The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (84 page)

She spoke the truth. After less than four months in Roma four of the current crop of
donzelle
were already promised to eligible husbands. But there is an obverse to this pretty picture, the side that Madama prefers to turn to the wall, so to speak. These
donzelle
do not receive their education free. They more than pay their way by acting as magnets for the rich, powerful, and clever men who typically patronize a renowned salon. Furthermore, the girls perform as sponges, albeit delicate and subtle ones, who sop up information and pass it on to their benefactress to be used for the advantage of herself, her family, and her little state.

You may remember that when we first came to this palace, there lived here among the
donzelle
a distant connection of Madama’s, Giulia Gonzaga, celebrated as the most beautiful virgin in Italy. Whether or not she was the most beautiful — or indeed a virgin — this jewel of a girl sparkled with enough brilliance to capture the heart of Vespasiano Colonna. The bride was fourteen years old. The grizzled groom was a widower over fifty, very rich, brother to Cardinal Pompeo Colonna. It was considered by all a brilliant match.

Now with the wedding less than a month away, the besotted bridegroom found himself about to attack the city where his beloved bride was tucked away under Madonna Isabella’s protection. Passion overcame reason. Fearful that the shock of waking up with troops outside her window would alarm his bride, the old campaigner threw discretion to the winds and sent the girl a note warning her that a secret raid on the Vatican was in the offing.

“Stand fast and have no fear, darling,” the foolish man wrote to his Giulia. “You will always be safe in the stronghold of my family where you now reside and soon you will rest within the sheltering arms of your knight, Vespasiano Colonna.”

I saw the letter with my own eyes, for of course Giulia made haste to bring it directly to Madama. And from that document Madama, no mean reasoner, not only learned of the raid but was able to estimate when to expect it.

“Vespasiano’s dispatch rider tells me he has ridden post from Anagni in sixteen hours. Surely it will take the Colonna troops twice that time to make the same trip,” she calculated aloud for my benefit. “So we must tell the Pope that he has one day to prepare himself and the city. And we too must prepare ourselves for the visit of this lovesick cur of a Vespasiano and his marauders.”

She was in a terrible rage against Colonna.

“Only weeks ago, Vespasiano signed an honorable truce with the Pope. The Pope trusted him.
I
trusted him. He has proven himself unworthy of our trust.”

There are some loyalties she cherishes with utter consistency. I have never seen her turn her back on a member of her own family or the Holy Father. This latter allegiance may not be unrelated to the number of favors she wants from him, but I credit it at least partly to a good Catholic’s reverence for the office if not the man who fills it. Whatever her reasons, she did take immediate steps to warn the Pope of what she perceived as a serious danger. And he showed sufficient confidence in her assessment to order the gates of the city closed and to enforce a troop levy at once.

The only one without enough sense to pay attention to her wisdom was your mother. When Madama urged me to bring you to the palace the next day so that you and I would both be safe, I refused. Whatever the meaning of Vespasiano’s warning to his bride, I could not believe that he and his brother Pompeo — a
cardinal
— would go to war against the Pope for the sake of the Emperor. The more Madama attempted to persuade me that our safety — perhaps our lives — stood at risk, the more obdurate I became in my refusals to bring you to the palace. I did have my reasons.

Of course she could not force me to take refuge with her. So she finally gave up trying, but not without having the last word. “Go back to the Portico then if you will not be dissuaded,” she ordered me. “But be sure to lock your doors and hide your valuables.” With that she turned away to other matters as if to say good riddance, but as I backed out of the room in the customary way, she added with a disapproving shake of her head, “You are as stiff-necked and reckless as you were when you were a girl, Grazia. I hope for your sake and that of your son that you do not live to regret your obstinacy.”

She had offered help. Her offer had been scorned. Another woman would have left me to stew in my own juice. But Madama is not small-minded. That night she sent her coach to offer me a second chance. Knowing my obstinate nature, she also sent along the letter she had received only hours before from Cardinal Pompeo Colonna himself, wherein he had advised her that he and several of his staff would be occupying the west wing of the palace within a few hours. She was not to be alarmed. But it was made quite clear that she had better clear her possessions out of the west wing — some thirty-odd rooms including the main salon and all the fine reception rooms — on the double quick.

“We stand only twenty leagues from Porto San Giovanni,” the letter concluded, “and will be at the Piazza S.S. Apostoli in time for supper tonight.”

If indeed Roma was the target of the Colonna brothers, there was hardly a safer place to wait out this raid than in their own palace, which, despite its being on loan to Madonna Isabella, they apparently meant to use as their headquarters. In the face of that undeniable reality even my obduracy gave way. I bade the coachman wait and ran upstairs to awaken you.

I know that in your eyes that night was all adventure. The midnight awakening. The hasty toilette. The wonderful golden coach. The ride through the streets of Roma at breakneck speed. The sight of the shimmering facade of this great palace by moonlight.

I was not so charmed. I entered the place full of misgivings. You must have sensed my panic. I remember that you offered me your arm as we passed slowly under the grinning
putti
carved into the lintel over the portal.

In no time you were fast asleep in the trundle that was set up for your comfort in my workroom. But I did not find such ready ease within the sheltering walls of the Colonna Palace. Sleepless, I paced back and forth across the chamber, driven by restlessness and confusion.

What my mind could comprehend my imagination still could not encompass: that thousands of Imperial supporters and hirelings were even now converging on the city; that, in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor, these “Christians” were prepared to penetrate the heart of Christendom with their swords and to violate its Holy of Holies.

What I did not know that night — just as well for my fluttering peace of mind — was that the raid on Roma was only a feint, a rehearsal, so to speak, for a serious assault on the papacy to come, this to be led by the Emperor’s strong right arm, Constable Bourbon, not long since the strong right arm of the King of France.

My mind kept returning to that little boy who could not decide which toy soldiers best suited him and who, when he was grown and became Constable Bourbon, had the same difficulty deciding which real troops deserved his loyalty. What decided him to desert Francis and go over to that German weasel the Emperor? What turned this chivalrous knight into a traitor? Madonna Isabella, who has known him since he was a child — he being her nephew on her husband’s side — admits herself puzzled by his willful pursuit of self-destruction. It took Lord Pirro, our mole hidden deep inside the French court, to ferret out an explanation.

FROM DANILO’S ARCHIVE

TO GRAZIA DEI ROSSI AT THE COLONNA PALACE, ROMA

Good news, my love! My petition has been granted. The Holy Father has released me from my bondage to bloody Francis and bloody France. I leave for Lombardia within the week, and thence to Roma.

This letter comes to you from Chambord, the site of the King’s most recent burning enthusiasm. Here he is building a grand new palace upon the design of our own Leonardo. He has shown me drawings of the plans and I have pronounced them excellent although I have as little right to speak on architecture as on the movements of the planets in their orbits. If he had shown me da Vinci’s plans for fortifications or siege machines, I could have responded with confidence. But alas, I am not a soldier here. Nor, I fear, much of a diplomat either, since I have not achieved a single one of the objectives I was sent here to attain. No navy blockades the port of Napoli; no Swiss have been levied; not a white piece has been sent to protect Roma.

As for the King’s mother, Madama Louise, whom I hoped to enlist on our side because of her well-known hatred of Constable Bourbon, she does indeed hate him. I even know why. If I did not love you so much I would leave you there suspended. But knowing your appetite for the secrets of the human heart, I will give you one juicy enough to satisfy all the gossips of Europe.

It seems that all these years, without anyone knowing of it, the King’s mother, Louise, has harbored a mad, incestuous passion for her nephew the Constable. This is the genesis of all that follows. Surely you can already guess how it had to go.

Bourbon’s young wife dies. She was an angel. He is heartbroken. In the midst of his heavy mourning he receives a condolence letter from his aunt, Louise, in which she urges him to resume his duties to life, to France, to the noble house of which they are both members and . . . to marry. Her!

Bourbon is appalled, enraged, insulted. He bursts into a furious rant in the presence of the lady’s emissary. “Does your mistress actually believe that I, who have been married to the finest woman in the world, would stoop to marry the worst woman in the world?” he rages.

Posthaste, the messenger relays Bourbon’s message to Louise. In a rant equal to Bourbon’s she calls upon her son — Francis, the King — to avenge this insult to his mother. “If you do not redeem my honor from the stain placed on it by Charles Bourbon, I will disown you and consider you a coward king.”

A coward king is, of course, the last thing Francis wants to be thought, especially by his mother. From that moment on Bourbon, the King’s strong right arm and best friend, becomes anathema. He is humiliated at court, his lands threatened, his advice ignored, his will thwarted at every turn. After two years of this treatment he throws himself into the willing arms of the Emperor, avowed enemy of France and rival of King Francis. How do you like that for a footnote to history, Messer Guicciardini?

A personal note. Armed with what I thought to be the key to Louise’s heart, I sped to Paris to fan the flames of her rage and thus, I hoped, to swell the Pope’s empty coffers with French ecus. Alas. Much as Louise hates Bourbon, she loves money even more. What I received from the lady was a paltry offering which stands to our need as a fly to an elephant.

How can I have been so blind to the profligacy and vanity of this life of courts? When I think how I berated you for your opinions on the subject, I am ashamed. Do you forgive me, my love? Say this for me at least. My lesson was long in the learning but is in the end well learned. I tell you this so that you may know that I love you for your fine mind as well as for your sublime body. And sign myself forever your friend, lover, pupil, and at last to be husband.

(signed) Ever, P. G. at Chambord, France.

January 10, 1527.

55

T
here is no need to recall for you the amazements of the Colonna brothers’ raid on Roma last September. You saw their arrival in the square below us with your own wide eyes and thrilled to the blast of the trumpets when they sallied forth to sack the Vatican palace.

Your head is filled with battles and glory. Don’t bother to deny it. With each day that passes I see increasing evidence of your father’s blood in you — his daring spirit, his soldier’s appetite for the joust. Do not mistake a mother’s concern for disapproval. If anything, finding these qualities of his in you makes me love you more — and fear more to lose you. I do not want my son to perish in a burst of chivalry.

Look at the underbellies of these bold knights whom you admire: Cardinal Colonna, who connived secretly to unseat his master, the Pope, in the hope of securing the triple crown for himself; his brother Vespasiano, who suffered no qualm of conscience when he betrayed his oath of fealty to the Pope within weeks of swearing it. And what of the so-called
Holy
Roman Emperor? Madama explained the Colonna raid to me as a family quarrel — those were her words — between the Holy Father and his loving son Charles: a warning to the Pope to cease treating with the French. The Emperor would never countenance a genuine attack on the city. So she said.

But Caesar tells us that once a city reveals itself to be soft and ripe, it is bound to be picked off. Now tell me, my son, if you were an emperor who craved to be lord of Europe, and the Colonnas revealed to you a plum as ripe for picking as the Vatican, would you not be tempted to gobble it up?