"CONSILIUM DELECTORUM CARDINALIUM."
(Vol. viii., p. 54. Vol. ix., pp. 127-29.)
Novus did not require correction; but Mr. B. B. Woodward has elaborately confounded the genuine Consilium of 1537 with Vergerio's spurious Letter of Advice, written in 1549. Four cardinals, and not nine (as Mr. Woodward supposes), subscribed the authentic document; but perhaps novem may have been a corruption of novum, applied to the later Bolognese Consilium; or else the word was intended to denote the number of all the dignitaries who addressed Pope Paul III.
R. G.
"This Consilium was the result of an assembly of four cardinals, among whom was our Pole, and five prelates, by Paul III. in 1537, charged to give him their best advice relative to a reformation of the church. The corruptions of that community were detailed and denounced with more freedom than might have been expected, or was probably desired; so much so, that when one of the body, Cardinal Caraffa, assumed the tiara as Paul IV., he transferred his own advice into his own list of prohibited books. The Consilium became the subject of an animated controversy. M‘Crie in his History of the Reformation in Italy, has given a satisfactory account of the whole, pp. 83, &c. The candid Quirini could maintain neither the spuriousness of this important document, nor its non-identity with the one condemned in the Index. (See Schelborn's Two Epistles on the subject, Tiguri, 1748.) And now observe, gentle reader, the pontifical artifice which this discussion has produced. Not in the Index following the year 1748, namely, that of 1750 (that was too soon), but in the next, that of 1758, the article appears thus: 'Consilium de emendanda Ecclesia. Cum Notis vel Præfationibus Hæreticorum. Ind. Trid.' The whole, particularly the Ind. Trid., is an implied and real falsehood."— Mendham's Literary Policy of the Church of Rome, pp. 48, 49.
M. Barbier, in his Dictionnaire des Pseudoynmes, has given his opinion of the genuineness of the Consilium in the following note, in reply to some queries on the subject:
"Monsieur.—Le Consilium quorundam Episcoporum, &c., me paraît une pièce bien authentique, puisque Brown déclare l'avoir trouvé non-seulement dans les œuvres de Vergerio, mais encore dans les Lectiones Memorabiles, en 2 vol. in fol. par Wolphius. Je ne connais rien contre cette pièce.
"J'ai l'honneur, &c.
"Barbier."