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

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

The second hypothesis therefore was the popular one among those who could not accept the official account of the matter as credible, and has continued to be the received version with the numerous novelists and dramatists who have made increment of the tragedy.

In favour of the third, it has been already admitted that no tittle of direct evidence can be produced. The value of the guess hazarded at the meaning conveyed in those enigmatical phrases at the commencement of Signor Soderini's letter will be different to different minds. Signor Guerrazzi, the discoverer and first editor of this extraordinary letter, has evidently not been struck by the idea that any such sense could be seen in the words. On the contrary, he considers the letter as conclusive against the poisoning, either by the Cardinal or by Bianca. But it may be stated on the other hand, that the interpretation above suggested has seemed probable to other Italians versed in the history of the time, and practised in extracting their secrets from the wrappages in which writers who lived under the survey of unscrupulous despots were commonly wont to conceal their meaning.

Further, in a subsequent part of this same letter, which is of great length, occupying no less than nineteen closely printed post octavo pages, there are statements which seem hardly compatible with the supposition that Francesco died of an illness, which gradually reached its conclusion at the end of several days.

"He—the Grand Duke—made no will either before, or at this time.[221] Only he signed an order for fifty thousand crowns to be distributed among the court servants. Father Maranto confessed him; and he tells me, that the Grand Duke did not specify the number of crowns to be distributed, but desired in general terms, that the servants should be remunerated, and that it grieved him that he could not live long enough to do it himself. The confessor was not in time to remind him, by asking if he wished to make any further provision for his friends; for he shut his eyes, and could neither move his tongue, nor shake his head."

Surely all these evidences of haste, and deficiency of time for the arrangement of matters, which the dying man professes his wish to have settled, if a few more moments had been allowed him, are scarcely compatible with the supposition of an illness of several days.

PROBABILITIES.

At a subsequent page of his letter, Signor Soderini drops a few words respecting the new Grand Duke's manner some hours after the death of Francesco, which are not without their significance. He makes the number of hours which elapsed between the two deaths eleven only. Francesco's death at "four hours and a half after sunset," would have taken place according to our mode of keeping time between nine and ten. And at three in the morning, says the letter, the Cardinal left Bianca still living, "and at half–past seven arrived at the Prato gate." (He was therefore four hours and a half travelling twelve miles);—"where meeting the first Captain of the Lancers, he said doubtingly,[222] with fear, and a trembling voice,—as I suppose by reason of the suddenness of the change,—'Henceforward, Captain, you must be as faithful to me, as you have hitherto been to my brother.'"

Signor Soderini may attribute, since he deemed it safest to do so, the new Duke's trepidation and fear–marked manner to an innocent cause. But it can hardly but be felt, that such a manner is a weight in the scale against a man, when the probabilities of his having come fresh from the perpetration of fratricide are being balanced.

Then the question of motives must be taken into consideration; and it must be seen at once that the reasons Ferdinando had for wishing Bianca removed were of the very strongest nature. For the last ten years and more, she had been a constant thorn in his side, the ever recurring difficulty in all his schemes for aggrandising the family, the wreck of all his strivings for the support of the decorum and respectability of the Medicean name, and the ground of discord and hatred between him and his brother. She had made the Grand Duke the laughing–stock of Italy, and odious as well as contemptible to his own subjects. Her blood–stained practising had succeeded in foisting one base–born plebeian of alien blood into the family. She was continually attempting still worse frauds to wrong him of his birthright; and though by the exertion of extreme vigilance her schemes had been hitherto foiled, what possible security, short of her death, could be had against the success of future attempts of the same sort. A De Medici, and a sixteenth century Cardinal may well have persuaded himself that he was justified under the circumstances, in adopting the only possible means of providing against such treason, pregnant with such results.

But his brother? Can it be shown that Ferdinando had sufficient motive to wish his brother's death, as to favour the probability that he was his murderer? It can only be said, that there was old hate between them, constantly stimulated and embittered by fresh provocations of the most galling sort on the part of the elder brother; hate, made more dangerous by the necessity for carefully suppressing all manifestation of it for long years of self–restraining dissimulation; that from the manner in which Francesco had received the proposals of a second marriage after the death of his first wife, there was very little room to hope that Bianca's death would be followed by any marriage, which might put the prospects of the family on a satisfactory footing; that to have taken off Bianca and left her husband alive would have been an exceedingly dangerous step, for then the inquiries, the suspicions, the post–mortem examinations, and the investigations, would, of course, have been of a very different sort, and, under the circumstances, very difficult to deal with; that, finally, last, though far from least, Ferdinando was a De Medici.