Chapter 13

‘Capitanus Stone’

The Rifled Crown

The Interregnum is the most significant period in the early modern history of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi. This is the decade during which the painting becomes visible through documentation and from its tangible presence at the Commonwealth Sale. It is during this time that we have a window on the painting’s reception—by kings, courtiers, civil servants, and creditors—in mid-seventeenth-century England.

Understanding how Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi was viewed, literally and figuratively, while it was part of the Commonwealth Sale demands attentiveness to the context and administration of its various phases. Ostensibly, the sale was devised to recompense the multitude of Crown creditors who now found themselves without patronage or employment; these included war veterans and widows, officials, servants, and suppliers of the former royal households. The punctilious paperwork generated by the state-appointed Contractors of the Sale reflects strenuous attempts to liquidate and redistribute Crown assets, but the economic conditions of the first two years of the Commonwealth impeded the transformation of works of art into hard cash. The thriving commercial hub of London had been ravaged by a decade of civil war and the evacuation, exile, and extinction of the Stuart court. After the execution of the king, the Commonwealth was effectively a rogue state, unrecognized by European courts, whose ambassadors found themselves without portfolio and diplomatic bag. Export tariffs hampered the international trade in luxury goods. The artless and cluttered display of damaged and dusty objects at Somerset House, noted by Lodewijk Huygens, undoubtedly served to suppress value and discourage interest.¹ During its first six months, the sale attracted few buyers; in March 1650 a committee was established to prioritize the claims of the 120 most needy royal creditors (later known as the ‘First List’), who received, not a share of the £12,800 cash raised to date, but goods in kind.² To liquidate their assets the unfortunates of the First List had to sell the goods disbursed to them on an already saturated and sclerotic market.

King Philip IV recognized the republican regime at the end of 1650, thereby securing the position of the Spanish ambassador, Alonso de Cárdenas. Bankrolled by Luis de Haro, Marquis del Carpio, Cárdenas was one of the few international buyers at the early stage of the sale, and his correspondence reveals him to be the single most important source of information about its administration and conduct. Haro and Cárdenas acted on behalf of the Spanish king, who had been eying up the Stuart royal collection since at least June 1645, when he had asked the ambassador to buy paintings ‘which might be originals by Titian, Paolo Veronese, or other old paintings of distinction.’³ Alert to the possibility of the sale of the Royal Collection, as soon as the Contractors released their master inventory Cárdenas lost no time in compiling a wish list of spolia. Aided and abetted by a team of artists and advisers, in 1649 he drew up a memorandum of the most prestigious tapestries belonging to the late Charles I, which he sent to Haro.⁴ This was followed by a list, dated 8 August 1651, of the principal fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian pictures of the Royal Collection, including Titian’s Twelve Emperors,and a couple of pieces by Rubens and Van Dyck; a selection conforming closely to the taste of Philip IV.⁵ Cárdenas did not itemize a single painting attributed to Leonardo, but it is possible he saw the Salvator Mundi and the Boy with a Puzzle because he made special mention of the small paintings from the queen’s cabinet, which, he said, were curious and praiseworthy.⁶ In fact, Cárdenas had been buying important Renaissance paintings from the very outset of the sale in October 1649, using prominent Parliamentarian war veterans as intermediaries to cover his tracks.⁷ In February 1651 he wrote to Haro, informing him that he had shipped eight crates of tapestry aboard a Parliamentarian frigate; three crates of paintings were being held securely in Dover pending a fair wind.⁸ By this means, Cárdenas attempted to mitigate the threat of French and Irish ships menacing the English Channel. In all his dealings at this early stage of the sale, he seems to have been advantaged by the good relations with Parliamentarians that he had cultivated during the years of civil war and Spain’s early diplomatic recognition of the Commonwealth regime. As a result, he exploited a buyers’ market.

Cárdenas’s French counterpart was not so lucky. Uncle and ally to Charles II, Louis XIV initially refused to recognize the Protectorate. As a consequence, the king’s envoy, the Sieur de Croullé, found himself without diplomatic recognition. Visiting the Commonwealth Sale in May 1650, he itemized the ‘piece of Christ’ from Greenwich, and the ‘lords figure/Christ in bust’ from St James, both attributed to Leonardo, in a memorandum addressed to Cardinal Mazarin. In March 1651 he was expelled from England. Mazarin would later rely on Antoine de Bordeaux-Neufville for his purchases from the sale, but by the time the agent arrived in England in December 1652, many of the paintings in Croullé’s 1650 list had already been sold or disbursed, and the cardinal instructed Bordeaux to turn his attention to the acquisition of tapestries and horses.⁹ As we have seen, the Greenwich ‘piece of Christ’, once destined for the Mazarin collection, remained in England, in John Stone’s custody, and is therefore securely identifiable with the painting of Christ as Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo, that was catalogued in the Royal Collection c. 1666. The ‘lords figure/Christ in bust’ from St James’s was sold to Edward Bass in December 1651 and, frustratingly, falls from view thereafter.

The biggest threat to Cárdenas’s acquisitive ambitions was, therefore, not the French envoy. The wily artists and dealers who had served the Caroline court before the outbreak of war proved no obstruction; on the contrary, they were only too keen to foster new commercial allegiances, abandoning their former loyalties. The most conspicuous of these was Balthasar Gerbier. Ingratiating himself with the new regime, he forged a new career, supplying and advising Cárdenas, as did the Flemish exile Remigius van Leemput. Ultimately, Cárdenas would be hampered, not by rival buyers, but by the faltering pace of the sale. During the first six months of the public sale he embarked on a spending spree, but by the summer of 1650 widespread accusations of the Contractors’ inept and fraudulent management began to emerge, which the release of the First List of Crown creditors only served to aggravate. Towards the end of 1650, the Trustees of the Sale intimated that a second list of creditors would be drawn up to enable wider dispersal of former Crown assets. This had the effect of halting progress as potential buyers waited to see which items would be reserved for the new list and thereafter transferred into private hands. Undeterred, the Spaniard continued to deal with potential beneficiaries.¹⁰

The Second List of 970 creditors, eventually published by Parliament in July 1651, is central to the fortune of the Salvator Mundi that would later belong to Charles II because the painting formed part of the second mass distribution of former Crown property, which occurred in October of that year. Cárdenas is our most valuable witness to the protocols behind its drawing up. From him we learn that during the first half of 1651 the creditors of the Second List had pressed their claims, amid a mounting climate of mistrust and anger towards the administrators of the sale; eventually they decided to take a more organized approach. In an important letter of 20 October 1651, Cárdenas informed Haro that the creditors proposed to form themselves into fourteen syndicates of creditors, each division to be accorded goods to the value of 15,000 escudos (£3,750) in cash.¹¹ The trustees of the sale would then draw up sets of items equivalent to this sum, and each syndicate, or ‘dividend’, would draw lots; a winning ticket enabled the syndicate to choose which pre-selected set of items it wanted. A method designed for fairness and equity nonetheless incurred an element of risk and luck, and perhaps some manipulation by the better connected and more powerful. The appointment of effective leaders of these syndicates was therefore an imperative. Ten men were elected to head each of the fourteen dividends.

On 23 October 1651, in a great lottery, Parliament distributed over £70,000 worth of goods—including the painting of Christ attributed to Leonardo, formerly at Greenwich—to the representatives of the Crown creditors, and it was at this point that Captain John Stone entered into the history of the Salvator Mundi. Cárdenas’s letter sheds light on how much influence individual creditors, and dividends, exerted over the choice of items disbursed to them from the Commissioners of the Sale. It also explains why the executors of Jan van Belcamp—who, as former deputy to Abraham Van der Doort and subsequently a Trustee of the Sale, exercised great authority—picked up one of the choice pictures of the former royal collection: Leonardo’s St John the Baptist.¹²

The context of the administrative phases and documentary evidence left by our principal eyewitnesses—Hollar, Croullé, Cárdenas, and Huygens—provides a rudimentary timeline of the reception of the Salvator Mundi at the Commonwealth Sale. Hollar produced an etching of the piece some time during 1650, perhaps in consultation with French agents, because Croullé also saw and listed the two paintings of Christ attributed to Leonardo in 1650, considering them worthy of inclusion in the celebrated Mazarin collection, an ambition stymied by the ambassador’s expulsion shortly afterwards. Cárdenas may have seen the Greenwich painting together with others from Queen Henrietta Maria’s cabinet in August 1651. Although he considered these items noteworthy, he had not yet got around to compiling a memorandum of their prices because during this period he fell ill and was confined to his house for six months. Huygens did not mention any such paintings in the note of his visit in February 1652; not only were the viewing conditions at Somerset House unfavourable, by this date the paintings had been sold to Stone and the Sixth Dividend, and Bass and the Ninth Dividend, and presumably removed from sight. This leaves the question of what Stone himself thought of the painting, and whether he exerted any choice over his dividend’s acquisition of the lot containing the Salvator in October 1651.

John Stone

John Stone (1620–67), was the youngest son of the celebrated sculptor, master mason, and architect Nicholas Stone (c. 1585–1647) and his Dutch wife Mayken de Keyser, daughter of the distinguished Amsterdam architect Hendrick de Keyser.¹³ His elder brothers Nicholas and Henry are better known, not least from the record of their extended tour of Europe of 1638–42. At Florence they gained access to the Medici collections, and at Rome Nicholas was advised in draughtsmanship by Gianlorenzo Bernini. Their notebooks, preserved in the Sir John Soane Museum, London, were owned, respectively, by the antiquarians George Vertue and Horace Walpole.¹⁴ Much of the information about John Stone derives from these sources, however, the Stone brothers have frequently been confused with each other, and also with a famous copyist, Symon Stone, employed by the Duke of Northumberland during the Interregnum and Restoration.¹⁵ John—styled Capitanus Stone in the register of his death at St Martin-in-the-Fields—remains largely obscure, despite having performed some significant, and surprising, roles in the Commonwealth administration, a matter that has come to light during the course of this research.¹⁶ Vertue related that he had been brought up at Oxford and was designed as a divine, but at the outbreak of the Civil War saw active service, almost certainly on the Royalist side, since his father held the post of Master Mason to Charles I.¹⁷ He attributed to John Stone the publication of Enchiridion of Fortification: or, a handful of knowledge in Martial Affairs (London, 1645).¹⁸ His parents and brother Nicholas had died in 1647; Henry would run the family business until his death in 1653. As has already been established, by October 1651 John was fronting the Sixth Dividend of Crown Creditors.

At first glance, John Stone appears an unlikely candidate for a leader of a dividend since one presumes his natural allegiance was to the Royalist cause. However, as the son of a leading sculptor, one intimately involved with the decoration of royal palaces (and perhaps even connected to the acquisition or gifting of works of art from the Continent), he was impeccably qualified for the task.¹⁹ Still, this role found him working in cooperation with leading figures of the Commonwealth administration, a fact that sits uneasily with our image of him as Royalist veteran. His brother Henry was named as a member of the Fifth Dividend, led by the painter Emmanuel de Critz, so the Stone family interests were amply represented in the Second List.²⁰ At the Restoration, John Stone petitioned Charles II for the post of Master Mason that had belonged to his late father, whom he claimed was sequestrated, plundered, and imprisoned on account of loyalty to the crown. On 14 May 1660, Stone submitted his ‘discovery return’ of the remainder of the goods disbursed to the Sixth Dividend, among which was a painting of Christ attributed to Leonardo. He accorded the items their original values at disbursement in 1651 to persuade the crown of his honesty and fealty, and, as we shall see, to mitigate against his activities during the Protectorate. According to Vertue, travelling to meet the king at The Hague in May or June 1660, John Stone suffered a stroke, and his foreman, Caius Gabriel Cibber, was sent from England to conduct him home.²¹ He was to be further disappointed: the king did not reinstate John Stone to his father’s post of Master Mason to the Crown, preferring instead his rival Edward Marshall. Stone was appointed the lesser post of master mason at Windsor Castle, which he later sold to Marshall’s son Joshua.²²

A painting by Sir Peter Lely, c. 1665, of a rather world-weary statuary, traditionally thought to be the more famous Cibber, may in fact portray John Stone (Fig. 13.1). Certainly, the age of the sitter, his fine clothing, and the bust of (?)Faustina placed behind his left shoulder, suggest an individual of the stature of a master mason, rather than a foreman. Cibber was ten years Stone’s junior and did not set up an independent workshop until his master’s death in 1667. Lely had painted Henry Stone around 1648, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that he would make a portrait of John, whom he certainly knew well as the sole surviving member of the important Anglo-Dutch family. The sitter is not shown with any of the tools of a sculptor, instead he rests his elbow on an elaborately carved pedestal, strongly reminiscent of the stone plinths produced by Nicholas Stone for Greenwich in 1639–40.²³ A drawing is tucked inside the void of the bust. Allowing for some artistic license in the treatment of the hair, the sculpture looks very similar to the marble bust of Faustina the Younger in the Royal Collection today (RCIN1299). This bust is illustrated in an album of drawings of antique statuary bought from the Gonzaga collection c. 1631 (the Whitehall Album).²⁴ Indeed, the piece has an illustrious provenance, it was owned by Andrea Mantegna (depicted in his Triumph of Caesar: The Musicians), who sold it to Isabella d’Este.²⁵ The props may signal the identity of the sitter, acting as a pointed reminder of his family’s role in the manufacture, and restitution, of Crown goods. Despite the grandiose setting, a melancholic air of reflection plays on the sitter’s face, befitting the shortcomings of Capt. John Stone’s last years. Surely Lely, a fellow ‘discoverer’ of royal property, appointed Principal Painter to Charles II at the Restoration, savoured the reference to Mantegna’s Faustina, quoting its cameo in the Triumph canvas, which he would have known in the collection of the king.

Fig. 13.1Sir Peter Lely, Portrait of a Man with a Marble Bust, c. 1660/65, Hatchlands, National Trust, on loan from Cobbe Collection.

Because he responded promptly to orders to return royal goods at the Restoration, made no attempt to inflate their values, and claimed allegiance to the Crown, it is logical to conclude that Capt. John Stone was chosen to act as a dividend leader simply on account of his family’s expertise in statuary, fine art, and fine furnishings, not because of any standing with the Parliamentarians. However, the State Papers of the Commonwealth period tell a different story. Here we find numerous references to Capt. John Stone as an important foot servant of the Commonwealth regime. On 11 August 1651 he was appointed by the Council of State to a committee of safety as a ‘dependable radical’.²⁶ Even more surprisingly, on 3 November 1653 Stone was sworn in as a member of the Council of State, during the short-lived Barebone’s Parliament, ahead of Cromwell’s appointment as Lord High Protector on 16 December 1653. Stone was re-appointed to the renamed ‘Lord Protector’s Council’ and served with John Milton. Between 1653–4 he occupied several influential positions in Cromwell’s administration: as a member of the ‘Irish and Scotch Committee’;²⁷ supervising the returns of the Committee of Inspections;²⁸ superintending the Committee of Prize Goods;²⁹ receipt of the petition of the Society of Merchants of the Intercourse (an important Anglo-Dutch expatriate trade association);³⁰ and, in July 1654, acting as Receiver-General of the Assessments of London, responsible for the salaries of Cromwell’s foot regiment.³¹ This activity reveals Stone to have been embedded in the Commonwealth administration, providing close oversight of the resources of the army, Customs and Excise, and taxation of foreigners. He was also responsible for the payment of Commonwealth creditors, from the Excise.³² It seems his rise in Cromwell’s ‘civil service’ was rapid. The view of Stone as a close collaborator of Cromwell casts his activities as a dividend leader during the Interregnum in a very different light, and goes some way to explaining Charles II’s reserve towards a Royalist veteran at the Restoration.

Stone’s appointment to the Council of State illuminates two puzzles concerning the goods under his charge as leader of the Sixth Dividend. The first is an anomaly. According to annotations in the Contractors’ Inventory, a suite of six silk and gilt-metal tapestries of the History of Vulcan and Venus, totalling 156 ells, valued at £546, and accorded in October 1651 to Stone’s dividend, had been ‘taken to Holland’.³³ Why the Contractors would disburse missing goods to Crown creditors is a mystery, but the Sixth Dividend was not alone in this treatment: David Murray, the late king’s tailor, ‘received’ on the same occasion six pieces of the same suite, which ‘the Queene carried into France’.³⁴ The tapestry suite was of the highest order; designed by Francis Clein and woven at Mortlake tapestry works, c. 1620–25, it shimmered gold and silver. (See, for instance, Neptune and Cupid Plead for the Release of the Lovers, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.) John Stone was clearly an assiduous leader of his dividend, to judge by a petition submitted to the Council of State on 16 February 1652 ‘for delivery of some hangings of the late King, sold to him and others, referred to Mr Love, Mr Holland, Mr Masham, and Mr Hay.’ Eighteen months later Stone was himself a member of the Council of State.

This elucidates a remark of the antiquarian Richard Symonds, who, having spent the Civil War years abroad, returned to England at the beginning of the Interregnum; his notebook is a vital source of information about the onward sale of works of art disbursed to Crown creditors. Symonds wrote about Cárdenas’s purchases in London c. 1651–3, ‘The Spanish Embassador hath bought. that were the Kings. His bid in England … The State gave him the 11 Cesars of Titian & ye 12th done by Vandyke. Those cost the King 100t a piece for wch he was offerd 12 thousand pound.’³⁵ This was the series of Roman Emperors by Titian (executed c.1536–9), purchased from Mantua and shipped to England on the Margaret by Nicholas Lanier in 1628.³⁶ Nijs had noted that eleven of the paintings were by Titian and another, a Domitian, by another hand.³⁷ On arrival in England the paintings were found to be damaged by mercury spillage; Van Dyck was paid £5 for mending the Galbus on 8 August 1635, and £20 for a Vitellius.³⁸ The greatly damaged Vitellius was sent to the king’s agent Gerbier in Brussels for specialist restoration; on its return it was given into the custody of Sir Endymion Porter.³⁹ Van der Doort recorded twelve Emperors at St James’s Palace, one of which was a copy.⁴⁰ Van Dyck provided a ‘pastiche’ twelfth emperor, so skilfully assembled that it attracted the admiration of the queen mother’s biographer Puget de la Serre, who considered that, ‘the way Van Dyck succeeded in bringing Titian’s style back to life makes this painting a miraculous and incomparable piece of workmanship’.⁴¹ By the time of the Commonwealth Sale however, this view was out of favour.

The series was disbursed to Stone on behalf of the Sixth Dividend on 23 October 1651, and accorded a value of £1,200.⁴² From a concordance of the Contractors’ Inventory, the Taylour Inventory and the Stone return, it is possible to discern that the Taylour Inventory comprises a master list of all the items disbursed to the Sixth Dividend, at different dates, (see Appendix). One entry, detailing four items, is dated 2 August 1653; the Taylour Inventory therefore dates from between 1653 and 1660. Since the Titian Emperors also appear in the inventory, it is apparent that Cárdenas purchased them after August 1653. As discussed above, the Spanish ambassador had listed the series in one of his earliest memoranda, dated 8 August 1651, just before it was given to the Sixth Dividend, noting that six of the paintings were in poor condition. In November of that year Cárdenas informed Haro that he had sent an agent with a painter to assess the condition of the Emperors before they were withdrawn from the sale, and that he was now dealing with the new owner [i.e. Stone]: ‘Given that this set of portraits is not highly valued by everyone, I have not heard that there are many trying to buy it. … I am continuing to negotiate their purchase from the owner, but this cannot be accomplished hurriedly, for if the vendor is made aware of my inclination to buy, their price will increase.’⁴³

Capt. John Stone was, from at least 3 November 1653, a member of the Council of State. This makes sense of Symonds’s statement that ‘the State gave him the 11 Cesars’. The reverse of the Taylour Inventory is annotated by Daniel Taylour’s second wife, Margaret Locke: ‘I concive this was a dividend of King Charls the first his goods: for money oing to my husband with others: but he never had much of it.’ If Capt. Stone did indeed sell Titian’s Emperors to Cárdenas at half their accorded value, as Symonds says, there may be some truth in Mrs Taylour’s complaint.

While the paper trail concerning the works of art disbursed to the Sixth Dividend is remarkable, even unique, among the documentary evidence relating to the Commonwealth Sale, it is not possible to pinpoint the exact location of the ‘peece of Christ’between 1651 and 1660. We know that the painting was recoverable in 1660, since it appears on Stone’s discovery list, but whether it remained with him or one of the other members of the dividend, is unknown. In his return, Stone said that the goods he listed ‘remaine yet undisposed off, in the Custody of the said Crediters’; the committee then submitted a draft order for Stone to seize the goods mentioned in his inventory.⁴⁴ This implies the painting may not have been in his hands in May 1660. A list of the fourteen dividends and their members, attributed to Elias Ashmole and compiled in 1660, names the eighteen members of the Sixth Dividend: ‘John Stone for himself and the rest of his Dividend. Thomas Lockington, Daniell Taylour, Rebecca Wiseman, Lettis Holcroft, Judith Hobson, Thomas Worsley, William (?)Slisled, Susana Malaugh, Sara (?)Delamane, Thomas Lockington for Thomas Sutton, Jone Haksey, John Coll, Symon Basrell, Robert Strong, Anthony Masson, Jeremy Crewes, Jeremy Nolles, Richard Sherbroke, John Fax and Matthew Butler, Hugh Radclyff, Francis Goff.’⁴⁵

The Taylour Inventory was preserved among household papers and published in a history of the family in 1831;⁴⁶ it provides a wealth of information germane to the constitution of the Sixth Dividend and illuminates the character of Daniel Taylour (1614–55), a London merchant, and a freeman of the Haberdashers Company, living in Coleman St., St Stephen’s parish. He was a judge at the trial of Lord Goring, Lord Capell, and Sir John Owen, 5 February 1648, sentencing them to death, and sat on the Extraordinary Commission of the Oyer and Terminer for the trial of John Lilburne (‘Freeborn John’), 24–26 October 1649.⁴⁷ According to a family tradition, he was on the scaffold at the execution of Charles I. He owned extensive land and property, which, a family memorandum states, was Crown property purchased from Cromwell.⁴⁸ At the Restoration, his son William was ‘obliged to give the State lands his father had purchased, and to buy his pardon from Charles II.’⁴⁹ Daniel Taylour’s death in 1655, and an inventory of his household effects,⁵⁰ rule him out as an interim owner of the Salvator, but his activities are highly revealing of the political proclivities of Stone’s close associates. One wonders whether Stone also had to buy a pardon from the king, and whether his association with Daniel Taylour had anything to do with his rapid ascent in Cromwell’s administration.

The other members of the dividend are obscure, except Thomas Lockington, a yeoman of the fish and salt store who petitioned Charles II on 23 May 1660,⁵¹ and Lettice Holcroft, probably the widow of Sir Henry Holcroft of Long Acre, Westminster (and thereby a neighbour of Stone, who lived at the upper end of St Martin’s Lane, next to St Giles’s Fields in 1664).⁵² The trajectory of Holcroft’s political career saw a similar seismic shift in allegiances. Groom of the Privy Chamber to Queen Anne, Remembrancer for Irish Affairs under James I and Charles I, he subsequently supported Parliament in the Civil War, and was Commissioner for the Sale of Crown lands in 1649, before his death in 1650.⁵³ A picture of the makeup of the Sixth Dividend as a set of individuals connected by their shifting political loyalties, and participation in the sequestration and sale of Crown lands, begins to emerge.

The precise ownership of the Salvator Mundi between 23 October 1651 and 14 May 1660 is still obscure, but in all likelihood it remained in the hands of Capt. John Stone. What did he think of the painting? Ultimately, it seems that, for him, Leonardo’s painting was effectively a pawn in a game of political opportunism that would conclude with his supplication to Charles II in 1660. Shortly afterwards, the painting of Christ as Salvator Mundi would hang in the King’s Privy Cabinet at Whitehall Palace, where it represented a fragmentary recuperation of Charles I’s ‘world of rare pictures’.