“for [he explained], because of certain matterswhich fall out at present, it is necessary that we seethe testament made by the illustrious quondam dukethe first.... Thou must come to-morrow, Sunday,the twentieth of the present month, here, to ourpresence, and bring with thee the said original will....And we advise thee, that for the viewing of thesaid will we will deal with thee according as thouwouldst.”
“for [he explained], because of certain matterswhich fall out at present, it is necessary that we seethe testament made by the illustrious quondam dukethe first.... Thou must come to-morrow, Sunday,the twentieth of the present month, here, to ourpresence, and bring with thee the said original will....And we advise thee, that for the viewing of thesaid will we will deal with thee according as thouwouldst.”
“for [he explained], because of certain matterswhich fall out at present, it is necessary that we seethe testament made by the illustrious quondam dukethe first.... Thou must come to-morrow, Sunday,the twentieth of the present month, here, to ourpresence, and bring with thee the said original will....And we advise thee, that for the viewing of thesaid will we will deal with thee according as thouwouldst.”
“for [he explained], because of certain matters
which fall out at present, it is necessary that we see
the testament made by the illustrious quondam duke
the first.... Thou must come to-morrow, Sunday,
the twentieth of the present month, here, to our
presence, and bring with thee the said original will....
And we advise thee, that for the viewing of the
said will we will deal with thee according as thou
wouldst.”
Oliari and his father before him had been servants of the legal Dukes. Something in the tone of Sforza’s letter, its awkward mingling of the menace and the bribe, gave pause to the faithful notary. He had no mind to render up so sacred a deposit to the tender mercies of this blunt old soldier, who signed himself “Cichus” (Frank), and who was wholly without the dignity of the legitimate tyrants. Oliari wrote back and said that he believed a copy of the original will would be found to answer every purpose.
The so-called Duke of Milan was irate, and despatcheda curt letter to the suspicious and insubordinate lawyer, and by the same messenger he sent a line to the Castellan of Pavia, informing him that Oliari had not come, and bidding him despatch the notary at once,cum dicto testamento et non cum la copia. But neither the Duke nor the constable of the castle could induce Oliari to go back from his decision. “I really cannot come,” he replied to Sforza on February 24th, “for I have neither money nor horses.” Now Pavia is not so long a journey from Milan, but that, to serve a sovereign, a man might borrow his neighbour’s hackney. The same day, the 24th, the Duke replied in anger, both to Oliari and to the castellan, that he could not conceive why it should be so difficult to come at the said testament. “And forasmuch as you hold dear our favour, and under pain of rebellion, you must be here with us to-morrow with the said will, for if you dost not come we will make you repent it.” Oliari dared not hold out against so ominous a command. He made in secret five copies of the precious document, and then we may suppose that he took the original to Sforza, for no more letters require it from his custody. Thus the original will of Giangaleazzo Visconti was destroyed.
But while Sforza was stooping to a crime in order to protect himself against the rivalry of Orleans, as a fact that pretender was less dangerous than he had been before. However good his claim might be, his inefficiency was a terrible counterpoise. When,[85]atthe new year of 1454, Alfonso the Magnanimous wrote to Venice requesting the government to continue their relations with Orleans, the Venetians replied that Orleans was too far off and too unready. They were as desirous as Arragon to get rid of the usurper. A month before they strove to enlist Arragon in favour of their novel candidate, they had written to Savoy,[84]asking Duke Louis to join with them in requesting the Dauphin of France to invade Italy and suppress Francesco Sforza. They proposed that the Dauphin should conquer the Ticinese and Piacenza for himself, and the Duchy of Milan for the Duke of Orleans. In case the Duke was not minded to go to this expense and danger for a cousin’s sake, the Venetians let it be understood that any French prince would be agreeable to them upon the throne of Milan.
The House of Orleans had no more dangerous enemy than the royal house of France. Matters had greatly changed since, immediately after the liberation of Orleans, Charles VII. had seconded his claim to the Milanese. The reduction to insignificance of the great feudal houses in general, and particularly the reduction of Orleans, was now the policy of the French crown; and at that moment the policy of the already inscrutable Dauphin appears to have been the conquest of a kingdom which should comprise the Dauphiny, the Ticinese, Asti, the Piacentine angle ofthe Emilia, and the entire stretch of Liguria. To the restless contriver of a plan so bold the claims of Sforza and of Orleans came equally amiss; and, in secret, the chief enemy of either credulous pretender was the Dauphin.
Sforza, however, had little to fear from Orleans, and less from the French. In fact, in King Charles he found at this difficult period his ablest friend. The records of the Archives of Milan, from the year 1452 until the death of King Charles, abound in friendly letters, and are evidence of the cordial relations existing not only between the Duke of Milan and the King of France, but between the House of Sforza and the royal Governor of Asti. In 1459 the King besought Francesco to ask the hand of the little Princess Marie d’Orléans for his only son; but we may presume that Orleans would not consent to so much recognition of the usurper, for the negotiation came to nothing. Yet with the Court of France Francesco continued on terms of affectionate friendship and mutual respect.
In 1453 the Dauphin still had designs on Italy, and offered to the Venetian Signory his aid in Italy to combat Count Francesco.[86]It was arranged that heshould come with from eight to ten thousand men, dispossess Sforza, and conquer for himself a Duchyof Milan to extend from Adda to Ticino, from Paduabeyond Piacenza. Or, if the King and the Dauphin would guarantee the army, Venice professed herself willing to aid the Duke of Orleans in the same undertaking. But while these princes were arranging their future conquests, a spirit stronger than they was making these conquests impossible—a spirit which, a score of years ago, had begun to draw together Scotland and England, those ancient enemies, to the alarm of France; a spirit which had estranged Burgundy and Brittany from their English companions in so many battles, and which was leading them to the feet of the long-despised and outraged King of France; a spirit which now should reconcile Venice with Sforza, Florence with Milan, and make, for a brief moment of millennium, those immemorial foes at peace together; a spirit which awoke in these middle years of the fifteenth century—aroused Heaven knows whence or how—and strangely changed the world it breathed across: I have named the spirit of Nationality.
At Christmas-time in 1453 the Venetians spared neither pains nor prayers nor promise to induce the Dauphin to come and suppress Count Francesco Sforza. In April of the next year[89]they sent to tell him, as delicately as possible, that they had no further need of his services (a refined way of informing him that they would oppose him), since they had made peace with the man whom four months agothey had called the Common Enemy of his countrymen, and whom they had so many times endeavoured to assassinate. And probably the Dauphin was not sorry. For the spirit that animated these Italians inspired him also. Already it had touched his intelligent and sensitive spirit. Already, in 1447,[88]he had laughed for joy when the French lost Genoa, and had declared“le Roy se gouvernoit si mal qu’on ne pouvoit pis.”In the five years between 1445 and 1450 the Dauphin had passed from the friendship of Orleans to the friendship of Burgundy, and his ideal had changed. He raged to see the King prefer Italy to the north, and amuse himself with taking Genoa and securing Asti when he should have set to conquering Normandy. He said aloud that the true place for such a King as that was in such a Hermitage as the Duke of Savoy’s. He plotted to seize the government of affairs himself, and leave the King, in prosperous desuetude, to amuse himself with his Belle Agnès and his pleasures. As we know, the plot fell through, and the impatient Dauphin, a discomfited fugitive, was himself the one to seek a hermitage at the Court of Burgundy. There he spent five years of chafing exile and mortification while his father ruled France, not unsuccessfully, after his own fashion, pursuing shadows indeed in Italy, yet at home administering affairs and inventing a regular army with no less zeal and skill for this extraneous ambition. Louis was still at the Court of Philip of Burgundy when, in 1461, he heard the news of his father’s death. Andthe prince who, of all others, should do most for the reintegration of his country ascended the throne of France.[87]
As we know, the law of historic necessity required that the Dauphin should renounce his ambition of a North Italian state—he had, in fact, already renounced it; that he should abandon his early visions and his early friends, and adopt for his counsellors the very men who once had ruined him. Henceforth he must bend the whole strength of his spirit to the furthering of that policy which he had so long, and at so great a sacrifice, resisted and attempted to destroy. The interests of the time required that France should forego all ambitions foreign to herself in order to consolidate herself; that she should sacrifice the south in order to insure the north; that she should also sacrifice the aristocracy to the people; and Louis XI., who, as a prince, had paid so dear for his adherence to the rights of the nobles, became the monarch who more than any other was governed by men of low and base condition—who more than any other oppressed and resisted the pride of feudalism. Those who had been his friends became his enemies; those likewise who had been his enemies became his friends. Francesco Sforza, from whom he had been so eager to take his duchy, became the one man alive whom he admired and respected. Yes, this successful captain of adventure, who for years had prevented him in Milan, in Naples, and in Genoa, who once hadbeen the chief stumbling-block in the path of the Dauphin, became the corner-stone of the policy of the King. Like Catherine de’ Medici, like Rodrigo Borgia, like most unscrupulous rulers, there was something oddly magnanimous in the moral indifference of Louis IX. Sforza never suffered for his enmity of yore. The new King of France was a being as destitute of rancour as devoid of gratitude.
With Savoy, Orleans, Dunois, and Anjou the new king was ill-disposed to treat. He had learned the secret of their intrigues and their ambitions. On May 10, 1463, he wrote to Sforza that he was content to come to an understanding with Milan, if Milan would utterly disavow Savoy. This conspirator, versed since boyhood in all the dismal ins and outs of treachery, was too well aware of the tricks of his confederates.[90]It still might be possible that his enemies were honest. They at least were the only people he could trust; and more than any other he confided in Francesco Sforza. In December, 1463, he made to thede factoDuke of Milan the significant cession of the French claim to Genoa.[91]He also arranged for the cession of Savona. Negotiations were even begun for yielding Asti to Francesco Sforza; but the inhabitants declared that they would stand by the house of Orleans.
At first the cousins of the King could not believe that he had actually abandoned them—he who had begun his career as the pupil of Dunois, and had suffered so long as the champion of the nobles. So late as October 10, 1465, the descendants of Valentine Visconti sent a very secret embassy to Venice[92]to propose to the Ten a league between their government and the Duke of Orleans, the Count of Angoulême, and the Duke of Brittany, for the purpose of ousting the usurper, Count Francesco, and delivering the Duchy of Milan to Charles of Orleans. This league, which could not be confirmed by the Pope, a political adversary, might, it was suggested, be headed by the King of France. Probably the Venetians were better informed as to the real intentions of Louis XI. Certainly they knew that it was too late or too early to dream of dislodging the Sforzas from Milan. They replied that they loved the house of France, but that peace also was dear to them: they begged to be excused from attacking Count Francesco.
After this for many years the house of Orleans ceased to struggle. Before the year was out Charles of Orleans was dead, and the French pretender to the crown of Milan was only an infant, three years old. Before the child was six Dunois was also dead. Dunois—who had not suffered the children of his adoptive mother to be cheated of their inheritance in Asti—would, had he lived, have instructed his nephew in the details of his claim to Milan. But Louis II. of Orleans, born in his father’s seventy-second year, was naturally doomed to lose in infancy his father’s contemporaries.As the child grew up every link was severed that might have bound him to the past, and he knew little or nothing of the pretensions of his house. His mother, who had a romantic worship for the memory of Valentine Visconti, related to her son many a legend of the quasi-royal power which during the last century his ancestors possessed. But that supremacy seemed at an end for ever. In France, in Italy, the star of Orleans suffered a long eclipse. By his own experience in rebellion Louis XI. was aware how dangerous to the Crown and how disastrous to the kingdom was the power of the great feudal houses. Alençon and Armagnac and many another he diminished by confiscation and captivity; Dunois, Bourbon, Saint-Vallier, Sancerre, he attached to the Crown by royal marriages. Kinship in subjection, independence in imprisonment: these were the two alternatives presented by the King to the nobles of France. Among the most unfortunate of those who accepted the former gift was the young Louis d’Orléans. Louis XI. had decided that with this young man the house of Orleans should end; and when its representative was eleven years of age, the King married him to Jeanne of France, a gentle girl, deformed, incapable of offspring, and so ugly that when she was brought to court for her wedding the king himself exclaimed:Je ne la croyais pas si laide. To this bride the young duke was married in 1473. “They will have no expense with a nursery,” wrote the malicious King to Dammartin:ils n’auraient guères à besoigner et nourrir les enfans qui viendraient du dit mariage: mais toutefois se feroit-il.
Meanwhile the six sons of Sforza had grown to manhood; and the eldest ruled in Milan, accepted, by the mere fact of his unchallenged succession, as the lawful inheritor of his father’s duchy.
When Louis II. of Orleans had reached the age of twenty he was the best archer, the most dexterous horseman, the most adroit and brilliant man-at-arms about the Court of France. He was handsome, fond of the arts, and well instructed. He had an engaging manner, gentle, gracious, and benign. A brave and eager cavalier, he was ready for adventures; but a strong hand kept him down, a hand whose cruel restraint was never lifted from that audacious brow. Suddenly the pressure ceased: the hand was gone; on August 30, 1483, King Louis died.
He was succeeded by a child of fourteen, an ugly, ignorant youth, who had grown up neglected in the castle of Amboise, far from the Court, alone with his gentle forsaken mother, Charlotte of Savoy, who had taught him the only thing she knew, the plots of innumerable romances of chivalry. For Louis XI., partly afraid of injuring the delicate constitution of his only heir, and partly remembering his own dangerous and rebellious childhood, denied any solid education to his son. He never saw the boy, leaving him for years at a time to grow up as best he might alone with his mother at Amboise. “Let the body grow strong first,” said the King; “the mind will look to itself.” And, according to tradition, the sole foodthat he provided for the eager mind of his son was one single Latin maxim:Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare. This was all the Latin that was taught to Charles VIII., and on this solitary morsel of classic attainment he was never known to act. Louis XI., for all his subtlety, had forgotten that by simply withholding one sort of education you cannot insured vacuity. The child at Amboise knew nothing of history, nothing of geography, nothing of the classics. But his mind was stuffed with the deeds of Roland and Ogier, and the beauty ofLa belle dame sans merci. Suddenly one summer day, unwonted messengers knocked at the gates of Amboise; they fetched the child away to see an old, misshapen, suspicious man, whom he did not know—who was his father. The next day Charles VIII. was king of France under the regency of his married sister, Anne de Bourbon. Madame Anne inherited her father’s dislike and distrust of Orleans; but her sister was his wife and adored him, and her brother, the king, admired him. She did her best to repress Orleans in France; but her hand, though firm, had not the solidity of her father’s. Orleans grew and expanded.
Just at this moment Venice was in sore distress. Almost every power in Italy was against her, and she turned for help to France. On January 16, 1484, she sent Antonio Loredan to Charles VIII., complaining of the aggressions of Naples, Milan, and Ferrara, and desiring a resumption of the Franco-Venetian league of Louis XI. That league had been a very tame and passive piece of policy; the Venetians hoped a bolder favour from a younger king. Loredan was bidden toinsist upon the suggestion that the kingdom of Naples occupied by Ferdinand of Arragon, belonged in fact to France.[95]“Nor content with that,” run the instructions of the Senate, “this king it was who instigated Lodovico Sforza to the usurpation of Milan.” Lodovico il Moro,[94]the fourth son of Count Francesco Sforza, had, as a matter of fact, usurped the position of his nephew in 1481, and, though nominally regent, conducted himself as Duke of Milan. But this intrusion was not the seizure which now the Venetians meant to blame. They wished to suggest, as the lawful claimant, not the young son of Galeazzo Sforza, but the Duke of Orleans.
“Express to the Duke of Orleans in secret our desire for his exaltation [run the instructions given to Loredan], and explain to him how good is the opportunity for him to recover the Duchy of Milan, which belongs to him by right; and how his claim would be favoured by the differences and dissidences at present existing between ourselves and Milan, as also by the discontent of the Milanese with their tyrants. Inform the Duke that Lodovico Sforza aspires to seize the sovereignty for himself, amid the murmurs of his people, and that he will certainly massacre all whouphold the claim of the Duchess Bona. Inflame and excite as best you can the Duke of Orleans to pursue this enterprise, ... and if the French should choose to make good their claim to Naples as against the tyrant Ferdinand, they could not find a better time than now.”[93]
This is the programme of the great invasions of 1494 and 1500; but the times were not yet ripe. On February 4th the Ten despatched a second missive to the Duke of Orleans,[96]instigating him to the speedy conquest of Milan, and offering him the entire Venetian army for this service. The young Duke appears to have taken these proposals very seriously, and the project created some disturbance and quarrelling at Court. But the Venetians were incapable of any sustained policy in foreign affairs; to serve Venice in the way that at the moment appeared most advantageous was their only aim, and thus their attitude was one of constant unrest. In August they made peace with Naples and Milan, and sent word to Orleans that they were glad to hear that all disunion was at an end between him and the King. The same thing had happened in Italy. Peace had set in under the happiest auspices, and a fraternal affection united the King of Naples and the Regent of Milan with the Venetian Senate.
So ended the project for a French succession. Louis of Orleans, thwarted of his foreign ambition, strove for greatness at home, and contested the regency withAnne of Bourbon. The civil war, the flight into Brittany, the pretensions of Louis to the hand of his beautiful cousin (the heiress to that duchy), the defeat of the Orleanist troops at Saint-Aubin on July 28, 1488, and the three years’ captivity of the Duke, are matters of common knowledge. But as Charles VIII. grew out of the tutelage of his sister, more and more he grew to favour his imprisoned cousin. There was little to fear from him now that the King was a major, and Anne of Brittany the Queen of France. In 1491 the Duke was released; and when in 1494 Charles at the head of his troops invaded Italy, Louis of Orleans preceded him across the mountains, chief in command, master of the fleet, destined to drive the Neapolitans from Genoa, and thence to lead the fleet of France into the port of Naples.
The invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. appeared, even to contemporaries, a miracle. The young King, ill advised, without generals, without money, with the impromptu army of a moment’s whim, traversed hostile Italy as glorious as Charlemagne. Charlemagne, in fact, was the true leader of his forces: for that glorious phantom marched before him, filling with dread the hearts of the enemy, and blinding them to the actual penury of the invader. With the events of that romantic campaign we have no business at this moment, for, notwithstanding his commission to lead the fleet to Naples, the Duke of Orleans did not go south of Lombardy. While Orleans wasgaining the battle of Rapallo, suddenly the King arrived at Asti. It was Sept. 9th, a malarious season. Across the wide plain, the marshy fields of Lombardy, Orleans galloped, fresh from victory, to a council with the King. He had scarcely arrived at Asti when Charles fell ill of the small-pox. The attack was slight, and within a fortnight he recovered. But the very day the King began to mend, Orleans sickened of a quartan ague, and when his cousin was well again and ready, on Oct. 6th, to set out for Naples, Orleans was still unfit to take the road. He sent his company south with the royal troops, and with a handful of squires and servants remained behind in his hereditary county of Asti, among the subjects who had loved his father, and who had served himself, far-off, unseen, through years of peril and intrigue, with as devoted and chivalrous a spirit of loyalty as ever the highlanders of Jacobite Scotland dedicated to an absent Stuart.
Sforza and Orleans were now the nearest neighbours, bound to each other by their interest in the King. Fate has seldom brought about more ironic complication. When Lodovico Sforza, out of revenge and anger towards King Ferdinand, had revived the French claim to Naples, and had instigated Charles to enter Italy, he had not foreseen the accident that left the Duke of Orleans within a league or two of Milan. Charles VIII. entered Italy as the friend and guest of Lodovico il Moro, the Regent of Milan. To the external and uninitiated world the French claim to the duchy appeared about as actual as the claim of the English kings to France. Lodovico il Moro,familiar with the France of Louis XI., knew that the claims of Orleans were not likely to be countenanced by the throne.
The present is never clear to us. Its Archives, its Secreta, are not given over to our perusal. Lodovico il Moro was probably uninstructed in that secret policy of the Venetian Senate which, in 1483, had so strongly urged the half-forgotten rights of Orleans. But we, familiar with those silent manuscripts, are not surprised to find that no sooner had the King gone south than Venice and Florence began to interfere with Orleans. The very day the King left Asti,[97]a secret messenger from Piero de’ Medici entered the city. His errand was to Orleans. In their desire to stop the progress of Charles VIII., and in their hatred of Lodovico who had invoked the stranger, the Italian princes proposed to offer Milan to the French in place of Naples. Orleans himself suggested, unknown to his chivalrous young cousin, that the King would be satisfied if Ferdinand would pay him homage for Naples, and, besides a war indemnity, a yearly pension such as the kings of France pay to England. For himself, and as a just fine on Lodovico, he intimated that the Duchy of Milan might be divided between the houses of Orleans and Sforza. But as time went on, and the arms of France were everywhere successful, he grew bolder in his demands, and “Milan for the heir of the Visconti” was his cry.
But Charles, ignorant of the intrigues of Orleansand Florence, of Venice and of Sforza (who also for his private ends wished the King to keep this side the Apennines), crossed the southern range as he had crossed the Alps, and by the new year he was in Rome. Then, afraid of the French success, the Italians began to draw back from their conspiracy with Orleans. They had wished the French to take Milan instead of Naples, but Milan as well as Naples was too much.
When the French had entered Italy, Orleans had had no legal rival to his claim, unless, indeed, the Emperor be called his rival. To the people of Lombardy, oppressed by taxes, hating their tyrant, he appeared as the rightful heir, the last of the Visconti. Round the history of a past not yet remote there had grown a mist through which all things appeared of vague, heroic, and mysterious proportions, of which the King Arthur, the legendary glory, was the first duke—“Saint Giangaleazzo,” as one of the brothers of Pavia called him in the presence of Commines. “This saint of yours,” cried the amused historian, “was a great and wicked, though most honourable, tyrant.” “That may be,” said the brother; “we call him saint because he did good to our order.”
This was also the feeling of the Milanese, for whom Giangaleazzo had invented security and peace, for whom he had conquered immense possessions. They forgot his sins, his crimes, and the first duke became the hero of the place. To be the last descendant ofthis man seemed in itself a claim to inherit his possessions, to sit in his place, to expel the usurper. While this was their feeling, in October the usurper died.
Giangaleazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan, a youth of five-and-twenty, kept in prison by his uncle, the Regent Lodovico, died no less suspiciously than the little princes in the Tower. He left behind him a son four years old, his legitimate successor. But, with ominous prevision, a year before this time, Lodovico the regent had negotiated with the Emperor to obtain the reversion of the duchy. He had admitted that his father, his brother, his nephew were no more than illegal usurpers: moreover they had prejudiced the rights of the empire by receiving their titles only from the people. Thus the infant son of Giangaleazzo was the son, not merely of a usurper, but of a man who had forfeited whatever rights he originally had. Conceding this, Lodovico besought the Emperor, of his free grace and bounty, to bestow the duchy on himself and his descendants, even as once before an emperor had bestowed Milan upon a man who had no legal claim—namely, on Giangaleazzo Visconti. Maximilian consented, and on Sept. 5, 1494, the Imperial letters of promise[98]were despatchedfrom Antwerp, letters for which the Regent paid the sum of 100,000 ducats.
This document, kept in the deepest privacy, can have arrived in Milan but a few days before Giangaleazzo died. Every one believed that the young man had died of poison. It was a piteous thing. But the son of the murdered man was only four years old; and the French were in Lombardy—the guests of Lodovico. “To be short,” says Commines, “Lodovico had himself declared Duke of Milan, and that, as I think, was his only end in bringing us across the mountains.” Terrorised by the presence of the French, the people hailed the Regent as their duke, “and cryingDuca! Duca!” (wrote Corio), “and having robed him in the ducal mantle, they set him on horseback, and he rode to the temple, the men of his faction proclaiming him the while, and they set the joy-bells ringing, while all this time the dead body of Giangaleazzo was lying still unburied in the great cathedral.”
Conscious of the secret diploma in his pocket, Lodovico could enjoy the pleasure of this ceremony with a feeling of security. Yet his crown did not sit quite smoothly on his brows. Orleans in Asti was assuming an intolerable air of patronage. And behind that thin row of partisans shouting with their hired voices, “Duca! Duca!” there was a sullen, silent crowd. Those, and the rest of Italy, believed that Lodovico had poisoned the father in order to usurp the inheritance of the child, Francesco. Of the three pretenders, by far the most popular was the unconscious infant, who bore so quaintly in his mother’sarms the beloved and redoubtable name of his grandfather, the great condottiere. “Nearly all the Milanese,” wrote Commines, “would have revolted to the King had he only followed Trivulzio’s advice and set up the arms of the child-duke.” But Charles refused to injure the claims of his cousin of Orleans.
Meanwhile the relations between the French and Lodovico were growing difficult and strained. The presence of Orleans in Asti, the miraculous success of Charles, inspired the Duke of Milan with the bitterest regret that ever he had called his allies across the mountains. He had used them as a weapon, and now their use had passed. When, on Feb. 27, 1495, he heard the news that the French had entered Naples, he simulated every sign of joy. But while the bells were still ringing in the steeples, he drew aside the Venetian envoy. “I have had bad news,” he whispered. “Naples is lost. Let us form a league against the common enemy.”
This was in the end of February. During the next month there was much secret business in the diplomatic world. Ever since the entry of the French into Rome the great powers had looked unkindly on the triumph of Charles VIII. The Emperor beheld with dismay the alliance of Ghibelline Milan and the Ghibelline Colonna with the King of France. The Pope believed with reason that France, the Colonna, and the Savelli might depose a pontiff so unpopular as Alexander VI. Ferdinand and Isabella declared that the intention of Charles was nothing less than to make himself the king of Italy and then proceed to conquer Spain. So likely did it seem that this ungainly,limping, ill-instructed youth might justify the name he had assumed—Carolus Octavus, Secundus Magnus.
At Venice in the dead of the night the secret council used to meet. There, with the Venetian Senate, the ambassadors of Germany, Castile and Arragon, and Milan conferred together. They were negotiating a league to expel the French from Italy. On March 31st, while Charles was still shut in the Neapolitan trap, the quintuple alliance was proclaimed. The last name among the allies was the name of the man who had called Charles into Italy, now given for the first time among his equals his new dignity of Duke of Milan. Lodovico hastened to legalize this official recognition. In May the Imperial privilege, formally promised in the preceding autumn, arrived at Milan. In presence of the Imperial envoys the privilege was read aloud at Lodovico’s solemn coronation.
Lodovico had sprung a disagreeable surprise upon the Duke of Orleans, for his title, derived directly from Maximilian, was now as good as that of Giangaleazzo Visconti himself. To conquer Milan by arms, to force the Emperor into revoking the privilege of 1495, to induce him to grant a new one confirming the Visconti succession—this was the only course that remained to Orleans.
Secret as the Council had been at Venice, it had not escaped the notice of Commines, who wrote in March to Orleans bidding him look to the walls ofAsti, and sent a messenger to Bourbon in France bidding him despatch a reinforcement to the scanty force of Orleans. The young Duke at Asti was not sorry to receive the message. He had now been six months in Lombardy; he had done nothing; and he was eager to come to battle with Lodovico. To all the French, by this time, Il Moro appeared a traitor and a secret poisoner. To Louis of Orleans he appeared all this and also the usurper of his inheritance.
Great were the pomp and beauty of Milan in the year 1495, humbled as yet by no centuries of foreign servitude, ruined by no battles and untouched by time. Wonderful in the fresh whiteness of its stately cathedral; delicate with the unblurred beauty of the new frescoes by Lionardo; rich with statuary, broken now and lost for ever; gay with the clear fine moulding of its rose-red palaces, Milan in the rich plain was a fountain of wealth to its possessor. When Orleans beheld this earthly paradise of the Renaissance, his claim to Milan, which had been at first but a shadowy pretension, took certainty and substance in his mind. And as the attention of the young man was drawn to his Visconti ancestors, and to the marriage of his grandfather with the daughter of the Duke of Milan, he and his counsellors began to reconstruct the half-forgotten title that he had to Milan.
No one was very clear as to the point. The ducal secretaries found themselves compelled to suppose, to invent. Nicole Gilles, the chief of them, declared that Filippo Maria Visconti had married MadameBonne, daughter of King John of France (a lady who had she existed, would have been a good forty years older than her husband), by whom he had two girls, Valentine, who married the Duke of Orleans, and Bonne, who married the lord of Montauban in Brittany. Besides these he had a bastard child, Bianca Maria, the wife of Sforza.
This is perhaps the clearest of these singular genealogiespour rire. Louis was glad to escape from their confusion and bewilderment to the plain issues of the field of battle. There seemed a good chance for him. Lodovico was so hated by his subjects[99]that they would welcome almost any change. Almost at the same moment that Piacenza offered herself to King Charles if he would undertake to support the child Francesco, the cities of Milan, Pavia, and Novara were secretly practising with Orleans, and Commines declares he would have been received in Milan with greater rejoicings than in his town of Blois.
On April 17th Lodovico il Moro insolently summoned Orleans to quit Asti and cross the Alps again with all his men. Thanks to the warning of Commines, Orleans already had fortified the town.
“This place,” he replied,[100]“and its dependent castles are a part of my inheritance, and to put them in other hands, and to go away and leave my ownpossessions, is a thing that I never meant to do. Tell your master,” he added to the messenger, “that he will find me ready for combat, either waiting for him here or going forth to meet him on the field of battle. I have received a commission from the King, and it is my intention to fulfil it.”
Unfortunately, the real commission that Orleans had received from his cousin was to keep quiet and on no account to break the peace (for the league was defensive, and did not menace the royal troops if they retired without offence) until Charles and his diminished army had arrived at Asti. They would be in imminent peril if any rash act of Orleans should let loose upon them, amid the bewildering passes of the mountains, the eager concourse of their vigilant enemies. But Orleans did not remember this. He was burning for personal conflict with his rival, indignant at his treachery, and persuaded that he could easily secure the whole of Lombardy to France. Thrice in April he wrote to Bourbon entreating succour. “Only send me the reinforcements at once, and I think I shall do the King a service that men will talk of many a year.” The forces came; and Orleans saw himself the master of 5,000 foot, 100 archers, 1,300men-at-armsmen-at-armsor thereabouts, and two fine pieces of artillery.[101]He was aware that Lodovico was so out-at-elbows that he could not pay his army. He knew the discontent of Lombardy. He felt himself so much older and wiser than the Kingthat he found it hard to obey his commands. His secret practice with the nobles of the Lombard cities informed him that all was ripe for a sudden stroke. On the last night of May, in the safety of the dark, twenty men-at-arms under Jean de Louvain rode out from Asti across the Lombard plain, until at daybreak on June 1st they reached the gate of San Stefano at Novara. The gate was opened to them by the factors of the Opicini, two nobles of the place; the citizens ran out to meet the French; the handful of Sforzesco troops within the town barred themselves in the citadel. By June 13th, Orleans, with the flower
No sooner was he there than, first Pavia, then Milan, offered to receive him. He ought to have gone at once, before the armies of his enemies could encircle him in Novara. But his whole soul was invaded by a deep distrust of the Italians. It seemed safer to temporise until the royal troops came up. Long before these could possibly arrive, on June 22nd, the Venetians protected Milan with 1,000 Grecian stradiots, 2,000 foot, 1,000 cuirassiers.[102]It was now impossible to take Milan, which a little boldness might easily have gained. It was impossible even to evacuate Novara. And when, after many difficulties heroically overcome, the little army of Charles arrived in Asti on July 27th, sorely in need of rest and of refreshment, a new and arduous task awaited it; for Orleans and his soldiers were perishing of hunger in besieged Novara.
X.
Commines has set dramatically before us the division between the army and the council of the King. He himself warmly espoused the cause of the army, which frankly declared a battle impossible against such overwhelming odds: unless reinforcements arrived from Switzerland, Orleans must be released by composition from Novara. But the council insisted on an immediate engagement. The soldiers commonly said that Orleans had promised Briçonnet an income of 10,000 crowns for his son, if Milan should still be gained and the siege of Novara raised. The Swiss did not come; the army was too small. In September there began to be a serious talk of peace. On the 26th of that month, Orleans and his army were released by composition from Novara. Over 2,000 of them had died of hunger, and many fell by the roadside from sheer weakness and died there as they lay. (Commines found fifty of them dying in a garden, and saved their lives by a timely mess of pottage.) Most of those who lived to reach the camp perished of the dangerous abundance. More than three hundred of their wasted corpses were cast upon the dunghills of Vercelli.
This was a heavy price to pay for one man’s disobedient ambition. All the harder did it seem to buy nothing with so great expense. There were many who were still unwilling for peace. Orleans had endeared himself to his troops by his conduct during the hunger of Novara, where he had fared and fasted like any common man-at-arms, setting asidethe ducal mess for the use of the sick in hospital. His mess-fellows were willing still to die for him. By an ironic turn of fate, on the very day on which the army evacuated Novara, 20,000 Swiss came to the relief of the king. With such a reinforcement as this, cried Orleans, Ligny, D’Amboise and their men, Charles might not only conquer Milan, but make himself master of the whole of Italy. But the negotiations for peace already were begun; Novara was lost; the French soldiers were few and much enfeebled; and it was rumoured that the Swiss meant no less than to capture King Charles with all his nobles, carry them off into the impregnable fastness of the Alps, and then exact a fabulous ransom for their liberty.
The King thought it best to dismiss at once these dangerous allies, and take his homesick soldiers back to France. On Oct. 10th peace was concluded. The king promised—on condition that Lodovico Sforza renounced all claim to Asti, made no obstacle to the relief of the French in Naples, and paid to Orleans a war indemnity of 50,000 ducats—not to sustain his cousin’s right to Milan. Orleans was enraged and disappointed. In secret he negotiated for the support of the Swiss captains, and with these and with 800 of his men-at-arms he meant to march from Vercelli upon Milan. But the night before he was to leave, when all was ready, suddenly he demanded the consent of the King. Charles refused to sanction this breach of the peace, and bade his cousin join the army in marching back to France. By Nov. 7th Orleans, none the richer for his endeavours, was with the King at Lyons.
A little more than a year after this the King would gladly have sent his cousin of Orleans to conquer Milan: it was the Duke who made excuses and would not go. For soon after the French returned to France, the Dauphin died. Charles, who had inherited that terrible distrust of his own children from which he had suffered in his father, did not greatly mourn, or so at least Commines assures us. But if the quickness of a little child of three—his own son—had given him concern, much more did he dread his new heir, the Duke of Orleans. The queen, bewailing the loss of her child, had fallen into a lamentable melancholy, and Charles, with an absurd idea of cheering the poor mother, ordered a masque of gentlemen to dance before her. Orleans was among them, and he danced to such purpose, with such lightness of heart and heel, such buoyancy and gladness, that the sorrowing queen was seriously offended; and Charles himself determined, if possible, to send his cheerful heir a little further from the throne.
An opportunity soon offered. Florence, faithful against all the world to France, sent to the King at Amboise, asking him to come and uproot the Sforza out of Milan. She offered to furnish 800 men-at-arms and 5,000 footmen at her own cost. The cardinal of St. Peter in Vinculis, the Orsini, Bentivoglio of Bologna, Este of Ferrara, Gonzaga of Mantua, all had promised to hire their forces to the King. Genoa was to be conquered by Trivulzio while Orleans marched on Milan. The plan of campaign was settled, the troops were all drawn up, Trivulzio had already entered Italy with 6,000 infantry and800 men-at-arms, when, on the very night of his departure, Orleans suddenly abandoned his post. On his own private quarrel, he declared, he could not and he would not go; as the King’s lieutenant, and at his express command, he was ready to depart—not otherwise. “I would never force him to the wars against his will,” exclaimed Charles, and, though for many days the Florentine ambassadors besought him to exercise the authority of the throne, he refused to interfere with Orleans. “Thus was the voyage dashed,” relates Commines, “spite of great charges and all our friends in a readiness. And this was done to the King’s great grief, for Milan being once won, Naples would have yielded of itself.”
What, then, had happened to change the mind of Orleans—Orleans, disobedient at Novara, and disobedient again to-day for so opposite a reason? “He shunned this enterprise,” continues our historian, “because he saw the King ill-disposed of his body, whose heir he should be if he died.” “He would not go,” relates Guicciardini, “for he saw that the King was ill, and to himself belonged the succession of the crown.”
Just a year after this, on the morning of Palm Sunday (April 8, 1498), Louis of Orleans, fallen into a sort of undetermined half-disgrace, was standing at a window in his house at Blois, when he saw in the street some soldiers of the royal guard, running quickly. “God save the King!” they cried;“Vive le roi Louis XII.!”This was the first King Louis heard of the sudden death of his cousin. The day before, Charles VIII. had fallen down, suddenly stricken todeath, as he and his wife were watching a game of tennis from the gallery at Amboise.
The French claimant to Milan was now the King of France. From this moment the pretensions of Orleans became a factor in European history. The plans of the first Duke of Milan went so grievously astray, that, instead of France and Germany each holding the other in check, for half a century their armies occupied the soil of Lombardy, nor, when they withdrew, was the land left at peace, but, baffled and paralyzed, the helpless prey of Spain.
This Iliad is too important to be contained within the slender limits of an essay. We can but briefly indicate the events which developed and then extinguished the right of the French to Milan. Conquered in 1499, by Louis XII. of France, Lombardy remained for five and twenty years an intermittent province of that kingdom, continually revolting, continually reconquered. During this time several privileges and investitures, extracted from the Emperor, confirmed the victories of France, and annulled the claims of Lodovico Sforza. These investitures are worthy of at least our brief consideration, since, from the moment of their bestowal, the French claim to Milan, already emphasised by the rights of heredity, testamentary bequest, and contract, received the final sanction of the feudal law.
The first of these Imperial investitures was bestowed on King Louis XII. by the hand of Maximilian onApril 7, 1505.[103]It secured the Duchy of Milan (non obstante priore investitura illustri Ludovico Sfortia prius exhibita) to the King of France and to his sons; or, in default of males, to his daughter Claude. At this time, through the influence of Queen Anne, Claude was most unnaturally betrothed to the permanent enemy of her country, the future Charles V., and in this document he is mentioned as her husband and co-heir—a fact he did not allow to slip. But fortunately the heiress of Brittany, Orleans, and Milan, was not allowed to marry the great rival of France. On June 14, 1509, a second investiture confirmed the inheritance of Claude, and associated with her therein her future husband, Francis of Angoulême, her cousin, equally with herself the offspring of Valentine and Orleans.[104]This Imperial document explicitly admits the right of feminine succession to a Lombard fief,[105]for Claude, it affirms, is the heiress to Milan through her father, the grandson of Madame Valentine. But it says nothing of the descent of Francis of Angoulême, although it provides that if Claude should die in childhood, and the King have no other children born to take her place, then Francis of Angoulême shall be recognized as in his own right Duke of Milan because he is the heir of the King of France.
These are the rights of Francis I. to Milan, rights absolute and impregnable. But it was only by continual conquest that the French could keep their hold upon the Milanese. For the tendencies of ages go to show us that there is a natural right more potent than the claims of blood, succession, testament, adoption, or investiture. The French dukes of Milan were, in their own dominions, foreigners. And, as the wise Commines foresaw—
“There is no great seniorie but in the end the dominion thereof remaineth to the natural countrymen. And this appeareth by the realm of France, a great part whereof the Englishmen possessed the space of four hundred years, and yet now hold they nothing therein but Calais and two little castles, the defence whereof costeth them yearly a great sum of money. And the self-same appeareth also by the realm of Naples and the Isle of Sicily, and the other provinces possessed by the French, where now is no memorial of their being there, save only their ancestors’ graves.”
It was the fatal battle of Pavia which really lost her Italian dependencies to France. The treaty of Madrid, extorted by compulsion, which proved so powerless to restore to the Emperor Burgundy (already become an integral part of France), resigned to him for ever the dominions of the French in Italy; not, however, without a struggle. No sooner was Francis released from Madrid than he declared that extorted contract void. He despatched protest afterprotest[106]to all the courts in Europe: but what availed to retain his hold on Cognac, proved vain to regain him the Milanese.
Immediately after the battle of Pavia, Charles V. had invested Francesco Sforza II., the son of Il Moro, with the duchy of his fathers. But what should happen on the death of Francesco Sforza, a childless man? Foreseeing this event, the hopes of the king of France were not extinguished; and the ten years between 1530 and 1540 are filled with the various endeavours, menaces, persuasions, by which he strove to obtain from the emperor the Duchy of Milan for the second son of France. Since it was evidently impossible to induce Charles V. to let Milan be an adjunct to the French Crown, the ambition of the king persevered upon a lower level, and a French Duke of Milan became the sum of his desires. At two different moments the realization of this scheme appeared possible. In 1535, after the death of Francesco Sforza II., negotiations were set on foot to obtain the Milanese for Orleans. A document still existing in the National Library at Paris[107]proves how lively and how sanguine at this moment was the hope of Francis I. to recover Milan. The king offered a promise never to unite this duchy to the Crown of France, and declared himself ready to expend an immense sum on its investiture. But the Venetians,[108]aware of the danger to themselves which a great French state must create in Italy, temporized and manœuvred so well that the matter came to nothing; for Charles V. was in a humour to credit their assertions, that any time was better than time present. The affairs of Italy were dull and dead to him. All his energies were fixed upon the idea of the crusade against Algiers. It was proposed that Orleans should join him in this enterprize,[109]and that, hand to hand in this holy fight, emperor and prince might consent to forget the bitter memory of bygone days. But in 1536 the eldest son of Francis died, and Orleans became the Dauphin of France. The schemes, the policy which during several years had endeavoured to secure for the husband of Catherine de’ Medici an Italian principality, collapsed before that unexpected stroke of fate. Orleans was not to be the head of an Italian kingdom reaching from the Alps to Rome, and in 1540 Charles V. invested his own son, Philip of Spain, with the Duchy of Milan. Yet France could not acquiesce in this alienation of her transalpine inheritance, and in 1544 the disastrous treaty of Crépy provided that, in two years from that date, either Milan or the Netherlands should be bestowed upon the third son of Francis. But before the time of the engagement had expired, Prince Charles was dead, and Milan fast in the grasp of the Spaniards.