After languishing five years in exile, having lost all hope of return, through the interposition of his own family, or countrymen, in a fit of despair he addressed the Duke of Milan, putting him in mind of services which the Doge, his father, had rendered him, and begging that he would use his powerful influence with the State of Venice, that his sentence might be recalled. He entrusted his letter to a merchant, going from Canéa to Venice, who promised to take the first opportunity of sending it from thence to the Duke; instead of which, this wretch, as soon as he arrived at Venice, delivered it to the chiefs of the Council of Ten.
This conduct of young Foscari appeared criminal in the eyes of those judges; for, by the laws of the republic, all its subjects are expressly forbid claiming the protection of foreign Princes, in any thing which relates to the government of Venice.
Foscari was therefore ordered to be brought from Candia, and shut up in the State prison. There the chiefs of the Council of Ten ordered him once more to be put to the torture, to draw from him the motives which determined him to apply to the Duke of Milan. Such an exertion of law is, indeed, the most flagrant injustice.
The miserable youth declared to the Council, that he had wrote the letter, in the full persuasion that the merchant, whose character he knew, would betray him, and deliver it to them; the consequence of which, he foresaw, would be, his being ordered back a prisoner to Venice, the only means he had in his power of seeing his parents and friends; a pleasure for which he had languished, with unsurmountable desire, for some time, and which he was willing to purchase at the expence of any danger or pain.
The Judges, little affected with this generous instance of filial piety, ordained, that the unhappy young man should be carried back to Candia, and there be imprisoned for a year, and remain banished to that island for life; with this condition, that if he should make any more applications to foreign Powers, his imprisonment should be perpetual. At the same time they gave permission, that the Doge and his lady, might visit their unfortunate son.
The Doge was, at this time, very old; he had been in possession of the office above thirty years. Those wretched parents had an interview with their son in one of the apartments of the palace; they embraced him with all the tenderness which his misfortunes, and his filial affection, deserved. The father exhorted him to bear his hard fate with firmness; the son protested, in the most moving terms, that this was not in his power; that however others could support the dismal loneliness of a prison, he could not; that his heart was formed for friendship, and the reciprocal endearments of social life; without which his soul sunk into dejection worse than death, from which alone he should look for relief, if he should again be confined to the horrors of a prison; and melting into tears, he sunk at his father’s feet, imploring him to take compassion on a son who had ever loved him with the most dutiful affection, and who was perfectly innocent of the crime of which he was accused; he conjured him, by every bond of nature and religion, by the bowels of a father, and the mercy of a Redeemer, to use his influence with the Council to mitigate their sentence, that he might be saved from the most cruel of all deaths, that of expiring under the slow tortures of a broken heart, in a horrible banishment from every creature he loved.—“My son,” replied the Doge, “submit to the laws of your country, and do not ask of me what it is not in my power to obtain.”
Having made this effort, he retired to another apartment; and, unable to support any longer the acuteness of his feelings, he sunk into a state of insensibility, in which condition he remained till some time after his son had sailed on his return to Candia.