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,
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.[5]
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
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
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
