LUCREZIA BORGIA.*
THE main interest attaching to the character of Lucrezia Borgia is the conflict of evidence about it, for her political career was not more distinguished than that of any ordinary Princess ; her life at Ferrara was so regular as to be somewhat tedious to read about, and though an accomplished woman, she left no notable mark in literature. But the conflict of evidence about her is very remarkable ; and as we have a distinct theory on the subject we will try, with Mr. Gilbert's help, to analyze a character which tradition has made synonymous with all evil. The conflict extends to both forms of testimony, the direct and the indirect, the latter being, in Mr. Gilbert's eyes, the more important of the two. He has, however, as we shall presently endeavour to show, disregarded in his estimate a datum of which he was well aware, but which may possibly have been the most important of all. His proposition is, that if Lucrezia Borgia had been the monster described by some contemporaries, if she had been a murderess who committed incest, and shared the orgies attributed to her father, Pope Alexander, she never could have been the much praised Duchess of Ferrara, a princess who lived not only a decorous life, with a husband of strong character, for twenty years, but was universally beloved for her kindness, beneficence, and piety, whose letters display an excellent heart and understanding, and who left behind her, after so long a reign, an enduring tradition of personal goodness. There is no controversy about the latter set of facts, whatever there may be about the former, and Mr. Gilbert's argument taken by itself may be considered sound. Plenty of wicked women have turned devotees, but it has been later in life than Lucrezia ; and she did not turn devotee, but led just that regular decorous life of good works and stateliness which would have been intolerable to such a temperament. Messaliva does not turn into the gracious matron, nor can we imagine Catherine II. a model of virtue to a small state whose inhabitants scrutinized their rulers with microscopic care. Such a change would be incredible even if we admitted the story that in Ferrara she was too intimate with Cardinal Bembo, a story for which there is scarcely a particle of evidence ;—the charge against Lucrezia not being that she was like most women of her time and rank, but that she was a paragon of iniquity, a moral monster. We should consider her life at Ferrara, even with this drawback, which we do not believe, final evidence against Lucrezia's slanderers, but for one consideration. There is one influence under which women naturally good have joined in or tolerated scenes of impurity, have become in the world's eyes monsters of vice, have even committed murder, and that is a special superstition. The history of the Maharaj sect, revealed in Bombay three years ago, in the trial before Sir J. Arnould, of the English Agapemone, of some spiritualist sects in America prove to a demonstration that a particular form of religious belief has power absolutely to suppress the sexual conscience, to pervert all instincts, to take all meaning out of the facts of ife. This belief is always in one form or another the same, the belief that a man may be either by the will of God, or the permission of God, or the attainment of some special grace sofutus a legibus, alone and beyond law, so high that his own will is law, that his acts are right because they are his acts. So far is this belief from being uncommon, that the ancient Pagans knew no other, holding Jupiter, for example, moral in all foulnesses, because he was Jupiter; that modern Hindoos sneer when missionaries denounce the vices of Krishna, and ask how a deity can do wrong ; that some obscure sects among ourselves doubt if any act committed by a redeemed person is sinful. In a recent trial at New York, the defence made for conduct nearly as subversive of morality as Lucrezia's, was when briefly expressed just this, that the test of perfection is the ability to commit sin sinhnsly. Now, it is as nearly a certainty as• any psychological statement can be that Pope Alexander held this precise belief, that he held himself, being Pope, incapable of sin,—sohaus a legibus, —infallible not only as to his utterances, but as to his personal acts. Murder !—he could not commit murder. He simply doomed, and was as right in dooming as Providence when it sends cholera: His crimes were not crimes, but acts which Heaven sanctioned, as it sanctioned acts held by the world to be good. He was beyond law, and consequently denunciations for breach of law were, as regarded him, mere phrases.
A belief very similar in principle was held by Philip II., who certainly considered a sentence of death delivered by him in secret without trial full justification for assassination if the offender were a subject ; and the notion that kings are not bound by morals has been sedulously inculcated on many princes,— notably on Charles I.,—and was repeatedly expressed by Napoleon in his letters to his brothers and to Eugene Beauharnais, whom he taxes with keeping a private conscience, whereas he should only have a king's, and shoot innocent people without ceremony. Mr. Gilbert himself admits that Alexander fully believed in his personal as well as official infallibility ; and if so, why should not Lucrezia Borgia have believed it too, and the Roman populace also? There is much evidence that she did. She certainly was for four years the Pope's private secretary, read his correspondence, dictated his letters, dwelt in his apartments, and must have been thoroughly aware that her father,—unless, indeed, as Pope, absolved from law, —was one of the wickedest of mankind. If everything he did was right because he did it, she might tolerate scenes around her, and even commit murders which, unless so guarded, would have corrupted her for ever ; and this, to a great extent, must have been the fact merely from her presence in that polluted household. The accusation of incest is probably a falsehood, invented not to injure her, but her father. It is always thrown at persons very highly placed and very dissolute, probably because opinion, seeing such men beyond direct law, tries to avenge itself by accusations which in themselves are punishments. In the Revolutionary Plutarch—a series of biographies, written by respectable persons, and widely circulated during the last war with France—similar charges were levelled against all the Bonapartes. Burchard's special story about the orgy the day before Lucrezia's marriage is probably a wild exaggeration of some very disgraceful scene ; but on our theory of her superstition, Lucrezia in the Vatican may have tolerated the intolerable ; while out of it, away from the Pope-King,---who, remember, was also the most unscrupulous of despots,—she was an ordinary Italian woman of her day, liking luxury, liking, it may be, flirtations with Cardinals, but neither paragon nor monster of iniquity. That theory is exactly consistent with Roscoe's remark that those who denounced her conduct in Rome never assigned her a lover outside the Vatican.
The indirect evidence in Lucrezia's favour, therefore, seems to us imperfect, not more than sufficient to weigh against tradition, and the direct evidence is not worth much either way. Mr. Gilbert makes a good deal of sonnets and praises from writers ; but they were all true about her during her life at Ferrara, and during her life at Rome might have been perfectly honest even if she had been as vile as popular belief paints her. How could the poets know the secrets of a jealously guarded palace, guarded not only by mercenaries, but by religious terrors, and presided over by a family whose enemies had a habit of suddenly dying in great pain ? What litarateur in Moscow knew what the life of Catherine II. really was ? One bit of direct testimony is worth heaps of such addresses, but the direct testimony here is singularly weak. Burchard, indeed, tells an amazing story, and Burchard certainly intended to tell the truth ; but an envoy, specially credited to the Vatican to report all that occurred to the Marchioness of Mantua, and who reported very minute incidents, beard nothing of the reported orgy. That is not disproof, and as we have said, we think the probabilities point to some disgraceful scene as having occurred, which was reported to Burchard at second-haud, and got infinitely worse in the telling, as all such prurient scenes have a tendency to do. As for the worst charge of all, it was made to injure the Pope, and not Lucrezia, is, as we said, the usual revenge of the punishable dissolute against the unpunishable dissolute, and probably has no foundation whatever, except the fact that Lucrezia was the one person whom her father, with his infamous character, loved and trusted, and who shared his own belief as to his personal infallibility. In this view, Lucrezia was what an ordinary Italian woman, brought up in such a palace, would be,—not personally worse than her age, but frightfully, and, as regarded her father's conduct, disgracefully tolerant, with a remaining capacity for better things, which, once relieved from the influence of her earthly deity,—the Pontiff, perpetually criminal, because perpetually believing himself incapable of crime,—developed into the Lucrezia of Ferrara, good wife, good princess, and good friend.
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