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Cavendish, a trusted military commander in Charles I’s army, had been forced to leave England precipitately after the battle of Marston Moor, at which the Royalists suffered their most crushing defeat of the entire Civil War, throwing into question Cavendish’s competence as a general. He made his way to Henrietta Maria’s court in exile in Paris, where in 1645 he contracted his second marriage, to Margaret Lucas, one of her ladies-in- waiting. From there the newlyweds had moved on to the Netherlands.32 Having lived in some splendour on vast estates in the north of England, Cavendish now found himself reduced to living with Margaret in temporary lodgings in Rotterdam.

On a trip to Antwerp, probably in search of some art purchase, since he was in the company of the English agent Endymion Porter, Cavendish was shown Pieter Paul Rubens’s elegant house on the Wapper canal, just around the corner from the Duartes’ house on the Meir, which his widow was offering for rent (Rubens had died two years earlier). Although emptied of Rubens’s own works, the room designated as his ‘museum’ may still have contained the many plaster casts of antique statues and friezes with which he had replaced the originals he had sold to the Duke of Buckingham twenty years earlier.33

Cavendish took a great liking to the baroque neoclassical style of Rubens’s remodelling of an already appropriately grand residence. Returning to The Hague, he notified Prince Charles at the end of September 1648 (as he was required by court protocol to do) that he was leaving the court in exile and moving his entire household to Antwerp.34

There he and Margaret would remain ‘till it shall please God to reduce the sufferings of England to such a condition of peace or war as may become honest men to return home’.35

The Rubens House was certainly suitable in scale and conspicuously fashionable style for the émigré who was the grandson of Bess of Hardwick, and whose own remodelling of the family estate at Bolsover Castle in England subsequently gained him a considerable reputation for its ostentation in the ‘baroque mannerist’ architectural style.36

Here the Cavendishes installed themselves ostentatiously. Margaret, an intellectual and poet, held soirées and entertained lavishly. William established a highly esteemed indoor riding school, possibly in Rubens’s studio itself. There he would entertain the grandees of Antwerp and the Spanish Netherlands, demonstrating how to perform ‘manège’, the art of elaborate formal patterned movement on horseback (still partially recollected in ‘dressage’ today), to the amazement of his audience – which sometimes included the enthusiastic horsewoman Queen Christina of Sweden. The first edition of Cavendish’s important work on horsemanship, Méthode et invention nouvelle de dresser les chevaux, was published in 1658 in Antwerp, in French. Lavishly produced, with large illustrative plates, it caused a sensation.37

The Cavendishes’ household at the Antwerp Rubenshuis became a cultural magnet for displaced Royalists. By the mid-1650s, English émigrés, including the exiled King himself, were habitually making their way there for cultural solace. The intellectual soirées, musical recitals and balls there were also frequented by cultivated resident Dutch sympathisers like Huygens, who visited regularly. The Duarte family participated, and Utricia Swann joined them whenever she was in town, sometimes performing songs written by William Cavendish, and set by herself. The Cavendishes entertained on as grand a scale as they could under the circumstances, their household financed by large loans taken out against lands and goods sequestered in England (when finally William Cavendish rushed home to be part of the welcoming party for Charles II in 1660, he had to leave Margaret behind as ‘surety’ for his Dutch creditors).

One entertainment at the Cavendishes’ Antwerp home for which records survive may serve to capture the scale and sophistication of the diversions on offer there during the