Gaining insight into the darkest passions from associating withCardinal Beaufort.—II. His passage about London in the FourteenthBook of the Annals examined.—And III. About the Parliament ofEngland in the Fourth Book.
I. In the autumn of 1418, after the breaking up of the Council of Constance, Bracciolini left Italy and accompanied to England a member of the Plantagenet family, the second son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Henry Beaufort, whose placid and beardless face the great Florentine seems to have first seen at the Ecumenical Council which that princely prelate had turned aside to visit in the course of a pilgrimage he was making to Jerusalem. Henry Beaufort was then Bishop of Winchester, but afterwards a Cardinal, and though there was another Prince of the Roman Church, Kemp, Archbishop of York and subsequently of Canterbury, Beaufort was always styled by the popular voice and in public acts "The Cardinal of England," on account, perhaps, of his Royal parentage and large wealth, more enormous than had been known since the days of the De Spencers: he had lands in manors, farms, chaces, parks and warrens in seven counties, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Somersetshire, Hampshire and Surrey, besides having the Customs of England mortgaged to him, and the cocket of the Port of Southampton with its dependencies,—an indebtedness of the State which is so far interesting as being the foundation of our National Debt.
Bracciolini had now an opportunity of watching and unravelling the wiles of this august prelate and patron of his; he thus gained still more insight into the ways of the worldly and the feelings of the ambitious; acquired a masterly knowledge of the dark passions and became versed in the crooked policy of court intrigue. He had quitted provinces at home laid waste by hostile invasions and cities agitated by the discord of contending parties; Genoa sending warships to ravage in the Mediterranean, Venice reducing to subjection the smaller States along the Adriatic, and Florence warring with Pisa, still to fix his eyes on darkness and the degradation of humanity; for he was visiting a country,—as England was in the fifteenth century,—buried in the gloom of barbarism, and forlorn in its literary condition, with writers, unworthy the name of scholars, Walsingham and Whethamstede, Otterbourne and Elmham, inditing bald chronicles; students applying their minds to scholastic philosophy; divines confounding their wits with theological mysteries; and men with inclinations to science, as Thomas Northfield, losing themselves in witchcraft, divination and the barbarous jargon of astrology, while rendering themselves, at any moment, liable to be apprehended by order of the doctors and notaries who formed the Board of Commissioners for the discovery of magicians, enchanters and sorcerers; for it was the age when invention framed the lie of the day, the marvellous military leadership of Joan of Arc, and credulity stood as ready to receive it as little boys in nurseries the wondrous tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. Through this mist the figure of Cardinal Beaufort loomed largest, unsociable, disdainful, avaricious, immeasurably high-stomached (for he deemed himself on an equality with the king); and, in spite of immoderate riches, inordinately mean: along with these unamiable qualities, he upheld the policy of Martin V., which was to destroy the independence of the National Church of England: he was treacherous to his associates, and murderous thoughts were not strangers to his bosom.
Bishop Milner, in his History of Winchester under the Plantagenets (Vol. I. p. 301), denies that there is solid ground in history for representing Beaufort as depraved, and condemns Shakespeare for having endowed Humphry, Duke of Gloucester, with merit of which he deprived the memory of Cardinal Beaufort. The late Dean Hook, too, in his elegantly written life of Archbishop Chicheley (p. 97) is of opinion that Beaufort "has appeared in history with his character drawn in darker colours than it deserves." Those two distinguished dignitaries, one of the Roman Catholic and the other of the English Church, do not then seem to have heard of the anecdote related by Agnes Strickland, in her Life of Katherine of Valois (p. 114), that Henry V., when Prince of Wales, was narrowly saved from murder by the fidelity of his little spaniel, whose restlessness caused the discovery of a man who was concealed behind the arras near the bed where the Prince was sleeping in the Green Chamber in the Palace at Westminster, and a dagger being found on the person of the intruder, he confessed that he was there by the order of Beaufort to kill the Prince in the night, showing that the Cardinal was guilty of a double treachery, for he was setting on the heir-apparent at the time to seize his father's crown; nor do Milner and Hook seem to have known that the death of the Duke of Gloucester was principally contrived by Wykeham's successor in the See of Winchester, and that, whether poisoned or not, the Duke was hurried out of the world in a very suspicious manner, one of the first acts of Margaret of Anjou after her coronation being, in conjunction with the Wintonian diocesan to bring about the death of that Prince after arresting him in a Parliament called for the purpose at St. Edmund's Bury; Shakespeare, accordingly, had historic truth with him, when he represented the Cardinal suffering on his death-bed the tortures of a murderer's guilty conscience, from being implicated in taking away by violence the life of Humphry, Duke of Gloucester:—
"Alive again! Then show me where he is,I'll give a thousand pound to look upon him.He hath no eyes, the dust hath blinded them.Comb down his hair. Look, look! it stands uprightLike lime twigs set to catch my winged soul.Give me some drink; and bid the apothecaryBring the strong poison that I bought of him":—
to which a looker-on observes:—
"O! thou Eternal Mover of the Heavens,Look with a gentle eye upon this wretch."
It could have been with no gentle eye that Bracciolini looked onCardinal Beaufort, whose "bad death," as Shakespeare makes theEarl of Warwick observe, "argued a monstrous life."
Repeatedly in letters to his friend Niccoli, during two years and more of anxiety and discontent passed by him from 1420 to 1422 in the Palace of the Prince Prelate, Bracciolini complained bitterly of the magnificent promises not being fulfilled that the Cardinal had held forth to him on condition of his accompanying him to England. In vain he looked forward to considerable emolument; day after day he found himself doomed to the common lot of those who depend on the patronage of the great;—"in suing long to bide":—
"To lose good days that might be better spent;To waste long nights in pensive discontent;To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;To feed on hope; to pine on fear and sorrow;To fret the soul with crosses and with cares;To eat the heart through comfortless despairs;To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."
And, really, Bracciolini may be said to have been "undone"; for when he got what he had bargained to purchase, the frivolous goodwill of his master, it was, as he expressed it, "the birth of the mouse after the labour of the mountain": he obtained a benefice of 120 florins a year, with what he did not anticipate would be attached to it,—hard work.
In order to have a precise and not a vague and confused idea of the galling effect produced on his feelings by this offer, it is necessary to turn to two paragraphs (37, 38), in the Second Book of the Annals;—for I cannot divest myself of the suspicion that this incident in his life is there indirectly referred to, where an account is given that has no historical basis of the "nobilis juvenis, in paupertate manifesta," Marcus Hortalus, whose noble parentage and straightened circumstances closely corresponded to the birth and means of Bracciolini. When seeking recompense from Tiberius for his four sons, he calls on the Emperor to behold in them "the scions and offspring of what a multitude of consuls! what a multitude of dictators! which he says not to mortify, but to excite commiseration."—"En! stirps et progenies tot consulum! tot dictatorum! nec ad invidiam ista, sed conciliandae misericordiae refero;" commenting on which Justus Lipsius bursts into the angry exclamation: "What a braggart, lying speech on this man's part! For where was this multitude of consuls, this multitude of dictators? Why, I can find only one dictator and one consul in the Hortensian family; the dictator in the year of Rome, 467, when the Commons revolted; and the Consul, Quintus Hortensius, the grandfather of the speaker,—who, perhaps, however, reckoned in the ancestors also in his mother's line": —"Vaniloqua hominis oratio et falsa! Ubi enim isti tot consules, tot dictatores? Certe ego in Hortensia gente unum, dictatorem reperio, et Consulem unum; dictatorem anno urbis 467 secessione plebis; consulem, Q. Hortensium hujus avum. Sed intellegit fortasse majores suos etiam ex gente materna."
Lipsius would have spared himself the trouble of inditing this indignant note and throwing out this useless suggestion had he known that Bracciolini forged the Annals, and playfully interspersed his fabrication occasionally with fanciful characters and fictitious events. The picture of Marcus Hortalus, who had received from Augustus the munificent gift of a million sesterces, being in the days of Tiberius once more poor, married, with children, and seeking aid from the State for his four sons, seems to be all purely imaginary, introduced merely as a photograph from life, the feelings and conduct of Hortalus, after the treatment of his sons by Tiberius, being such a faithful reflex, as far as can be judged from his own confessions, of the feelings and conduct of Bracciolini himself after the way in which his hopes of preferment were blasted by Cardinal Beaufort. Just as Hortalus, if he had been left to himself, would have remained a bachelor, and only from pressure on the part of Augustus, became a husband, and, while incapable of supporting children, a father, so Bracciolini would have remained in Italy and never visited this country, had it not been for the importunities of the Cardinal, and never turned his thoughts to preferment in the Church, which he is invariably telling us he disliked, had not Beaufort given assurance that he would put him in the way of holding some high and lucrative post in England; and then when he received a paltry benefice, instead of expressing thanks like the other dependents on the Prince Prelate, he was silent, from fear of the power possessed by Beaufort, or from retaining even in his contracted fortunes the politeness which he had inherited from his noble forefathers:—"egere alii grates; siluit Hortalus, pavore, an avitae nobilitatis, etiam inter angustias fortunae, retinens" (An. II. 38).
II. We are indebted to Bracciolini's stay among us for one or two matters that are interesting about our country. His two years' residence here filled him with a marked admiration of London as well as with the most confused ideas of the antiquity and greatness of its commerce; and though comments have already been made on his description of it as eminently absurd, the passage is too curious not to be examined again; the more so as it has misled good historians of London, who believing that the account actually proceeded from Tacitus, have taken it to be incontrovertibly true, whereas it is only true, if it be applied, as it is applicable only to the advanced state of society and the large commercial town of which Bracciolini was the eye witness towards the close of the reign of Henry V., and the commencement of that of his infant son and successor. The slightest investigation will carry conviction of this.
A hundred years before the birth of Tacitus, Britain was so monstrously barbarous and obscure, that Julius Caesar, when wanting to invade it and wishing for information of its state and circumstances, could not gain that knowledge, because, as he tells us, "scarcely anybody but merchants visited Britain in those times, and no part of it, except the seacoast and the provinces opposite Gaul": ("neque enim temere praeter mercatores illo adiit quisquam, neque iis ipsis quidquam, praeter oram maritimam, atque eas regiones, quae sunt contra Gallias." (Caesar De Bell. Gall. IV. 20). From this we see that, in the middle of the century before the Christian era, the only trade with Britain was then confined to the shores, and the southern parts, from Kent to Cornwall: it is then, against every probability that, in a period extending over no more than about a hundred years, this trade should have extended up the navigable rivers and have reached London enough for it to have risen up, by the year 60 of our era, into an immense emporium and be known all over the world for its enormous commerce. That this was not the case we know from Strabo, who lived in the time of Augustus, and who, though saying a great deal about our island and its trade, has not a word about London, howbeit that the author of the Annals does record in his work that it was exceedingly famous for the number of the merchants who frequented it and the extent of its commerce; but it is not likely that it was so, if the whole island did no more trade than Strabo informs us, the articles exported from all Britain being insignificant and few;—corn and cattle; such metals as gold, silver, tin, lead and iron; slaves and hunting dogs (Strabo III. 2. 9.—ib. 5. 11.—IV. 5. 2), which Oppian says were beagles. Musgrave, in his Belgicum Britannicum adds "cheese," from some wretched authority, for Strabo says that the natives at that time were as ignorant of the art of making cheese, as of gardening and every kind of husbandry:—[Greek: "Mae turopoiein dia taen apeirian, apeirous d'einai kai kaepeias kai allon georgikon."] (IV. 5. 2).
The statement, then, that London had the very greatest reputation for the number of its merchants and commodities of trade in Nero's time is utterly unfounded—nothing more nor less than outrageously absurd; the picture, however, is quite true if London be considered at the time when Bracciolini was here. Its merchants then carried on a considerable trade with a number of foreign countries, to an extent far greater, and protected by commercial treaties much more numerous than previous to investigation I could have been led to suppose. The foreign merchants who principally came to the Port of London were those of Majorca, Sicily, and the other islands in the Mediterranean; the western parts of Morocco; Venice, Genoa, Florence and the other cities of Italy; Spain and Portugal; the subjects of the Duke of Brabant, Lorraine and Luxemburgh; of the Duke of Brittany, and of the Duke of Holland, Zealand, Hanneau and Friesland; the traders of the great manufacturing towns of Flanders; of the Hanse Towns of Germany, 64 in number, situated on the shores of the Baltic, the banks of the Rhine, and the other navigable rivers of Germany; the people of the great seaport towns of Prussia and Livonia, then subject to the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order of Knights, along with the traders of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland.
In addition to these bringing their goods here in their own bottoms, a great number of other foreign merchants were established in London for managing the trade of their respective States and Cities, performing, in fact, the duties now attached to the office of Consul, first instituted by the maligned but enlightened Richard III. These foreign merchants being as powerful as they were numerous, formed themselves into Companies: independently of the German merchants of the Steel Yard, there were the Companies of the Lombards; the Caursini of Rome; the Peruchi, Scaldi, Friscobaldi and Bardi of Florence, and the Ballardi and Reisardi of Lucca. The Government protected them, and, as they were viewed with intense jealousy by the native traders, they were judged, in all disputes, not by the common law, but the merchant law, which was administered by the Mayor and Constables; and of the mediators in these disputes, two only were native, four being foreigners, two Germans and two Italians.
The Londoners had made prodigious advances upon their forefathers in the commodities of merchandize in which they dealt. Their most valuable articles of exportation were wool and woollen clothes in great varieties and great quantity; corn; metals, particularly lead and tin; herrings from Yarmouth and Norfolk; salmon, salt, cheese, honey, wax, tallow, and several articles of smaller value. But their great trade was in foreign imports and that was entirely in the hands of foreign merchants who came here in shoals, bringing with them their gold and silver, in coin and bullion; different kinds of wines from the finest provinces in the south of France, and from Spain and Portugal; also from the two last countries (to enter into a nomenclature that's like the catalogue of an auctioneer for monotony of names and unconnectedness of things), figs, raisins, dates, oils, soap, wax, wool, liquorice, iron, wadmote, goat-fell, red-fell, saffron and quicksilver; wine, salt, linen and canvas from Brittany; corn, hemp, flax, tar, pitch, wax, osmond, iron, steel, copper, pelfry, thread, fustian, buckram, canvas, boards, bow-staves and wool-cards from Germany and Prussia; coffee, silk, oil, woad, black pepper, rock alum, gold and cloth of gold from Genoa; spices of all kinds, sweet wines and grocery wares, sugar and drugs, from Venice, Florence and the other Italian States; gold and other precious stones from Egypt and Arabia; oil of palm from the countries about Babylon; frankincense from Arabia; spiceries, drugs, aromatics of various kinds, silks and other fine fabrics from Turkey, India and other Oriental lands; silks from the manufactories established in Sicily, Spain, Majorca and Ivica; linen and woollen cloths of the finest texture and the most delicate colours from the looms of Flanders for the use of persons of high rank; the tapestries of Arras; and furs of various kinds and in great quantities from Russia, Norway and other northern countries. The native merchants of London, the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans, carried on an enormous inland trade. They supplied all parts of the kingdom with corn from the many granaries which filled the City of London. There was a constant buying and selling of live horned cattle and sheep. Trade was great among goldsmiths, jewellers, gilders, embroiderers, illuminators and painters; and makers of all kinds of commodities sent their goods from every part of the provinces, knowing that they were wanted and would meet with immediate purchasers.
If those were the days when Florence had its Cosmo de' Medici, who spent millions of florins in building palaces, churches and charitable foundations to beautify his native town; and when Bourges had its Jean Coeur who was rich enough to furnish Lewis VII. with sufficient gold crowns to support the armies with which that monarch recovered his possessions from the English, London, too, had its Hende, Whittington and Norbury affluent and magnificent enough to lend their sovereign immense sums of money, and adorn the city in which they had amassed their stupendous fortunes with useful and ornamental buildings—Bridewells, Colleges, Hospitals, Guildhalls and Public Libraries. Well might Bracciolini, without the slightest particle of exaggeration, say of London, as he saw it, that it was "COPIA negotiatorum et commeatuum MAXIME CELEBRE" (An. XIV. 33).
In leaving this passage I cannot help remarking that the expression, "copia negotiatorum et commeatuum," has a turn that is frequently found in the Annals; it is a cast of phrase not affected by Tacitus; but it is exactly the manner of arranging words in a sentence to which Sallust is partial: "frequentiam negotiatorum et commeatuum," he says in his "Jugurtha" (47); it is obvious that in this passage Sallust means by "commeatuus," "supplies of corn and provisions," as it is equally obvious that Bracciolini (though following the phraseology of his favourite Latin author,) gives it, in the sentence quoted from the Fourteenth Book of the Annals, a wider meaning, "commodities of merchandize."
III. If Bracciolini erred with respect to London, in magnifying it into a town of superlative commercial splendour in the days of Nero, which, I repeat, is wildly ridiculous, he more grossly erred with respect to our form of government; for when he decried it, and prophesied its decadence and downfall, his sagacity and judgment were impugned.
When he was here our country was in the infancy of its example as a land ruled by the most admirable political arrangements. It can readily be believed with what interest and surprise the proud Italian, who had seen nothing of the kind in his own land of high civilization, must have witnessed our parliaments regularly meeting, as had been the case for generations, since the reign of Edward I. in 1293, knights and burgesses popularly elected by the inhabitants of the counties and boroughs sitting in council with the king, surrounded by his barons and bishops, priors who were peers and abbots who had mitres. With an outspoken contempt of England, and an overweening admiration of Italy, he avails himself of an opportunity of sneering covertly at our harmonious combination of the three forms of government, the monarchy, the oligarchy and the republic.
It is scarcely necessary to say that, as reference is made to the English Parliament, the editors of Tacitus have all been puzzled as to the meaning of the phrase, "delecta ex his et consociata," in the following passage, where the author of the Annals speaks of "the commonalty, or the aristocracy, or a monarch ruling every nation and community"; and that "a form of government based on a SELECTION AND CONJUNCTION OF THESE is easier praised than realised; or if it is realized, cannot last":—"cunctas nationes et urbes populus, aut primores, aut singuli regunt: DELECTA EX HIS ET CONSOCIATA reipublicae forma laudari facilius, quam evenire; vel si evenit, haud diuturna esse potest" (IV. 33). Now the phrase, "delecta ex his," selected from these, that is, the monarchy, the oligarchy and the republic, and meaning that the selections were of all the excellences and none of the faults of each, is in every way applicable to only one form of government,— our Parliamentary government, which is at once legislative and executive, and, as it is now, it almost was in the days when Bracciolini was on a visit to us in the opening days of the infant king, Henry VI. Then not only was the "populus," or "commonalty," represented by knights, citizens and burgesses of their own choosing; but the "primores," or "aristocracy," had their representatives also in the larger barons, bishops, priors who were peers and mitred abbots; priors who were not peers, and abbots who had not mitres, as well as many of the smaller barons, not receiving writs of summons: the king himself, being an infant at the breast, had his representative, the "selection" being from his own family, in the person of his uncle Humphry, Duke of Gloucester, who was his substitute in the Parliament as the Protector or Regent; and even when the king was an adult, and absent in wars, as Edward I. when engaged in the conquest of Wales, he was represented in Parliament by Commissioners, as our sovereign is to this day.
But Bracciolini not only said that the selections were from the monarchic, aristocratic and popular elements, but that they were "associated" or "conjoined"—"consociata." Here all the editors of Tacitus by their silence or otherwise fairly admit that the passage is utterly beyond their comprehension,—"one of those things," in fact, "which," in the words of Lord Dundreary, "no fellow is supposed to understand." As for the word, "consociata," James Gronovius was of opinion that Tacitus must have written "concinnata"; but not having the boldness, after the fashion of Justus Lipsius of making alterations, according to his own sweet pleasure, without the authority of manuscript or edition, he followed Beroaldi, who, as much puzzled as any of the subsequent editors, had substituted "constituta" for the nonsensical word in the blundering MS. "consciata," though common sense should have told him that "consociata" was meant, it being evident that the transcriber, infinitely more puzzled than the editors, for he could not have had the remotest conception of what he was doing, had merely omitted a vowel in his usual careless way. It was not till Ernesti's time, 1772, that the proper word was restored. Ernesti, too, fancied that he had discovered something in the Roman government, according to the description by Polybius, which justified the language in the Annals. "I have no doubt," he says, "but that Tacitus had in his mind (along with other historians) Polybius, who, in the 9th and following chapters of the 6th book of his History, praises the Roman Republic for combining the excellences of all the three forms of government, while avoiding the faults of each, and he speaks of that system of government as being alone perfect which is compounded of these three." "Neque dubito, Tacitum in animo habuisse cum alios historicos, tum Polybium qui 6. 9 sqq. rempublicam romanam laudat hoc nomine, quod omnium illarum trium formarum commoda complexa sit, vitatis singularum vitiis, eamque solam rempublicam perfectam esse dicit, quae sit e tribus istis temperata."
Let us then see exactly what it is that Polybius does say. After speaking of a balance between the three forms of government in the Roman administration being so fine that it was no easy matter to decide whether the government was aristocratic, democratic or monarchical (VI. 11), he proceeds to point out the several powers appropriated to each branch of the constitution;—the apparently regal rule of the Consuls, the aristocratic authority of the Senate, and the share taken by the people in the administration of affairs (ibid.12, 13, 14). This done, his endeavour is to show not that there was any "selection and conjunction" as stated in the Annals, of the several forms, but quite on the contrary, "counteraction and co-operation": to this he devotes an entire chapter, with these remarks by way of preface:—"With respect, then, to the several parts into which the government is divided, the nature of every one of them has been shown; and it now remains to be pointed out how each of these forms is enabled to COUNTERACT the others, and how, on the other hand, it can CO-OPERATE with them:—[Greek: "Tina men oun tropon diaergaetai ta taes politeias eis ekaston eidos, eirgaetai tina de tropon ANTIPRATTEIN boulaethenta, kai SYNERGEIN allaelois palin hekasta ton mergan dunatai, nun phaethaesetai."] (VI. 15.)
After this, it cannot be supposed that reference is made to the Commonwealth of Rome. Still less so, when, in the very next sentence the author of the Annals attempts to show that an equally blended administration cannot endure, because of the example afforded by Rome (proving how well he knew that the Romans had mixed together in their government the elements of the three forms); he says, that when the Plebeians had the principal power, there was submission to the will of the populace; when the Patricians held the sway, the wishes of the aristocratic section of the community were consulted; and when Rome had her emperors, the people fared no better than during the reign of the kings: here are his words:—"Therefore as in the olden time" (during the Republic), "when the plebeians were paramount, or when the patricians were superior in power," (in the first instance) "the whim of the populace was ascertained and the way in which their humour was to be dealt with, and" (in the second instance) "those persons were accounted astute in their generation and wise who made themselves thoroughly conversant with the disposition of the Senate and the aristocracy; then when a change took place in the Government" (from the Republic to the Empire), "there was the same state of things as when a King was the ruler":—"Igitur, ut olim, plebe valida, vel cum patres pollerent, noscenda vulgi natura et quibus modis temperanter haberetur, senatusque et optimatium ingenia qui maxime perdidicerant, callidi temporum et sapientes credebantur; sic, converso statu, neque alia rerum quam si unus imperitet." (l.c.)
What he is striving in his usual dark way to establish is this:— Here was the failure of the Roman form of administration; the Romans were the most accomplished people in the art of government; the English, who are semi-barbarous, can know nothing about government; it is then idle on their part to imagine that they are endowed with such a vast amount of political knowledge as to be qualified by their own reflections alone to build up a new and magnificent form of government; when, too, that form of government is essentially different from our superb oligarchies in Italy, the most civilized and cultivated part of the world in everything, especially politics; the English style of government is, also, strictly based on the old Roman mode of administration, and when that failed, how can any sensible man deem that the English method of administration will ever work successfully. Hence his remarks: "raking up and relating this," (namely, how the Roman government never worked well at any time,) "will be of benefit," (to whom? forsooth, the English,) "because few" (in matters of statesmanship), "by their own sagacity distinguish the good from the very bad, the practicable from the pernicious; the many gain their wisdom from the acts of others; yet as examples bring benefit so do they meet least with a probation." If that be not the meaning of his words, then they must remain, as in all translations, without meaning. Yet the Latin, crabbed as it is, (and it is always crabbed in the Annals), seems to me to be simple enough:—"haec conquiri tradique in rem fuerit; quia pauci prudentia honesta ab deterioribus, utilia ab noxiis, discernunt; plures aliorum eventis docentur; ceterum ut profutura ita minimum oblectationis adferunt" (l.c.).
That he does not mean the Roman form of government is further seen by his remark that the kind of administration spoken of is "easier to be commended thanrealized"—"laudari facilius, quamevenire"; just as it is easy to see from his language that he has before him an instance of some government framed like that which he says will not exist for any length of time; for whenever he employs the hypothetical particle, "si" about anything that is absolute and beyond doubt, he always uses it with the indicative and not the conditional. As he then writes, "sievenit," (not "sieveniat"), "if itisrealized," (not "if itberealized,") he really has in his mind some State constituted according to his description.
It should now be borne in mind that he was in this country before he forged the Annals, and was in the household of Cardinal Beaufort, who had repeatedly filled the office of Chancellor, on whom devolved the duty of issuing the writs to the members of the Parliament, Commoners as well as Peers; for that great officer the Speaker, was not yet invested with the authority so to do with respect to the Lower House; not only, then, had Bracciolini heard of the English Parliament, but the precise nature of it must have come frequently under his cognizance. In fact, it was no other than the English Parliament to which he refers.
That being accepted, there were several reasons to induce him to doubt the durability of our Parliament: the Crown possessed too great power in those assemblies: it was with difficulty that the great barons could be got to attend, their delight being to reside at their castles in the country, and take no part in political affairs; it was also difficult to get the representatives of the counties and boroughs to attend, on account of the long distances that many had to come, and the great expenses of their attendance; sometimes in a county the properly qualified person,—an actual knight,—could not be found, and there was no representative from a county, until upwards of twenty years after Bracciolini had left us, when esquires and gentlemen could be returned; sometimes a city or borough would not send a member, either by pleading poverty in not being able to pay the wages of the two representatives, or from not finding among their townsmen two burgesses with the qualifications required by the writ, that is, sufficiently hale to bear the fatigue of the journey, and sufficiently sensible to discharge the duties of close attendance on Parliament; for every member was then required to be present at the Parliament; hence each small freeholder from a county and each burgess had to find three or four persons of credit to be sureties for him that he would attend; and the constituents of each were forced to bear the cost of his attendance.
In addition to these difficulties there were other drawbacks that seemed to threaten a speedy termination to these Parliaments. The session was very short; the business was prepared beforehand, the laws being drawn up by the bishops, earls, barons, justices, and others who formed the king's council; and several statutes and laws were thus hastily and ill considered.
In spite of all these excuses for Bracciolini, experience has proved that his observation was shallow; and it is possible that, with his profound insight into the human mind, he might not have made it had he gone deeply into English character; but it seems that he deemed it unworthy of his study, England being "a country, which," as he says, "he did not like at all,"—"hujus patriae, quam parum diligo" (Ep. I. 2). With such an aversion to us it is no wonder that he had no faith in the continuance of our Parliament, for no stronger reason, probably, than that it was an English institution; but had he foreseen its durability he would have been a greater wonder than he was from having his eyes more fully opened than were the eyes of any man at that period to the rare qualities possessed by Englishmen; their unpretending magnanimity; their fine talents for business; their keen views in policy; the great things they had done in the arts of peace and war, as well as their capability of continuing to accomplish still greater achievements in both; the solidity of their understandings and their reflective spirits, which, when directed and applied to political schemes, devise and consummate sound and lasting reforms of the State.
I. The Proposal made in February, 1422, by a Florentine, named Lamberteschi, and backed by Niccoli.—II. Correspondence on the matter, and Mr. Shepherd's view that it referred to a Professorship refuted.—III. Professional disappointments in England determine Bracciolini to persevere in his intention of forging the Annals.—IV. He returns to the Papal Secretaryship, and begins the forgery in Rome in October, 1423.
I. About this period Bracciolini commenced the forgery of the Annals. In noticing the preliminary steps to that fabrication, and then glancing back at a few circumstances peculiar to his age, while touching upon some incidents hitherto passed over in his biography, we shall have all the necessary lights and shades in his life that will be of use to us in the maintenance and illustration of our theory.
Although he received in exchange for the living of 120 florins a year another of the annual worth of £40 with slighter duties attached to it, he still continued to express dissatisfaction at his fortunes, and desire a sinecure canonry in England that would enable him to live in literary ease at home. When, however, an alternative was presented to him of returning to the Pontifical Secretariate, through the intercession of one of his powerful Italian friends, Cardinal Adimari, Archbishop of Pisa, he rudely scouted the overture upon these grounds: that he would "rather be a free man than a public slave"; that he had "a smaller opinion of the Papacy and its limbs than the world believed"; that "if he had thought as highly of the Secretaryship to the Pope, as many did, he would long before have gone back to it; and that if he lost everything, from what he now had, he would not want."—"Video quae Cardinalis Pisanus scribit de Secretariatu. Sane si ego illud officium tantum existimarem, quantum nonnulli, ego jamdudum istuc rediissem: sed si omnia deficerent, hoc quod nunc habeo, non deerit mihi. Ego minus existimo et Pontificatum et ejus membra quam credunt. Cupio enim liber esse, non publicus servus" (Ep. I. 17).
Just as he was in this bad humour, disgusted with his patron and the world, and in the most cynical of moods, a proposal reached him from Florence, which, as set forth to view by himself in communications to his friend Niccoli, is so dimly disclosed as to be capable of two interpretations: The Rev. William Shepherd in his Life of him understands his ambiguous terms as having reference to a professorship, the words of Mr. Shepherd being:
—"Piero Lamberteschi … offered him a situation,the nature of which is not precisely known, but which was probably that of public professor in one of the Italian Universities" (Life of Poggio Bracciolini, p. 138). Now I conceive, and shall attempt to prove that the proposal was not about a "situation," but to forge additional books to the hopelessly lost History of Tacitus.
Niccolo Niccoli seems to have been at the bottom of the business; at any rate, he appears to have advised his bosom friend to undertake the task; for Bracciolini says that he "thinks he will follow his advice, while writing to him from the London Palace of Cardinal Beaufort, in a letter dated the 22nd of February, 1422, respecting "a suggestion" and "an offer" made by his fellow- countryman, Piero Lamberteschi, who, he says, "will endeavour to procure for me in three years 500 gold sequins. If he will make it 600, I will at once close with his proposal. He holds forth sanguine hopes about several future profitable contingencies, which, I am inclined to believe, may probably be realized; yet it is more prudent to covenant for something certain than to depend on hope alone." "Placent mihi quae Pierus imaginatur, quaeque offert; et ego, ut puto, sequar consilium vestrum. Scribit mihi se daturum operam, ut habeam triennio quingentos aureos: fient sexcenti, et acquiescam. Proponit spem magnam plurium rerum, quam licet existimem futuram veram, tamen aliquid certum pacisci satius est, quam ex sola spe pendere" (Ep. I. 17).
Speaking further on in the letter about Lamberteschi, he says: "I like the occupation to which he has invited me, and hope I shall be able to produce something WORTH READING; but for this purpose, as I tell him in my letters, I require the retirement and leisure that are necessary for literary work." "Placet mihi occupatio, ad quam me hortatur, et spero me nonnihil effecturum DIGNUM LECTIONE; sed, ut ad eum scribo, ad haec est opus quiete et otio literarum."
II. The expression of his hope that he would "produce something worth reading," and the mention of his want, in order that he should accomplish what was required of him, "retirement and leisure for literary work," quite set at rest Mr. Shepherd's theory that the proposal had reference to a Professorship. In the first place, professors in those days did not collect their lectures and publish them for the behoof of those who had not the privilege of hearing them delivered. They did not give their addresses an elaborate form, nor introduce into them the novel views and profound and accurate thought with which Professors now dignify their vocation from chairs in Universities, especially those of Oxford and Cambridge, or places of public instruction, as the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, with its Professor Tyndall, or the Royal School of Mines and Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street, with its Professor Huxley. They could not then "produce something worth reading." In the second place they did not require the "retirement and leisure necessary for literary work"; they talked about what they knew in the most simple and artless manner; made no preparations beforehand; walked into a class room, and, book in hand, Greek or Roman classic, discoursed to their pupils about the meaning of this or that passage or the rendering of this or that word benefiting the juvenile class with the spontaneous harvest of their cultivated minds, and giving the opinions of others a great deal more freely than they gave their own: all that they said, too, was detached and trite; and if books are valuable, as consisting of perfectly combined parts, and new or extraordinary contents, the lectures of the fifteenth century professors would not have been worth the paper on which they were written. Bracciolini, then, would never, in the contemplation of turning a professor, have spoken of "producing something worth reading"; nor, for the discharge of professorial duties, would he speak of requiring "retirement and leisure for literary work." It is clear that Mr. Shepherd is altogether wrong in his conjecture.
And now as to mine. If the dim revelations concerned a plan about forging the Annals, then "something worth reading" Bracciolini certainly did produce; for the Annals is,—taking the circumstances under which it was composed into consideration— about one of the most wonderful literary creations that we have; on every page there is indication of the "labour limae,"—the filing and polishing that are the result of the "retirement and leisure necessary to literary work"; and, though not bearing a very striking resemblance to the History of Tacitus, of which it is intended to be the supplement, it was, nevertheless, contrived with so much artfulness that, for more than four hundred years, it has deceived the scholars of Europe: yes, indeed, the author
"Gave out such a seemingTo seal their eyes up,—close as oak,—They thought 'twas Tacitus."
The more the passages in these interesting letters are considered, the stronger becomes the impression that they are all about a scheme for forging the Annals of Tacitus. Even those which seem to give a colouring to Mr. Shepherd's view in reality favour mine.
A part of the original scheme appears to have been that Bracciolini was to go to Hungary: what for is not mentioned. It then becomes a matter of conjecture. Mine is, that, on account of the belief current in those days that singular treasures of ancient history were to be found more readily than elsewhere in barbarous countries, and that the more barbarous the country the greater the chance of recovering an ancient classic, so Bracciolini was to go, or feign that he had gone to Hungary, and then on returning give out that he had there found some of the lost books of the History of Tacitus. If this be not the right conjecture, it can barely be understood why Bracciolini should make a mystery about this visit. "If I undertake a journey to Hungary," he says, "it will be unknown to everybody but a few, and down the throats of these I shall cram all sorts of speeches, since I will pretend that I have come from here," that is, from England. "Si in Hungariam proficiscar, erit ignotum omnibus, praeter paucos; quin simulabo me huc venturum, et istos pascam verbis." (Ep. I. 18). This intention to keep the journey to Hungary a secret looks as if his going there were connected with the wrong act suggested, seeing that men usually resort to concealment when they commit a wrong act, and endeavour to lead people astray with respect to it (as Bracciolini showed an inclination to do) by misstatements and falsehoods: then Bracciolini knew well that the commission of a forgery would be immediately suspected were it bruited abroad that he had come from Hungary where he had found a long-lost classic because those were days when book-finders were in the habit of first forging works, and then visiting far distant lands to report on their return that they had there recovered MSS. which they themselves had written.
Another passage strengthens my view, though, at a first glance, it favours Mr. Shepherd's. After observing that his friend "knew well how he preferred liberty and literary leisure to the other things which the vast majority held in the highest estimation and made the objects of their ambition," Bracciolini proceeds thus: "And if I were to see that I should get that which our friend Picro expects, I would go not only to the end of Europe but as far as to the wilds of Tartary, especially as I should have the opportunity of paying attention to Greek literature, which it is my desire to devour with avidity, were it but to avoid those wretched translations, which so torment me that there is more pain in reading than pleasure in acquiring knowledge."—"Id primum scias volo, me libertatem et otium litterarum praeponere rebus caeteris, quae plures existimant permaximi, atque optant. Sique videro id me consecuturum, prout sperat Pierius noster, non solum ad Sarmatas, sed Scythas usque proficiscar, praesertim proposita facultate dandi operam Graecis litteris, quas avide cupio haurire, ut fugiam istas molestas translationes, quae ita me torquent, ut pluris sit molestiae in legendo, quam in discendo suavitatis." (Ep. I. 18.)
This is the passage that must have particularly induced Mr. Shepherd to think that what was offered to Bracciolini was a Professorship; and as Bracciolini spoke of the opportunity that would be afforded to him of studying Greek literature, that the Professorship was of Greek. But Mr. Shepherd ought not to have conjectured that the Professorship must have been in some Italian University; it is clear that if Bracciolini was to carry out the proposal of Lamberteschi, he was, from the original plan, to have gone to Hungary. The Professorship must, therefore, have been in Hungary. But in 1422 no professor was wanted in that country, because it had no university: Hungary then was, and remained a wilderness of unlettered barbarism for nearly half a century after, it not being until 1465, half a dozen years from the death of Bracciolini, that Matthias Corvinus established in Buda the first Hungarian University, filling it with valuable works which he got copied from rare manuscripts in the principal cities of Italy, especially Rome and Florence, and inviting to it men as learned as Bracciolini, not only from Italy, but also France and Germany. What Bracciolini really alludes to is not a professorship, but the money he was to get for his forgery,—the 500 or 600 gold sequins; and as money was then worth about twenty times more than it is now, it was a moderate fortune of ten or twelve thousand pounds; and when he should have such means at his disposal, he would have quite sufficient for his purpose; he could then forsake the clerical duties which were so onerous and distasteful to him, to devote himself in peace and comfort to his favourite study of Greek literature, with which he became specially captivated just at this period of his life from reading for the first time in the magnificent library of Cardinal Beaufort the works of the Greek fathers, above all, Chrysostom, whom he looked upon as the greatest of all writers; for writing to Niccoli from the London palace of Cardinal Beaufort in the summer of 1420, he speaks of "preferring Chrysostom to everybody else whom he had ever read,"—"Joannes Chrysostomus, quem omnibus, quos ego unquam legerim, praefero" (Ep. I. 7); and, on another occasion, in a letter to the same friend, again referring to Chrysostom, he bursts into the enthusiastic exclamation: "this man by a good shoulder, or more, overtops everybody":—"hic vir longe humero supereminet omnes" (Ep. I. 8). A still greater, nay, "the greatest reason for his desire of returning to Greek literature," he gives in a letter to Niccoli dated London, the 17th of July, 1420, that, in "skimming over Aristotle during the spring of that year, not for the purpose of studying him then, but reading and seeing what there was in each of his works,"—he had found that sort of "perusal not wholly unprofitable, as he had learnt something every day, superficial though it might be, from understanding Aristotle in his own language, when he found him in the words of translators either incomprehensible or nonsensical." "Ego jam tribus mensibus vaco Aristoteli, non tam discendi causa ad praesens, quam legendi, ac videndi, quid in quoque opere contineatur: nec est tamen omnino inutilis haec lectio; disco aliquid in diem, saltem superficie tenus, et haec est causa potissima, cur amor graecarum litterarum redierit, ut hunc virum quasi elinguem, et absurdum aliena lingua, cognoscam sua."
III. As Bracciolini gave his assent to the fabrication of additional books to the History of Tacitus, his friends Niccoli and Lamberteschi as well as himself were of opinion that his presence was required in Italy, in order that the three should take counsel together, and, discussing the matter in concert, deliberate fully what was best to be done: "nam maturius deliberare poterimus, quid sit agendum," he says in a letter addressed to Niccoli from London on the 5th of March, 1422; and as he left England for Italy in the summer, and did not begin his forgery till the autumn of the next year, he spent the interval of some eighteen, nineteen or twenty months in continually holding cabinet councils with his two friends, and secretly devising with them on what plan he could best execute the addition to the History of Tacitus; no doubt, he thought they had so cleverly arranged matters in providing against all mishaps that he never would be found out. "Veniam ad vos," he continues in the same letter; "et tunc propositis in unum conditionibus, discussisque in utramque partem rationibus, meliorem, ut spero, eligemus partem."
Bracciolini was, notwithstanding, undesirous of leaving England just yet, from keeping his eye fixed upon the main chance. There was the pleasant prospect before him of his living, which had such heavy duties attached to it, being exchanged for a sinecure worth £20 a year, "all," he said, "he coveted, and no more"; but it being uncertain when such good fortune would attend him, he knew not what to do,—whether, as things now stood, he should return to Italy, and lose all chance of getting the free benefice, or stay a little longer in England and wait the possible exchange. "Credo me inventurum pro hac beneficium liberum, et sine cura XX librarum: hoc si fieri poterit, satis est mihi, nec opto amplius; veruntamen nescio quando hoc inveniam; neque scio, an sit melius isto venire, prout res nunc se habent, an expectare paulum, quaerens an possem hanc facere permutationem" (Ep. I. 18). Three months passed without the exchange being effected, whereupon as time progressed, his hopes, like the courage of Bob Acres, "oozed out at his fingers' ends." Still he was unwilling to lose what had cost him a great deal of importunity, as well as much time and anxiety of mind by any fault on his part, such as being in too great a hurry over the matter; so he told his friend Niccoli when writing to him in June; as that "there was nothing else which detained him in England but the business of effecting the exchange of his benefice, which from the badness of the times was a much worse living than it was considered to be:" he also came to the definite determination that if in two months what he had been looking for turned up, he would make his arrangements immediately and be off to his two friends at home; and even if he got nothing, still he would start for Italy in August at the latest. "Ut alia epistola ad te scripsi, nihil aliud me hic tenet, nisi cura permutandi hoc beneficium, quod defectu temporum multo tenuius est, quam ferebatur. Nollem enim, id quod tanto et temporis impendio quaesivi, et animi sollicitudine, nunc amittere vitio festinandi. Si his duobus mensibus emerserit aliquid, quod cupio, concludam statim, atque ad vos veniam; sin autem nihil invenero, etiam veniam ad vos." (Ep. I. 22 in.)
Cardinal Beaufort had in the April of 1422 promised to get him a prebend for his church,—a simple, as distinguished from a dignitary prebend. If without a dean and chapter inducting him into a prebendal stall, which he did not want, he could go to Italy and there draw every year the stipend granted for the maintenance of a prebendary out of the estate of an English collegiate church, possibly in the diocese of Winchester, he would not have visited England in vain. But when he reminded the Cardinal of his promise, and claimed its performance, Beaufort receded from his position. "To trust the speeches of such persons," said Bracciolini, "is like holding a wolf by the ears," (quoting what the old Greeks used to say, [Greek: ton oton echein ton lukon] when they wanted to denote the awkward position of a man holding on to something when it was difficult for him to cling to it, and still more dangerous for him to let it go). From that moment Bracciolini ceased to place any further trust in Cardinal Beaufort, and turned with redoubled zest to the proposal of Lamberteschi as one on which he alone relied: "Quidam me duobus jam mensibus suspensum tenet promittens mihi daturum praebendam quandam pro hac ecclesia: nunc autem cum rem urgerem, et ad calcem cuperem pervenire, recessit a promissis suis. Credere verbis istorum est, ac si auribus lupum teneas. Tu vero da operam, et cum primum Petrus responderit, me de eo facias certiorem: nam hoc solum expecto" (Ep. I. 21). From this time his mind was made up: he would leap the Rubicon: he would go in for the forgery, and his friend must have confidence in him. So speaking of his powers for the great task which he meditated he proceeds thus interestingly in the letter to Niccoli bearing date London, the 10th of June, 1422: "I want you to have no distrust: give me the leisure and the time for 'writing that HISTORY'" (the nearest approach this to a disclosure of the grand secret so frequently hinted at by him in the London letters of the spring and summer of 1422), "and I will do something you will approve. My heart is in the work, though I question my powers." Then quoting the sentiment from Virgil about "labour overcoming everything," he proceeds with unabated interest: "I have not for four years devoted any attention to literature, nor read a single book that can be considered well- written,—as you may judge from these letters of mine which are not what they used to be; but I shall soon get back into my old manner. When I reflect onthe merits of the ancient writers of history, I recoil with fear from the undertaking" (mark that); "though when I consider what are the writers of the present day, I recover some confidence in the hope that if I strive with all my might, I shall be inferior to few of them." He then implores his friend to let him know the reply of Lamberteschi as soon as possible. "Nec dubites volo; si dabitur otium et tempus DESCRIBENDI GESTA ILLIUS, aliquid agam quod probabis. Cor bonum, adest mihi; nescio an vires aderint: tamen 'labor omnia vincit improbus.' Quatuor his annis nullam dedi operam studiis humanitatis, nec legi librum, quod ad eloquentiam spectaret; quod ex ipsis litteris meis potes conjicere. Non sunt enim quales esse consuevere; sed tamen brevi tempore redigar in priorem statum.Cum priores rerum scriptores considero, deterreor a scribendo; cum vero nostri temporis, nonnihil confido, sperans me paucis inferiorem futurum, si omnino nervos intendero. Tuum vero sit studium, ut quam primum certior fiam responsionis Petri" (Ep. I. 21).
IV. He did not remain in England long after this; soon after the midsummer of 1422 he left this country. His motive for taking this step may have been that he ended by giving up all hope of exchanging his laborious living for a sinecure free benefice, or of obtaining a permanent appointment to a prebend that was without any jurisdiction attached to it; or, what may be far more likely, he resolutely abandoned every object he had in view in England for the far brighter prospects that opened out before him at home if he undertook the forgery which had been proposed to him by Lamberteschi, and to which he had been invited by the promise of, in the first instance, a magnificent pecuniary reward, and afterwards the possibility of many rare advantages.
Only a fortnight after the last letter to Niccoli he addressed to him another, the last he wrote from London, on the 25th of June, 1422, couched in language which showed how deeply involved his Florentine friend was in the plot of the forgery: "If Lamberteschi would only place something certain before us, which we could adopt or approve," he wrote; and "How heartily I hope that Lamberteschi will do what would be so agreeable to us both." "Si Petrus certum quid responderit, quod sequi ant probare possimus"—"Quam maxime exopto, ut Petrus perficiat, quae vellemus" (Ep. I. 22).
From this day we hear no more of him in London. Sometime during the summer of 1422 he returned to Rome, and, following the advice of the Cardinal Archbishop of Pisa, went back to his old employment in Rome at the Secretariate, but now, it would appear, as the Principal Secretary to the Pope,—a post which he obtained with little or no intercession, as borne testimony to by himself: —"Ego effectus sum Secretarius Pontificis, et quidem nullis precibus, vel admodum paucis" (Ep. II. 2).
Here then was Bracciolini again in Rome, not then a city of saints and sacred things, but of scoffing priests and absolved sinners: we all know what Luther said on returning to Wittenberg, after his first visit to Rome: "everything is permitted there except to be an honest man." If that was true at the commencement of the sixteenth century, it was much more true at the commencement of the fifteenth.
Count Corniani, in his "Ages of Italian Literature," is of opinion that Bracciolini had been in Hungary (II. 76). If so, it must have been after he left England; he could not then have been so soon, as I have stated, in Rome: he was there, however, for a certainty, as some of his letters now extant show, in the earlier portion of the spring of the following year; even this is against his having been in Hungary, except on the ground that almost immediately after he had arrived there, he found that whatever it was that Lamberteschi had offered to him was neither practicable nor agreeable; therefore he relinquished it and accepted the office of Secretary in the Papal Court. Bracciolini, however, does not seem to have gone to Hungary; nor was there any necessity that he should have done so, if my theory be correct; for then, so far from Lamberteschi's offer being neither practicable nor agreeable, it was both so feasible and pleasant, that it was in order to accomplish it, he expressly accepted the Secretary's post in the Court of Rome. He could not have carried out the forgery had he remained in England, because he would not have had the necessary leisure, on account of the heavy duties attached to his cure; and we have seen how he could get neither a sinecure nor a simple prebend; but to be in the Secretariate of the Papacy was to be the holder of an office with little or nothing to do, which gave him ample leisure for literary pursuits. He, therefore, became reconciled to accepting the Papal Secretaryship; "it being the way with a wise man," he observed in a philosophic spirit, "to do the best he can under circumstances, and be satisfied." If by being Secretary to the Pope he saw he could procure what he wanted, which was "obtaining a support," stick to the Secretariate he would; accordingly, he staid in Rome, devoting himself to his books. "Parere temporis semper sapientis est habitum. Si videro me hac via consecuturum, quod cupio, hoc est aliquod sustentaculum, tum adhaeream: quiescens in studiis, hic manebo" (Ep. II. 2).
As if preparing for some great literary undertaking connected with antiquity, he wrote from Rome on the 15th of May, 1423, to his friend Niccoli to let him have without the least delay all his notes and extracts from the various books (and they not a few and miscellaneous) which he had read; here it may be observed that what Cortese, Bishop of Urbino, says of the Camaldolese General, Traversari, is strictly applicable to him:—"Such was his inexhaustible love of reading, he regretted a moment spent away from his books; and every day, when not engaged in writing, devoured the compositions of the ancient Greeks and Romans": ("Erat in hoc homine inexhaustus quidem legendi amor; nullum enim patiebatur esse vacuum tempus. Quotidie aut scribebat, aut aliquid ex Graecis Latinisque litteris mandabat"):—"Mittas ad me, rogo, singula commentariola mea, hoc est, excerpta illa ex variis libris, quos legi, quae sunt plurima, ac dispersa; collige simul omnia, oro te, et ad me quamprimum mittas" (Ep. II. 2).
Having, no doubt, obtained in due time the notes and extracts wanted, apparently in the autumn of 1423, he then set about the commencement of his immortal and wonderful forgery, or, as he styles it in the fabrication itself, his "condensed and inglorious drudgery,"—"nobis in arto et inglorius labor" (Annal. IV. 31); for in a letter written from Rome in the night of the 8th of October that year he makes a reflection about "beginnings of any kind being arduous and difficult," following up the remark with these striking words: that "what the ancients did pleasantly, quickly and easily was to him troublesome, tedious and burdensome"; a remark which he could not have made unless he was attempting something in the way of the ancients; unless, moreover, he was just setting about it; then he consoles himself by again repeating his favourite sage old saw from Virgil: that "hard work gets over everything":—"In quibusvis quoque rebus principia sunt ardua et difficilia; ut quod antiquioribus in officio sit jucundum, promptum ac leve, mihi sit molestum, tardum, onerosum. Sed 'labor omnia vincit improbus'" (Ep. II. 5).
A month after this significant declaration he was hard at work forging the Annals of Tacitus; for we find him earnestly plying for books that were indispensable for any one writing the history of the early Roman Emperors. In a letter to Niccoli dated Rome, the 6th of November, 1423, he begs his friend to do all he can to get him some map of Ptolemy's Geography; to bear it in mind in case one should happen to fall in his way; also not to forget Suetonius and the other historians, and, above all, Plutarch's Lives of Illustrious Characters: "Vellem aliquam Chartam Ptolemaei Geographiae, si fieri posset; in hoc cogita, si quid forte inciderit; ac etiam Suetonium, aliosque Historicos, et praesertim Plutarchi Viros Illustres non obliviscaris" (Ep. II. 7).
If it be said that Bracciolini wrote a History of Florence, and that these remarks which, unquestionably, refer to some "history" from the expression "describendi gesta illius," apply to that work, it must be borne in mind that he did not write that history until towards the close of his life, that is, more than thirty years after these letters which passed between him and Niccoli, for the events recorded in his History of Florence are carried down to as late as the year 1455; that that historical work is the only one he wrote under his own name; that it is no more written in imitation of the ancients, than any other of his acknowledged productions; and that even if it were, he would not have required for its composition such maps as Ptolemy's, nor such works as those of Suetonius and Plutarch. In fact, the most acute ingenuity cannot rescue Bracciolini from the charge that in October 1423 he, then resident in Rome, began to forge a work with the intention of palming it off upon the world as written by an ancient Roman: as I proceed I shall convincingly show that that ancient Roman was Tacitus, and that that work was the Annals.
I. Doubts on the authenticity of the Latin, but not the Greek Classics.—II. At the revival of letters Popes and Princes offered large rewards for the recovery of the ancient classics.—III. The labours of Bracciolini as a bookfinder.—IV. Belief put about by the professional bookfinders that MSS. were soonest found in obscure convents in barbarous lands.—V. How this reasoning throws the door open to fraud and forgery.—VI. The bands of bookfinders consisted of men of genius in every department of literature and science.—VII. Bracciolini endeavours to escape from forging the Annals by forging the whole lost History of Livy.—VIII. His Letter on the subject to Niccoli quoted, and examined.— IX. Failure of his attempt, and he proceeds with the forgery of the Annals.
I. When we thus see Bracciolini setting to work in this quiet, business-like manner to forge the Annals of Tacitus, as if it were a general, common-place occurrence, a grave suspicion enters the mind whether it was not a thing very ordinarily done in his day; if so, whether we may not have a wholesale fabrication of the Latin classics; which is very annoying to contemplate when we remember the number of works we shall have to reject as not having been written by ancient Romans but by modern Italians, of the fifteenth, and possibly the close of the fourteenth centuries. The suspicion becomes all the stronger with the fact before us that the literature of the ancient Romans was totally extinguished in Europe in the very opening centuries of the Christian aera; and that their language would have been also lost had it not been preserved till the age of Justinian (527-565) by the pleadings and writings of the leading lawyers; after which it is generally believed that it was continued to be preserved, along with the literature of the ancient Romans, in the buildings founded by the various monastic orders of Christians. Here again we are met by another equally vexing circumstance, it being excessively questionable whether monasteries ever really conserved, to any, even the least extent, the interests of human knowledge. Monks never had any love for learning; did not appreciate the volumes of antiquity; in fact, could not read them; for the Latin was not their Latin; and they are not likely to have preserved what they did not appreciate and could not read: the libraries they founded were for bibles, missals and prayer-books: the schools they established were for teaching children to read the Testament and prayer book, and to sing hymns and psalms, while the ancient manuscripts they transcribed were, at best, the hagiological productions of the Fathers of the Christian Church.
But even if the works of the ancient Romans were preserved by the monks in their convent libraries, that was only till the approach of the last quarter of the sixth century. Then came the dark period of the conquest of Italy by the last swarm of the northern barbarians from their native settlements in Pannonia: Italy continued under the iron yoke of the dominion of these illiterate Lombards till their final overthrow towards the commencement of the last quarter of the eighth century by the great conqueror, warrior, Christian and devoted admirer of learning, Charlemagne: during that period literature became entirely extinguished, for in all the vigour and savage freedom of their fresh and unworn barbarism these Pannonian dunces were as diligent for two whole centuries (568-774) in demolishing monasteries and destroying books as in levelling fortresses and ravaging cities. For six centuries after, a confused assemblage of different races of boors, Franks, Normans and Saracens, occupied Italy; they cared not a fig for knowledge; they did not know what a book was, for they did not know the alphabet, engaged as they were, like those kindred spirits in after ages, the Ioways, Mohicans and Ojibbeways, in perpetual wars and bloodshed: all this time the light of literature never once broke in upon the scene: at length traces of it were discerned in the revival of learning during the age of Petrarch and the Father of modern Italian prose, Boccaccio, in the middle of the fourteenth century. Thus for eight hundred years there was a moral eclipse of all that was excellent in human knowledge in Italy and the whole West of Europe.
Fortunately there was no such middle age of darkness in Greece: there the light of science and literature remained unextinguished: the knowledge of the works of antiquity was cultivated in the East with enthusiasm; and while we may be confident that we possess the works of all those high and gifted spirits who adorned that bright period which extends from Homer and Hesiod to Plato and Aristotle, and again the works of all those Greeks who flourished from the death of Alexander the Great to the death of Augustus Caesar, the brightest of whom were Menander, Theocritus, Polybius, Strabo, and a gorgeous array of philosophers, sophists and rhetoricians, we can be by no means sure that we have the real works of the Roman classics; there must even be the gravest doubt as to the probability; for, though during the close of the fourteenth century, throughout the fifteenth, and at the commencement of the sixteenth, books purporting to be of their writing were constantly being recovered, it was invariably under distressingly suspicious circumstances; exactly the Roman author that was wanted turned up; and always for a certainty that Roman author for whom the highest price had been offered; the monastery was rarely famous, seldom in Italy, but obscure and situated in a barbarous country; the discoverer, too, was not, as is generally supposed, an ignorant, unlettered monk or friar, who could not read what he found, and who could not, therefore be suspected of having forged what he stated he had discovered; it was invariably a most cultured scholar, nay, a man of the very highest literary attainments, an exquisitely accomplished writer, to boot; a "Grammaticus," forsooth, who possessed a masterly and critical knowledge of the Latin language.
II. The unlettered gloom in which Italy had been immersed for ages was effectually dissipated by the great number of learned and illustrious Greeks who took refuge in the West of Europe, in order to escape from Ottoman Power long before the fall of Constantinople. On account of their enlightenment, literature revived in Florence, Venice and Rome; it speedily spread from the Cities of the Great Merchants and of the Popes into the provincial and inferior towns; thus Italy was the first country in the West where good taste, enlightened views, and generous emulation in the sciences and the fine arts took the place of the ignorance, the avarice and the venality which for centuries had held sole sway in that civilized portion of the world. Princes and nobles vied with Popes and Cardinals in the restoration of letters; and now the best way for a man to advance himself was to show a desire for the promotion of letters; above all, for the discovery of manuscripts of the ancient classics, which, when long looked for, and not found, were usually,—from the too tempting reward, which was a fortune,—forged by some unscrupulous "Grammaticus," or writer of Latin.
III. At the commencement of the fifteenth century, a little band of men lived in Rome: some were Apostolic Secretaries; all were famous for their abilities; five were scholars endowed with sterling talents, Antonio Lusco Cincio de Rustici, Leonardo Bruni, and two others from Florence, Bracciolini, and Dominici, afterwards Cardinal Archbishop of Ragusa. (Pog. Vita p. 180 from Joannes Baptista Poggius in Orat. Card. Capranicae (Miscell. Ballutii Tom. 3.) They were all friends; and their delight was, like their masters, the Popes, to retire in summer from the heat of Rome into the cool air of the Campagna; there, after a frugal repast, they held discourse daily, like men of mind, on a variety of engaging topics: "sumus saepius una confabulantes variis de rebus," says Bracciolini in a letter to Francesco Marescalcho of Ferrara (Op. Pog. 307), and continues: "incidit inter nos sermo de viris doctis et eloquentibus." Thus
"Oft unwearied did they spend the nights,Till the Ledaean stars, so famed for love,Wondered at them from above—They spent them not in toys, or lust, or wine;But search of deep philosophy,Wit, eloquence, and poetry,Arts which they loved."
Of these men, the most extraordinary for superlative qualifications, and, apparently that inseparable companion of the highest order of genius, indefatigable energy, was Bracciolini. Muratori, in his "Annali d'Italia" (anno 1459) speaks of him as "letterato insigne di questi tempi," and, as leaving behind him when he died on the 30th of October, 1459, "molte opere e gran nome" (Vol. XIII. 481).
When Bracciolini first joined the Papal Court, Guarino of Verona, Aurispa and Filelfo were making continuous voyages to Greece in order to fetch home manuscripts of Greek authors yet unknown in Italy; at this time were found and first brought to the West of Europe the poems of Callimachus, Pindar, Oppian and Orpheus; the Commentaries of Aristarchus on the Iliad; the works of Plato, Proclus, Plotinus, Xenophon and Lucian; the Histories of Arrian, Cassius Dio, and Diodorus Siculus; the Geography of Strabo; Procopius and some of the Byzantine historians; Gregory of Nazianzen, Chrysostom, and other Greek Fathers of the Church. In emulation of these men Bracciolini and a band of bookfinders, assisted and rewarded by the wealth of Princes and Popes, went up and down the countries of Europe to find manuscripts of the ancient works of the Romans that were supposed to be lost; and it is generally believed that the republic of letters is more indebted to him than to anybody else of his manuscript finding age for the numerous books that were found, and which without such timely recovery we are given to understand, from the decaying state of the manuscript and the pernicious place where it was lighted on, would very soon, in almost every instance, have been irrecoverably lost.
When Bracciolini accompanied the Papal Court in the capacity of Secretary to the Council of Constance in 1414, he, one day, went with two friends, Cincio, the Roman gentleman and scholar of fortune, of the family de Rustici, and the eminent schoolman and finished writer Bartolommeo de Montepulciano to the monastery of St. Gall about twenty miles distant from Constance for the purpose of finding new manuscripts; his companions found Lactantius, "De Utroque Homine," Vitruvius on Architecture and the Grammar of Priscian, while he himself found, in addition to the Commentaries of Asconius Pedianus on eight of Cicero's Orations,—the three first books, and half of the fourth of the Argonauticon of Valerius Flaccus. On this discovery being communicated to Francesco Barbaro, the latter in his reply spoke of other discoveries of Bracciolini's, of some of which we have no account as to where they were found, nor when, except before 1414: Tertullian, Lucretius, Silius Italicus, Ammianus Marcelinus, Manilius (his unfinished poem on "Astronomy," clearly a forgery), Lucius Septimius Caper, Eutychius and Probus; and, adds Barbaro, "many others,"—"complures alios," among which Aulus Gellius may be included. All these were found not by Bracciolini alone, but always in the company of very remarkable characters, and more frequently than any other, Bartolommeo de Montepulciano, of whom nothing is known, except that he was a splendid scholar, and great bookfinder, or forger (the terms are synonymous), and that he resided in Rome in a pleasant villa situated near the Lateran Church (Pog. Op. p. 2).
In the oration which he delivered over the remains of his friend Niccoli (Op. 272) Bracciolini says that he found in French and German monasteries, besides Quintilian, Silius Italicus, and part of the poem of Lucretius, some orations of Cicero and Nonius Marcellus. In his Treatise "de Infelicitate Principum" (p. 394), and in one of his Letters (II. 7), he mentions having found Cicero's Orations along with Columella in the Monastery of Cluny in the Maconnois district of Burgundy; he gives the number of the Orations of Cicero, which were eight (Ep. IV. 2), and which are generally supposed to have been those for Caecina, Rubirius and Roscius, against Rullus and Lucius Piso, and those relating to the Agrarian Laws. He also found Cicero's two treatises De Legibus and De Finibus. In his Descriptio Ruinarum Urbis Romae he states that he found in the Monastery of Monte Casino, near Naples, Frontinus on the Aqueducts of Rome, and it was, as we know from one of his letters (III. 37), in July 1429. The Abbé Méhus, in the preface to his edition of the works of Traversari, adds that he found the eight books of the Mathematics of Firmicus, which is confirmed by himself (Ep. III. 37). While in England he recovered the poems of Julius Calpurnicus who wrote pastorals in the reign of the Emperor Carus; he also lighted in the monasteries on part of Petronius Arbiter (Ep. IV. 3), also part of Statius, and book XV. in Cologne in 1423 (ib.); six years after he found the following twelve plays of Plautus: Bacchides, Mostellaria, Mercator, Miles Gloriosus, Pseudolus, Poenulus, Persa, Rudens, Stichus, Trinummus and Truculentus. In fact, he was occupied nearly all his days, as long as he was in the vigour of life, in traversing Germany and other lands in search of ancient manuscripts, which he recovered in monasteries at different times and in different places; nor was he to be deterred from these toils, which have been likened to the labours of Hercules, by any stress of weather, length of journey or badness of roads.