecticut, for in 1632 he granted to Lord Say, Lord Brooke, John Hampden, and others what is known as “the old patent of Connecticut,” under which the town of Saybrook (named for Lord Say and Lord Brooke) was founded.

In English politics Warwick opposed the policy of Charles I and, consequently, after the dissolution of the Short Parliament, he was arrested by the King’s order.

As temporal head of the Puritans and opposed to the party in the Established Church led by Archbishop Laud, Warwick concurred in the prosecution of Archbishop Laud and the Earl of Strafford. In 1643 Warwick was appointed Lord High Admiral of the Fleet, serving Parliament in opposition to Charles I, and he bore the title of Governor-in-Chief of all the islands and other plantations subject to the English Crown, on which authority he became associated with the founding of the Colony of Rhode Island. After the monarchy and the House of Lords had both been swept away, the Earl of Warwick gave his support and encouragement to Oliver Cromwell. The marriage of Cromwell’s daughter to Warwick’s grandson proves the strength of the friendship. The Earl of Warwick died on April 19, 1658, and was buried at Felsted, Essex. He had been three times married.

This picture, in oils on canvas (83 × 49 inches), belonged in the Collection of the Marquess of Breadalbane, Taymouth Castle, Scotland, and to the Collection of the Hon. Mrs. Robert Baillie-Hamilton, Langton, Duns, Scotland.

QUEEN HENRIETTA MARIA WITH JEFFREY HUDSON AND A MONKEY.

_Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641)._

_Collection of Mr. William Randolph Hearst._

This full-length portrait in oils on canvas (85¼ × 52 inches) was painted in 1633, the year that Van Dyck was knighted and when he had been about a year in the service of Charles I. Its pedigree is interesting. The painting was in the possession of the Newports, Earls Bradford of the first creation, and was left in 1762, on the death of the fifth Earl, to his sister, Diana, Countess of Mountrath. From the Countess of Mountrath it descended to her son, the last Earl of Mountrath, and from him to the first Earl of Dorchester, of Milton Abbey, where it remained until removed by the Earl of Portarlington to Emo Park, Queen’s County, Ireland. In 1881 Thomas George, first Earl of Northbrook, acquired it by exchange from the Earl of Portarlington; and from the latter it was inherited by Francis George, the second Earl of Northbrook, whence it came to the present owner.

The Queen of Charles I, proud and handsome, is very French and Italian in general style; for be it remembered that Henrietta Maria was the daughter of the gallant King Henry of Navarre and his second wife, Marie de’ Medici, and that she was, consequently, the sister of Louis XIII (see page 176).

The Queen has brown hair curled in “ringlets” and one “ringlet” falls on her shoulder. Her face is oval and delicate and her eyes are brown. She is standing at full length on a step with her head slightly turned to the left, dressed in a blue silk gown (of the shade we now call “Alice blue”), trimmed with narrow gold braid, and a large black felt hat with a white plume, lace collar and a kerchief over her shoulders with two pink bows in front. Beautifully painted frills of lace adorn the elbow sleeves. With her left hand she touches a stiff fold in her dress and with her right hand she caresses a little brown monkey perched on the shoulder of Jeffrey Hudson, the famous dwarf. The little dwarf is about thirteen years of age and is much under size. He has light hair and the slightly wizened face that usually goes with this kind of freak. Indeed our little Jeffrey looks not unlike the pictures of the famous “Gen. Tom Thumb” of Barnum days in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Jeffrey Hudson wears a suit of brick-dust red velvet, a lace collar, and long, brown boots.

In the background, to the left, there is a stone wall and upon it a flower-pot holding an orange tree, and farther away we note some trees and, still farther beyond, the sky. To the right of the fluted pillar on the right, there is a sort of ledge or shelf covered with a brilliant orange silk curtain on which rests a crown of gold studded with pearls, which informs us of the presence of Royalty.

Queen Henrietta Maria was born in 1609, the year before her father, Henri IV, King of France, was assassinated. In 1624, when she was about fifteen, the Prince of Wales offered marriage; and this was consented to by her brother, Louis XIII, on condition that the English Roman Catholics should be relieved from the enforcement of the penal laws. In June, 1625, Henrietta Maria was married by proxy and went to England, thus encumbered with political and religious pledges that were certain to bring unpopularity upon everybody concerned. The Prince of Wales had now become King of England and he soon found an excuse for breaking his promise to relieve the English Roman Catholics. This course of action offended the Queen deeply. The early years of Charles’s married life were very unhappy and the favorite, the dashing Buckingham, fanned the flames of the King’s discontent. After the assassination of Buckingham in 1628, the King and Queen became deeply attached to each other; and from that moment the bond of affection that united them was never loosened.

[Illustration:

_Collection of Mr. William Randolph Hearst_

QUEEN HENRIETTA MARIA WITH JEFFREY HUDSON AND A MONKEY

--_Sir Anthony Van Dyck_]

For a number of years Henrietta Maria’s chief interests lay with her young family. Her children were: Charles II (born 1630); Mary, Princess of Orange (born 1631); James, Duke of York, afterwards James II, (born 1633); Elizabeth (born 1636); Henry, Duke of Gloucester (born 1640); and Henrietta, Duchesse d’Orléans (born 1644). The Queen also delighted in the amusements of the gay and brilliant Court. With political matters she had nothing to do until 1637, when she opened a diplomatic communication with the See of Rome, to help her co-religionists. She appointed an agent to reside in Rome and Rome sent to her a Papal agent (a Scotchman named George Conn), who soon made many converts among the English nobility and gentry.

Protestant England took alarm and, therefore, the Queen became very unpopular. When the Scottish troubles broke out Queen Henrietta Maria raised money from her fellow Catholics to support the King’s army on the Borders in 1639; and in 1640, during the sitting of the Short Parliament, the Queen urged her husband to oppose himself to the House of Commons in defence of the Catholics. When the Long Parliament met, the Catholics were believed to be the authors and agents of every arbitrary scheme supposed to have entered into the plans of Strafford or Laud. During the Long Parliament Henrietta Maria urged the Pope to lend money to enable her to restore her husband’s authority and she threw herself heart and soul into the schemes for rescuing Strafford and coercing Parliament. The Army Plot, the schemes for using Scotland against England, and the attempt upon the five members--Pym, Hampden, Haselrig, Hoiles, and Strode--were the fruits of her political activity.

Next the Queen effected her passage to the Continent and in February, 1643, she returned and, landing at Burlington Quay, placed herself at the head of a band of Loyalists and marched through England to join the King near Oxford. After little more than a residence there of a year, on the 3d of April, 1644, she parted from her husband to see his face no more; but as long as Charles I was alive she never ceased to encourage him to resistance. Henrietta Maria found refuge in France, for Richelieu was then dead and Anne of Austria proved compassionate, yet she had much to suffer in her exile. The execution of her husband was a terrible distress. There is a story with some truth that she married her equerry, Lord Jermyn, which may account for the estrangement of her children.

When Henrietta Maria returned to England after the Restoration, she found that she had no place in the new Court. Parliament gave her a grant of £30,000 a year in compensation for the loss of her dower-lands and her son, Charles II, added a similar sum as a pension from himself. In January, 1661, Henrietta returned to France to be present at the marriage of her daughter, Henrietta, to the Duc d’Orléans, but in July, 1662, she was back in England, taking up her residence at Somerset House. Three years later she returned to France and died at Colombes, near Paris, in 1666.

The other personage in this double portrait, Jeffrey Hudson, was born at Oakham, Rutland, in 1619. His father was a butcher, who kept and baited bulls for George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham. Neither of his parents was undersized. When he was nine years old his father carried Jeffrey to Burleigh-on-the-Hill and offered him to the Duchess of Buckingham, who took him into her service. At that time he was scarcely eighteen inches in height and, if we may believe Fuller, “without any deformity, wholly proportioned.”

Shortly afterwards Charles I and Henrietta Maria passed through Rutland and the Duke of Buckingham gave a dinner in their honor. During one of the courses an enormous pie[22] was served; and when it was cut, out jumped Jeffrey Hudson! The Queen was so delighted with the sprightly little dwarf that she appropriated him at once and he became a Court favorite.

Jeffrey had a number of adventures. On one occasion, when he was sent to France to procure a nurse for the Queen, the ship was captured on the return voyage by a Flemish pirate and Jeffrey, the nurse, and the Queen’s dancing-master were all taken to Dunkirk. Then Jeffrey also saw some military service. When the Prince of Orange besieged Breda in 1637, “Strenuous Jeffrey” was in the Prince’s camp in company with the Earl of Warwick (see page 187) and the Earl of Northampton, who were volunteers in the Dutch Service.

During the Civil Wars Jeffrey Hudson is said to have been a Captain of the Horse. It is certain that he followed the Queen, for he was with her in the flight to Pendennis Castle, in June, 1644, and he went with her to Paris. “He was,” says Fuller, “though a dwarf, no dastard”; and, accordingly, when insulted by Crofts at Paris in 1649, he shot him dead with a pistol in a duel. Crofts had rashly armed himself only with a squirt. In consequence of this, Jeffrey had to leave Paris, although Henrietta Maria saved him from imprisonment, which, however, he had frequently experienced. At sea Jeffrey was captured by a Turkish rover, carried to Barbary, and sold as a slave. His miseries, according to his own account, made him grow taller. Jeffrey managed to get back to England about 1658, at which time Heath addressed some lines to him in his _Clarastella_.

After the Restoration, Jeffrey Hudson lived quietly in the country for some time on a pension subscribed by the Duke of Buckingham and others; but, on coming up to London to push his fortunes at Court, he, being a Roman Catholic, was suspected of complicity in the Popish Plot (1679) and was confined in the Gatehouse at Westminster.

In June, 1680, and April, 1681, “Captain Jeffrey Hudson” received respectively £50 and £20 from Charles II’s secret service fund. Jeffrey Hudson died in 1682.

Accounts of his height vary, but, according to his own statement (as made to Wright, the historian of Rutland), after reaching the age of seven, when he was eighteen inches high, he did not grow at all until he was thirty, when he shot up three feet, six or nine. Hudson’s waistcoat, breeches, and stockings are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

DUTCH PAINTING

_DUTCH PAINTING_

It is not until we come to the Seventeenth Century that Painting in that part of the Spanish and Austrian Netherlands now known as Holland took on the national character of the Dutch race. The new political and economic views inculcated by the States-General, and even more

## particularly through the bias of the Protestant faith, produced an

entirely new kind of painting. The sacred subjects inspired by the Roman Catholic religion, as well as the mythological and historical subjects (made so popular by Rubens) were rejected for more prosaic and literal interpretations of Biblical stories; for representations of popular heroes in the late wars that overthrew Spanish tyranny; for portrait groups of civic dignitaries, such as Regents and Presidents of guild-halls, shooting-galleries, hospitals and other charitable institutions (known as “_Regent_” and “_Doelen_” pictures); and for those domestic scenes and social parties called “_Conversation Pieces_,” in which are mirrored the Dutch home and its simple pleasures with detailed representation of furniture, rugs, china, glass, brass-ware, musical instruments, birds, animals, food, fruit, and flowers. Landscapes and marines were also in harmony with the new choice of subject, and, of course, portraiture of the most realistic kind.

This matter-of-fact art was given a somewhat “romantic” quality by the extraordinary treatment of dark masses of shadow and of sunlight effects and also by a fine use of color. Artists have always appreciated these characteristics, agreeing with Sir Joshua Reynolds, who wrote after his visit to the Netherlands:

“A market-woman with a hare in her hand, a man blowing a trumpet, or a boy blowing bubbles, a view of the inside or outside of a church, are the subjects of some of their most valuable pictures; but there is still entertainment, even in such pictures--however uninteresting their subjects, there is some pleasure in the contemplation of the imitation. But to a painter they afford likewise instruction in his profession; here he may learn the art of coloring and composition, a skillful management of light and shade and indeed all the mechanical parts of the art as well as in any other School whatever.

“The same skill which is practised by Rubens and Titian in their large works is here exhibited, though on a smaller scale. Painters should go to the Dutch School to learn the art of painting as they would go to a grammar-school to learn languages. They must go to Italy to learn the higher branches of knowledge.”

In the long list of great and noteworthy Dutch painters the two greatest names are Rembrandt and Frans Hals. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), a powerful giant, excelling in painting, etching, and drawing, producing masterpiece after masterpiece and standing alone as an interpreter of Bible stories, profound searcher for character in portraiture, and dramatist in light and shade (see page 204).

Frans Hals (1580?–1666), painter of portraits, corporations and military companies, and characters of low life, with an uncanny analysis of the eye and an uncanny technique to register surely and rapidly what his eye saw, whose pictures, long neglected, are of high value to-day (see page 220).

Not far below Frans Hals and Rembrandt as a painter of great civic group pictures comes Bartholomew van der Helst (1612–1670), whose enormous _Civic Guard Banquet_, painted in 1648 in celebration of the Peace of Münster, with its twenty-four life-size portraits, ranks as one of the great pictures of the world. Van der Helst’s _Company of Captain Roelof Bicker_, in the same gallery, with its thirty-two portraits, is its equal although not quite so renowned.

Dutch Painting, however, did not leap into being with Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Bartholomew van der Helst. There were Dutch Primitives, as there were Flemish Primitives, and they are not always to be distinguished from one another. The famous Hubert and Jan van Eyck, for instance, are thought to have been natives of Maaseyck on the Maas and Hans Memling is supposed to have been born in Memelynck, near Alkmaar.

The greatest of the Dutch painters was Lucas van Leiden (1494-1533), who knew Italian Art well and who was a follower of Albrecht Dürer. Some of his paintings are very decorative and his chess and card-players may almost be said to begin Dutch _genre_ painting, brought to such perfection by the Little Dutch Masters. By the end of the Fifteenth Century a great many Dutch painters had visited Italy; some of them had studied there; and some of them had worked there. Jan van Scorel (1495–1562), for instance, was kept in Rome for five years by Pope Adrian VI, who was, himself, a native of Utrecht.

Jan van Scorel was the master of Antonio Moro, or Antonis Mor (1512–1577), who went to Rome, was admitted to the Guild of Painters in Utrecht in 1547, and leaped into fame with a portrait of Cardinal Granvella, who took Moro in his train to Brussels. Moro soon became Court-Painter to the House of Hapsburg and travelled about to various courts, painting portraits of Royalty. Michiel Jansz Mierevelt (1567–1641), was portrait-painter to the House of Orange and Nassau and his pupil, Paulus Moreelse (1571–1638), a native of Utrecht, was hardly less popular. The greatest painter of Corporation Pictures before Frans Hals was Jan van Ravensteyn (1572–1657).

The early Dutch landscape-painters travelled to Italy, Switzerland, and even Norway; but none of them acquired the reputation of two Dutchmen who found inspiration at home. Jan van Goyen (1596–1656), and Jan Wynants (1620?–1682), were the first to take pleasure in their own country. Van Goyen loved the water, the boats, the clouds, the mist, and distant towns silhouetted against the sky. Wynants showed the charm of the lonely walk that led through the dunes to the sea. Wynants formed Adriaen van de Velde (1635–1672), who carried landscape-painting so far that he comes very close to the Barbizon School of the Nineteenth Century. Then there are two Dutch artists who are doubly famous for their landscapes and animals: Aelbert Cuyp (1620–1691), “the King of Dutch landscape-painters,” noted for his golden light and elegant cavaliers riding fine horses; and Paul Potter (1625–1654), known far and wide for his _Bull_, in the Hague Gallery, painted when the artist was only twenty-two; but not so fine a work as _La Vache qui se mire_ (_The Mirrored Cow_) in the same gallery. Of these two pictures the French critic, Burger, wittily remarked: “_La Vache qui se mire_ is a _chef-d’œuvre_ and not a _hors d’œuvre_, like the _Bull_!” Supreme as landscape-painters stand Jacob Ruisdael (1628–9–1682), who used as a rule a very dark green and who was able to suggest immense perspectives in very small compass, also for his harmonious relation of earth and sky, and Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709), supposed to have been his pupil, and whose long neglected pictures of long, straight roads beneath tall trees now bring high prices.

Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685), a pupil of Frans Hals, wandered about the country finding material along the roads. Ostade often caught the poetic side of a rustic scene and he had a commanding knowledge of light.

The Dutch, with their love of home and their simple pleasures, excelled in depicting scenes of intimate life, “_Conversation Pieces_,” and _genre_. The list of these worthy painters is long. A few, however, stand out prominently,--Gerard Dou, Gerard Terborch, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hoogh, Jan Vermeer of Delft, Gabriel Metsu, Nicholas Maes, and Frans van Mieris--all painters of the Seventeenth Century, portraying life as they saw it around them, according to the class in which they moved. Terborch, Metsu, and van Mieris showed ladies and gentlemen, beautifully dressed, enjoying music, or playing cards, or having a light afternoon repast, or writing letters, or making love, or talking in the garden, or sitting quietly in a comfortably furnished room; Jan Steen depicted feasts, merry-making, weddings, St. Nicholas celebrations, tavern-scenes, drunken brawls and quack doctors; and Gerard Dou produced simple scenes in the home where servants are at work and mothers sit by the cradle, and sometimes scenes by candle-light with strange reflections, for Gerard Dou was a pupil of Rembrandt and liked to play tricks with _chiaroscuro_. Another painter, who was a magician with light, is Jan Vermeer of Delft (1632–1675), who was a pupil of Rembrandt’s pupil, Carel Fabritius, and whose pictures are rare and famous (see page 228). Still another artist, remarkable for his knowledge of the complex problems of light, is Pieter de Hoogh or Hooch (1629–1677?), hardly less remarkable for his solid and splendid rendering of architecture, exterior as well as interior (see page 226).

Moreover, the Dutch excelled in two other _genres_,--birds and flowers. Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636–1695), caught all the beauties of the feathered world and had an insight into its society. _The Floating Feather_, in the Rijk’s Museum, is very celebrated. Burger delightfully wrote of it: