The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (34 page)

chapter 18

Papal Reprieve

In October
1523
Hadrian VI died, much to the relief of the Roman elite, after a reign of twenty very long months. Prior to the Pope’s death, Felice had some small revenge on Hadrian VI, who had stood by while Napoleone wreaked havoc with her life. Her servant Bernardino di San Miniato wrote to her on
26
August
1523
to inform her that ‘this morning the Reverend Cardinal Ermellino sent for me in order to apprise your illustrious ladyship that His Holiness would like to rent Palo in the same way that it was held by the holy memory of Pope Leo. I replied that your ladyship could do nothing as the Reverend Cardinal of Trani [Felice’s brother] had taken possession of it.’
1
Hadrian’s enduring legacy was that he was to be the last non-Italian pope until the twentieth century. The Northern Pope had inflicted gloom on the city of Rome, and many in the College of Cardinals wanted to see a return to the golden days of Julius and Leo. They chose Leo’s cousin Giulio as their new pontiff, Pope Clement VII. Ultimately, the election of Clement was to bring disaster to Rome but, in
1523
, he seemed to bring back a bygone era to the city. Felice was relieved. She knew that her long-standing friendship with the Medici family would serve as good defence against the volatile and dangerous Napoleone. As Francesco and Girolamo grew older, Napoleone started to agitate for the early declaration of their majority. This, of course, would terminate Felice’s tenure as Orsini regent. The younger his brothers were declared adults, the weaker they would be, and the easier for Napoleone, with the support of the family, to dominate. In early
1525
he drew up a draft of provisions regarding the estate, in which he proposed that ‘the proposed minority of the sons of the Signora should end on the fourteenth birthday of Signor Girolamo’.
²

Fourteen, even by the standards of the day, was young for a boy to be declared an adult. Napoleone also wanted Felice to pick ‘one place as her residence where the Abbot will not go, reserving Bracciano as the communal residence’, which would serve to isolate her. He proposed that should the ‘Signora be obliged to leave for any reason the governing of the estate, she should elect one of the Orsini in her place’. For Felice the most sinister of all his suggestions was unquestionably that ‘the governance of Madonna Clarice shall be deputized communally to all three brothers’. In
1524
Clarice was ten years old. Napoleone was proposing that Felice’s youngest child be wrested from her, and he be given authority over her.

Felice turned to papal arbitration to suppress Napoleone’s schemes to oust her from her seat of governance. At the end of October
1525
, a lengthy ‘chapters of ordinance between Donna Felice della Rovere, and her children, signed by them in the presence of Pope Clement VII’, was presented in the Sala Regia, an audience hall of the Vatican Palace.
³
The lawyer who prepared it was the ever efficient Prospero d’Acquasparta. It was, not surprisingly, overwhelmingly in Felice’s favour. Clement gave Felice another four years as ‘sole and unique administrator of the estate’, so her sons would not come to their majority until they were seventeen and eighteen, and would have more time to mature. In that period of time, Felice could get Clarice safely married. These
capitoli
also forbade Napoleone from bringing armed men with him to Bracciano. While he could live at one of the Orsini castles, he had to accommodate himself at his own expense, and not that of the estate. Although, ‘in the event of illness’ the Pope recommended that Felice allow Cardinal Franciotto Orsini to govern in her place, she could, with Napoleone’s permission, elect another ‘qualified person who was not from the house of Orsini’. And if Napoleone refused, Clement still reserved the power to arbitrate himself. This allowed for the option of Cardinal Gian Domenico de Cupis governing the Orsini in her absence, a situation Felice would of course prefer.

Clement also agreed to some provisions to benefit Felice personally, beyond her role as Orsini trustee. He decreed that as Felice had invested
2000
ducats of her own money in the palace at Trinità dei Monti, the palace should be considered hers, even if it had originally been a part of the Orsini estate. Additionally, with regard to the Orsini holding of Galera, ‘a seat which, it is hypothesized, was a part of Madonna Felice’s dowry, and given to her for her marriage, and so shall remain in the hands of Madonna Felice’. That there was no surviving document to support this ‘hypothesis’ and that Galera was not included in the
1516
lists of Felice’s possessions suggest that this was a private donation from Clement to Felice. Given that a large number of cardinals who depended on Galera’s forests for their wood, it was an arrangement by which the Vatican could continue to profit.

Napoleone realized that the
capitoli
authorized by Clement rendered him completely powerless for the next four years. It was a great victory for Felice. She knew, however, that the negotiation had in no way lessened the enmity of
l’Abate
, who now hated the Pope almost as bitterly as he hated his stepmother, a hatred that was to colour and shape the next decade of her life.

part v

Dispossessed and Repossessed

chapter 1

At Prayer

The year
1527
marked Felice’s tenth anniversary as
gubernatrix
of the Bracciano Orsini. ‘I would rather die as a slave in this house than a queen of anywhere else,’ she had told the ailing Gian Giordano when he conferred the position on her and reminded her of her duty to the family. She had intended her declaration to be disingenuously rhetorical but a decade later Felice was in fact both queen and slave. She exercised more authority over more individuals and more terrain than any other woman in Italy but there were no holidays from her responsibilities, no respite, no letting go – not even for a moment. There was always Napoleone or an Orsini cousin eager to step in and take advantage of her perceived weakness to wrest control of the family from her. In the interim period, she had also lost her most trusted servant: Statio del Fara, who had died in
1524
. Right up to the end, Statio had been devoted to her. The last letter he wrote to her told her how he regretted that his ‘fever makes me unable to serve your sweet presence and I feel the affliction even more from your absence, deprived as I am of the company of the wisest and most virtuous lady that I have ever seen, or heard nominated. You are an ornament and glory, and neither our land nor this unhappy country can provide another example of such excellent ways, chastity and every virtue, which you possess, and every Roman is obliged to you for our well-being and our honour.’
¹
Following Statio’s demise, Bernardino di San Miniato came to serve Felice and her family as long and as faithfully, but without the same kind of piquant intimacy.

Felice came increasingly to keep the de Cupis family, her mother Lucrezia, half-brother Gian Domenico and half-sister Francesca, as close to her as possible. They had never sought, unlike her della Rovere and Orsini relatives, to belittle or undermine her. Much of their fortune depended on her but there was genuine love between them as well. If Felice could ever relax, it was in their presence. Gian Domenico, thanks to the income from the cardinalate Felice had secured for him, had turned the family palace on the Piazza Navona into a magnificent residence, with a staff of a hundred and fifty servants. It was near enough to Monte Giordano for her to keep an eye on the Orsini, and Felice preferred to spend her time in Rome at the Palazzo de Cupis, with its familiar memories of her childhood. Letters arrived addressed to her
in Agone
, the original name of the Piazza Navona. Even when they left Rome in the summer, the de Cupis family was solicitous for her well-being: Gian Domenico wrote to her from a summer house at Campagna: ‘We were glad to get your letter letting us know that you and the children are well. Madonna Lucrezia has been a bit indisposed, but it is nothing else other than old age. We have left Rome for Campagna, and we hope that you will come and stay with us at our house. You do not need to give us notice, you know the rooms that are here, take the ones in which you will be most comfortable. Truthfully, it is not only our house that is here to serve you, but our hearts as well.’
2

In addition to the solace Felice found in her maternal family, she took comfort from prayer. In one of her account books listing smaller daily expenses such as cough syrup, soap, slippers, gloves, oil of camomile and lily, is a preponderance of wax candles. Over and over again, entries appear such as ‘four
carlini
were spent on wax candles for the prayers of the Signora’, ‘five were spent on wax candles for the prayers of the Signora’, or ‘a pound of wax candles were bought for the prayers of the Signora’.
³
Beeswax candles, which did not have the noxious odour of those made of tallow, animal fat, were expensive. Their expense is justified in Felice’s books because they were acquired to accompany her prayers. The records of purchases of costly wax candles increased to the point where sometimes she was lighting over a pound a week at her orisons. These brief entries reveal a very private Felice, one kneeling in the dark, lit only by the flickering votive candles, asking for divine guidance as she negotiated her ever increasing challenges and obligations.

Despite the regular time she spent at prayer, like many others in Rome in
1527
, Felice della Rovere would come to wonder whether God had abandoned her.

chapter 2

The Fall of Rome

Felice’s personal demons were ferocious, but they were to pale in comparison with those unleashed on Rome in May
1527
.
1
The Sack of Rome by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s troops began on the morning of
6
May
1527
and lasted well into the following year. The first-hand accounts that exist of the raping, robbing, pillaging and murder by these ‘barbarous hordes’ are chillingly vivid. ‘In the streets,’ wrote Luigi Guicciardini in his history of the Sack, ‘many nobles lay there cut to pieces, covered with mud and their own blood, and many people half dead lay miserably on the ground. Sometimes in that ghastly scene a child or man would be seen jumping through a window, forced to jump to escape becoming the living prey of those monsters and finally ending their lives horribly in the street.’
2
What had Rome done to warrant such an invasion? Whatever their transgressions, its citizens were largely blameless. Few could have anticipated that this savage attack on Rome would be the outcome of the antagonism between Charles V and Pope Clement VII over a matter that meant little to most Romans. There had been a longstanding feud between the Emperor and the French King, Francis I, over territorial rights in the Burgundian provinces and occupancy of Milan. Francis and Charles sought to buttress their claims by alliance with, and allegiance from, the Pope, the Holy Father. Alliance with the Emperor, who controlled over half of western Europe, was in the papacy’s, and thus in Rome’s, best interests. But in making his choices, Clement VII did not act as Pope; he acted as a member of the Medici family. Honouring a history of matrimonial ties between the Medici and the French royal family, Clement severed an old alliance with Charles to make a new one with Francis.