The months that followed were among the most dismal of Renée’s life. The flight of her friend chilled her to the marrow of her being. Realization could not be avoided. She was over thirty, and the bitter sense of being suddenly old and weary is unavoidable in any woman brusquely abandoned by the man who has kept her young with kindnesses. All the vaporous flimsiness of her hold upon Monsieur Pons lay brutally exposed and patent. His wife had got into difficulties; his business lay immediately with the welfare of his wife. No outside woman existed in the intimate agitation of private affairs. Renée was simply dropped like some acquaintance grown needless, and husband, wife, and the baby, whose mouth Renée had described as so incredibly small, practically withdrew from her existence.
The next crucial circumstance—perhaps the most crucial of Renée’s long and uncomfortable life—was her encounter with the Inquisition. This supreme test of Renée’s character came when Paul III. died and Julius III. succeeded to the throne of Rome. Paul had been mild, gentle, and favourable to some reformation in the ways of the Church. Contarini, in a letter, spoke of him as “this our good old man.” His successor had no leanings towards change; mercy sent no gentle warmth through his system. The heresy practised by the Duchess of Ferrara had been notorious for a considerable period; her household constituted a sanctuary for heretics; she permitted herself Protestant preachers and Protestant services. Her attendance at mass had ceased, and she was accused, though it seems unjustly, of eating meat on Fridays.
Ercole’s position, consequently, at this time was far from easy, the basis of his political security requiring that he should maintain peace with the authorities of Rome. Renée’s new religion endangered his duchy. She either did not understand the political risks of what she persisted in doing, or did not care. But Ercole, alarmed as well as furious, wrote bluntly to the King of France, saying what he thought of her. The unburdenment was no longer incautious. Francis I. had been dead some time. Henry II. felt no obligation to be bothered by an elderly woman whom he did not know, and whose claims upon him were negligible. Himself an intolerant Roman Catholic, he wrote to her upon receiving Ercole’s letter, and explained unambiguously that should she be relying upon the support of France, her confidence was founded upon false anticipations. He did more—he sent the famous Inquisitor Orriz, with orders to use “rigour and severity,” sooner than return to France without having reduced the elderly lady to a proper religious disposition.
The letter in which Orriz received directions shows a curious method of thinking. Renée was exhorted to return more easily to the Mother Church, “by consideration of the great favours which God has granted to her, and among others that of being the issue of the purest blood of the most Christian house of France, where no monster has ever existed.” The sentence ended with the statement that should she “choose to remain in stubbornness and pertinacity, it would displease the king as much as anything in the world, and would cause him entirely to forget the friendship, with all the observances and demonstrations of a good nephew, he hating nothing with a greater hatred than all those of the reprobate sects, whose mortal enemy he was.”
The following paragraph was still more plain spoken, and might well have sent a shiver through the hard-pressed duchess. Henry wrote, “And if, after such remonstrances and persuasions, together with those which the said Doctor Orriz shall employ of his own way and profession, to make her know the truth, and the difference there is between light and darkness, it shall appear that he is unable by gentle means to gain her and to reclaim her, he shall take counsel with the said lord duke as to what can possibly be done in the way of rigour and severity to bring her to reason.”
Renée’s position had at last become dire and dangerous. She stood with none to help her, pressed about by a crowd of enemies. From the moment Orriz arrived in Ferrara her life became a nightmare. When he chose to preach, she had to listen; when he questioned, she had to answer; when he threatened, she had to preserve quiescence. Morning, noon, and evening, the menacing presence of the French Inquisitor kept her shaken, sickened, lacerated. His arguments could only have been torture to her, for pitted against the subtlety of the trained heretic-catcher, Renée’s mentality would have been the incarnation of incoherent feebleness. Her person, moreover, made no appeal to mercy; ugly, drear, and wrinkled, she did not even possess dramatic dignity—only tears and an obstreperous dismalness of manner. Gradually, however, Orriz was to discover that dismalness did not necessarily accompany weakness. He could make her cry, but that was about all he could do with her. His own temper must have quickly sharpened. The position left him ridiculous. Presently the Inquisitor and the husband took counsel together. Renée’s unexpected fortitude proved equally serious for both. Ercole had given his word to the Pope that the lady should return duly submissive to the fold she outraged. Renée had got to be mastered somehow. Words left her tearfully obstinate—there remained nothing but harsher measures. Ercole himself wrote in a letter, “We kept her shut up for fifteen days, with only people who had no sort of Lutheran tendencies to wait upon her. We also threatened to confiscate all her property.”
RENÉE, DUCHESS OF FERRARA
FROM A DRAWING IN THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE
She held out, notwithstanding. Some decree of courage must have stiffened resistance, but it also is probable that the little creature relied upon a definite limit to persecution. A daughter of the royal house of France stood too high for genuine martyrdom. She had, in addition, a secret Bull previously given her by Paul III., which exempted her from the jurisdiction of all local inquisitions.