OTWAY'S "VENICE PRESERVED."
(Hundreds of our readers who have again and again heard
Belvidera pour her soul in love—
may not be aware of the precise historical connexion of the incidents of Otway's play with the events of history. They are taken, in the main, from an atrocious conspiracy formed at Venice in 1618. Sir Henry Wotton, then English ambassador at Venice, writes as follows on the 25th of May, in the above year:—"The whole town is here at present in horror and confusion upon the discovering of a foul and fearful conspiracy of the French against this state; whereof no less than thirty have already suffered very condign punishment, between men strangled in prison, drowned in the silence of the night, and hanged in public view; and yet the bottom is invisible." Beyond this quaint, meagre, chronological notice, little is actually established of the details, although the event is perhaps as familiarly known by name to English readers as any other in the History of Venice. We are, therefore, happy to see the affair treated with minute consideration in the second volume of "Sketches from Venetian History," in the Family Library; and so interesting is the narrative, or rather the facts and conjectures, to the lover of history, as well as to the unstudious playgoer, that we are induced to quote nearly every line of the passage. The editor observes:—)
Muratori indeed has scarcely exaggerated the obscurity in which this incident is enveloped when he affirms that only one fact illuminates its darkness; namely that several hundred French and Spaniards engaged in the service of the Republic were arrested and put to death. The researches of Comte Daru have brought to light some hitherto unknown contemporary documents; but even the inexhaustible diligence of that most laborious, accurate, and valuable writer has been baffled in the hope of obtaining certainty as its reward; and he has been compelled to content himself with the addition of one hypothesis more to those already proposed in explanation of this mystery.
All that can be positively affirmed is that during the summer of 1617, Jacques Pierre, a Norman by birth, whose youth had been spent in piratical enterprises in the Levantine seas, from which he had acquired no inconsiderable celebrity, fled from the service of the Spanish Duke d'Ossuna, Viceroy of Naples; and, having offered himself at the Arsenal of Venice, was engaged there in a subordinate office. Not many days after his arrival in the Lagune, Pierre denounced to the Inquisitors of State a conspiracy projected, as he said, by the Duke d'Ossuna, and favoured by Don Alfonso della Cueva, Marquis de Bedemar, at that time resident ambassador from Spain. The original minutes of Pierre's disclosures, written in French, still exist among the correspondence of M. Leon Bruslart, the contemporary ambassador from the court of France to the Republic; and they were translated into Italian, with which language Pierre was but imperfectly acquainted, by his friend Renault, in order that they might be presented to the Inquisitors. In this plot, Pierre avowed himself to be chief agent; his pretended abandonment of the Duke d'Ossuna forming one part of the stratagem: and he added that his commission enjoined him to seduce the Dutch troops employed in the late war, who still remained in Venice and its neighbourhood; to fire the city; to seize and massacre the nobles; to overthrow the existing government; and ultimately to transfer the state to the Spanish crown. The sole immediate step taken by the Inquisitors in consequence of these revelations was the secret execution of Spinosa, a Neapolitan, whom Pierre described as an emissary of the Duke d'Ossuna; and whom he appears to have regarded with jealousy as a spy upon his own conduct. For the rest, the magistrates contented themselves, as it, seems, by awaiting the maturity of the plot with silent vigilance. Ten months elapsed during which Pierre communicated on the one hand with the Duke d'Ossuna, unsuspicious of his treachery, and on the other with the Inquisitors; till at the expiration of that term he was seized by an order of the X, while employed on his duties with the Fleet, and drowned without the grant of sufficient delay even for previous religious confession. More, perhaps many more, than three hundred French and Spaniards engaged in various naval and military capacities were at the same time delivered to the executioner; and Renault, after undergoing numerous interrogatories, and being placed seven times on the cord, was hanged by one foot on a gibbet on the Piazzetta, which day after day presented similar exhibitions of horror.
This evidence of Pierre remained at the time concealed in the bosoms of the Inquisitors to whom it had been delivered; and no official declarations satisfied public curiosity as to the cause of the sanguinary executions which deformed the Capital. A rumour indeed spread itself abroad, and, although not traced to any certain authority, was universally credited, that a great peril had been escaped; that Venice had trembled on the very brink of destruction; and that the Spaniards had meditated her ruin. Popular fury was accordingly directed against the Marquis de Bedemar; and so fierce were the menaces of summary vengeance that the ambassador was forced to protest his innocence before the Collegio, more in the spirit of one deprecating punishment than defying accusation. He then earnestly solicited protection against the rabble surrounding his palace; for "God knows," affirmed his pale and affrighted secretary more than once, "the danger of our residence is great!" The Vice-doge, who during the interregnum between the death of one chief magistrate and the election of another presided over the Collegio, replied vaguely, coldly, and formally; and, the application having been renewed without any more favourable result, Bedemar, justly apprehensive for his safety, seized a pretext for withdrawing, till a successor to his embassy was appointed. Meantime, considerable doubts were entertained, not only by the resident foreign ministers,—especially by that of France, better informed than his brethren through the possession of Pierre's minutes,—but by the Venetian senators themselves, also, whether any conspiracy whatever had really existed. Nevertheless, in spite of these misgivings not obscurely expressed, it was not till the expiration of five months that the X presented a report to the Senate, detailing the information which they had received and the views upon which they had acted. That report however is so manifestly contradicted in many very important instances by Pierre's depositions, that it must be considered as drawn up and garbled solely with the intention of making a case; and therefore as revealing only so much truth dashed and brewed with a huge proportion of falsehood, as it suited the interests of the magistrates to exhibit to public view. All mention of the denouncements of Pierre during the long period of ten months is carefully suppressed, and yet no fact in history is more distinctly proved than that he did so communicate. The first intimation of the plot is there said to have been given but a few days before it was to have been executed, by two Frenchmen, Montcassin and Balthazar Juven, whom Pierre had endeavoured to seduce. "Look at these Venetians," said the daring conspirator one day to his apparent proselytes, "they affect to chain the lion; but the lion sometimes devours his master, especially when that master uses him ill." According to their further evidence, some troops despatched by the Duke d'Ossuna were to land by night on the Piazzetta and to occupy all the strong holds of the city; numerous treasonable agents already within the walls were to master the depots of arms; and fire, rapine, and massacre were to bring the enterprise to consummation.
The papers abovementioned, together with a few letters from the Doge to the Venetian ambassador at Milan, and one or two other not very important documents contained in the archives of Venice, all printed by Comte Dam, are the sole authentic vouchers for this conspiracy now known to exist; and it must be confessed that they are insufficient for its elucidation. The Abbe St. Real, who for a long time was esteemed the chief historian of this dark transaction, is an agreeable and attractive writer; but—since he was unacquainted with the report of the X; since he does not cite the correspondence of the French ambassador containing Pierre's depositions; and since he frequently varies from a MS which he does cite, The Interrogatories of the Accused,[12] a MS indeed, which, even when quoted faithfully, is often contradicted by the few established facts, and by numerous well-known usages of the Venetian government,—little faith can be attached to his narrative. It was his opinion, and it has been that which has most generally prevailed, that the Duke d'Ossuna, the Marquis de Bedemar, and Don Pedro di Toledo, governor of Milan, mutually concerted a plan for the destruction of Venice; the chief execution of which was entrusted to Pierre and Renault: and that, on the very eve of its explosion, Jaffier, one of their band, touched by the magnificence of the Espousals of the Adriatic which he had just witnessed, was shaken from his stern purpose, and revealed the conspiracy. In order to overthrow the latter part of this hypothesis, it may be sufficient to state that the first executions took place on the 14th of May, 1618, and that it was not till the 24th of that month that the Feast of Ascension, and its gorgeous ceremonies, occurred in the same year.
Comte Daru, on the other hand, first explains a design which it is notorious was entertained by the Duke d'Ossuna to convert his viceroyalty of Naples into a kingdom, the crown of which, wrested from Spain, should be placed on his own head. And hence he establishes the impossibility that d'Ossuna should at the same moment be plotting the overthrow of Venice; that power whose assistance, or at least whose connivance was one of the weapons most necessary for his success. On these grounds, Comte Daru contends that the Duke maintained a secret understanding both with the Signory and the court of France; that, refining on political duplicity, he deceived Pierre by really instructing him to gain over the Dutch troops quartered in the Lagune; not, however, as his emissary supposed, to be employed ultimately for the seizure of Venice, but in truth for that of Naples; that Pierre's courage was not proof against the dangers with which his apparently most hazardous commission beset him; and that accordingly he betrayed his employer, and revealed to the Inquisitors a plot which they well knew to be feigned: and, lastly, that when the ambitious plans of d'Ossuna, partially discovered before their time by the Spanish government, might have compromised Venice also if they had been fully elucidated; in order to blot out each syllable of evidence which could bear, even indirectly, upon the transaction, so far as she was concerned, it was thought expedient to remove every individual who had been even unwittingly connected with it. So fully was this abominable wickedness perpetrated, that both the accused and the accusers, the deceivers and the deceived, those either faithless or faithful to their treason, the tools who either adhered to or who betrayed d'Ossuna, who sought to destroy or to preserve Venice, were alike enveloped in one common fate, and silenced in the same sure keeping of the grave. Some few, respecting whose degree of participation a slight doubt arose, were strangled on the avowed principle that all must be put to death who were in any way implicated; others were drowned by night, in order that their execution might make no noise.[13] Moncassin, one of the avowed informers, was pensioned, spirited away to Cyprus, and there despatched in a drunken quarrel; and if it be asserted that his companion Balthazar Juven was permitted to survive, it is because he is the only individual concerning whose final destiny we cannot pronounce with certainty.[14]
Of one personage who holds an important station in St. Real's romance, and yet more so in Otway's coarse and boisterous tragedy, which, by dint of some powerful coups de theatre, still maintains possession of the English stage, we have hitherto mentioned but the name; and, in fact, even for that name we are indebted only to the more than suspected summary of the Interrogatories of the Accused.
Antoine Jaffier, a French captain, is there made chief evidence against Pierre and Renault, who are employed by d'Ossuna, as he vaguely states, to surprise some maritime place belonging to the republic. This informer was rewarded with four thousand sequins, and instructed forthwith to quit the Venetian territories; but having, while at Brescia, renewed communications with suspected persons, he was brought back to the Lagune and drowned. The minute particularities of Jaffier's depositions, and the motive which prompted him to offer them, (the latter, as we have already shown, resting on a gross anachronism,) are, we believe pure inventions by St. Real; and Otway has used a poet's license to palliate still farther deviations from authentic history. Under his hands, Pierre,—whom all accounts conspire in representing to us as a foreign, vulgar and mercenary bravo, equally false to every party, and frightened into confession,—is transformed into a Venetian patriot, the proud champion of his country's liberty; who declaims in good, set, round, customary terms against slavery and oppression; and who, in the end, escapes a mode of execution unknown to Venice, by persuading the friend who has betrayed him, and whom he has consequently renounced, to stab him to the heart, in order "to preserve his memory." The weak, whining, vacillating, uxorious Jaffier, by turns a cut-throat and a King's evidence; now pawning, now fondling, and now menacing with his dagger an imaginary wife; first placing his comrade's life in jeopardy, then begging it against his will, and finally taking it with his own hand, is a yet more unhappy creation of wayward fancy; and it is only in the names of the conspirators, in the introduction of an Englishman, Eliot, (whom he has brought nearer vernacular spelling than he found him,—Haillot,[15]) and in the character of Rainault, that Otway is borne out by authority. The last-mentioned person is described by the French ambassador as a sot, a gambler, and a sharper, whose rogueries are well known to all the world; in a word, therefore, as a fit leader of a revolutionary crew wrought up, "without the least remorse, with fire and sword t' exterminate" all who bore the stamp of nobility; and not as the most fitting depository in which Belvidera's honour might be lodged as a security for that of her irresolute husband.
Whatever hypothesis may be adopted, be this conspiracy true or false, there is no bloodier, probably no blacker page in history than that which records its development. Were it not for the immeasurable weight of guilt which must press upon the memory of the rulers of Venice if we suppose the plot to have been altogether fictitious, we should assuredly admit that the evidence greatly preponderates in favour of that assertion. But respect for human nature compels us to hesitate in admitting a charge so monstrous. Five months after the commencement of the executions, either a tardy gratitude or a profane mockery was offered to Heaven; and the Doge and nobles returned thanks for their great deliverance, by a solemn service at St. Mark's.
(Among the master-spirits who have commemorated the olden glories of Venice, but more especially her association with our dramatic literature, must not be forgotten Lord Byron:
But unto us she hath a spell beyond
Her name in story, and her long array
Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond
Above the dogeless city's vanish'd sway;
Our's is a trophy which will not decay
With the Rialto: Shylock and the Moor,
And Pierre cannot be swept away—-
The keystones of the arch! though all were o'er,
For us repeopled were the solitary shore.
I lov'd her from my boyhood—she to me
Was as a fairy city of the heart,
Rising like water-columns from the sea,
Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart;
And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakspeare's art
Had stamp'd her image in me, and ever so,
Although I found her thus, we did not part,
Perchance even dearer in her day of woe
Than when she was a boast, a marvel, and a show.
Returning to the "Sketches," we must observe that we beg to differ with the Editor in merely applying the epithets "coarse and boisterous," to Otway's play, and pointing to "coups de Theatre" as its only merits. He surely ought not to have omitted its originality of whatever order it may be.
The volume before us brings the history of Venice to her subjection to Austria in 1798. It is throughout spiritedly executed. The illustrations, antique and modern, are precisely of this character, being from Titian, and our contemporary artist, Prout.)