For twenty-four years the Scheldt was rigorously blocked by the fleets of Holland; and the commerce of Antwerp, which Parma would fain have restored, disappeared altogether. A gleam of hope came when, in 1609, the Twelve Years' Truce was signed at Antwerp by the representatives of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella and the States-General of Holland. But the city had fallen so low that many years would scarcely have sufficed to raise it; and whatever progress followed the truce came to an end with the Treaty of Münster. The closing of the Scheldt had become a political dogma with the Dutch; and the fourteenth article of the treaty kept it closed against the trade of Brabant and Flanders, to the great benefit of the seaports of Holland.[52]

About the year 1590, amongst the pupils at one of the schools established by the Jesuits at Antwerp after the great siege, was a boy whose parents had given him the Apostolic name of Peter Paul. His father was Joannes Rubens, a distinguished lawyer, who had been a magistrate of Antwerp at the time of the image-breaking in the Cathedral, and whose name was in the list of persons suspected of Calvinism. The Burgomaster and magistrates solemnly assured the Government that he was above suspicion; but Rubens, who undoubtedly was a Calvinist, fearing the Inquisition, left the city and went to Germany with his wife. There he was involved in an intrigue with Anna, daughter of the Elector Maurice, and second wife of William the Silent. Rubens was sent to prison, and thereafter banished to Siegen, where his wife joined him. The Princess, after being kept in close confinement for some years, died in 1577. In that year, the year before the Spanish Fury, and on June 28, being the Eve of the Festival of St. Peter and St. Paul, was born the boy who afterwards became the famous painter. Ten years after the birth of his son Joannes Rubens died at Cologne, and his widow, returning to Antwerp, took up her abode in the house where she had formerly lived with her husband, in the Place de Meir. There young Rubens passed his schooldays. If the cupboards were bare at Antwerp at that time, the confessionals were full, and the widow, having abjured the errors of Calvinism, sent her son to the schools which, ever since the surrender to Parma, had been in the hands of the Catholic clergy.

When his education was finished he went to learn painting from Venius, whose studio was then in a street called the Rue Sale,[53] because, it is said, of its extreme dirtiness, and also from Van Noort, who taught in the Rue du Jardin. Thereafter he travelled for eight years in Italy and Spain, gaining friends and painting, always painting, and studying art. News reached him that his mother was ill, and he hurried back to Antwerp, but found on his arrival that she was already dead. Having no longer any home ties, he was on the point of returning to Italy, and Antwerp nearly lost him, when the Archdukes Albert and Isabella persuaded him to remain. This was in 1608. Next year he married Isabelle, daughter of Jean Brant, town clerk of Antwerp, and set up house in the Rue du Couvent, where many of his best-known works were painted.

He soon, however, built the mansion in which he lived for the rest of his life, in what is now called the Rue Rubens,[54] to the south of the Place de Meir. He drew the plans himself on the model of some palace he had known in Italy, painted frescoes on the walls, and filled it with curios he had collected during his travels. In his large garden he put up a domed 'Pantheon,' where he arranged the paintings, antique statues and busts, cameos, medals, vases of porphyry, and other treasures which his friends in Italy sent him. His studio was a vast room, from which the largest canvases were easily brought down by a staircase which one of his biographers describes as like that of a royal palace.

We know a great deal about his mode of life at Antwerp, and how he was sent journeying on diplomatic errands by the Court of Albert and Isabella to France, Spain, Holland, England, and everywhere received with honour. At home, early in the morning (he rose at four in summer), having already been to Mass, he is at work in his studio, and loves to listen as he paints to some friend who will read to him from Cicero or Plutarch, or, brush in hand, talks with endless vivacity to the guests who have come to call on him. After a walk in his garden he dines frugally and very soberly, for he dreads, we are told by Van Hasselt, the effect of wine on his imagination; and then he works on in his studio till late in the afternoon, when he mounts one of his fine horses and rides till after sunset. In the evening he sups as frugally as he dined, and finishes the day at home in a circle of his most intimate friends, the only society for which he cared. This busy, happy life of Antwerp's greatest citizen closed on May 30, 1640. The statue in the Place Verte[55] was erected to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of his death; but the fruit of his laborious days is the best monument of his fame.

Close to the Place Verte is the Marché du Vendredi, where, in 1578, Christopher Plantin, 'the Rubens of the printing-press,' set up his works. The story of Plantin's life is a romance of labour. He was born at Tours in 1514, of a wealthy family called Tercelain; but, his father having lost his fortune, he changed his name to Plantin, and found employment at Caen as a bookbinder. Having married there, he went to Antwerp, and opened a small shop, in which he worked at his own trade while his wife sold cloth. The story goes that one night during the carnival he was wounded by some masqueraders, who mistook him for another person. To hush up the affair they paid him a sum of money, with which he bought a press and types, began to print almanacs and books for children, and did this so well that he soon had a flourishing business.

ANTWERP
The Place Verte.

The first important work produced at the Plantin Press was 'L'Instruction d'une Fille de Noble Maison,' a translation from the Italian, which appeared in 1555. His reputation grew, and in thirteen years he was able to purchase the site at the Marché du Vendredi. His name, like that of Joannes Rubens, was on the list of suspected Calvinists after the image-breaking, and his printing-house was searched. But nothing was found to support the charge of heresy, and his orthodoxy must have been established beyond doubt, for Philip not only employed him to produce the famous Polyglot Bible, but gave him the monopoly of printing missals and breviaries for the whole of the Spanish Empire.

After his death in 1589, the business, which now had branches in Paris, Leyden, and Frankfort, was carried on by his son-in-law, Jean Mourentorff, whose family afterwards changed their name, in accordance with the pedantic fashion of the day, to Moretus. The Musée Plantin-Moretus, with the dwelling-rooms and their Renaissance furniture; the type and presses of the sixteenth century; the old proof-sheets, looking as if the printer's reader had just left them; the tapestry and paintings; and the quaint courtyard with the aged vine-tree, which traditions say was put there by Plantin himself—is the place of all others where some idea may be formed of the family life and surroundings of a wealthy business man in the Netherlands 300 years ago.