But the exalted rank and prominent position of her own family, the high military grade and reputation of her husband, the wide-spread hopes and fears of which he had recently been the centre in the affair of the conspiracy, joined to the fame of her talents, learning, and virtues, which had been made the subject of enthusiastic praise by nearly all the Ischia knot of poets and wits, rendered her a very conspicuous person in the eyes of all Italy. Her husband's premature and unexpected death added a source of interest of yet another kind to her person. A young, beautiful, and very wealthy widow, gave rise to quite as many hopes, speculations, and designs in the sixteenth century as in any other.
SADOLETO'S BULL.
But Vittoria's first feeling, on receiving that fatal message at Viterbo, was, that she could never again face that world, which was so ready to open its arms to her. Escape from the world, solitude, a cell, whose walls should resemble, as nearly as might be, those of the grave, since that asylum was denied to her, was her only wish. And she hastened, stunned by her great grief, to Rome, with the intention of throwing herself into a cloister. The convent of San Silvestro in Capite—so called from the supposed possession by the community of the Baptist's head—had always been a special object of veneration to the Colonna family; and there she sought a retreat. Her many friends, well knowing the desperation of her affliction, feared, that acting under the spur of its first violence, she would take the irrevocable step of pronouncing the vows. That a Vittoria Colonna should be so lost to the world was not to be thought of. So, Jacopo Sadoleto, Bishop of Carpentras, and afterwards made a cardinal by Pope Paul III., one of the most learned men of his day, himself a poet, and an intimate friend of Vittoria, hastened to Pope Clement, whose secretary he was at the time, and obtained from him a brief addressed to the abbess and nuns of San Silvestro, enjoining them to receive into their house, and console to the best of their ability the Marchesana di Pescara, "omnibus spiritualibus et temporalibus consolationibus," but forbidding them, under pain of the greater excommunication, to permit her to take the veil, "impetu potius sui doloris, quam maturo consilio circa mutationem vestium vidualium in monasticas."
This brief is dated the 7th December, 1525.
She remained with the sisters of San Silvestro till the autumn of the following year; and would have further deferred returning into a world which the conditions of the times made less than ever tempting to her, had not her brother Ascanio, now her only remaining natural protector, taken her from the convent to Marino, in consequence of the Colonna clan being once again at war with the Pope, as partisans of the Emperor.
On the 20th of September, 1526, this ever turbulent family raised a tumult in Rome to the cry of "Imperio! Imperio! Libertà! Libertà! Colonna! Colonna!" and sacked the Vatican, and every house belonging to the Orsini;[183] the old clan hatred showing itself as usual on every pretext and opportunity.
The result was a papal decree, depriving Cardinal Colonna of his hat; and declaring confiscated all the estates of the family. Deeply grieved by all these excesses, both by the lawless violence of her kinsmen, and by the punishment incurred by them, she left Marino, and once more returned to the retirement of Ischia in the beginning of 1527. It was well for her that she had decided on not remaining in or near Rome during that fatal year. While the eternal city and its neighbourhood were exposed to the untold horrors and atrocities committed by the soldiers of the Most Catholic King, Vittoria was safe in her island home, torn indeed to the heart by the tidings which reached her of the ruin and dispersion of many valued friends, but at least tranquil and secure.
IN MEMORIAM.
And now, if not perhaps while she was still with the nuns of San Silvestro, began her life as a poetess. She had hitherto written but little, and occasionally only. Henceforward, poetical composition seems to have made the great occupation of her life. Visconti, the latest, and by far the best editor of her works, has divided them into two portions. With two or three unimportant exceptions, of which the letter to her husband already noticed is the most considerable, they consist entirely of sonnets. The first of Signor Visconti's divisions, comprising 134 sonnets, includes those inspired almost entirely by her grief for the loss of her husband. They form a nearly uninterrupted series "In Memoriam," in which the changes are rung with infinite ingenuity on a very limited number of ideas, all turning on the glory and high qualities of him whom she had lost, and her own undiminished and hopeless misery.
"I only write to vent that inward pain,
On which my heart doth feed itself, nor wills
Aught other nourishment,"