In his brief pontificate of twenty-two months he was unable to accomplish the work which lay so close to his heart. His death was regarded by the Roman literati as a kind of providence, a special grace from heaven which had averted the return of mediæval barbarism; and some of them went so far as to adorn with garlands the house of his physician, to whose want of skill the fatal termination of Adrian’s illness was ascribed, hanging over his door the inscription—“To the Saviour of his country.”
Yet those two-and-twenty months, which seemed so fruitless, witnessed the turning of the tide. The election of another Medici as successor to Adrian was the signal for extraordinary rejoicings, and for the return to Rome of many who had abandoned it after the accession of Adrian. Clement VII. had all the personal grace and refined intellect of his family; he had less taste for pleasure, and more aptitude for business than Leo, and was a true lover of learned men. He induced Sadolet to resume his functions as secretary, and did his best to engage Erasmus to devote his genius to the earnest defence of the Church.
The spirits of the Romans revived when they witnessed the splendid patronage of letters exercised by the new Pope and his kinsman, Cardinal Hyppolitus de’ Medici, who entertained in his household no fewer than three hundred learned men. The artists and academicians confidently reckoned on a return of their golden age; and yet all were more or less conscious of a certain indefinable change which had stolen over the public mind, betokening that a reaction was setting in, and that a new era was at hand. The German revolt from the Church had by this time assumed proportions which it was impossible to ignore. The question of the English divorce was causing grave inquietudes, and whilst the shadow of new and unprecedented calamities hung heavy over the world, even the most indifferent minds felt perhaps that something more earnest was called for at that moment than the cultivation of the Muses. It cannot, indeed, be said that the tide of social corruption was checked; yet another and a better element was silently at work; and, hidden in the glittering crowd,
Some few there were who with pure hearts aspired
To lay their just hands on the golden key
That opes the palace of eternity.
Clement had summoned to his Court several illustrious ecclesiastics who, whilst inferior to none of their contemporaries in literary merit, were desirous above all things to provide a remedy for those grave domestic abuses which, they rightly felt, afflicted the Church more heavily than any attacks from her exterior foes. Among these were the Venetian, Gaspar Contarini, a profound scholar, and a man of fervent piety; Sadolet, who, now greatly weaned from the pursuits which had formerly absorbed him, desired to devote his remaining years to his pastoral duties; Matthew Ghiberti, the worthiest prelate of his time, whom Clement had admitted to his closest confidence, and raised to the dignity of Chancellor and the see of Verona; the Prothonotary, Cajetan of Thienna, and the Cardinal Caraffa, Archbishop of Theate, who afterwards became Pope under the title of Paul IV. The jubilee year 1525 also brought to Rome a number of devout and earnest pilgrims, among whom was our own great countryman Reginald Pole, then a student at Padua, whom Bembo called the most virtuous young man in Italy, and whose happiness it was to enter on his list of friends the name of almost every one of his contemporaries most illustrious for scholarship or piety. Men of this stamp felt the need, in the midst of that luxurious and enervating atmosphere, of some tie of Christian fellowship which might support and invigorate their spiritual life; and the result was the formation of a humble confraternity which met in the church of SS. Silvestro and Dorotea, and took the name of “the Oratory of Divine Love.”
Similar associations were springing up in other cities of Italy, but that at Rome is remarkable as being the germ whence afterwards developed the order of the Theatines. A plan was concerted among the members of the confraternity for instituting an order of regular clerks, in which the ancient canonical mode of life should be revived; this being suggested as offering the surest means for effecting that reformation of manners among the clergy which all good men so earnestly desired to forward. This design was carried out with the approbation of the Pope; Caraffa and St. Cajetan being chosen the two first superiors. Of the latter it was commonly said that he desired to reform the world without letting the world know he was in it, and in the northern cities of Italy, where he had hitherto chiefly resided, he had the character of uniting in one person the seraphic gifts of a contemplative to the heroic virtues of an apostle. The rule adopted by the regular clerks was nearly the same as that of the ancient Canons Regular. It appears certain that their original design included the formation of ecclesiastical seminaries, and in all essential particulars the new foundation bore a striking resemblance to that set on foot in the eighth century, with a very similar purpose, by St. Chrodegang of Metz. And thus we see how saintly men, when they took in hand the work of ecclesiastical reform, found no better means for carrying out their views, than turning back into the old paths, and following the traditions bequeathed them by a golden antiquity.
The order of Theatines, however, whilst yet in its infancy, was threatened with extinction when that terrible calamity fell upon Rome, to describe which one needs to use the language of the inspired writers, when they detail the woes that were to chastise the guilty city, which was yet the chosen city of God. The political combinations which had closely allied the Roman Pontiff with the Court of France, exposed him to the hostility of the Emperor Charles V., whose armies entered Italy in the early part of the year 1527, and threatened to lay siege to Rome. On the 5th of May, the city was stormed by the ferocious bands of the Constable de Bourbon, consisting chiefly of German Lutherans, animated to frenzy by the thirst for plunder and a wild religious fanaticism. The Pope took refuge in the castle of St. Angelo, and from thence had the anguish of witnessing his capital given up to scenes of sacrilege and violence which find no equal in history. The sack of Rome by the barbarian Goths lasted but six days, but the Germans held possession of their prey for nine months, every hour of which witnessed some fresh abomination. The citizens were subjected to horrible tortures, to compel them to give up their hidden treasures; the churches were desecrated, and sacred relics tossed about the streets; troop-horses were stabled in the Pontifical chapel, and littered with Bulls and decretals; mock celebrations of holy rites were performed by drunken troopers, who, decked out with cardinals’ dresses, pretended to hold a conclave, and proclaimed the election of Luther as Pope. Out of a population of 85,000, 50,000 citizens are calculated to have perished by torture and the sword, and the excesses of the soldiers at last brought a pestilence in their train, which all but annihilated, the conquerors themselves; so that the city, awhile before so brilliant and luxurious, became little better than a desolate and fetid tomb.
Amid the nameless horrors of that time it is needless to say that neither piety nor learning procured any mercy for their owners. St. Cajetan was scourged and tortured, and then compelled with his brethren to abandon the Roman territory and take refuge in Venice; where their modest house a few years later afforded hospitality to St. Ignatius and his first companions. As to the academicians, we are assured by Jerome Negri that the very few who escaped from the sword were dispersed into foreign lands, and that all subsequent efforts to restore their Society on its former footing proved an utter failure. In fact, when the city was at last delivered from the apostate hordes that possessed her, it was only to be exposed to the new scourges of famine, pestilence, and inundation, and during these calamities there reappeared in her streets, not the gay bands of artists and literati, but reformed Camaldolese and Capuchin friars, whose existence in the city, says one writer, was first made known to the Romans during the plague of 1528. Rome, indeed, recovered from her overwhelming disasters with astonishing rapidity, and it was not long before the Court of Clement VII. reassumed much of the brilliant character which it had borne under Leo X. But Roman society no longer groaned under the dictatorship of professors. The grave troubles of the Church drew to her capital men of earnest and exalted piety, who responded to the cry that came from every Catholic land for a General Council that should not only vindicate the doctrine of the Church against heretical innovators, but courageously enter on the reform of practical abuses. Delivered by her terrible chastisement from the meretricious splendour of a false prosperity, Rome prepared to put on her beautiful garments as of old, and to purify herself from the contagion which worldly men had brought into the very presence of the sanctuary. Even whilst her enemies were counting her among the dead, and rejoicing over her humiliation, she arose to a more beautiful and vigorous life than ever, so that many of those whose hearts had become estranged turned to her once more, and beholding her invested with the majesty of ancient discipline, recognised the seven-hilled city to be indeed “the city of truth, the mountain of the Lord of Hosts, the sanctified mountain.”[336]