Queens of the Renaissance

by M. Beresford Ryley

Isabella was a great, lusty creature, and Lucrezia a frail, slight woman, just arrived from an exhausting journey, after having been overtired before she started. If she could not charm, besides, in these first crucial days, her case was lost. Who cares at any time to champion an ugly woman with every fragment of evidence against her? But a fresh, smiling, childlike creature disarms antagonism through sheer contagion of joy. And Lucrezia, as one knows, could be like sunshine itself in her soft urbanity and good humour. She did her best to create a pacifying impression, and succeeded. Nevertheless, the marriage remained, as Isabella had said, a cold one. The bride was so lightly thought of that not even a pretence of affection could be asked from Alphonso. Alexander himself only required that he should actually be her husband, and, satisfied upon that point, remarked to the Ferrarese ambassador, “It is true that being young he wanders here and there after pleasure during the day, but he does well.”

From the first, however, Lucrezia proved herself wonderful. She had no sooner reached Ferrara than she shed the soiled Roman personality, as she might have done a dirty garment. Without slow gradations, she showed herself a pleasant, sober housewife, lacking even the self-assurance to make demands upon fidelity. Intellectually, she could not compete with Isabella of Mantua or Elizabeth of Urbino; but she had, at least, sufficient vitality of character to turn her back in one bound, as it were, on her entire past life, as if she were trying to prove herself an alien personality.

Ercole she conquered immediately. He was old, and this girl, whose coming had so agitated him, possessed a very graceful attitude towards her elders. Also he was tired, and those nearing the tragic termination of existence are always fugitively warmed by the presence of attentive youthfulness. These two, at least, got on excellently. Once she fell ill, and had to go away for the sake of her health. During her absence the old man insisted upon receiving daily notes of her condition. They are the simplest, most disarming little letters imaginable. Of all things about Lucrezia, artfulness appears the most conspicuously absent. Her sins could never have been of the deliberate, prearranged order. She must have stumbled into them, more than anything, as a strayed, unshepherded lamb falls over a precipice.

Presently came the customary baby. It was a girl, thus thwarting the wishes of everybody. But Lucrezia knew some comfort, notwithstanding. For a time she was dangerously ill, and during this period Alphonso could hardly be drawn from her bedside. Evidently he had grown aware that she suited him, and the weak girl in her stuffy bed must have experienced an inflow of pleasure. She had not been good for nothing.

Her recovery brought her to one of the most fateful events of her fateful and dramatic existence. Alexander suddenly died. He and Cæsar had fallen ill simultaneously. Every one spoke of poison, but Alexander’s symptoms were perfectly consistent with apoplexy. His death, however, placed the new Ferrarese lady in the utmost social peril. She had become Don Alphonso’s wife solely because he and Ercole deeply feared her father. Now that he was dead, nothing could be easier than to draw upon the hoard of former scandals and to repudiate her upon the strength of them. Alexander was no sooner buried, in fact, than Louis XII. remarked diplomatically to the Ferrarese ambassador, “I know you never approved of this marriage. Madame Lucrezia has never been, in fact, the wife of Don Alphonso.”

Lucrezia must have grown cold with terror; but nothing calamitous occurred. Fortunately she had been given sufficient time to show how good she could be. By now neither Ercole nor Alphonso desired to change the gentle-mannered woman, who was needed to give an heir to the family. Her placid, light urbanity suited both, and the danger that threatened for a moment to overwhelm her drew off quietly like calm, receding waters. But in connection with it one of the principal friendships of Lucrezia’s life at Ferrara comes into prominence. Bembo, at the time of her mourning—a year after her marriage—had become intimate enough to give the advice no man troubles to offer to a woman entirely indifferent to him. He wrote, referring to Alexander’s death, that having been informed that her sorrow was terrible and extreme, he had called the day before in the hope of being able, in some small degree, to comfort her. But he owned regretfully that his visit had proved useless, for he had no sooner seen her than her forlorn unhappiness, and her piteous, black draperies, had stricken him with such an overwhelming heartache, that he had been literally unable to utter a single coherent sentence. He then went on to beg her—and he wrote with a kind of tender directness—to try and control her misery, for fear, the circumstances being evidently not absolutely straightforward, it should be thought she wept less for her father than for the possible insecurity of her present position. He reminded her gently that this was not the first dire calamity that a harsh fate had thrust upon her, and in some admirably sincere phrases he practically beseeched her, for her own sake, to show a brave and composed demeanour. He closed the letter by an almost ingratiating apology for having said so much, and with the request—so customary with a man in love—that she should take every care of her health.

Apart from the distress at seeing Lucrezia unhappy, the second part of the letter shows a man who had received confidences. Lucrezia’s version—perhaps the true one—of the turbid past, was to some extent in his keeping, and he gave her what warning he could to save her from adding to her present precarious position in Ferrara.

The friendship of these two is another of the uncertainties in which everything intimately concerning Lucrezia lies. It has been dragged unnecessarily into a false appearance of shadiness. A lock of her hair was found among a packet of her letters to him, and though it is extremely doubtful that the hair could have been hers even, the intimacy because of it was immediately regarded as having passed the bounds of virtue. Yet why should a lock of hair incriminate anybody? The desire to soften the pains they see is strong in all mothering women. Lucrezia wore her hair about her shoulders; scissors must have been conveniently near owing to the amount of needlework done at that period. Bembo, then a young man, was also for a time very much in love, therefore capable of little sentimental comforts. A woman’s hair is a fragment of her very personality. To grant a boon like that, under circumstances of such facility, would need merely a softened or impulsive moment. Lucrezia, besides, with a husband absorbed in the manufacture of explosives, may reasonably have been a little grateful that somebody at least loved her.