The Book of the Dead (34 page)

Cosimo’s great-granddaughter, Henrietta Maria, Charles I of England’s queen, was another monkey and dwarf enthusiast. Her court favorite was the most celebrated of all English little people,
Sir Jeffrey Hudson
(1619–82), keeper of the royal monkey.

Jeffrey Hudson was born in Oakham, Rutland. He was the son of a bull-baiting butcher “of lusty stature” and no one could understand why he was so small. Local theories ranged from his mother’s choking on a gherkin while pregnant to dark rumors about his parents keeping him in a box. Actually, he suffered from
growth-hormone deficiency, caused by a misfiring pituitary gland.

At the age of eight he had reached only eighteen inches in height. His father, sensing an opportunity for betterment, took him to his employer, the Duke of Buckingham. The duchess, Katherine, was entranced. Her husband was the king’s “favorite” at the time and very probably his lover, too. This did not please the queen, so the duchess decided to present Jeffrey to her as a gift: a peace offering from one wronged wife to another. She arranged for the little man to arrive at court inside a cold venison pie. Jeffrey then leaped out, bowed, and marched up and down the table in a full suit of armor. He was an instant hit. The queen invited him to enter her service, gave him a servant of his own, and put him in charge of her pet monkey, Pug.

Jeffrey soon found his niche as a court entertainer, making friends with a 7½-foot-tall porter called William Evans. They developed an act together where Evans would pull a loaf of bread out of one pocket and Hudson out of the other and proceed to make a sandwich. The two were often seen together in public and a number of London pubs were named in their honor. Together with a later arrival, Thomas Parr, who claimed to be 151 years old, they were known as the Three Wonders of the Age.

Jeffrey was more than just a curiosity: He was bright and audacious enough to act as a diplomat for the Stuart court. At the age of eleven, he was part of an embassy sent to France to bring back a midwife for the pregnant Queen Henrietta Maria. The ambassadors were granted an audience by Marie de’ Medici, the queen’s mother, who was so taken with Jeffrey that she presented him with $3,000 worth of jewelry. This was an enormous sum of money (equivalent to almost $20 million today). Jeffrey’s father, by comparison, probably earned around $15 a year as a butcher.

In the 1620s and 1630s, the French coastal town of Dunkirk was an independent Flemish state and a notorious pirate base. It was these “Dunkirkers” who intercepted the royal ship on its way back across the Channel, stealing Jeffrey’s newly acquired jewels and kidnapping all the members of the party. The group was a little too “hot” for the pirates, though, and they were quickly released. The incident inspired a mock epic,
Jeffreidos
(1638) by William Davenant, which featured an unnerving assault on the dwarfish hero by a hungry turkey cock.

As he grew older, Jeffrey began to excite attention from the ladies. Paintings show him to be attractive and properly proportioned (if small) with large blue eyes and a mane of blond curls. He was fond of boasting that as a young man, he had slept with at least fifteen court lovelies, and in 1641 he was the master of ceremonies at the “bedding” ceremony following Charles’s daughter Mary’s wedding to William of Orange. As she was just nine years old, “consummation” required the royal couple only to touch bare legs. However, much to the puzzlement of the Dutchman, she had been sewn into her nightdress—until Sir Jeffrey sauntered in, wielding a pair of shears.

During the Civil War, Jeffrey commanded a troop of horses in the king’s army, after which he always referred to himself as Captain Jeffrey Hudson. When the war was lost, he accompanied the queen to her court-in-exile in France. In this more informal atmosphere, Jeffrey found himself subjected to teasing by the cavaliers. To nip this in the bud, he issued a challenge to the brother of William Crofts, the captain of the queen’s guard, and a duel was arranged. Croft made the fatal error of turning up with a water pistol. Jeffrey wasn’t amused. He had used his idle hours well and was an accomplished marksman. He shot Croft clean
through the forehead. The queen managed to get his death sentence commuted to exile, so Jeffrey set off for England. With singular bad luck, he once again fell victim to pirates—this time the rather more serious Barbary corsairs from North Africa—who sold him into slavery in Algiers. He remained there for the next twenty-five years.

No one is quite sure how or by whom Jeffrey was ransomed and returned to England, but in the intervening years, he had more than doubled in height, a growth spurt he put down to the trauma of being repeatedly buggered by his Turkish captors.

At just under four feet, he was decidedly tall for a working dwarf so he returned to Rutland. For a while he sat at home, like a real-life hobbit, smoking and drinking ale and telling tales of his exploits, but in 1678, poor and bored, he decided to move back down to London to see if the new king would employ him. It was unlucky timing. London was in the grip of the Popish Plot organized by his fellow Rutlander, Titus Oates. As a well-known Catholic and royalist, Jeffrey, even in his new taller incarnation, was instantly recognizable, and he found himself thrown into the Gatehouse prison. Later released, he received a small honorarium from the king for services rendered (though never specified), but it wasn’t enough to save him from penury. Captain Jeffrey Hudson, whom the playwright Thomas Heywood had called “the prettiest, neatest, and well-proportioned small man that Nature bred,” died in obscurity, his small body buried in a secret grave reserved for Catholic paupers.

Poverty also stalked the life of another famous monkey owner,
Rembrandt van Rijn
(1606–69). Rembrandt was an almost exact
contemporary of Jeffrey Hudson and like the Englishman enjoyed the fruits of fame while still young. But unlike the randy little courtier, he had earned his preeminence through hard work. He toiled through his teens, denying himself the “the normal pleasures of young men” although he was fully aware of what he was missing. “I love those decadent wenches who do so trouble my dreams,” he later confessed.

By the time Rembrandt arrived in Amsterdam in 1630, he was ready for success, money, and love. All three came quickly. In less than two years he had painted forty-six portraits of the great and the good of his adopted city, making himself wealthy in the process. Merchants, lawyers, local dignitaries, and their wives fought one another for the chance to sit for him. At the age of twenty-six Rembrandt was, as the filmmaker Peter Greenaway put it, “a cross between Mick Jagger and Bill Gates”: young, successful, good at business, and full of swagger. Like Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo before him, he signed his work with his first name, which is what we still call him. In 1633 he added a “d” to his signature, where previously he had just been “Rembrant.” No one knows why, but it obviously mattered to him because he kept it for the rest of his career.
*

In the same year, he met and married Saskia van Ulenborch, the daughter of an extremely affluent Amsterdam family. As well
as being attractive and fond of the high life, Saskia was an excellent financial manager and the couple were soon able to move into an expensive house in the Jewish quarter, which Rembrandt filled with the artworks and exotic bric-a-brac he loved to collect. As well as the amazing torrent of his own work—there are more than 2,300 paintings, sketches, and etchings that we know about—Rembrandt was also a gifted teacher; at least fifty of his pupils went on to establish themselves as working artists.

The van Rijns’ apparently unbeatable marriage of art and commerce was not to last long. Saskia gave birth to four children in as many years, but only one, Titus, survived beyond a few weeks. She herself succumbed to tuberculosis shortly afterward. Without his wife’s business acumen, Rembrandt’s mania for collecting meant that his debts begin to pile up. He didn’t appear to care, working even harder, producing a string of masterpieces: portraits, biblical scenes, self-portraits, and large commissions, the grandest of which was
The Night Watch
(1642). The painting should really be called
The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburgh.
It was a group commission from eighteen merchants who were also a part-time civic guard. The payment terms were simple: The more money each man put in, the more prominently Rembrandt would paint him. Unfortunately, like many of Rembrandt’s best works, it suffered from poor attempts at conservation, with thick layers of varnish being ladled all over it, darkening the scene to such an extent that when Sir Joshua Reynolds saw it a century and a half later, he referred to it as “The Night Watch” and the name stuck. As modern restoration has shown, it’s actually set in broad daylight.

Stories about Rembrandt always seem to come back to
money. His greed was legendary: His students would paint coins on the floor and see how long it took before he stooped to pick them up. Others described how his clothes resembled filthy rags: He used them to wipe his brushes and “other things of a similar nature.” If he didn’t waste money on clothes, Saskia’s relatives were painfully conscious of his other extravagances. They made sure that if he remarried, he would inherit none of her estate. So though he became the lover of Titus’s nursemaid, the malodorous Geertje Dircx, he refused to marry her. When, seven years later, he turned his amorous attentions to his buxom young housekeeper, Hendrickje Stoffels, Geertje sued him for breach of promise. He won the case but Geertje was awarded a lifetime annuity of 200 guilders a year, a sum the near-bankrupt Rembrandt couldn’t afford. He responded by getting her committed to a workhouse for moral delinquency and promiscuity.

Financially, things went from bad to worse. In the early 1650s, the Dutch economy, weakened by the Anglo-Dutch war, suffered a severe credit crunch. A Rembrandt portrait was expensive in both time and money: A subject might have to sit for three months and the artist refused to court fashion by using the cheaper, gaudy colors pioneered by the Flemish school of Anthony Van Dyck. The commissions dried up.

In a last-ditch attempt to save his home, Rembrandt transferred the deeds to his fifteen-year-old son. As soon as his creditors learned of this, they panicked and called in his debts. In July 1656 he was forced to apply for a
cessio bonorum.
This spared him the shame of bankruptcy, but required that all his possessions be sold to pay his debts. Years of collecting fell under the hammer—a giant’s helmet, a plaster cast of a negro’s head, crossbows, thirteen bamboo wind instruments, a sculpture of a child
urinating, the skins of a lion and lioness, and scores of paintings. His art collection was so huge that the Artists’ Guild worried that the market would be swamped. They used their influence to speed up the sale; Rembrandt raised only a paltry 600 guilders and was forced to move to a small rented house in a poor part of the city.

Virtually bankrupt, Rembrandt’s housekeeper/lover and his son concocted a scheme to keep him solvent. They started an art business, buying and selling paintings under their own names, but employing Rembrandt as an “assistant.” The man who was once Amsterdam’s most popular artist was now an employee of his own staff. More tragedy followed. Plague claimed Hendrickje in 1662 and Titus in 1668. Rembrandt died the following year, “without a friend or a guilder, or even a good piece of herring.” He was buried in an unmarked grave.

In the years after Saskia’s death, his favorite companion had been his pet monkey, Puck, and their closeness reveals the side to Rembrandt that we now most appreciate. He cared little for money, as such. He liked what it bought but not what it did to people. He egged on the swanks and grandees who trooped into his studio to dress opulently, making themselves look even more ridiculous and vain. Rembrandt preferred to paint life in the raw: people urinating, wrinkled faces, dimpled thighs. Even in his biblical pictures, such as the
The Preaching of Saint John
, he couldn’t resist painting a pair of copulating dogs in the foreground. When Puck died, Rembrandt was heartbroken. Just as he had painted his beloved Saskia as she lay dying, he immortalized Puck’s memory by painting his corpse into the portrait of a family he was working on. The paterfamilias protested and threatened to withdraw the commission unless
Rembrandt removed the offending item. Rembrandt refused, sacrificed the cash, and kept the painting, monkey included. Sadly, this masterpiece of simian portraiture has long been lost.