II.
Meanwhile a melancholy fate had pursued the French heirs to Milan, the children of Valentine and Orleans. This is not the place to explain how their young dissensions with their father’s murderers summoned the English into France; or how the youngest, John of Angoulême, was sent to England, a mere child, in 1412, as a hostage for his brother’s debt; or how, three years later, the defeat at Agincourt sent Charles of Orleans to join him there. The sons of Valentine remained in prison all their youth. When, in 1440, the son of their father’s murderer, the gentle Duke of Burgundy, ransomed the Duke of Orleans out of bondage, Charles was a man of forty-six,[[55]] who returned home to find his estates half ruined by disastrous wars; his brother Philip dead; his half-brother a hero—Dunois, the restorer of his country. It was late to regain his position in this altered world, but at least he lost no time. In the same month of the same year (November, 1440) Charles married a niece of Burgundy, Mary of Cleves. In 1445 his brother, John of Angoulême, newly released from England, married a neighbour of his sister’s—Marguerite de Rohan, to whose elder sister he had been contracted in his youth. The two princes were determined to recover their inheritance, to raise up children, and restore the ancient dignity of their house. Much of Angoulême and much of Orleans and much of the inheritance of Bonne d’Armagnac was still in the hands of the English. The estates of Orleans in France were grievously diminished. And outside France Asti had been lost also.
In the year 1422, when Charles of Orleans had lain already seven years, and John ten years, in an English prison, when Philip of Vertus was dead, when France was paralysed, and Henry VI. of England crowned the king of France in Paris, the county of Asti, in great fear of the English (those Goths of the Riviera) and of the nearer jealousies of ambitious Montferrat, sent to Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, and begged him to receive Asti under his guardianship and protection[[57]] until such time as either of his nephews should be released from England. The Duke of Milan consented willingly. Asti was the Calais of Italy, and from the Italian point of view it appeared intolerable and unnatural that this one county should remain a little island of France in Lombardy, a pied-à-terre across the mountains for invading Gaul. And now, after twenty years of undisturbed possession, the Duke of Milan turned a deaf ear to his nephew’s reminder that he was home again and ready to reassume his inheritance. As a fact the Duke did not dare to restore Asti. In 1438 he had made Francesco Sforza his lieutenant there; and he was afraid of Sforza. It was in vain sending letters and requisitions; so in the beginning of the year 1441 the princes of Orleans sent Dunois to Milan.[[56]]
There were other matters more important even than the restitution of Asti, upon which it was well that a man so wise, so experienced, so persuasive as Dunois should confer with the uncle of his half-brothers. The Duke of Milan had no sons, one daughter only, and she was illegitimate. Therefore the princes of Orleans considered themselves the heirs to Milan. But they were not alone in expecting this inheritance. The Emperor pointed to the clause in the investiture of 1396 which declared that, in default of males, Milan should revert to the empire. Jacopo Visconti, a distant cousin of the Duke’s, brought forward some pretensions of his own. Sforza, the husband of the Duke’s natural daughter, thought of the house of Este and of other Italian houses where more than once a bastard, if courageous and beautiful, had succeeded to his father before legitimate heirs; and as to the fact that Madonna Bianca was a woman, had not Giovanna I. of Naples succeeded to King Robert, even in defiance of a Salic law? Meanwhile the princes of Savoy remembered that when the Duke of Milan had married the Savoyard princess he had made, upon receipt of her dower, a promise to her father and her brother that if no children sprang from this union, he would bequeath the titles of Milan to Savoy. It is significant of the strange confusion of the laws of inheritance in Italy that all these princes believed in the right of a Duke of Milan to bestow by testament, or deed or gift, or marriage-contract, that which was, in fact, a fief of the Holy Roman Empire. But the rights of the empire had fallen into long disuse across the Alps, where a strange confusion of kinship, bequest, investiture, or election by the people regulated the succession to Papal and Imperial fiefs. Some princes succeeded in one way, some in the other. To the eyes of contemporaries they all appeared justifiable alternatives, giving some shadow of right to that which a strong hand meant to grasp and meant to keep. “Most of the princes in Italy,” wrote Commines fifty years later, “hold their lands by no title unless it be given them in heaven, which we can but divine.”
Thus eyed suspiciously by rival heirs, Dunois, as the representative of Orleans, crossed the Alps in 1441 and came to Milan, both to require the restitution of Asti, and also, as Ventura remarks, to confer on other matters with the Duke. The Duke of Milan was a sad, timid, indifferent man, old at five-and-fifty and harassed by an almost lunatic suspicion of danger from his friends. As he grew older his fears and doubts grew stronger, and he saw no motive for any sort of conduct beside the desire to succeed him in Milan. Oppressed by hypochondria, corpulent to deformity, fatigued by the weight of his body, and exhausted by the heaviness upon his spirits, this timid and sceptical Volpone of Lombardy found his sole amusement in weaving into a complicated perplexity the expectations of his heirs. Sitting immovable in his corner at Milan, like some huge spider spinning in the dusk, he crossed and recrossed, twisted and confused, in his dreary web, the hopes of Sforza and of Orleans, of Savoy and of the bastard cousins of his house.
No one could be sure of the succession. Sforza, the object of his senile fondness, was the object also of his insane suspicion. The Duke had tried a score of times to shuffle out of a promise to give him his natural daughter; and the very week that he had finally consented to their marriage, he sent a private messenger to Lionello d’Este, offering him the hand of Madonna Bianca. Nevertheless, in 1441 Sforza married Bianca, a mere girl, but bringing in her dowry the Signories of Cremona and Pontremoli, in addition to his lieutenancy of Asti. After the marriage he was no more sure of the Duke of Milan than he had been before. The uncertain seesaw of the Duke’s caprices continued as unsteady as of old. On the one hand, the Duke was aware that Sforza, though the son of a peasant, was the most remarkable Italian of his day, courageous, frank, spirited, kind of heart, and cunning. His immense strength of will both attracted and repelled the vacillating and suspicious Visconti. He admired Sforza, and Sforza was the husband of his only child. Still more, Sforza was secretly supported by Agnese del Maino, the mother of Bianca, the sole woman whose influence had ever touched the indifferent and preoccupied heart of Filippo Maria. On the other hand, the Duke was afraid of Sforza[Sforza]—and to fear, in timid natures, is to hate.
When fear and suspicion sank the scale, Visconti inclined to his wife’s relations of Savoy, who, having no right at all except such as he chose to give them, presented no cause for fear. Or he encouraged the claims of Jacopo Visconti. Osio, in a note, informs us that this Jacopo Visconti was the son of Gabriello, the bastard of Giangaleazzo, and had this been the case Jacopo Visconti would have had a certain claim. But Gabriello left no children, and Jacopo must have been the son of one of the numerous children of Bernabò. Nevertheless he considered himself to have pretensions. When all these had been weighed in the balance and found wanting, there remained the princes of Orleans.
In early life the Duke of Milan had been inclined to France; and he had been a suitor for that Princess Marie d’Anjou, who afterwards married King Charles VII. From 1420 to 1427 the pages of Osio abound in messages and treaties. Then the vexed question of Asti began to embitter his relations with France, and to increase that fatal suspicion which ever made him turn with sudden loathing from his former friends. While his discontent with Anjou was still undecided, the Genoese handed into his custody the enemy of Anjou, the prince of Arragon, taken prisoner at sea. In their suzerain Visconti, the ally of Anjou, the Genoese imagined that they had found a sure custodian for Arragon. But they had not reckoned upon the personal charm of Alfonso the Magnanimous, nor upon the capricious indifference of Visconti. Young, handsome, engaging, fearless, their chivalrous captive won the heart of his timid jailer, and easily turned his fluctuating policy from Anjou towards Arragon. Visconti suddenly deserted his own subjects, released Alfonso without consulting the Genoese, and supported him upon the throne of Naples.
With some thought in his heart, doubtless, of the success of Alfonso, Dunois turned his steps to Milan. He also was handsome, persuasive, rhetorical; and if no longer young, his comely head was encircled by the aureole of heroic victory. But Dunois lacked the enthusiasm, the spontaneity, that, in Arragon, had warmed for a moment the numb and chilly heart of the Duke of Milan. Dunois was as cold, as sceptical, as wise, as worldly as himself. His flowers of speech made no real effect upon the weary Duke, who, to get rid of him, made, doubtless, some magnificent promise for the future; for Dunois did not insist on his demand for Asti, but returned almost immediately to France, hoping to settle matters by the friendly intervention of the Emperor Frederic; but at that time the customary malentendu as to the occupation of Alsace estranged France and Germany, and Frederic declined to interfere with the projects of the Duke of Milan.
Dunois had not impressed the Duke, who was impressed only by youth, fearlessness, and a never-daunted will. He thought he perceived these qualities in the young Dauphin, half in disgrace on his estate in Dauphiné. Him also Visconti determined to drag into the tangled web of the Milanese succession; and about this time negotiations with the Dauphin Louis began to complicate the difficulties of Transalpine policy.
Already in the spring of 1445[[58]] a minute in the Archives of Milan, transcribed by Signor Luigi Osio, records the willingness of the Duke of Milan to further the Dauphin in his plan of an Italian invasion, provided that Louis agree to help the friends and not the enemies of Visconti. Asti should be confided to a person equally trusted by Orleans and Milan, and after the expiration of a given term should be freely handed back to the eldest son of Valentine. Notwithstanding this fair-spoken scheme, Visconti finds it necessary to caution his young ally against certain persons on the French side of the Alps who use threats and menaces towards the Crown of Milan. By these it is clear that he intends his nephews of Orleans. He has no friendship for them. Noluit restituere, briefly remarks Secundino Ventura.
The negotiations with Louis proceeded briskly, and in May the Milanese ambassador arrived in Paris, where he found grande garra e divisione between the restless Dauphin and King René of Sicily, who he remarks (to our unfeigned surprise) è quello che governa tucto questo reame. Meanwhile Louis, young as he was, had already learned a maxim as true in policy as in almsgiving: he let not his right hand divine the secrets of his left; and while on the one side he treated with the Duke of Milan, on the other he practised with Savoy. According to the latter plan Savoy and the Dauphin, aided by Montferrat and Mantua and Ferrara, were to conquer between them the north of Italy; France was to take Genoa, the Lucchese, Parma, Piacenza, Tortona—all south of the Po and east of Montferrat; Savoy was to gain Milan and keep the Riviera; Alessandria was to be handed over to Montferrat, and the Duke of Ferrara and the Marquis of Mantua were, for the present, to keep their actual possessions; but this significant phrase was followed by one more significant still: “All future conquests are to be divided at the rate of two shares to France and one share to Savoy.”[[59]]
An intimate acquaintance with documents inspires little confidence in the rectitude of human nature. Of all these personages, Charles of Orleans, a simple lyric creature, kept fresh and wholesome in arrested youth behind his prison bars, and Sforza, an honest, grasping and ambitious soldier, alone inspire respect or sympathy. This old duke, conscious that in a few months his immense possessions will have dwindled to a single grave, amusing the last hours of his sceptical, indifferent existence by juggling the expectations of a dozen heirs; this child-prince, without an impulse or an illusion left of youth, successfully deceiving a couple of enemies who each believes himself his sole ally—these unfortunately are no exceptions to the rule of the game.
Savoy, in the act of drawing up this project of conquest, was encouraging the Milanese to trust him to secure them a free republic on the death of the Duke. Montferrat and Mantua, pledged on the one hand to conquer Italy with the Dauphin, were as deeply pledged to Venice[[60]] to oppose the invader and preserve the peace. Each had been careful to risk something on every possible event, so that no sudden turn of the wheel of Fortune could bring about complete disaster.
On the 9th of February, 1447, an indiscreet French squire, riding to Rome upon a message, let out to the Florentines that a league had been formed between the Dauphin of France and the Duke of Milan.[[61]] According to this report Visconti had offered to aid the lad to recover Genoa, and had volunteered, in defiance of the rights of Orleans, to make him lord of Asti. A document in Osio (t. iii. ccclxxiii.) dated the 20th of December, 1446, and a series of letters in the Bibliothèque Nationale,[[62]] confirm this remarkable statement, which, if it spread horror throughout Italy, caused no less indignation among the heirs of Valentine. Strangely enough it was Sforza, at that time the Milanese governor of Asti, who advocated the cause of the Dauphin. “Give him Asti, and he will do you excellent service. Pay him well; and yet contrive it in such a way that none but your Highness shall be cock or hen in this country.” This advice was rendered still more unpalatable to the Italians and to the house of Orleans by a rumour that the Duke of Milan intended to adopt the Dauphin as his heir. Before the month was out the north Italian princes formed themselves into a counter-league against France and Milan, and Orleans and Dunois had despatched to Milan the baillie of Sens, a certain Reynouard du Dresnay, with a demand for the immediate restitution of Asti. This time they would brook no refusal, they would be tempted by no future benefits. Indignant and disenchanted, they instructed their lieutenant to press the matter home; and on the 4th of May, Asti again returned to France. The conditions of the surrender were peculiar. The county was not directly given back to Orleans, but yielded to Du Dresnay as the lieutenant of the king, so long as the said king should preserve the good will and consent of Charles of Orleans, directus dominus ipsius civitatis et patriæ.
In this matter at least the shifty Duke of Milan was outwitted. Asti had slipped from his grasp; France had again her hand upon the key of Lombardy. Much of his interest in the game was gone. As the summer waxed and waned, the Duke grew more than ever heavy, indifferent, and lethargic. He was not seriously ill, but, as I have said, his interest in the game was over. In August his health, always feeble, sank in the great heat of the summer. Immense in his unwieldly corpulence, the Duke sat in a darkened chamber of his palace brooding over his unfinished testament. He suffered no physician near him, and his illness—a low fever—was kept a secret. But the faint heart of Filippo Maria could no longer animate the weight of his body. On the 13th of August, 1447, he died—less of his illness, it was said, than of utter indifference, as one who, weary of the spectacle of existence, left his seat and retired whence he came.
Above the corpse, scarcely yet cold, the rival heirs, in eager expectation, gathered to the reading of the will. The Duchess-dowager represented Savoy; Madonna Bianca appeared for the absent Sforza; Raynouard du Dresnay came to Milan on behalf of Orleans; while, at a distance, Montferrat and Jacopo Visconti looked to their own interests; the Venetians had hopes of their own; the Milanese, as we know, intended to inaugurate a republic; the emperor, serene above these petty quarrels, declared that by feudal law Milan had already devolved to him. Absent or present, there was not one of these, save him, but had some promise of Filippo Maria’s in his mind when at length the testament was opened. The will was dated August 12th,[[63]] the day before the death of the Duke. There was no mention in it of his daughter, Madonna Bianca, none of his wife, none of any of his nephews or kinsmen. He left Alfonso of Arragon his universal heir.
Perhaps, as Guicciardini suggests, love of his people induced the dying Duke to leave his city to a distant tyrant; perhaps, in his suspicion of his present friends, his fancy turned with pleasure to the good bright youth who had been his captive long ago; perhaps his defeat at Asti made him like to think of the evil turn that once he had done the French in Naples; or, it may be, the mere desire of outraging the detestable cohue of his quasi-legal heirs proved irresistibly[irresistibly] fascinating to the sceptical old man. At least so it was. Every right was outraged;[[64]] the King of Naples was left the Duke of Milan. “Nevertheless come here as soon as you can,” wrote Antonio Guidoboni to Sforza[[65]] on the 14th; “once on the spot and half the game is won.”