Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Nothing could have been more to the taste of the monarch whose appetite for Italy at that time was being whetted by his naval triumph over his Dutch and Spanish adversaries off Sicily, by which he enjoyed for a space the sovereignty of the Mediterranean. The only possible difficulty in the matter was that of inducing the owner of Casale, the Duke of Mantua, to make over the control of it to King Louis—a difficulty of which the astute Louvois undertook to dispose, without fail, by means of pressure in the right place. Thus reassured, his sovereign left the management of the affair entirely in the hands of Louvois.

Louvois did not keep the King waiting long for further and most welcome news upon the subject of Casale and the Duke of Mantua. He had placed the matter, he reported, with the French representative in Venice, the Abbé D’Estrades, for investigation; and D’Estrades, an ambitious, intriguing man, only too anxious for an opportunity of distinguishing himself in the eyes of his master, had replied that he felt perfect confidence in his own ability to bring about the desired result. He was thoroughly informed, he said, of the Duke of Mantua’s affairs; and, so far as these were concerned, the success of the enterprise was a foregone conclusion.

In point of fact, the Duke of Mantua was, as Mr. Tighe Hopkins puts it, “up for sale”; his revenues, as D’Estrades reported to Louvois, were spent in advance, and he was helplessly in the hands of the Jews; there was nothing he owned that he would not be willing to sell for money to spend on his pleasures in Venice, where he lived almost habitually and whence he never returned to Mantua except upon expeditions of rack-rent. He was also much under the influence of his favourites, to whom he was accustomed to leave the governing of Mantua and the administration of his affairs; all he asked for himself was that they should leave him to his boon companions in Venice, “his gamesters, his women, and his wine-parties.” And it was D’Estrades’ opinion that he might best be approached in the matter of Casale through one of his favourites.

The responsibility for Duke Charles’ way of life may not have lain entirely with the young man himself, then in the springtime of life; for it would seem that some of the blame should fall upon his widowed mother, Archduchess Isabella Clara of Austria, the head of his council and virtual ruler of his small domain; and Isabella Clara was as notoriously opposed to the interests of the King of France as she was favourable to those of the King of Spain, his sworn opponent in Italy. And it may even be that, in order to keep the destinies of Mantua in her own control, she rather encouraged than otherwise her son’s absence from his territories in order the more easily to administer them in union with the Spanish policy—Spain being then allied with Austria against the encroachments of their rapacious Gallic neighbour.

Duke Charles, himself, according to D’Estrades in writing to Louis XIV from Venice, was endowed with “more talent and ambition than he is thought to have,” was eager to recover for himself the authority he had let fall into his mother’s hands; and, supremely, was imbued with profound suspicion of the Spaniards, who, as he believed, had every intention of making themselves masters of Montferrat and the fortress of Casale. Moreover, wrote D’Estrades, he was convinced that the duke would be willing to accept King Louis “to some extent” as his protector.

In this same letter there first occurs the name of Mattioli, whom, as D’Estrades informs the King, he has approached through a mutual acquaintance, a certain Giuliani, with the object of enlisting Mattioli’s services on the French side.

For Mattioli had the ear of Duke Charles as being the one of the favourites most especially admitted to his intimacy. Mattioli was about thirty-six years old, a member of the Mantuan senate and an ex-secretary of state; a successful lawyer, and, it would appear, a boon companion of the duke’s. No one fitter then, considered D’Estrades, than Mattioli to be entrusted, if possible, with the task of persuading his master to let the French take care of Casale for him against the Austrians and Spaniards, who designed to rob him of it. But Mattioli himself must first be sounded, in order that D’Estrades might be as sure of his sentiments towards France as he was of his influence over Duke Charles; hence Giuliani’s mission to Verona, where Mattioli was staying, in October, 1677.

Now from this same despatch of D’Estrades’ to Louis XIV it is evident that he knew Mattioli to have been already engaged in negotiations with the Spaniards in Milan—which was still, for some years, to remain their capital in Upper Italy—and to have been disappointed by them in regard to certain hopes they had led him to entertain.

What those hopes were I do not know, because D’Estrades’ despatch does not go into the details of them; but one can only suppose they must have had to do in some way with Mattioli’s personal advancement or profit—which consideration seems to have weighed, at first, more with him than did that of patriotism. And, if indeed Mattioli’s later conduct can be held to have been inspired by a desire to benefit his country, that conduct is at all events open by its deceitful tortuousness to the worst possible of interpretations.

And so D’Estrades’s agent, Giuliani, came to seek out Mattioli at Verona, under pretence of private business, but in reality that he might win him over to the side of King Louis and so obtain his coöperation in bringing Duke Charles to the same view of his own interests. To this end Giuliani represented to Mattioli “that the friends of the duke desired greatly to see him in a position of independence; that all his territories and all his revenues were under the absolute control of his mother and the monk, Bulgarini, her confessor, and that Casale and the Montferrat were threatened by all manner of Spanish and other intrigues.”[26]