This description of her husband returning, loaded with spoils and honours;—of her fond admiration, mingled with a feminine awe, of his warlike demeanor;—of his yielding, half reluctant, to her tender entreaties, and showing her the wounds he had received in battle;—then the bitter thoughts of his danger and absence, mingling with, and interrupting these delicious recollections of happiness,—are all as true to feeling as they are beautiful in poetry.
After a short career of glory, Pescara was at length appointed commander-in-chief of the Imperial armies, and gained the memorable battle of Pavia. Feared by his enemies, and adored by his soldiers, his power was at this time so great, that many attempts were made to shake his fidelity to the Emperor. Even the kingdom of Naples was offered to him if he would detach himself from the party of Charles the Fifth. Pescara was not without ambition, though without "the ill that should attend it." He wavered—he consulted his wife;—he expressed his wish to place her on a throne she was so fitted to adorn. That admirable and high-minded woman wrote to confirm him in the path of honour, and besought him not to sell his faith and truth, and his loyalty to the cause in which he had embarked, for a kingdom. "For me," she said, "believe that I do not desire to be the wife of a King; I am more proud to be the wife of that great captain, who in war, by his valour, and in peace, by his magnanimity, has vanquished the greatest monarchs."[30]
On receiving this letter, Pescara hastened to shake off the subtle tempters round him; but he had previously become so far entangled, that he did not escape without some impeachment of his before stainless honour. The bitter consciousness of this, and the effects of some desperate wounds he had received at the battle of Pavia, which broke out afresh, put a period to his life at Milan, in his thirty-fifth year.[31]
The Marchesana was at Naples when the news of his danger arrived. She immediately set out to join him; but was met at Viterbo by a courier, bearing the tidings of his death. On hearing this intelligence, she fainted away; and being brought a little to herself, sank into a stupor of grief, which alarmed her attendants for her reason or her life. Seasonable tears at length came to her relief; but her sorrow, for a long, long time, admitted no alleviation. She retired, after her first overwhelming anguish had subsided, to her favourite residence in the isle of Ischia, where she spent, almost uninterruptedly, the first seven years of her widowhood.
Being only in her thirty-fifth year, in the prime of her life and beauty, and splendidly dowered, it was supposed that she would marry again, and many of the Princes of Italy sought her hand; her brothers urged it; but she replied to their entreaties and remonstrances, with a mixture of dignity and tenderness, that "Though her noble husband might be by others reputed dead, he still lived to her, and to her heart."[32] And in one of her poems, she alludes to these attempts to shake her constancy. "I will preserve," she says, "the title of a faithful wife to my beloved,—a title dear to me beyond every other: and on this island-rock,[33] once so dear to him, will I wait patiently, till time brings the end of all my griefs, as once of all my joys."
D'arder sempre piangendo non mi doglio!
Forse avrò di fedele il titol vero,
Caro a me sopra ogn' altro eterno onore.
Non cambierò la fè,—ne questo scoglio
Ch' al mio sol piacque, ove finire spero
Come le dolci già, quest' amare ore![34]
This Sonnet was written in the seventh year of her widowhood. She says elsewhere, that her heart having once been so nobly bestowed, disdains a meaner chain; and that her love had not ceased with the death of its object.—
Di cosi nobil fiamma amore mi cinse,
Ch' essendo spenta, in me viva l' ardore.