A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 1 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

Perhaps this, too, was consistent with the nicest honour, as defined "by the ordinances of canon and civil law." But whether he were a traitor to his king or not, he was determined to shrink from no depth of treachery towards his dupes, that could serve to ingratiate him with his master. While still feigning to accede to their proposals, he sent to Morone to come to him at Novara, that all might be arranged between them. Morone, against the advice of many of his friends, and, as Guicciardini thought,[180] with a degree of imprudence astonishing in so practised and experienced a man, went to the meeting. He was received in the most cordial manner by Pescara, who, as soon as they were alone together, led him to speak of all the details of the proposed plan. The trap was complete; for behind the hangings of the room in which they were sitting, he had hidden Antonio da Leyva, one of the generals of the Spanish army, who arrested him as he was quitting the house, and took him to the prison of Novara, where Pescara the next day had the brazen audacity to examine as a judge the man whom a few hours previously he had talked with as an accomplice.[181]

Surely, whichever version of the story may be believed, as to Pescara's original intentions, there is enough here in evidence to go far towards justifying Chancellor Morone's opinion, that he was one of the worst and most faithless men in Italy. Some modern Italian writers, with little moral, and less historical knowledge, have rested the gravamen of the charge against him on his want of patriotic Italian feeling on the occasion. In the first place, no such motive, however laudable in itself, could have justified him in being guilty of the treason proposed to him. In the second place, the class of ideas in question can hardly be found to have had any existence at that period, although distinct traces of such may be met with in Italian history 200 years earlier. Certainly the Venetian Senate were not actuated by any such; and still more absurd would it be to attribute them to Pope Clement. It is possible that Morone, and perhaps still more, Giberti, may not have been untinctured by them.

PESCARA'S SPANISH TENDENCIES.

But Pescara was one of the last men, even had he been as high-minded as we find him to have been the reverse, in whom to look for Italian "fuori i barbari" enthusiasm. Of noble Spanish blood, his family had always been the counsellors, friends, and close adherents of a Spanish dynasty at Naples, and the man himself was especially Spanish in all his sympathies and ideas. "He adopted,"[182] says Giovio, "in all his costume the Spanish fashion, and always preferred to speak in that language to such a degree, that with Italians, and even with Vittoria his wife, he talked Spanish." And elsewhere he is said to have been in the habit of expressing his regret that he was not born a Spaniard.

Such habits and sentiments would have been painful enough to a wife, a Roman and a Colonna, if Vittoria had been sufficiently in advance of her age to have conceived patriotic ideas of Italian nationality. But though her pursuits and studies were infinitely more likely to have led her mind to such thoughts, than were those of the actors in the political drama of the time to generate any such notions in them, yet no trace of any sentiment of the kind is to be found in her writings. Considering the extent of the field over which her mind had travelled, her acquaintance with classical literature, and with the history of her own country, it may seem surprising that a nature, certainly capable of high and noble aspirations, should have remained untouched by one of the noblest. That it was so is a striking proof of the utter insensibility of the age to any feelings of the sort. It is possible too, that the tendencies and modes of thought of her husband on the subject of Italy may have exercised a repressing influence in this respect on Vittoria's mind; for who does not know how powerfully a woman's intelligence and heart may be elevated or degraded by the nature of the object of her affections; and, doubtless, to Vittoria as to so many another of every age do the admirable lines of the poet address themselves:—

"Thou shalt lower to his level day by day,

What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathise with clay.

As the husband is, the wife is; thou art mated with a clown,

And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down."

When we come to examine the tone of sentiment prevailing in Vittoria's poetry, other indications of this deteriorating influence will be perceptible, and if much of nobleness, purity, high aspiration be nevertheless still found in her, this partial immunity from the evil influence must be attributed to the trifling duration of that portion of her life passed in her husband's company.