but he took leave of it with an arresting gentleness. After a serious
illness he had rallied, taken a fair amount of nourishment, and slept
a little. That same evening he asked to see two horses Ludovico had
sent him, and they were brought into the great stone hall, out of
which his room opened. He talked of Ludovico, his confidence remaining
childlike and unshaken to the end. His uncle, he said, would have been
sure, would he not, to come and see him, if the French business had
not swallowed up attention? As he grew weaker, he asked his favourite
attendant--much as a woman might ask about her lover, for the pleasure
of the answer--if he thought his uncle loved him, and grieved at his
serious illness. Satisfied, he begged to see his greyhounds, and then,
all his little interests tranquillized, quietly fell asleep. He was
dead next morning, and Ludovico's path was made easier than before. He
was, in fact, instantly proclaimed head of Milan. Guicciardini says of
it, "It was proposed by the heads of the council that, considering the
importance of the duchy, and the dangerous times dawning for Italy, it
would be extremely undesirable that a child not yet five years old
should succeed his father.... Ambition getting the better of honesty,
the next morning, after some pretence of reluctance, he accepted
the name and arms of the Duke of Milan."
[Illustration: PORTRAIT,--PROBABLY OF CECILIA GALLERANI
SAID TO BE BY AMBROGIO DA PREDIS]
At the time Ludovico was almost universally credited with having
murdered Giangaleazzo, but the accusation has since fallen to the
ground. Practically it was based upon the fact that the moment of the
duke's passing was too opportune to wear an air of naturalness. In
spite, moreover, of what men thought, nothing dared be uttered openly,
and Ludovico, blazing in cloth of gold, rode to the church of St.
Ambrozio to give public thanks for his accession. The wind was with
him for the moment. Beatrice, too, had become the first lady of Milan,
and her soul stood in a more perilous state than ever. She had reached
the place of her desire by ways too shady for loveliness of thought to
have had much hold in her.
Isabella meanwhile, from this time onwards, passes into a desolate
private existence. But there is an incident which occurred first that
remains very difficult to penetrate. Literally at Ludovico's mercy
after her husband's death, she still bore herself bravely. For a time
she refused to leave Pavia. When she did, we are told that Beatrice
drove out to meet her, and that when they came together, some two
miles from town, she got out of her own carriage and entered
Isabella's, both women sobbing bitterly as she did so. That Isabella
should cry was natural; she was weak with the weariness of sorrow. But
Beatrice's was not the nature to weep either easily or falsely.
Clearly face to face with the price paid for her own position, it beat
back upon her for a moment as an utter heaviness, and she cried
because Isabella was the living expression of despair, and they had
once been intimate and companionable. God knows what they said to each
other in this drive together, or whether through the passing grace of
a sudden penitence Beatrice found anything the widow could hear
without a sense of nausea. For how dire Isabella felt her life to have
become is revealed in a singularly tender reference made to her by the
court jester Barone, who wrote that she was so changed, and so thin
and grief-stricken, that the hardest heart could not have seen her
without compassion.
But the Duchy of Milan was to yield little happiness to the two who
had acquired it so shabbily. Charles' Italian campaign soon thrust
Ludovico into both difficulty and danger. At the commencement of it he
had been a great man. But when one Italian town after another became
as a doormat for Charles to walk over, he perceived suddenly the flaw
in his French invasion policy. Ferrante of Naples wrecked was one
thing; Italy given over to Charles VIII. another.
He was not even personally safe with Louis of Orleans at Asti. A
league was formed, in which the Pope, the King of the Romans, the King
and Queen of Spain, Henry VII. of England, the Signory of Venice, and
the Duke of Milan all combined. Isabella D'Este's husband was made
captain, with the express duty of cutting off Charles' triumphant
return into France. This fight against the king, so cajoled at the
beginning, and the subsequent peace patched up between him and
Ludovico, is purely a matter of history. In the attack against Asti,
made by Louis of Orleans, however, Beatrice showed a magnificent and
practical courage. Ludovico's own astuteness had died in a sickly
terror, and he had rushed back to his fortified castle at Milan. At
the time there is little doubt that he was suffering from nervous
exhaustion; but it was Beatrice whose courageous eloquence roused
Milan, and it was Beatrice who ordered the steps necessary to defend
the town and Castello.
It was about this time, also, that she showed a disarming and
warm-hearted rightness of feeling. Among the booty her sister
Isabella's husband, Francesco, had acquired from the French were some
hangings that had belonged to Charles VIII.'s own tent. They were
originally forwarded to Isabella, but presently Francesco asked her to
send them back, as he wished to give them to Beatrice. That made
Isabella angry. She had some degree of reason, but her expression of
it was repellantly ungracious. The hangings, notwithstanding, were
sent to Beatrice. Happily, she would not have them. As keenly as
Isabella, she loved beautiful and notable things, but with the simple
statement that, under the circumstances she felt she ought not to have
them, she returned the draperies to her sister. In doing so she was
beginning to practise the little niceties that help to keep existence
lovable. Had she lived, she would almost surely have weathered the
over-eager selfishnesses of her married life. They were after all
largely due to the absorption that all youth suffers during the first
unsettled, uncertain period, when life is still all newness and
personal excitements. But her time was short, and after the settling
of peace with France, the end drew horribly near to her.
For five years she had been happy. Ludovico constituted the integral
part of heaven for her, and after the first fierce struggle she had
lived in the soft security of an equal affection. Nature had given her
brains and seductiveness. To have both in one person, and then, as
crowning grace, to possess a genius for light-heartedness, was more
than most women can rely upon in the unceasing labour of retaining a
husband's affectionateness. But Beatrice was bolstered by even more
than this. The tastes of husband and wife were similar--Ludovico had
no hobbies outside the radius of her understanding. Nevertheless, at
twenty she stumbled upon the disheartenment that for most wives lurks
about the forties. She could not keep her husband from the charm of
other women. She had been everything, but the time had come when a
pretty face was to sweep her peace down like a house of flimsy
cardboard.
She had grown stale--observation, dulled by familiarity, could receive
no fresh impression. The very years they had handled life together
worked not for, but against, her. All her ways had grown a parrot-cry;
those of other women were new and half mysterious. Further, she was at
that time physically in a peculiarly defenceless condition. When
Ludovico's last passion swept him away from her, Beatrice was once
more expecting to be a mother.
Among the members of her household at this time there had been
included the daughter of a Milanese nobleman, a girl called Lucrezia
Crivelli. This Lucrezia Crivelli was far too beautiful to be a safe
person in the house of any man susceptible to all precious or lovely
objects. Could anything, indeed, be more exquisite than her face as
painted by Leonardo da Vinci? At the same time, to look for long at
the beautiful oval is to see that its meekness is purely a sham
expression. The eyes too, so gentle, undisturbed, observant, are just
a little, though illusively, unscrupulous. It is essentially the face
of a young girl with all the delicate finenesses and sweet, reliant
placidities of inexperience; but it is also a face already rich in
power, reservations, and a silent deliberateness of conduct. In
addition to all this, her hair was golden, her head almost perfectly
outlined. In any court she must have created a sensation--she was so
dazzling, and yet so quiet, so self-contained, and so demurely and
subtly dignified. The temperament was probably cold. There is more
thought than feeling in its gracious quietude--thought and a dim
suggestion of pain, not in the present, but for the future. Small
wonder she drew Ludovico. To be young, beautiful--a sweet wonder to
look at--and, in addition, to strain at men's heartstrings by just a
hint of wistfulness, is to be dangerous beyond bearing.
[Illustration: LUCREZIA CRIVELLI
BY LEONARDO DA VINCI]
Ludovico's admiration became rapidly unmistakable. From being
constantly pin-pricked, Beatrice saw the friendship between the two
spring suddenly into something mortal to her heart. The two were
thrown hourly into each other's society--the man with the inflammable
response to beauty, and the girl with the discreet and tantalizing
loveliness. It was a tense drama of three. For Beatrice was always
there as the tortured third. From the commencement nothing was spared
her. Each day some new incident shook her with unutterable
anticipations. Slowly existence, as she watched these two, became a
solidifying terror. There must have been some scenes at the
commencement. No woman could accept a crisis such as this and not cry
out for mercy. But Beatrice, with the innate wisdom that so soon grew
strong in her, quickly realized that to plead was like a voice trying
to be heard above a tempest. Ludovico was infatuated. Everybody knew,
and talked of the affair, both at the Court of Milan and beyond it.
In 1496, a Ferrarese ambassador wrote that the latest news from Milan
was the duke's infatuation for one of his wife's ladies-in-waiting,
with whom he passed the greater part of his time--a fact which was
widely condemned there.
That same autumn Ludovico's natural daughter, whom Beatrice had
adopted when she came to Milan, and whom she loved dearly, died. Only
a few months back she had been married to the Galeazzo di Sanseverino,
who had helped so largely to keep Beatrice merry in the first months
of her marriage. Her name was Bianca, and in her portrait by Ambrogio
da Predis--a portrait sometimes said to be of Beatrice D'Este--she
looks adorable. Her death struck Beatrice when she was already
heartsick. A dozen times between daylight and bedtime Lucrezia and
Ludovico had acquired the power to drive the blood to her temples.
Muralto, who mentions Il Moro making the girl his mistress, says, with
the simplicity characteristic of the period when touching anything
emotional, that though it caused Beatrice bitter anguish of mind, it
could not alter her love for him. It is very evident that Beatrice
dared nothing against this later mistress. With an admirable
wisdom--the wisdom of an intelligence which had deepened upon the
facts of experience--she did not struggle, after five years of married
life, against the fever of this tempestuous passion. But a passionate
restlessness wore her out. She looked upon days unending and
unbearable. In a few weeks her manner changed entirely. She, who had
been like an embodied joy for years, grew to have tears always near
the surface. In the end she became too weary to control them; for
there is no weakness like that brought about by a forlornness
constantly goaded into fresh sensations. Both her ladies and her
courtiers, in the inevitable publicity of court habits, saw her eyes
frequently blinded by silent tears. But she said nothing, and they
could not be certain whether they fell because of her husband's
conduct or because of the death of Bianca.
[Illustration: PROBABLE PORTRAIT OF BIANCA SFORZA
WIFE OF GALEAZZO SANSEVERINO]
To some extent she had become abruptly absorbed by a new outlook. All
her life previously she had been a frank materialist; the question of
death had loomed too distant to need attention. But suddenly life had
betrayed her, and in the bitter knowledge of its cruelties the soul
stirred to tragic wakefulness.
The Renaissance, as far as she was concerned, had shown itself
inadequate. It had promised, with artistic and philosophic culture,
to bring happiness. But in practice it provided nothing for the heart
of women. It could not make men faithful, nor help the warm and simple
ways of domesticity from the denudations of instability. There
remained only the question of the afterlife to fall back upon, and
Beatrice, enfevered and tortured, tried to fix her mind upon this
prospect. Bianca had been buried in the church of St. Maria delle
Grazie, and during the last months of her existence Beatrice formed
the habit of going constantly to her tomb, and of staying there for
hours at a time. In fact, shipwrecked as far as life was concerned,
and brought by her approaching motherhood to the nearness and
possibility of death, her soul sprung at last into a quivering
alertness, drawing her to silent introspections in the dark and
restful church, where the girl who had been alive a short time back,
now lay quietly buried. Only the most unshaken agnostics can come
close to death and not suddenly feel an overwhelming necessity for
some preparatory equipment--some consciousness of a clean and
justified existence. And Beatrice, whose manner hinted to those about
her the possession of a secret foreboding of what was coming, had
reached very close to the moment when this peace, both of
remembrance and of hope, would be tragically necessary.
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF ST. MARIA DELLE GRAZIE AT MILAN]
On January 2, 1497, she drove as usual to the church of St. Maria
delle Grazie. She remained there for hours, as if only in this one
sombre place could she obtain a little respite and tranquillity. Her
ladies--who probably disliked these outings beyond expression--had
difficulty in coaxing her at last from the building. They got her
home, and she seemed much as usual until about eight o'clock in the
evening, when the agony of child-birth suddenly commenced in her.
Her pains only lasted three hours. Then she gave birth to a still-born
child, and shortly after midnight she died. For a short hour she lay
in her canopied bed, worn in body and uncomforted in soul. Then she
died, and whom Ludovico loved or did not love mattered not one whit to
her.
But her death had been brutal, unexpected, sudden, and acted upon
Ludovico like a douche of icy water. Passion for Lucrezia died
brusquely through the shock. Beatrice, had she known it, had never
been profoundly discarded, and the thought of life without her had not
formed part of the Lucrezia madness.
And suddenly she was dead. There had been no reconciliation. In the
abruptness of her collapse, there had not been an interval in which to
endear her back to joy. She had suffered great pain, and then, in a
forlorn and piteous weakness, passed from existence.
Ludovico's grief became intense. His passionate prostration was so
unusual in the callousness of the period, that every one talked about
it. He refused to have her name mentioned in his presence, and when
most widowers of that time would have been thinking of a second wife,
he was still spoken of as caring nothing any longer for his children,
or his state, or for anything on earth.
Seven months after her death he continued still apparently a changed
man. He had become religious, recited daily offices, observed fasts,
and lived "chastily and devoutly." His rooms were still draped in
black, he took all his meals standing, and every day went for a time
to his wife's tomb in the church of St. Maria delle Grazie.
[Illustration: THE EFFIGY OF BEATRICE D'ESTE
AT SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM]
His last action in connection with Beatrice has a certain moving
sentimentality. It was when the miserable end of his adventure had
commenced, and he was obliged to escape from Milan with all the haste
he could. His safety depended upon his swiftness. Knowing this, he
nevertheless stopped at the church of St. Maria delle Grazie, and
stayed so long by the tomb of his wife that the small group with him
became anxious for their own skins as well as his. He came out at last
with the tears streaming down his face, and three times, as he rode
away, he looked back towards the church, as if all his heart held dear
lay there behind him.
Not long afterwards he was captured, and his captivity at Loches is
one of the few inexcusable stains upon Louis XII.'s character.
ANNE OF BRITTANY
1476-1514
With Anne of Brittany the Renaissance entered France. She herself,
though she had her little fastidiousnesses, hardly belongs to it. No
artistic strain ran through her temperament. She was an intelligent,
but excessively practical woman, who twice married men of opposite
dispositions from her own. Anne, it is certain, never glowed at the
thought of a beautiful thing in her life, but both her husbands did,
and both, as a result of their Italian campaigns, brought into France
a variety of new and educative lovelinesses. Charles VIII., Anne's
first husband, and Louis XII., her second, gave the primary impulse to
the Renaissance movement in France.
As for Anne herself, though in the end she appeals through a colossal
weight of sorrow, one feels her chiefly as a warning. Almost every
quality a woman ought to spend her strength in avoiding, she hugged
unconsciously to her soul, and every quality a woman needs as the
basis of her personality, she had not got. A woman should be
indulgence itself, and Anne indulged nobody; a woman should be as a
brimming receptacle of sympathy, toleration, and forgiveness, and Anne
forgave no one, and tolerated nothing that went against her. A woman
should be--it is without exaggeration her great essential--good to
live with, cosy, accommodating, an insidious wheedler, almost without
premeditation, not only into happiness, but into righteousness of
living. Now, Anne could never have been cosy, and it is doubtful
whether, once safely married for the second time, she would have
condescended to wheedle any one. She had not sufficient love to have a
surplus for distribution. Duties of some kinds she could observe
excellently, but there was no sub-conscious sense that in marrying she
was accepting one of the subtlest posts of influence in the world. She
had not the capacity for understanding that it is a woman's adorable
privilege to be _in herself_ so much, that the atmosphere of the house
she controls must in the end express principally her personality. And
nothing was more remote from Anne's intelligence than the secret
triumph of realizing how greatly the building up of character is the
charge intrusted to her sex by destiny.
It was not her gift to make any house feel warmer when she entered
it. Her second husband loved her--contrast is a frequent motive for
falling in love--but she could do nothing for temperament. Character
is not upheaved by violences, and Anne was all imperatives and
despotism. Practical organizations are often admirably conducted with
these methods, and as a housewife Anne attained considerable
proficiency; but the more immaterial achievements are beyond the
reaching power of a chill autocracy.
Born in 1476, she was the daughter of Francis II. of Brittany, enemy
of Louis XI. of France. Her mother, Marguerite de Foix, died when she
was little more than a baby, and the first thing one hears about the
child Anne was, as usual, concerned with the question of marriage. At
eight years old more than one suitor already desired her hand. The
English Prince of Wales had been accepted, when his murder put an end
to the engagement. Then the widowed Archduke of Austria, Maximilian,
was seriously considered, and for a short time Louis, Duke of Orleans,
subsequently her second husband, numbered among those said to be
possibly acceptable. He was married already to Jeanne, daughter of
Louis XI., but his dislike to the woman forced upon him by her
sinister parent had never been disguised. A dispensation from the Pope
could at any time make another marriage possible.
The notion did not hold attention long, but the man and the child,
after all one day to come together, were excellent friends during the
period when Anne was in the schoolroom. Louis of Orleans, restless and
discontented, could bear anything better than the presence of his own
wife. Jeanne, who was not only deformed but hideous, had wrung from
her own father on one occasion the remark, "I did not know she was so
ugly." Curtained behind physical ungainliness, her nature was white as
snow and soft as the breast of a bird; but though every thought that
came to her fused into tenderness, she lacked the common gaieties
needful for ordinary existence. She had wanted to be a nun, and
instead they made her the wife of a boy who felt for her nothing but
an uncontrollable physical repulsion.
Louis, when he fled to Brittany, did not take her with him, and every
writer is agreed that the pretty, precocious child whom he found
there, and the dissatisfied husband, became the best of comrades. One
chronicler mentions that Anne was flattered by the _hommage_ paid to
her by Louis, but it is very much in keeping with his character to
have been amused by a little creature with all the airs and graces,
and all the feminine obstreperousnesses, that Jeanne did not possess.
Louis admired character, and even at nine years old Anne must have
required no trifling efforts to manage.
In 1488, her father, worsted at last by the French, was obliged to
come to terms with them. Almost immediately afterwards he died, and
Anne, at twelve years old, became Duchess of Brittany.
It was, under the circumstances, a tragic position for any child to be
placed in, and Anne's little baby face and thin childish voice, at the
head of so forlornly placed a duchy, becomes suddenly pathetic. She
was no sooner proclaimed her father's successor, moreover, than France
sent to state that, since there were differences of opinion concerning
their respective rights to Brittany, she should, pending the decision
of arbitrators, not take the title of duchess. The reply--firm but
cautious--amounted to the statement that Anne had already convoked the
states of Brittany, in order to have the recent treaty made by her
father with France ratified.
This answer the child probably had nothing to do with, but, in the
vital question of her marriage, she suddenly revealed herself very
definitely the authoritative head of her own dominions. All her
ministers desired a marriage with the Comte D'Albret, thought to be in
a position to help Brittany against the claws of its enemy. D'Albret
was a widower, old, ugly, bad tempered, and the father of twelve
children. Anne hated him--he is said to have had a spotty face--and
the shrinking antipathy of children is not controllable by reasons.
Primarily she must have felt a little frightened when both her
governess, and the great bearded men who controlled affairs, informed
her that, whatever her feelings, the marriage must take place.
Happily, she was not timid, and she understood perfectly that she had
succeeded to the power of her father. She refused point-blank to marry
D'Albret. They argued, coaxed, laboured with interminable
explanations, but the girl merely became mulish. When their
importunities allowed no other outlet, she declared that sooner than
marry him she would enter a nunnery and become a nun. Obstinacy such
as this, when the child owed subjection to nobody, was a thing to gasp
at. The tempers of her ministers must have been sorely tested, but
the D'Albret marriage had in the end to be abandoned.
Maximilian was then brought forward once more--a suitor towards whom
Anne appears to have been more tractable. It was necessary to marry
somebody. Maximilian she had never seen, and therefore could regard to
some extent optimistically. At the worst he would be better than
D'Albret, and there was the chance that he might be actually charming.
Once she had consented they gave her no time to change her mind.
Maximilian sent his favourite, Baron de Polhain, to Brittany, and a
marriage by proxy, according to the German fashion, took place there.
The bride, having been dressed in her best frock, was placed in her
canopied bed, with the best pillows at her head, and the best
counterpane over her small person, and in the presence of the
necessary witnesses, Polhain bared one leg to the knee and introduced
it into the bed. This brief and simple ceremony rendered Anne a
married woman, wife of the King of Germany. For a year afterwards in
all proclamations she was called Queen, and Maximilian Duke, of
Brittany.