Thomas Adolphus Trollope

“ Catherine was the very belle idéale of a sovereign châtelaine in that stormy fifteenth century. Her aims and ambitions were those of her husband; and she was ever ready in sunshine or in storm to take her full share of the burden of the day; and, indeed, in time of trouble and danger, far more than what was even then deemed a woman's share in meeting and overcoming them. ”

“ This I know well, that the lady Vittoria Colonna, his wife, a woman of the highest character, and abounding in all the virtues which can adorn her sex, had no sooner heard of the intrigue on foot, than, wholly untempted by the brilliant hope hung out to her, she with infinite sorrow and anxiety wrote most warmly to her husband, urging him to bethink him of his hitherto unstained character, and to weigh well what he was about, assuring him that as far as she was concerned, she had no wish to be the wife of a king, but only of a loyal and upright man. ”

“ The gorgeous accounts of the Cardinal Peter Riario's unprecedented splendour and reckless prodigality especially touched a sympathetic chord of admiration in the bosom of Maria Galeazzo. The splendid Duke, who lavished on upholstery, festivals, and courtezans, the substance wrung from a groaning people, recognised a kindred spirit in the princely churchman, who expended the revenues of a dozen sees on a banquet and revel. The spirit of noble rivalry, too, was awakened in the Ducal bosom. Here was a man in whose eyes it was worth while to shine, and whose admiration would confer real glory. ”

“ Holy Fathers, the only Heaven-given guidance known, went from bad to worse, till badness culminated in a Borgia; new ideas too were bred, like flies in the heat, coming from no man knew where,—leading, assuredly no man then living guessed whither,—and promising in the long run to give more trouble than either French, Spaniards, or Popes,—all tended to make a troublous, yeasty, seething time of our Vittoria's life-span. ”

“ Great pity is it that man, whom God has created in his own image and likeness, should voluntarily by his own fault make himself worse than the brute animal, that like an ungrateful and ignorant creature, neither knows nor acknowledges the benefits of God, but attributes them to himself. From self-love proceeds every evil. Whence come injustice, and all the other faults? From self-love. It commits injustice against God, against itself, against its neighbour, and against Holy Church. Against God it commits injustice, in that it does not render glory and praise to his name, as it ought to do. ”

“ The self-love which a man has for his own self, which is a cloud that obscures the eye of the intellect, and hides from the pupil the light of the most holy faith. And thus a man goes as one blind and ignorant, following his own frailty, wholly given up to passion, without the light of reason, even as an animal, which, because it has no reasoning powers, allows itself to be guided by its own sensations. ”

“ A beautiful widow of six-and-twenty, holding one rich principality in her own right, and a second still more valuable, as regent for a son only nine years of age, was infallibly a mark for all the princely fortune-hunters, and ambitious intriguers throughout Italy. Every degree and mode of interference from marriage to murder was likely to be brought to bear by greedy nobles and unprincipled brother sovereigns against one of the weaker sex so circumstanced. But Catherine hardly deserves to be described by such a phrase. ”

“ That black care, which rode so inseparably and so hard behind the harassed prince backwards and forwards between Forlì and Imola, did more than keep the balance even between hempen jerkin and damasqued coat of mail; and the least enviable man in Forlì and its county was in all probability the founder of the greatness of the Riarii.
One consolation, however, this hard-worked prince had in all his troubles, and that perhaps the greatest that a man can have. His wife was in every way truly a help meet for him. ”

“ Now act not so any more, most dear Father! consult your own conscience; think that you must die, and that you know not when; put before the eye of your intellect, God and his truth, and not interest, or love of country; for as regards God, we ought not to make any difference between one country and another, since we all proceed from His holy mind, are created in His image and likeness, and redeemed by the precious blood of His only-begotten Son. ”

“ There is nothing in all we know of Catherine, either from her own writings, or from those of her biographer, to indicate that her spiritual conceptions, religious system, or theory of morals, differed in any respect from the standard orthodoxy of her time and country. We find no more elevated notions of Deity, no saner views of duty, no nobler beau-ideal of human excellence. ”

“ Francis, how readily may be conceived the sort of conversation and suggestions, which must have prepared the mind of Catherine to reproduce the miracle for them as soon as her infirmity should set free her imagination from the world of reality!
And this capability of being played upon, rendered her, it is to be observed, a far more valuable instrument in the hands of those who touched the keys than if she had been a mere accomplice of imposture. ”

“ Can it be supposed, that the wide-spread reputation she acquired, and the marvellous power she exercised, were derived from the impression made on her contemporaries by her virtues, the purity of her life, the earnestness of benevolence, and the zeal of her charity? But that would be to attribute to mere goodness a power over one of the most corrupt generations in the history of the world, which it has never been seen able to exert over any age. ”

“ This ruffian Pansecco, one of the historians quietly remarks, had been employed by the Count on occasion of the Pazzi murders.
Those moments were anxious ones to the doers of the desperate deed, for all depended on the feeling, with which the populace might at the first blush regard it. Their anxiety was not of long duration, however. From the open window the three assassins cried to the people in the Piazza "Liberty! Liberty! The tyrant is dead! Forlì is its own mistress!" ”

“ In the second instance, we have a woman, raging with tiger-like fury against the murderers of her love. This so faultlessly beautiful form, ruthlessly made a mangled corpse before her eyes, was the first and last love of this vehement and strong-willed woman;—her only taste of real natural heart's joy;—the one pet, private sanctuary of her life, not dedicated to the weary life-long toil of building up the Riario name. ”

“ Then the Pesaro folk, whose communications with the neighbouring towns are much interrupted by the Lady Catherine's new toll-bars, take it into their heads to retaliate, by seizing every Forlì man who ventures to show his face within their jurisdiction, weighing him publicly on a steel yard by the road-side, and taxing him so much a pound, as if he were hogsflesh or mutton, to the great amusement and scoffing of the cities round about, and the infinite scandal and discomfiture of the men of Forlì. ”

“ The Forlì historians recount at much length the cruelties and insults which their forefathers had to suffer from the victorious barbarian army during several days,—the insatiable rapacity of all classes of the soldiers, the wanton destruction of that which could not be appropriated, and the general devastation of the city. But all this is unhappily too common, and too well known a story, to need repeating here.
History has for centuries been preaching to mankind from her great stock text, on war and its consequences;—and at last not so wholly in vain, as in the good old time. ”

“ Wrong is done, and the strong-handed doer of it admired, the moral sense is blunted by the cowardly worship of success, and might takes from right the suffrages of the feeble, in the nineteenth as in the sixteenth century. But the contemplation of the total absence from such a mind as that of Vittoria Colonna, of all recognition of a right and a wrong in such matters, furnishes highly instructive evidence of the reality of the moral progress mankind has achieved. ”

“ If I look to the Divine judgment I see it close upon them, if they do not lift themselves out of this darkness; for every fault is punished, and every good deed is rewarded. It will be hard for them to kick against God, if they possessed the greatest possible human power. God is the supreme strength, which fortifies the weak who confide and trust in Him. And it is the truth; and the truth is that which makes us free. We see that only the truth of the servants of God follows, [36] and holds this truth of Pope Urban VI., confessing him to be truly Pope, as he is. ”

“ Michael Angelo was a man whose influence on his age was felt and acknowledged, while he was yet living and exercising it, to a degree rarely observable even in the case of the greatest minds. He had, at the time in question, already reached the zenith of his fame, although he lived to witness and enjoy it for another quarter of a century. He was a man formed by nature, and already habituated by the social position his contemporaries had accorded to him, to mould men—not to be moulded by them—not a smooth or pliable man ”

“ It can scarcely be necessary to tell even the most exclusively English reader, how ancient, how noble, how magnificent, was the princely house of Colonna. They were so noble, that their lawless violence, free-booting habits, private wars, and clan enmities, rendered them a scourge to their country; and for several centuries contributed largely to the mass of anarchy and barbarism, that rendered Rome one of the most insecure places of abode in Europe, and still taints the instincts of its populace with characteristics, which make it one of the least civilisable races of Italy. ”

“ Murders of princes, and awards of torture and death to their conspiring subjects, recurring in oscillations of pendulum-like regularity,—civil war in the streets of Rome, and monstrous corruption in her palaces,—lawless violence of the law-making classes, met by continually successful evasion of the law by those for whose oppression rather than protection it was intended: all this does not represent to our ideas a happy state of society.
But Guicciardini looks back to these days from amid the misfortunes of a far more disastrous period. ”

“ Catherine, give a present interest to her story, which it would otherwise want, and indicate but too clearly, that her influence is not a mere thing of the past, but a living and active fact. But the causes and nature of this influence are far from being a secret to those who have paid any attention to the present condition of Italy, and who understand the modus operandi, and policy of a church, the whole purpose, scope, and meaning of whose being, is the preservation of its own existence, and that of the sovereigns, its partners and accomplices in the subjugation and plundering of the people. ”

“ Orsini clans no longer level Colonna palaces with [Pg 239] the soil in the streets of Rome; the story-graven flagstones of the old Florentine Piazza are no longer stained with the blood of Bianchi or Neri; Siena no more sends out her war-car against Pisa, nor does Genoa fit out fleets against Venice. Despotism has crushed out all vigour from the life and torpified every pulse; and having made a deathlike "solitude, calls it peace." ”

“ Nothing was to be heard in all Naples but the thunder of cannon, and nothing to be seen but velvet, silk, and brocade, and gold on all sides. The streets were lined with richly tapestried seats, filled with all the noble dames of Naples, who, as the royal cortege passed, rose, and advancing, kissed the hands of the king, "et lo signore Re di questo si pigliava [Pg 296] gran piacere." It is a characteristic incident of the times, that as quick as the cortege passed, all the rich and costly preparations for its passage were, as Passeri tells us, scrambled for and made booty of by the populace. ”

“ Private hatred between man and man; clan hatred between family and family; party hatred between blacks and whites, or longs and shorts, or any other distinctive faction-cry; political hatred between patricians and plebeians; social hatred between citizens and the inhabitants of the fields around their walls; and, by no means least though last, municipal hatred between one city and another, has ever been in Italy the master passion, vigorous in its action and notable in its results in proportion to the vigour of social life animating the body of the nation. ”

“ With this view, the crafty lady gave a fête in her gardens outside the city, to which the Governor was courteously invited. In this little excursion outside the walls, there was little to excite the Castellano's suspicions. He could leave the communication between the fortress and the city safely closed behind him, come out from the citadel into the open country, and return to it at pleasure by the same road. But what is man's wit worth against a woman's wiles! In the gardens, no arm would serve Catherine to lean on save that of her trusty Castellano. ”

“ This man, whose wishes, hopes, and ambitions were as unbridled in their violence as low and vain in their aims and scope, would hurry from the death-chamber to the revel, and from the charnel-house hasten to plot long-sighted intrigues in the council-hall.
For the latter the pleasure-loving Cardinal was as ready as for gala making and revelry. Long conferences were held between the host and his guest in the secrecy of the Duke's private chambers. But princes are more than other men subjected to the vigilant surveillance of those who form their pomp or minister to their service. ”

“ And the final extinction of the reformatory movement in Italy was in great measure due precisely to the fact that conformity to Rome was dearer to most Italian minds than the independent assertion of their own opinions. It may be freely granted that there is every reason to suppose that it would have been so to Vittoria, had she not been so fortunate as to die before her peculiar tenets were so definitively condemned as to make it necessary for her to choose between abandoning them or abandoning Rome. ”