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Plundered art for the collections of Charles 1? The capture of Munich in May, 1632

This seminal, 20,000-word essay furthers knowledge of the assembling of King Charles I’s art collections, establishing for the first time that some artworks were obtained as result of plundering in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War. Two important areas of scholarship are thereby linked. An unnoticed encounter between Archibald Rankin, a Scottish diplomat, and the news-gatherer, John Pory, reveals Rankin as the first to recognise that the Swedish king, Gustav II Adolf’s military ambitions and Charles I’s collecting ambitions might converge on Munich, the seat of Maximilian I of Bavaria, one of the major art collectors in Europe. This study, however, reveals that some artworks taken from Munich reached Whitehall not through Rankin’s agency but through the separate efforts of two courtiers, James, Marquess of Hamilton, and Sir Henry Vane the Elder, who were present at the city’s capture in 1632. This study proceeds on two levels, unfolding a grand-scale narrative of military campaigning and art plunder from an unfamiliar British perspective while also engaging with particular art objects, even establishing the relative positions of plundered works in Charles I’s cabinet room and identifying a sculpture still in the Royal Collection as plundered from Munich.

The essay appears as a contribution to a Festschrift volume presented to Arthur MacGregor, editor of the Journal of the History of Collections since its founding and a figure of international standing in the field. It could, therefore, not be better placed to receive the attention of specialists concerned with collecting as a cultural practice and the psychology and pathology of art plunder. This publication represents an advance in both the study of art plunder in the Early-modern era and in the collecting and collections of Charles I, in which fields little recent progress has been made, claiming an immediate place in their select bibliographies.