BOOKS.
LUCRETIA BORGIA.* [FIRST NOTICE.] "LUCRETIA BORGIA is the moat unhallowed female figure int modern history. Is she this because she was the guiltiest of women ? Or only because she has to bear a curse wherewith the-
world has erroneously laden 'her ? Of Alexander VI._ and of Caesar Borgia a history exists, but of Lucretia there is barely more than a legend. According to it, she is a Maenad, carrying in one hand a poisoned cup, in the other a dagger, and at the same time, this fury-like being has the soft and lovely features of one of the Graces." In these graphic terms Dr.. Gregorovius foreshadows the anomalous character of the figure he- has made the subject of his delineation, and whose true features he- has succeeded in recovering in some degree out of the atmosphere- of a wild legend. There are individuals who, through some- indefinable demoniacal quality, have retained for posterity a mysterious interest, a certain force of glamour, all the more extraordinary from the vagueness in which the facts of their actual' life have been shrouded. Of such ghosts haunting the memory of ages none is more enigmatic than this figure of Lucretia Borgia, covered, as it is, with imputations of the most revolting kind,. and yet exalted as a paragon of sweetness by persons who, though no rigourists, were eminently fastidious on the score of refinement —a being who combined in her person beyond question accidents of life the most calculated to shock ; bastard to the most outrageously profligate of Popes, sister to the most diabolically unprincipled of ambitious adventurers, wedded wife to three- husbands, of whom one was divorced scandalously while another- was murdered by that same brother,—and yet withal, a creature flitting through the lurid glare of a period suffused with the deepest crimes as an apparition shaped in the fairness. of beautiful womanhood. That so perplexingly abnormal a phenomenon should have excited the attention of criticism. was but natural. Long ago, Mr. Roscoe was at a loss to ex- plain the contradictions between the foul charges advanced by some writers and the strong admiration for her winning nature felt by minds of high culture. Subsequent researches in Italian. archives have tended to confirm Mr. Roscoe's doubt as to the correctness of a representation which would have made of Lucretia a mere monster of profligacy. The first reliable biography of this enigmatic woman is, however, that given us by Dr. Gregorovius. In prosecuting his studies into the history of mediaeval Rome, which covers the Pontificate of Alexander VI.„ he was fortunate enough to collect a considerable amount of previously unknown material. The result has been embodied in a volume which furnishes a very valuable illustration of an event ful period of Italian history, as reflected in the strange career of a singular and yet typical life. Even now there are mysterious blanks in this life, but still enough has been recovered to bring before us. the actual outline of the real Lucretia in her progress through:
the main passages of her fitful and chequered existence. - In these• passages what commands attention are not the particular eccentricities of individual adventure, but the surroundings in, which these are set,—surroundings which rendered their occurrence- possible, and thereby illustrate a state of society which resulted in the shock of the Reformation, and made the Papacy the direct. agent in hurrying on the convulsion of the Church. For let it. be well remembered that this paraded and publicly glorified.1 daughter of a Pope was the contemporary of Savonarola, and lived to hear the echoes of Luther's public denunciation of Papal) pretensions.
Until our author's discovery of certain notarial deeds, the• childhood of Lucretia was wrapped in obscurity. It is now- established that she came into the world in April, 1480, being- the third child born to Cardinal Borgia by her who in history best known as Vannozza. The origin of this woman, like every-
thing relating to the Borgias, has been the subject of fable. She• was not a woman of the populace, any more than, as Litta con-
jectured, a member of the Farnese house. She sprang from. the Cattaneos, a middle-class Roman family whose name occurs. not unfrequently in public records. How she came first to meet Borgia is unknown, but the intimacy began about 1466. Though the connection never was disguised, and the children were publicly recognised as the Cardinal's, Vannozza was twice married. The first husband, Giorgio di Croce, died in 1486. At this time, the passions of Borgia were notoriously directed to another object, • Lucretia Borgia, with Urfunden and Corrapondenren time Zeit. Von, F Gregoroviue. Stuttgart: Chotta. 1874.
but it was a marked feature of his character, notwithstanding fickleness in love, to retain a warm interest in the worldly pro- sperity of those who stood near to him. Alexander VI. was every inch a nepotist, one who lavished freely the good things of this world on his belongings. Vannozza is proved to have become the owner of very considerable property, the source of which cannot be doubtful, and immediately after her husband's death we find her married again to one who, there is every reason to believe, espoused her at the intervention of her old lover. This second husband was no individual picked out of the gutter. He was Carlo di Canale, an elegant scholar of repute, and a Roman Curialist, holding a post of importance, and yet this man apparently did not lose caste by marrying the pensioned- off and no longer young mistress of a Cardinal. Though Vannozza, to the last, was recognised as her mother, Lucre- tia was placed, at an early age, under the care of Adriana Orsini, a near kinswoman of Borgia. His solicitude for her worldly prosperity made him seek to betroth her when yet a child ; and here, at the outset of her career, we encounter an inexplicable combination. It results from indubitably authentic deeds that Borgia almost simultaneously negotiated to contract Lucretia to a Spanish and to a Neapolitan nobleman, when his elevation to the Papacy caused him abruptly to seek a higher match. At his invi- tation, a few weeks after this event, Giovanni Sforza, Signor of Pesaro, came to Rome with the purpose of espousing Lucretia. At the same time, there hurried thither the Neapolitan bridegroom to assert his rights, secured by a formal deed of betrothal. But the Pope repudiated the pledges he had given as Cardinal. The Neapolitan bad perforce to acquiesce in renunciation, and in June, 1493, there was solemnised in the Vatican the marriage of the thirteen-years-old Lucretia to Giovanni Sforza, amidst a display of pomp which afforded much matter for description to the Italian envoys present. Thus, as a mere child, Lucretia went through the experience of three solemn affiances, and had been taught to view vows, by the Church proclaimed as sacred, in the light of engagements solely dependent on worldly advantage.
In this case, the advantage sought was the enlistment of the great Sforza interest in the plot that was being hatched in con- junction with France against the house of Aragon in Naples, by an unprincipled Pope bent on the aggrandisement of his family. During the storms which attended the irruption of Charles
Lucretia was sheltered from its scenes of violence in the sequestered Pesaro, whither Vannozza is mentioned as having accompanied her. But in Italian politics changes were sudden and violent. Alexander, from being the ally of France, became her antagonist, and then Sforza was transformed at once into an encumbrance from a useful instrument, for new schemes of ambition were entertained which involved the usurpation of Pesaro in behalf of Caesar. Accordingly as the readiest method to get rid of him, an attempt was made on his life, which he evaded only by sudden.flight from Rome ; where- upon Alexander, bringing to bear all his influence, pontifical and political, effected the promulgation of a divorce under pleas of a grossly scandalous nature, into admitting which, it is now proved, that the unfortunate Sforza was constrained in the vain hope of saving his estate by this act of complaisance. To establish, however, the semblance of a canonical ground for this act, the former contract of betrothal with the Neapolitan noble- man was made to do service. In a Brief dated June 10th, 1498, the dissolution of the original engagement was declared to have been invalid, because pronounced on grounds ascertained to have been without foundation ; but as in the interval the bridegroom had himself contracted marriage, Lucretia was now absolved from
her engagement and thereby declared marriageable, and so ten days later she was once more solemnly wedded in the Vatican to Don Alfonso of Naples, after King Federigo's protracted indisposition to assent to this union had yielded to the pressure of political exigency. In the person of Don Alfonso—a youth of seventeen— thrust, grievously against the wish of the head of his house, into this den of iniquity as a propitiatory offering, there comes the saddest and most touching figure upon the scene in this lugubrious Borgia drama. It is manifest how with a shudder, after long resist- ance, this forlorn stripling presented himself at the threshold of St.
Peter's with the feeling of a victim, to receive from the Pope the hand of a woman notoriously tainted through the incidents of her divorce, and already the subject of foul imputations in pasquinades of wide circulation. Silently, and as if shrinking from public observation, Alfonso took up his residence at Rome in his wife's palace, under the eyes of Alexander VI., and in immediate prox- imity to that dread machinator of remorseless deeds,—his blood- stained brother-in-law, Caesar. And through the cheerless win- dows of that dungeon-palace, living by the side of a woman
whose fairness was the weird loveliness of a Lamia, this deso- late scion of the grand stock of Aragon, a mere helpless fly within the grim spider's web, looked out upon the fell designs of those into whose bands he had been delivered, and who were actively compassing the destruction of his house and kin. Suddenly something, the record of which is shrouded from us, more than commonly ominous must have reached his ear, for on August 2, 1499, Alfonso fled from Rome, and took refuge in a castle of the Colonnas, leaving his wife gone six months with child ; but only to return shortly into the meshes of the net, either attracted by the fatal charms of Lucretia, or gone in deference to the representations of the infuriated Pope. That Lucretia consciously acted the part of a decoy there is no evidence, but nothing is better established than that her brother was the murderer of her husband, and that for this deed she subsequently exhibited no signs of enduring distress. Ctesar was at this time consummating that series of successful but most horribly unscrupulous actions which were investing him with supreme authority over the Romagna, and with the military ascendancy which it was in his mind to employ for the acquisition of a yet more dazzling possession. This coveted prize consisted in the realm of Naples, and therefore to remove, by fair means or by foul, his Aragonese brother-in-law was become to Caesar an object on which he would admit no scruple. Whoever would not get out of his way had to be trampled down with a ruth- less tread, and Alfonso, having become an obstruction, was violently removed. As, one summer's night, he was entering the Vatican Palace to wait on his father-in-law, he was attacked by masked men and stabbed, so that his life was despaired of, and in the Pope's apartment, to which he was carried, absolution was
hastily given him. It is not known who wounded the Duke," writes the Venetian Ambassador, "but it is said to have been the same person who murdered the Duke of Gandia, and threw him into the Tiber." Subsequently, Caesar actually said to the same Ambassador, " It is not myself who wounded the Duke, but had I done so, it would only have been what he deserved ;" and again he observed, " What failed to happen at noon can well take place in the evening." It would appear that Lucretia, on this occasion, bore herself as an affectionate wife. She herself nursed her hus- band, and prepared his food with her own hands,—a circumstance so particularly recorded as to mark the degree in which dread of poison prevailed. The youthful vigour of Alfonso threatened to defeat the sinister intentions of his deadly foe, when the latter accom- plished his purpose with a perfectly hellish contempt for any affecta- tion of secrecy. On August 18, 1500, Caesar Borgia, accompanied by unflinching henchmen, entered his brother-in-law's apartment, ordered Lucretia to leave it, and then and there Alfonso was strangled by the gripe of a certain Michclotto, a notoriously ruthless desperado. Silently was the corpse of the Aragonese prince borne for sepulture into the Church of St. Peter, as if it were the remains of a criminal. All Rome knew of the bloody deed,—not even any attempt at an official lie, however flimsy, was made to account to the public for this horrible crime. It is, indeed, stated on good contemporary authority that Alexander was not privy to the deed, and that Lucretia, in the first paroxysms of horror, vehemently besought her father to exact vengeance. But Alexander never was able to withstand the demoniacal spell of his son, and within a few days after the sanguinary event we find Lucretia retiring to the Castle of Nepi—a fief which had been bestowed on her father—as a contem- porary says, to recover from the shock she had experienced. There Lucretia resided some months, in a locality the natural gloom of which must at that season have been intensified by the notoriously fever-stricken atmosphere of the lonely and pestilential region, until, with the levity which makes an enigma of her, she again returned to that ominous Roman palace, the still reeking scene of tragedy, to seek once more, in deference to her father's wish, a matrimonial alliance, recommended solely by motives of policy. But this last affiance opens a new phase in the life of Lucretia which requires separate and special treatment.
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