Chapter VII: Part 7

The chief obstacle that stood in the way of Francis' liberty was the Emperor's continuing to insist so peremptorily on the restitution of Burgundy as a preliminary to that event. Francis often declared that he would never consent to dismember his kingdom; and that, even if he should so far forget the duties of a monarch as to come to such a resolution, the fundamental laws of the nation would prevent its taking effect. On his part he was willing to make an absolute cession to the Emperor of all his pretensions in Italy and the Low Countries; he promised to restore to Bourbon all his lands which had been confiscated; he renewed his proposal of marrying the Emperor's sister, the queen-dowager of Portugal; and engaged to pay a great sum by way of ransom for his own person.

But all mutual esteem and confidence between the two monarchs were now entirely lost; there appeared, on the one hand, a rapacious ambition, laboring to avail itself of every favorable circumstance; on the other, suspicion and resentment, standing perpetually on their guard; so that the prospect of bringing their negotiations to an issure seemed to be far distant. The Duchess of Alencon, the French King's sister, whom Charles permitted to visit her brother in his confinement, employed all her address in order to procure his liberty on more reasonable terms. Henry of England interposed his good offices to the same purpose; but both with so little success that Francis, in despair, took suddenly the resolution of resigning his crown, with all its rights and prerogatives, to his son, the Dauphin, determining rather to end his days in prison than to purchase his freedom by concessions unworthy of a king. The deed for this purpose he signed with legal formality in Madrid, empowering his sister to carry it into France, that it might be registered in all the parliaments of the kingdom; and, at the same time, intimating his intention to the Emperor, he desired him to name the place of his confinement, and to assign him a proper number of attendants during the remainder of his days.

This resolution of the French King had great effect; Charles began to be sensible that, by pushing rigor to excess, he might defeat his own measures; and instead of the vast advantages which he hoped to draw from ransoming a powerful monarch, he might at last find in his hands a prince without dominions or revenues. About the same time one of the King of Navarre's domestics happened, by an extraordinary exertion of fidelity, courage, and address, to procure his master an opportunity of escaping from the prison in which he had been confined ever since the battle of Pavia. This convinced the Emperor that the most vigilant attention of his officers might be eluded by the ingenuity or boldness of Francis or his attendants, and one unlucky hour might deprive him of all the advantages which he had been so solicitous to obtain. By these considerations he was induced to abate somewhat of his former demands. On the other hand, Francis' impatience under confinement daily increased; and having received certain intelligence of a powerful league forming against his rival in Italy, he grew more compliant with regard to his concessions, trusting that, if he could once obtain his liberty, he would soon be in a condition to resume whatever he had yielded.

Such being the views and sentiments of the two monarchs, the treaty which procured Francis his liberty was signed at Madrid on January 14, 1526.

SACK OF ROME BY THE IMPERIAL TROOPS

A.D. 1527

BENVENUTO CELLINI T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE

Charles, Duc de Bourbon, known as the Constable de Bourbon,
became famous in the wars of the emperor Charles V with
Francis I, King of France. The vast estates of both branches
of the Bourbon family were united in the possession of the
Constable, making him a person of importance independently
of his military career. He was born in 1490, and was made
Constable of France for his services at the battle of
Melegnano (1515), in which Francis gained a brilliant
victory over the Swiss.

The attempt of powerful enemies to undermine Bourbon in the
favor of the King led to the threatened loss of the
Constable's dignities and lands, and provoked him to
renounce the French service. After making a secret treaty
with Charles V and with his ally, Henry VIII of England,
Bourbon led a force of German mercenaries into Lombardy,
where in 1523 he joined Charles' Spanish army, and next year
aided in driving the French from Italy. Invading France, he
marched under the Emperor's orders to Marseilles and laid
siege to the city, but failed to take it.

Bourbon contributed materially to the Emperor's great
victory at Pavia, and was rewarded by being made Duke of
Milan and commander in Northern Italy. But although Charles
thus honored Bourbon he did not trust him, and was not
really desirous of advancing a person of such great resource
and consequence. In the peace between Spain and France in
1526 Bourbon's great interests were neglected.
Notwithstanding these things, when Charles V wished to
punish Pope Clement VII, who had joined a league against
him, Bourbon, with George of Frundsberg, led an army of
Spanish and German mercenaries to Rome.

The description of the sack which followed, written by
Benvenuto Cellini, the celebrated Italian artist, shows him
as an effective participant in the defence. This account of
a combatant is of course only fragmentary, and is
supplemented by Trollope's critical narrative.

BENVENUTO CELLINI

The whole world was now in warfare. Pope Clement had sent to get some troops from Giovanni de' Medici, and when they came they made such disturbances in Rome that it was ill living in open shops.[36] On this account I retired to a good snug house behind the Banchi, where I worked for all the friends I had acquired. Since I produced few things of much importance at that period, I need not waste time in talking about them. I took much pleasure in music and amusements of the kind.

On the death of Giovanni de' Medici in Lombardy, the Pope, at the advice of Messer Jacopo Salviati, dismissed the five bands he had engaged; and when the Constable of Bourbon knew there were no troops in Rome, he pushed his army with the utmost energy up to the city. The whole of Rome upon this flew to arms. I happened to be intimate with Alessandro, the son of Piero del Bene, who, at the time when the Colonnesi entered Rome, had requested me to guard his palace.[37] On this more serious occasion, therefore, he prayed me to enlist fifty comrades for the protection of the said house, appointing me their captain, as I had been when the Colonnesi came. So I selected fifty young men of the highest courage, and we took up quarters in his palace, with good pay and excellent appointments.

Bourbon's army had now arrived before the walls of Rome, and Alessandro begged me to go with him to reconnoitre. So we went with one of the stoutest fellows in our company; and on the way a youth called Cecchino della Casa joined himself to us. On reaching the walls by the Campo Santo, we could see that famous army, which was making every effort to enter the town. Upon the ramparts where we took our station, several young men were lying, killed by the besiegers; the battle raged there desperately, and there was the densest fog imaginable. I turned to Alessandro and said: "Let us go home as soon as we can, for there is nothing to be done here; you see the enemies are mounting, and our men are in flight." Alessandro, in a panic, cried, "Would God that we had never come here!" and turned in maddest haste to fly. I took him up somewhat sharply with these words: "Since you have brought me here, I must perform some action worthy of a man"; and, directing my arquebuse where I saw the thickest and most serried troop of fighting men, I aimed exactly at one whom I remarked to be higher than the rest: the fog prevented me from being certain whether he was on horseback or on foot. Then I turned to Alessandro and Cecchino, and bade them discharge their arquebuses, showing them how to avoid being hit by the besiegers. When we had fired two rounds apiece I crept cautiously up to the wall, and, observing among the enemy a most extraordinary confusion, I discovered afterward that one of our shots had killed the Constable of Bourbon; and, from what I subsequently learned, he was the man whom I had first noticed above the heads of the rest.[38]

Quitting our position on the ramparts, we crossed the Campo Santo, and entered the city by St. Peter's; then, coming out exactly at the Church of Santo Agnolo, we got with the greatest difficulty to the great gate of the castle; for the generals, Renzo di Ceri and Orazio Baglioni, were wounding and slaughtering everybody who abandoned the defence of the walls.[39]

By the time we had reached the great gate, part of the foemen had already entered Rome, and we had them in our rear. The castellan had ordered the portcullis to be lowered, in order to do which they cleared a little space, and this enabled us four to get inside. On the instant that I entered, the captain Palone de' Medici claimed me as being of the papal household and forced me to abandon Alessandro, which I had to do much against my will. I ascended to the keep, and at the same instant Pope Clement came in through the corridors into the castle; he had refused to leave the palace of St. Peter earlier, being unable to believe that his enemies would effect their entrance into Rome.[40]

Having got into the castle in this way, I attached myself to certain pieces of artillery, which were under the command of a bombardier called Giuliano Fiorentino. Leaning there against the battlements, the unhappy man could see his poor house being sacked, and his wife and children outraged; fearing to strike his own folk, he dared not discharge the cannon, and, flinging the burning fuse upon the ground, he wept as though his heart would break, and tore his cheeks with both his hands.[41]

Some of the other bombardiers were behaving in like manner; seeing which, I took one of the matches, and got the assistance of a few men who were not overcome by their emotions. I aimed some swivels and falconets at points where I saw it would be useful, and killed with them a good number of the enemy. Had it not been for this, the troops who poured into Rome that morning and were marching straight upon the castle might possibly have entered it with ease, because the artillery was doing them no damage. I went on firing under the eyes of several cardinals and lords, who kept blessing me and giving me the heartiest encouragement. In my enthusiasm I strove to achieve the impossible; let it suffice that it was I who saved the castle that morning, and brought the other bombardiers back to their duty.[42] I worked hard the whole of that day, and when the evening came--while the army was marching into Rome through Trastevere--Pope Clement appointed a great Roman nobleman named Antonio Santacroce to be a captain of all the gunners. The first thing this man did was to come to me, and, having greeted me with the utmost kindness, he stationed me with five fine pieces of artillery on the highest point of the castle, to which the name of the "Angel" specially belongs.

This circular eminence goes round the castle and surveys both Prati and the town of Rome. The captain put under my orders enough men to help in managing my guns, and, having seen me paid in advance, he gave me rations of bread and a little wine, and begged me to go forward as I had begun. I was perhaps more inclined by nature to the profession of arms than to the one I had adopted, and I took such pleasure in its duties that I discharged them better than those of my own art.

Night came, the enemy had entered Rome, and we who were in the castle--especially myself, who have always taken pleasure in extraordinary sights--stayed gazing on the indescribable scene of tumult and conflagration in the streets below. People who were anywhere else but where we were could not have formed the least imagination of what it was.

T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE

The combined force of Bourbon and Frundsberg was in all respects more like a rabble-rout of brigands and bandits than an army, and was assuredly such as must, even in those days, have been felt to be a disgrace to any sovereign permitting them to call themselves his soldiers. Their pay was, as was often the case with the troops of Charles V, hopelessly in arrear, and discipline was of course proportionably weak among them. Indeed, it seemed every now and then on the point of coming to an end altogether. The two generals had the greatest difficulty in preventing their army from becoming an entirely anarchical and disorganized mob of freebooters as dangerous to its masters as to everybody else. Of course food, raiment, and shelter were the first absolute essentials for keeping this dangerous mass of armed men in any degree of order and organization, and in fact the present march of Frundsberg and Bourbon had the obtaining of these necessaries for its principal and true object.

The progress southward of this bandit army unchecked by any opposing force--for Giovanni delle Bande Nere had lost his life in the attempt to prevent them from passing the Po; and after the death of that great captain, the army of the league did not muster courage to attack or impede the invaders in any way--filled the cities exposed to their inroad with terror and dismay. They had passed like a destroying locust swarm over Bologna and Imola, and crossing the Apennines, which separate Umbria from Tuscany, had descended into the valley of the Arno not far from Arezzo. Florence and Rome both trembled. On which would the storm burst? That was the all-absorbing question.

Pope Clement, with his usual avarice-blinded imbecility, had, immediately on concluding a treaty with the Neapolitan viceroy, discharged all his troops except a bodyguard of about six hundred men. Florence was nearly in as defenceless a position. She had, says Varchi, "two great armies on her territory; one that under Bourbon, which came as an enemy to sack and plunder her; and the other, that of a league, which came as a friend to protect her, but sacked and plundered her none the less." It was, however, probably the presence of this army, little as it had hitherto done to impede the progress of the enemy, which decided Bourbon eventually to determine on marching toward Rome.

It seems doubtful how far they were, in so doing, executing the orders or carrying out the wishes of the Emperor. Clement, though he had played the traitor to Charles, as he did to everyone else, and had been at war with him recently, had now entered into a treaty with the Emperor's viceroy. And apart from this there was a degree of odium and scandal attaching to the sight of the "most Catholic" Emperor sending a Lutheran army in his pay to attack the head of the Church, and ravage the venerated capital of Christendom, which so decorous a sovereign as Charles would hardly have liked to incur. Still, it may be assumed that if the Emperor wished his army kept together, and provided no sums for the purpose, he was not unwilling that they should live by plunder. And perhaps his real intention was to extort from Rome the means of paying his troops by the mere exhibition of the danger arising from their propinquity while they remained unpaid. Upon the whole we are warranted in supposing that Bourbon and Frundsberg would hardly have ventured on the course they took if they had not had reason to believe that it would not much displease their master. And Charles was exactly the sort of man who would like to have the profit of an evil deed without the loss of reputation arising from the commission of it, and who would consider himself best served by agents who could commit a profitable atrocity without being guilty of the annoying want of tact of waiting for his direct orders to commit it.

For the especial business in hand, it was impossible, moreover, to have had two more fitting agents than Bourbon and Frundsberg. It was not every knightly general in those days who would have accepted the task, even with direct orders, of marching to the sack of Rome, and the open defiance of its sacred ruler. A Florentine or a Neapolitan soldier might have had small scruple in doing so; and a Roman baron--a Colonna or an Orsini--none at all. But there would have been found few men of such mark as Bourbon, in either France or Spain, willing to undertake the enterprise he was now engaged in. The unfortunate Constable, however, was a disgraced and desperate man. He was disgraced in the face of Europe by unknightly breach of fealty to his sovereign, despite the intensity of the provocation which had driven him to that step. For all the sanctions which held European society together, in the universal bondage which alone then constituted social order, were involved in maintaining the superstition that so branded him. And he was a desperate man in his fortunes; for though no name in all Europe was at that day as great a military power at the head of a host as that of Bourbon, and though the miserable bearer of it had so shortly before been one of the wealthiest and largest territorial nobles of France, yet the Constable had now his sword for his fortune as barely as the rawest lad in the rabble-rout that followed him, sent out from some landless tower of an impoverished knight, in half-starved Galicia or poverty-stricken Navarre, to carve his way in the world.

Even among those whose ranks he had joined, Bourbon was a disgraced and ruined man beyond redemption. Although his well-known military capacity had easily induced Charles to welcome and make use of him, he must have felt that the step he had taken in breaking his allegiance and abandoning his country had rendered him an outcast and almost a pariah in the estimation of the chivalry of Europe. The feeling he had awakened against himself throughout Christendom is strikingly illustrated by an anecdote recorded of his reception at Madrid. When, shortly after winning the battle of Pavia, Bourbon went thither to meet Charles, and the Marquis of Villane was requested to lodge the victorious general in his palace, the haughty Spaniard told the Emperor that his house and all that he possessed were at his sovereign's disposition, but that he should assuredly burn it down as soon as Bourbon was out of it; since, having been sullied by the presence of a renegade, it could no longer be a fitting residence for a man of honor.

So low had Bourbon fallen! Every man's hand was raised against him, and his hand was against every man. And it is easy to conceive what must have been his tone of mind and feeling, as he led on his mutinous robber-rout to Rome, while men of all parties looked on in panic-stricken horror. Thus Bourbon led his unpaid and mutinous hordes to a deed which, none knew better than he, would shock and scandalize all Europe, as a man who, having fallen already so low as to have lost all self-respect, cares not in his reckless despair to what depth he plunges.

As for Frundsberg, he was a mere soldier of fortune, whose world was his camp, whose opinions and feelings had been formed in quite another school from those of his fellow-general; whose code of honor and of morals was an entirely different one, and whose conscience was not only perfectly at rest respecting the business he was bound on, but approved of it as a good and meritorious work for the advancement of true religion. He carried round his neck a halter of golden tissue, we are told, with which he loudly boasted that he would hang the Pope as soon as he got to Rome; and had others of crimson silk at his saddle-bow, which he said were destined for the cardinals!

Too late Clement became aware of the imminence and magnitude of the danger that threatened him and the capital of Christendom. He besought the Neapolitan viceroy, who had already signed a treaty with him, as has been seen, to exert himself and use his authority to arrest the southward march of Bourbon's army. And it is remarkable that this representative of the Emperor in the government of Naples did, as it would seem, endeavor earnestly to avert the coming avalanche from the Eternal City. But, while the Emperor's viceroy used all his authority and endeavors to arrest the advance of the Emperor's army, the Emperor's generals advanced and sacked Rome in spite of him. Which of them most really acted according to the secret wishes of that profound dissembler, and most false and crafty monarch, it is impossible to know. It may have been that Bourbon himself had no power to stay the plundering, bandit-like march of his hungry and unpaid troops. And the facts recorded of the state of discipline of the army are perfectly consistent with such a supposition.

The Viceroy sent a messenger to Bourbon, while he was yet in Bologna, informing him of the treaty signed with Clement, and desiring him therefore to come no farther southward. Bourbon, bent, as Varchi says, on deceiving both the Pope and the Viceroy, replied that, if the Pope would send him two hundred thousand florins for distribution to the army, he would stay his march. But, while this answer was carried back to Rome, the tumultuous host continued its fearfully menacing advance; and the alarm in Rome was rapidly growing to desperate terror. At the Pope's earnest request, the Viceroy, "who knew well," says Varchi, "that his holiness had not a farthing," himself took post and rode hard for Florence with letters from Clement, hoping to obtain the money there.

The departure of the Viceroy in person, and the breathless haste of his ride to Florence, speak vividly of this Spanish officer's personal anxiety respecting the dreadful fate which threatened Rome. But the Florentines do not seem to have been equally impressed with the necessity of losing no time in making an effort to avert the calamity from a rival city. It was after "much talking," we are told, that they at last consented to advance a hundred fifty thousand florins, eighty thousand in cash down, and the remainder by the end of October. It was now April; and Bourbon had by this time crossed the Apennines, and was with his army on the western slopes of the mountains, not far from the celebrated monastery of Lavernia. Thither the Viceroy hurried with all speed, accompanied by only two servants and a trumpeter; and having "with much difficulty," says Varchi, come to speech with the general, proffered him the eighty thousand florins. Upon which he was set upon by the tumultuous troops, and "narrowly escaped being torn in pieces by them." In endeavoring to get away from them and make his way back to Florence, he fell into the hands of certain peasants near Camaldoli, and was here again in danger of his life, and was wounded in the head. He was, however, rescued by a monk of Vallombrosa, and by him conducted to the neighboring little town of Poppi in the Casentino, or upper valley of the Arno, whence he made his way to Siena, and so back to Rome, with no pleasant tidings of what might be expected from Bourbon and his brigand army.

The Vallombrosan monk, who thus bestead the Viceroy at his need, was, as Varchi records, rewarded by the bishopric of Muro, in the kingdom of Naples, which, adds the historian, "he still holds."

The fate of Rome was no longer doubtful. Clement, who by his pennywise parsimony had left himself defenceless, made a feeble and wholly vain attempt to put the city in a state of defence. The corrupt and cowardly citizens could not have opposed any valid resistance to the ruffian hordes who were slowly but surely, like an advancing conflagration, coming upon them, even if they had been willing to do their best. But the trembling Pope's appeal to them to defend the walls fell on the ears of as sorely trembling men, each thinking only of the possible chances of saving his own individual person. Yet it seems clear that means of defence might have been found had not the Pope been thus paralyzed by terror.

Clement, however, was as one fascinated. Martin du Bellay tells us that he himself, then in Italy as ambassador from Francis I, hurried to Rome, and warned the Pope of his danger in abundant time for him to have prepared for the protection of the city by the troops he had at his disposal. But no persuasion availed to induce Clement to take any step for that purpose. Neither would he seek safety by flight, nor permit his unfortunate subjects to do so. John da Casale, ambassador of Henry VIII at Venice, writes thence to Wolsey on May 16th--the fatal tidings of the sack of the city having just reached Venice--as follows: "He"--Clement--"refused to quit the city for some safer place. He even forbade by edict that anyone should carry anything out of the gates on pain of death, though many were anxious to depart and carry their fortunes elsewhere." Meantime Florence, for her own protection, had hastily induced Francesco Maria, Duke of Urbino, to place himself at the head of the remaining forces of the Italian league, and to take up a position at Incisa, a small town in the Upper Valdarno, about twenty miles from the city, on the road to Arezzo. Thus the torrent was turned off from the capital of the commonwealth. Probably as soon as the invading army once found itself to the south of Florence, that wealthy city was in no immediate danger. Rome was metal more attractive to the invaders, even had there not been an army between them and Florence.

And now it became frightfully clear that the doom of the Eternal City was at hand. On came the strangely heterogeneous rout of lawless soldiery, leaving behind them a trail of burned and ruined cities, devastated fields, and populations plague-stricken from the contamination engendered by the multitude of their unburied dead.

On May 5th Bourbon arrived beneath the walls of Rome. During the last few days the unhappy Pope had endeavored to arm what men he could get together under Renzo di Ceri and one Horatius--not Cocles, unhappily--but Baglioni. "Rome contained within her walls," says Ranke, "some thirty thousand inhabitants capable of bearing arms. Many of these men had seen service. They wore swords by their sides, which they had used freely in their broils among each other, and then boasted of their exploits. But to oppose the enemy, who brought with him certain destruction, five hundred men were the utmost that could be mustered within the city. At the first onset the Pope and his forces were overthrown." On the evening of May 6th the city was stormed and given over to the unbridled cupidity and brutality of the soldiers, who during many a long day of want and hardship had been looking forward to the hour that was to repay them amply for all past sufferings by the boundless gratification of every sense, and every caprice of lawless passion. Bourbon himself had fallen in the first moments of the attack, as he was leading his men to scale the walls, and any small influence that he might have exerted in moderating the excesses of the conquerors was thus at an end.

It does not fall within the scope of the present narrative to attempt any detailed account of the days and scenes that followed. They have been described by many writers; and the reader who bears in mind what Rome was--her vileness, her cowardice, her imbecility, her wealth, her arts, her monuments, her memories, her helpless population of religious communities of both sexes, and the sacred character of her high places and splendors, which served to give an additional zest to the violence of triumphant heretics--he that bears in mind all these things may safely give the reign to his imagination without any fear of overcharging the picture. Frundsberg had been wont to boast that if ever he reached Rome he would hang the Pope. He never did reach it, having been carried off by a fit of apoplexy while striving to quell a mutiny among his troops shortly after leaving Bologna on his southward march. But the threat is sufficiently indicative of the spirit that animated his army, to show that Clement owed his personal safety only to the strength of the castle of St. Angelo, in which he sought refuge.

The sensation produced throughout Europe by the dreadful misfortune which had fallen on the Eternal City was immense. John da Casale, in the letter cited above, says that it would have been better for Rome to have been taken by the Turks, when they were in Hungary, as the infidels would have perpetrated less odious outrages and less horrible sacrilege. Clerk, Bishop of Bath, writes to Wolsey from Paris on May 28th following: "Please it, your Grace, after my most humble recommendation, to understand that about the fifteenth of this moneth, by letters sent from Venyce, it was spoken, that the Duke of Burbon with the armye imperyall by vyolence shold enter Rome as the 6th of this moneth; and that in the same entree the said Duke should be slayne; and that the Pope had savyd Himself with the Cardynalls in Castell Angell; whiche tydinges bycause they ware not written unto Venyce, but upon relation of a souldier, that came from Rome to Viterbe, and bycause ther cam hither no maner of confirmation thereof unto this day, thay war not belevyd. This day ther is come letters from Venyce confyrming the same tydinges to be true. They write also that they have sackyd and spoylyd the town, and slayne to the nombre of 45,000, _non parcentes nec etati nec sexui nec ordini_; amongst other that they have murdyrd a marveillous sorte of fryars, and agaynst pristes and churchis they have behavyd thymselfes as it doth become Murranys and Lutherans to do."

How deeply Wolsey himself was moved by the news is seen by a letter from him to Henry VIII, written on June 2d following. He forwards to the King the letters "nowe arryved, as wel out of Fraunce as out of Italy, confirming the piteous and lamentable spoiles, pilages, with most cruel murdres, committed by the Emperialls in the citie of Rome, _non parcentes sacris, etati, sexui, aut relioni_; and the extreme daungier that the Poopes Holines and Cardinalles, who fled into the Castel Angel, wer in, if by meane of the armye of the liege, they should not be shortly socoured and releved. Which, sire, is matier that must nedes commove and stire the hartes of al good christen princes and people to helpe and put their handes with effecte to reformacion thereof, and the repressing of such tirannous demenour."

Even Charles himself affected at least to mourn the success of his own army. Nowhere did this terrible Italian misfortune fail to awaken sympathy and compassion save in a rival Italian city. Florence heard the tidings, says Varchi, with the utmost delight. The same historian expresses his own opinion, that the sack of Rome was at once the most cruel and the most merited chastisement ever inflicted by heaven. And another Florentine writer piously accounts for the failure of all means adopted to avert the calamity, by supposing that it was God's eternal purpose then and thus to chastise the crimes of the Roman prelates--a theory, it may occur to some minds, somewhat damaged by the unfortunate fact that the greater part of the miseries suffered in those awful days were inflicted on the unhappy flocks of those purple shepherds.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] These troops entered Rome in October, 1526. They were disbanded in March, 1527.

[37] Cellini here refers to the attack made upon Rome by the great Ghibelline house of Colonna, led by their chief captain, Pompeo, in September, 1526. They took possession of the city and drove Clement into the castle of St. Angelo, where they forced him to agree to terms favoring the Imperial cause. It was customary for Roman gentlemen to hire bravoes for the defence of their palaces when any extraordinary disturbance was expected, as, for example, upon the vacation of the papal chair.

[38] All historians of the sack of Rome agree in saying that Bourbon was shot dead while placing ladders against the outworks near the shop Cellini mentions. But the honor of firing the arquebuse which brought him down cannot be assigned to anyone in particular. Very different stories were current on the subject.

[39] Renzo di Ceri was a captain of adventurers, who had conquered Urbino for the Pope in 1515, and afterward fought for the French in the Italian wars. Orazio Baglioni, of the semiprincely Perugian family, was a distinguished _condottiere_. He subsequently obtained the captaincy of the Bande Nere, and died fighting near Naples in 1528. Orazio murdered several of his cousins in order to acquire the lordship of Perugia. His brother Malatesta undertook to defend Florence in the siege of 1530, and sold the city by treason to Clement.

[40] Giovio, in his _Life of the Cardinal Prospero Colonna_, relates how he accompanied Clement in his flight from the Vatican to the castle. While passing some open portions of the gallery, he threw his violet mantle and cap of a monseigneur over the white stole of the Pontiff, for fear he might be shot at by the soldiers in the streets below.

[41] The short autobiography of Raffaello da Montelupo, a man in many respects resembling Cellini, confirms this part of our author's narrative. It is one of the most interesting pieces of evidence regarding what went on inside the castle during the sack of Rome. Montelupo was also a gunner and commanded two pieces.

[42] This is an instance of Cellini's exaggeration. He did more than yeoman's service, no doubt, but we cannot believe that, without him, the castle would have been taken.

GREAT RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT IN ENGLAND

FALL OF WOLSEY

A.D. 1529

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

The "New Learning" which had been slowly spreading from
Italy over all Europe, did not markedly affect England until
the sixteenth century. There the long Wars of the Roses had
not only gone nigh to exterminating the old nobility, but
had so distracted men's minds from more peaceful pursuits
that little note was taken of the intellectual movement
abroad. Under Henry VII and Henry VIII all this changed.
These Tudor monarchs were indeed tyrants over England, but
they brought her peace--and time for thought. Under the
leadership of the celebrated Dutch scholar Erasmus, and the
almost equally renowned Englishmen, Sir Thomas More and Dean
Colet, the land awakened about 1500 to a new life of study
and of culture, whose principles spread rapidly among the
upper classes.

When news of Luther's religious revolt reached England, the
leaders of the New Learning were at first inclined to favor
his ideas. But the two movements, one scholarly and calm,
the other impassioned and intense, soon parted company, as
Green shows in his justly famous account.

The true ruler of England at the time was the "great
cardinal," Wolsey, whose brain long enabled him to play upon
King Henry as a toreador does upon a bull, guiding at will
the frenzied rushes of the mighty brute. In 1521, the period
when the following account begins, Wolsey was fifty years
old. He had risen from being the studious son of a grazier
and wool merchant to be a dean of the Church under Henry
VII, and a bishop, cardinal and lord chancellor, of England
under Henry VIII. His ambition to be pope was thwarted by
the emperor Charles V, but he was "cardinal legate," having
control of the Catholic Church throughout England; and it
was said of him that in all European affairs he was "seven
times more powerful than the Pope."

In England Luther's protest seemed at first to find no echo. King Henry VIII was, both on political and on religious grounds, firm on the papal side. England and Rome were drawn to a close alliance by the identity of their political position. Each was hard pressed between the same great powers; Rome had to hold its own between the masters of Southern and the masters of Northern Italy, as England had to hold her own between the rulers of France and of the Netherlands. From the outset of his reign to the actual break with Clement VII the policy of Henry is always at one with that of the papacy. Nor were the King's religious tendencies hostile to it. He was a trained theologian and proud of his theological knowledge, but to the end his convictions remained firmly on the side of the doctrines which Luther denied. In 1521, therefore, he entered the lists against Luther with an "Assertion of the Seven Sacraments," for which he was rewarded by Leo with the title of "Defender of the Faith." The insolent abuse of the reformer's answer called More and Fisher into the field.

The influence of the "New Learning" was now strong at the English court. Colet and Grocyn were among its foremost preachers; Linacre was Henry's physician; More was a privy councillor; Pace was one of the secretaries of state; Tunstall was master of the rolls. And as yet the New Learning, though scared by Luther's intemperate language, had steadily backed him in his struggle. Erasmus pleaded for him with the Emperor. Ulrich von Hutten attacked the friars in satires and invectives as violent as his own. But the temper of the Renaissance was even more antagonistic to the temper of Luther than that of Rome itself.

From the golden dream of a new age wrought peaceably and purely by the slow progress of intelligence, the growth of letters, the development of human virtue, the reformer of Wittenberg turned away with horror. He had little or no sympathy with the new cult. He despised reason as heartily as any papal dogmatist could despise it. He hated the very thought of toleration or comprehension. He had been driven by a moral and intellectual compulsion to declare the Roman system a false one, but it was only to replace it by another system of doctrine just as elaborate and claiming precisely the same infallibility. To degrade human nature was to attack the very base of the New Learning; and his attack on it called the foremost of its teachers to the field. But Erasmus no sooner advanced to its defence than Luther declared man to be utterly enslaved by original sin and incapable, through any efforts of his own, of discovering truth or of arriving, at goodness.

Such a doctrine not only annihilated the piety and wisdom of the classic past, from which the New Learning had drawn its larger views of life and of the world; it trampled in the dust reason itself, the very instrument by which More and Erasmus hoped to regenerate both knowledge and religion. To More especially, with his keener perception of its future effect, this sudden revival of a purely theological and dogmatic spirit, severing Christendom into warring camps and ruining all hopes of union and tolerance, was especially hateful. The temper which hitherto had seemed so "endearing, gentle, and happy," suddenly gave way. His reply to Luther's attack upon the King sank to the level of the work it answered; and though that of Bishop Fisher was calmer and more argumentative, the divorce of the New Learning from the Reformation seemed complete.

But if the world of scholars and thinkers stood aloof from the new movement it found a warmer welcome in the larger world where men are stirred rather by emotion than by thought. There was an England of which even More and Colet knew little, in which Luther's words kindled a fire that was never to die. As a great social and political movement Lollardry had ceased to exist, and little remained of the directly religious impulse given by Wycliffe beyond a vague restlessness and discontent with the system of the Church. But weak and fitful as was the life of Lollardry the prosecutions whose records lie scattered over the bishops' registers failed wholly to kill it. We see groups meeting here and there to read "in a great book of heresy all one night certain chapters of the Evangelists in English," while transcripts of Wycliffe's tracts passed from hand to hand.

The smouldering embers needed but a breath to fan them into flame, and the breath came from William Tyndale. Born among the Cotswolds when Bosworth Field gave England to the Tudors, Tyndale passed from Oxford to Cambridge to feel the full impulse given by the appearance there of the New Testament of Erasmus. From that moment one thought was at his heart. He "perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue."

"If God spare my life," he said to a learned controversialist, "ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost." But he was a man of forty before his dream became fact. Drawn from his retirement in Gloucestershire by the news of Luther's protest at Wittenberg, he found shelter for a year with a London alderman, Humfrey Monmouth. "He studied most part of the day at his book," said his host afterward, "and would eat but sodden meat by his good-will and drink but small single beer." The book at which he studied was the Bible. But it was soon needful to quit England if his purpose was to hold. "I understood at the last not only that there was no room in my lord of London's palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England."

From Hamburg, where he took refuge in 1524, he probably soon found his way to the little town which had suddenly become the sacred city of the Reformation. Students of all nations were flocking there with an enthusiasm which resembled that of the crusades. "As they came in sight of the town," a contemporary tells us, "they returned thanks to God with clasped hands, for from Wittenberg, as heretofore from Jerusalem, the light of evangelical truth had spread to the utmost parts of the earth."

Such a visit could only fire Tyndale to face the "poverty, exile, bitter absence from friends, hunger and thirst and cold, great dangers, and innumerable other hard and sharp fightings," which the work he had set himself was to bring with it. In 1525 his version of the New Testament was completed, and means were furnished by English merchants for printing it at Cologne. But Tyndale had soon to fly with his sheets to Worms, a city whose Lutheran tendencies made it a safer refuge, and it was from Worms that six thousand copies of the New Testament were sent in 1526 to English shores. The King was keenly opposed to a book which he looked on as made "at the solicitation and instance of Luther"; and even the men of the New Learning from whom it might have hoped for welcome were estranged from it by its Lutheran origin. We can only fairly judge their action by viewing it in the light of the time. What Warham and More saw over sea might well have turned them from a movement which seemed breaking down the very foundations of religion and society. Not only was the fabric of the Church rent asunder and the centre of Christian unity denounced as "Babylon," but the reform itself seemed passing into anarchy.

Luther was steadily moving onward from the denial of one Catholic dogma to that of another; and what Luther still clung to, his followers were ready to fling away. Carlstadt was denouncing the reformer of Wittenberg as fiercely as Luther himself had denounced the Pope, and meanwhile the religious excitement was kindling wild dreams of social revolution, and men stood aghast at the horrors of a peasant war which broke out in Southern Germany. It was not therefore as a mere translation of the Bible that Tyndale's work reached England. It came as a part of the Lutheran movement, and it bore the Lutheran stamp in its version of ecclesiastical words. "Church" became "congregation," "priest" was changed into "elder." It came too in company with Luther's bitter invectives and reprints of the tracts of Wycliffe, which the German traders of the Steelyard were importing in large numbers. We can hardly wonder that More denounced the book as heretical, or that Warham ordered it to be given up by all who possessed it.

Wolsey took little heed of religious matters, but his policy was one of political adhesion to Rome, and he presided over a solemn penance to which some Steelyard men submitted in St. Paul's. "With six-and-thirty abbots, mitred priors, and bishops, and he in his whole pomp mitred," the Cardinal looked on while "great baskets full of books were commanded; after the great fire was made before the Rood of Northen (the crucifix by the great north door of the cathedral), thus to be burned, and those heretics to go thrice about the fire and to cast in their fagots."

But scenes and denunciations such as these were vain in the presence of an enthusiasm which grew every hour. "Englishmen," says a scholar of the time, "were so eager for the Gospel as to affirm that they would buy a New Testament even if they had to give a hundred thousand pieces of money for it." Bibles and pamphlets were smuggled over to England and circulated among the poorer and trading classes through the agency of an association of "Christian Brethren," consisting principally of London tradesmen and citizens, but whose missionaries spread over the country at large. They found their way at once to the universities, where the intellectual impulse given by the New Learning was quickening religious speculation.

Cambridge had already won a name for heresy; Barnes, one of its foremost scholars, had to carry his fagot before Wolsey at St. Paul's; two other Cambridge teachers, Bilney and Latimer, were already known as "Lutherans." The Cambridge scholars whom Wolsey introduced into Cardinal College, which he was founding, spread the contagion through Oxford. A group of "brethren" was formed in Cardinal College for the secret reading and discussion of the Epistles; and this soon included the more intelligent and learned scholars of the university. It was in vain that Clark, the centre of this group, strove to dissuade fresh members from joining it by warnings of the impending dangers. "I fell down on my knees at his feet," says one of them, Anthony Dalaber, "and with tears and sighs besought him that for the tender mercy of God he should not refuse me, saying that I trusted verily that he who had begun this on me would not forsake me, but would give me grace to continue therein to the end. When he heard me say so, he came to me, took me in his arms, and kissed me, saying, 'The Lord God Almighty grant you so to do, and from henceforth ever take me for your father, and I will take you for my son in Christ.'"

In 1528 the excitement which followed on this rapid diffusion of Tyndale's works forced Wolsey to more vigorous action; many of the Oxford Brethren were thrown into prison and their books seized. But in spite of the panic of the Protestants, some of whom fled over sea, little severity was really exercised. Henry's chief anxiety, indeed, was lest in the outburst against heresy the interest of the New Learning should suffer harm. This was remarkably shown in the protection he extended to one who was destined to eclipse even the fame of Colet as a popular preacher. Hugh Latimer was the son of a Leicestershire yeoman, whose armor the boy had buckled on in the days of Henry VII, ere he set out to meet the Cornish insurgents at Blackheath Field. Latimer has himself described the soldierly training of his youth.

"My father was delighted to teach me to shoot with the bow. He taught me how to draw, how to lay my body to the bow, not to draw with strength of arm as other nations do, but with the strength of the body."

At fourteen he was at Cambridge, flinging himself into the New Learning which was winning its way there with a zeal that at last told on his physical strength. The ardor of his mental efforts left its mark on him in ailments and enfeebled health from which, vigorous as he was, his frame never wholly freed itself. But he was destined to be known, not as a scholar, but as a preacher. In his addresses from the pulpit the sturdy good-sense of the man shook off the pedantry of the schools as well as the subtlety of the theologian. He had little turn for speculation, and in the religious changes of the day we find him constantly lagging behind his brother-reformers. But he had the moral earnestness of a Jewish prophet, and his denunciations of wrong had a prophetic directness and fire. "Have pity on your soul," he cried to Henry, "and think that the day is even at hand when you shall give an account of your office, and of the blood that hath been shed by your sword."

His irony was yet more telling than his invective. "I would ask you a strange question," he said once at Paul's Cross to a ring of bishops; "who is the most diligent prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing of his office? I will tell you. It is the Devil! Of all the pack of them that have cure, the Devil shall go for my money; for he ordereth his business. Therefore, you unpreaching prelates, learn of the Devil to be diligent in your office. If you will not learn of God, for shame learn of the Devil." But Latimer was far from limiting himself to invective. His homely humor breaks in with story and apologue; his earnestness is always tempered with good-sense; his plain and simple style quickens with a shrewd mother-wit. He talks to his hearers as a man talks to his friends, telling stories such as we have given of his own life at home, or chatting about the changes and chances of the day with a transparent simplicity and truth that raise even his chat into grandeur. His theme is always the actual world about him, and in his simple lessons of loyalty, of industry, of pity for the poor, he touches upon almost every subject from the plough to the throne. No such preaching had been heard in England before his day, and with the growth of his fame grew the danger of persecution. There were moments when, bold as he was, Latimer's heart failed him. "If I had not trust that God will help me," he wrote once, "I think the ocean sea would have divided my lord of London and me by this day."

A citation for heresy at last brought the danger home. "I intend," he wrote with his peculiar medley of humor and pathos, to "make merry with my parishioners this Christmas, for all the sorrow, lest perchance I may never return to them again." But he was saved throughout by the steady protection of the court. Wolsey upheld him against the threats of the Bishop of Ely; Henry made him his own chaplain; and the King's interposition at this critical moment forced Latimer's judges to content themselves with a few vague words of submission.