but so violent, undisciplined, and ungovernable, that no one had as yet succeeded in training or educating him. Nevertheless Vittoria undertook to do so, and succeeded completely. Under her influence Alfonso grew up to be a distinguished soldier. He is accused, indeed, of great arrogance and cruelty. He is, moreover, accused of perfidy and bad faith. It is not to be denied that his kinsman Pescara, our Vittoria's husband, was publicly known to be arrogant and cruel in the practice of his profession of arms, and was more than suspected of perfidy and bad faith in his political negotiations, and the young Alfonso may have had his part of these family characteristics. Vain as the attempt would be to analyse and disentangle the complex traits which make up every human character, assigning to each its cause, and tracing, as it were, its genealogy, one yet cannot help attributing those qualities of arrogance and cruelty which so specially marked both these D'Avalos to the Spanish blood of which they were so proud. For arrogance is not, in general, an Italian fault; nor cruelty, except the sudden cruelty which arises from violent and undisciplined passions. Italian cruelty is seldom of a cold and adamantine sort, inaccessible to beseeching. In any case, these faults in Alfonso were beyond Vittoria's power to cure, whilst his good qualities were in all probability elicited entirely by her influence. She won the attachment of the spoiled and self-willed boy, who continued to regard her as a mother to the end of his life. And she imbued his mind with some tincture of learning and literature. When Pescara had gone away again to the wars, his wife remained in Ischia, attending to the education of the young Alfonso; she was the centre of a little band of literary persons who have, many of them, celebrated the charms of those days on the island. Bernardo Tasso, father of the great singer of 'Jerusalem Delivered,' was one of these, and he has left a sonnet apostrophising Ischia as follows: Superbo scoglio, altero e bel ricetto Ch'ogni altro lume fan scuro e negletto; (Proud rock, high and beauteous resort of so many famous heroes and emperors, whence issue rays of glory which make all other lights seem obscure and disregarded, &c.) The heroes and emperors must be understood with some allowance for poetic license; although kings and captains were certainly among the guests on the proud rock' from time to time. Occasionally the Marchioness of Pescara quitted her island-retreat to pay a visit to Naples, as on the occasion of the marriage of the King of Poland with Donna Bona Sforza in 1517, when Vittoria appeared amongst her fellow-nobles with pomp and splendour surpassing that of most of them and equal to any. During the years from 1513 to 1520 Pescara paid several visits to his wife at Ischia, which, though brief, were joyfully welcomed by her, and helped her to support the many weary months of his absence. In 1520 Fabrizio Colonna, Vittoria's father, died, and within two years her brother also. And in the October of that same year (1522) Pescara paid a flying visit to his home. He remained but three days there, and then bade his wife farewell to rejoin the army. It was the last time they ever met. Pescara had been steadily advancing in dignity and reputation as a general during all these years; and after that last parting with Vittoria (which was little guessed to be the last by either of them) several brilliant' achievements added to his renown. One of them was the memorable battle of Pavia, fought on February 24, 1525, when Francis I., King of France, was taken prisoner, and of which he gave a laconic account to his mother in the well-known words, 'Tout est perdu fors l'honneur.' Pescara received three wounds, none of them dangerous, in the battle, and claimed the custody of the royal prisoner. But Francis was taken out of his hands into Spain, and Pescara complained loudly on the subject to his sovereign, Charles V., who had succeeded Ferdinand on the thrones of Spain and Naples in 1516. Pescara was now, at the age of thirty-five, Charles V.'s general-in-chief in Lombardy, and was high in the monarch's confidence. His discontent at having his captive taken away from him was matter of public notoriety, and upon it Pope Clement VII. and some others founded a hope that it might be possible to seduce Pescara from his allegiance to Charles, and bring him over to their own side, which was (now, and after much trimming and vacillation) that of opposition to the Spanish power in Italy. The army under Pescara's command would have been an almost irresistible engine for the purpose of crushing the Spaniards could he have been induced so to use it. An attempt was made to sound the great captain on this point, and the great captain appeared to receive the advances favourably. Appeared,' because in the sequel he revealed the whole plot to Charles V., declaring that from the first he had only intended to draw on the conspirators to their own betrayal, and had never contemplated treachery to his sovereign for an instant. But there is strong reason for believing that Pescara did waver in his allegiance-to use no harsher phrase. And one of the reasons for so believing is that Vittoria, hearing some rumour of the negotiations in hand, wrote a letter to her husband, imploring him in the strongest terms to consider well what he was doing, mindful of his pristine fame and estimation; and that, for her part, she cared not to be the wife of a king, but rather to be joined with a faithful and loyal man; that it is not riches, titles, and kingdoms which can give true glory, infinite praise, and perpetual renown to noble spirits desirous of eternal fame, but faith, sincerity, and other virtues of the soul; and that with these, men may rise higher than the highest kings, not only in war, but in peace.'1 Very noble words, and worthy of the high commendation which Vittoria's biographers and many other historians bestow on them. Signor Visconti asserts that this letter from his wife was the chief cause which determined Pescara to abandon the idea of betraying his sovereign. At all events, the fact that she wrote such a letter proves that Vittoria was not secure of her husband's steadfastness. And yet it would not be just to expect that Vittoria should regard his behaviour with the same sentiments which it awakens in us. In the first place, we behold Ferdinando Francisco d'Avalos, Marquis of Pescara, under the solar microscope of historical investigation; she saw him by the chiaro-scuro of human love and intercourse, and (in this case) from a distance which softened and changed the aspect of his actions. In the next place, if we could have interrogated Pescara at the time, he would probably have pleaded in excuse (supposing him to have contemplated treachery) the ill-usage he had received at the hands of the sovereign he had served. Not that such a plea could really justify treachery, but it might easily suffice so to obfuscate the very imperfect moral sense of a Cinque-cento soldier of fortune, as to lead him to think himself in the right to make reprisals. Anger and disappointed self-love have been known so to operate upon the human mind, even in subsequent periods of the world's history. Vittoria had a superior intelligence and a purer conscience, and she saw the matter more clearly. The end of the story was that Pescara remained true to Charles V., and gave up the chief mover in the conspiracy (Morone, chancellor and prime-minister of the Duke of Milan) into his hands. And in return he received the rank of generalissimo of the Imperial forces in Italy. But this dignity he did not long enjoy. A singular decay of his strength began to manifest itself in the autumn of that same year (1525), which the medical skill of his physicians seems to have been unable to account for. It could scarcely have resulted from the wounds he 1 Varchi. Storia Fiorentina, Book I. received at the battle of Pavia, which are expressly stated to have been very slight. Some writers have attributed Pescara's malady to anxiety of mind preying on him lest Charles V. should discover that he had not from the beginning been firmly minded to take no part in the conspiracy headed by the Pope. It seems more probable that the illness was of the nature of consumption. Towards the end of the year Pescara gave up all hope of recovery. He despatched a missive from Milan, where he then was, to his wife, begging her to hasten to him. She set off without delay, but when she had got as far as Viterbo on her northward journey, she was met by the news of her husband's death. He died on November 25, 1525, and was buried at Milan. But his biographer, Bishop Giovio, says that his body was shortly afterwards transported to Naples, with great pomp and magnificence. The shock of her husband's premature death-he was not yet thirty-six years old-appears to have crushed Vittoria utterly for a time. She hastened from Viterbo to Rome, on receiving the dreadful news, and sought a retreat in the convent of San Silvestro in Capite, inhabited by nuns of the order of Santa Chiara. The origin of this church dates from a venerable antiquity. But the present edifice has been over and over again restored and remodernised, and the present external façade is no older than the year 1703. Its great boast and treasure-whence it derives its title in Capite '-is that precious relic, the head of St. John the Baptist. The authenticity of this relic, together with that of another, the image of the Saviour, sent by Him through the hands of the Apostle St. Thaddeus to an Armenian king, and long preserved in the city of Edessa, was solemnly confirmed by Pope Clement VIII. on November 17, 1595. But probably no such measure was needed to strengthen the faith of all good Catholics in Vittoria Colonna's time. The chief reason why the newly-made widow chose San Silvestro as her retreat was that her family had for centuries been munificent patrons and benefactors of that church and convent. The church is now, as has been stated, much re-modernised, and the convent is partly turned into artillery barracks. It seems to have been Vittoria's first intention to devote herself entirely to a conventual life, and to take the veil. But her friends even those of the ecclesiastic hierarchy-were by no means willing that so brilliant an ornament of lay society as the beautiful, gifted, and wealthy Marchioness of Pescara should be lost to the world. Jacopo Sadoleto, Bishop of Carpentras, one of the most learned men of his time, obtained from Pope Clement VII., whose secretary he then was, a brief addressed to the abbess and nuns of San Silvestro enjoining them to receive into their house the Marchesana di Pescara, and to comfort her omnibus spiritualibus et temporalibus consolationibus,' but forbidding them, on pain of the greater excommunication, to permit her to take the veil 'impetu potius sui doloris, quam maturo consilio circa mutationem vestium vidualium in monasticas.' This brief is dated December 7, 1525. Vittoria remained with the nuns until the autumn of the following year, when she was taken to Marino by her brother Ascanio, now the head of the Colonna family. That turbulent clan raised a tumult in Rome in September 1526, being partisans of the Emperor, and consequently in opposition to the Pope. They, of course, took that opportunity of sacking every house belonging to the Orsini, their hereditary enemies. In consequence of these outrages the Pope deprived Cardinal Colonna of his hat, and declared all the estates of the family confiscated. Upon this Vittoria quitted Marino and returned to Ischia, which must more than ever have appeared to her a haven of peace and safety after the stormy scenes of which Rome and its neighbourhood were now the theatre. And worse storms were to follow. In 1527 took place that tremendous sack of Rome by the troops of the Constable de Bourbon which plunged the devoted city into a sea of nameless horrors. It may be mentioned by the way that the poor nuns of Santa Chiara at San Silvestro came very near to losing their precious relic, the Baptist's head, at this time. Pope Boniface VIII., in the thirteenth century, had placed above the tabernacle which contained the relic (which tabernacle was itself a marvellously rich and beautiful work in silver ornamented with precious stones, the gift of Pope Martin IV.) a costly tiara, triple crown. In order to save John the Baptist's head from the destructive rapacity of the soldiery the good sisters placed the tiara on another skull, which was (naturally) at once seized on and carried away, the troops of the Constable de Bourbon strictly limiting their attention to terrestrial treasures and such as were of marketable value. or But whilst cruelty, greed, and license made of Rome a hell upon earth, peace and tranquillity reigned in the home at rocky Ischia, even if the brightness of happy love had left it for ever. And now Vittoria appears for the first time to have devoted herself seriously to the writing of poetry, which became, indeed, the chief occupation of her life. Her poems consist almost entirely of With all spiritual and temporal consolations.' From the impulse of her grief rather than from mature counsel concerning the change of her widow's weeds into the monastic habit.' |