* The artist was the son of Jan Rubens, a leading Antwerp lawyer during the golden age of the city as capital of the Habsburgs’ Seventeen Provinces and mercantile hub. Its prosperity was ruined by the Dutch revolt, after which it was replaced by Amsterdam. Jan had become legal adviser and then lover of William the Silent’s widow Anne of Saxony, fathering a child with her. He was arrested and likely to be executed; his wife (the artist’s mother) may have saved her unfaithful husband’s life by having an affair with the prince’s brother. Either way, young Rubens received unusual benefits for the son of a scandalous attorney. He was brought up in ignorance of the scandal but when he learned of it he changed, pursuing his career with discipline and self-control. He studied art in Italy (he signed paintings as Pietro Paolo) and then enjoyed an astonishing career of art combined with diplomacy. He became the court painter for the Habsburg governors of the Netherlands, Albert and Isabella, who used him as a diplomat and spy, promoting him to secretary of their privy council. Living in luxury in Antwerp, he trained the young Anthony van Dyck, who would soon set off for London. In Paris, Louis XIII’s mother and widow of Henri IV, Marie de’ Medici, had hired him to paint a series for her Luxembourg Palace while he negotiated with France and Spain.
* In the next century, this movement became known as baroque, possibly from the Portuguese
* Charles I and Philip IV both knighted Rubens. In Madrid, Philip commissioned over eighty paintings from him, and loved watching him paint. The artist was rich enough to buy an estate outside Antwerp. Fifty-three when his first wife died, he then married her sixteen-year-old niece, Hélène Fourment, whose sister he had also had an affair with. One of Rubens’s friends called her ‘Helen of Antwerp, who far surpasses Helen of Troy’. Hélène modelled naked for him – rare in a woman of her status. In
* Baltimore could not have been further politically from the likes of Warwick and Cromwell: he had been James’s secretary of state who had championed the Spanish Match, losing his job after Charles’s escapade, and had then converted to Catholicism.
* In 1640, two white indentured servants, a Dutchman and a Scotsman, and an African, John Punch, escaped from an English proprietor’s estate, only to be recaptured and sentenced to thirty lashes. The whites were returned to servitude ‘and the third being a negro named John Punch’, ruled the judge, was enslaved ‘for the time of his natural life here’. The judgment hinted at what was to come: a legal and ideological system so founded on human bondage, and so afraid of rebellion by enslaved Africans, that slave masters were discouraged from ever manumitting their own slaves. DNA suggests that Punch was the progenitor of many Americans, white and black, including the white mother, Ann Dunham, of the first black president, Barack Obama.
* It is hard to find any region of the world that has not been created by migrants, but in modern times it was America, North and South, that was most shaped by settlement, conquest and intermarriage. Between 1492 and 1820, around 2.6 million Europeans, half of them English, 40 per cent Spanish and Portuguese, migrated to the Americas, while around 8.8 million Africans were enslaved and forced to work there. Between 1492 and 1640, 87 per cent of these 446,000 migrants were Iberians. The Atlantic world was dominated by Spanish and Portuguese, not the Anglos. But that was about to change.
* It was not just the men who were tough. Later in the century, in 1697, Hannah Duston, aged forty, a farmer’s wife and mother of nine, was captured with her baby in an Abenaki attack during which twenty-seven colonists, mainly children, were slaughtered. After the Abenaki had killed her baby, Hannah rebelled with two other captives, scalped ten Indians (including six children) and then escaped with the scalps to claim the scalp bounty, that ironically could only be paid to her husband.
* Henrietta Maria, the target of so much anti-Catholic hate, was wise enough to advise Charles to negotiate with Parliament, even offering: ‘Leave me to do it, for the good of your affairs in this country.’ But Charles was unsuited to compromise, and refused. Once it was war, she backed him, delivering arms and even commanding troops, and was nicknamed the
* Jahangir died travelling from Kashmir to Lahore, where he was buried in the resplendently Persianate–Mughal Shahdara Bagh tomb. Shahjahan retired his stepmother Nurjahan to Lahore, where she lived quietly for eighteen years. When she died at sixty-eight, she was buried with Jahangir.
