The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (46 page)

‘
Eighteen years is enough. It will serve out my time
’

C
OSIMO, AT
twenty-six, was just as gloomy as ever but far more self-confident than at the time of his wedding. An inveterate trencherman, he was now excessively fat; but he had a certain charm of manner, and though he was unduly fond of pious interjections, his conversation was wide-ranging and not uninteresting. In England, where he was well received in academic circles owing to his family’s protection of Galileo, he was seen coming out of the Queen’s Chapel by Pepys who described him as a ‘comely, black, fat man, in a morning suit… a
very jolly and good
comely man’. At the French Court he created a similarly favourable impression. The King wrote to Marguerite-Louise, ‘Consideration for you alone would have obliged me to give my cousin all the favourable treatment he has received from me. But from what I perceived of his personal qualities, I could not have refused them to his peculiar merit.’ In the less reliable words of Mademoiselle, ‘He spoke admirably on every topic. His physique was rather plump for a man of his age. He had a fine head, black and curly hair, a large red mouth, good teeth, a healthy ruddy complexion, abundance of wit, and was agreeable in conversation.’

Cosimo returned to Florence much taken with the countries of the north. ‘I hope for nothing in this world so ardently as once again to see [that] paradise called England,’ he said soon after his return. ‘I
long to embrace again all my old friends there.’ He was equally enthusiastic about France, and evidently prepared to make more allowances for the wayward behaviour of his French wife who, he was pleased to note when he got home, was now on good terms both with his mother and his father. His father, however, was failing fast with dropsy and apoplexy, and suffering agonies from the treatment of his doctors; towards the end, not content with bleeding him, they placed a cauterizing iron on his head and forced
polvere capitale
up his nose; they also applied to his forehead four live pigeons whose stomachs had been ripped open for the purpose. The Grand Duke Ferdinando II died on 27 May 1670 and was buried with his father and grandfather in the great baroque mausoleum at San Lorenzo.

Cosimo III entered upon his inheritance with the deepest apprehension. In spite of his father’s personal economy and his rigid and extensive system of taxation, there had been no recent improvement in the finances of Tuscany whose trade was rapidly declining and whose population was being constantly decreased by malaria, plague and food shortages due to a backward agriculture. At first, Cosimo endeavoured to deal effectively with the problems that beset him; but soon, recognizing that they were utterly beyond his ability to control, he withdrew more and more into the soothing darkness of his chapel, leaving his mother and her friends to deal with most affairs of state and even deputing his brother, who was not yet twelve, to receive foreign ambassadors. This pleased his bossy mother well enough, but it certainly did not please his wife who angrily complained about a mere della Rovere presuming to take precedence over a daughter of the royal house of France.

In the summer of 1671, after Marguerite-Louise had given birth to a second son, christened Gian Gastone after his grandfather, Gaston d’Orléans, relations between Cosimo and his wife deteriorated rapidly. Believing that she had cancer of the breast she asked Louis XIV to send her a French doctor. Louis agreed to do so; but when the doctor arrived, he discovered that the little bump on her bosom was ‘nowise malignant’. However, sympathizing with her urgent desire to return to France, he did suggest to the Grand Duke that her general
health might be improved by taking the medicinal waters at Sainte-Reine in Burgundy. Cosimo took leave to disagree, and naturally his objections led to heated protests from his wife. There were further quarrels over the quality of various jewels he gave her, over her extravagance, over her servants, and particularly over a male cook with whom she behaved outrageously in order to punish Cosimo for having dismissed two German grooms and a French dancing-master. ‘Now this cook,’ so it was recorded,

either dreaded, or pretended to dread, being tickled, and the Duchess, aware of his weakness, delighted in tickling him… He defended himself, shouting and running from one side of the room to the other, which made her laugh excessively.

When tired of this she would beat the cook over the head with a pillow, and the cook would take shelter under her bed where she went on beating him until, tired out with her exertions, she sank into a chair. As she did so her band of musicians started once more to play the tune they had abandoned when the romp had begun. One night the cook, being very drunk, made so much noise while the Grand Duchess was belabouring him with her pillow that he aroused the Grand Duke who, coming down to see what was happening, ‘instantly condemned the cook to the galleys’ – though he later reprieved him. Eventually the Grand Duchess decided to settle the matter once and for all. She wrote to inform Cosimo that she could bear her situation not a moment longer:

So I have made a resolution which will not surprise you when you reflect on your base usage of me for nearly twelve years… I am the source of your unhappiness, as you are of mine. I beg you to consent to a separation to set my conscience and yours at rest. I shall send my confessor to discuss it with you.

The Grand Duke replied,

I do not know if your unhappiness could have exceeded mine. Although everybody else has done justice to the many signs of respect, consideration and love which I have never tired of showing you for nearly twelve years, you have regarded them with the utmost indifference… I await the father confessor you are sending to learn what he has to say on your behalf…
Meanwhile I am giving orders that besides proper attendants and conveniences Your Highness will receive [at Poggio a Caiano] all the respect which is your due.

Hearing that the marriage had reached this sad pass, Louis XIV sent yet another envoy to Tuscany, this time the Bishop of Marseilles. The Bishop found the Grand Duchess established at Poggio a Caiano with an extremely large household numbering over a hundred and fifty servants and attendants. Her conduct and movements were closely regulated – she was followed everywhere and nobody could visit her without the Grand Duke’s express permission – but, as the Bishop discovered, although full of complaints about her husband, she was far from downcast. Indeed, she was ‘lively and brilliant, bold and enterprising… playful and merry’. It seemed not at all surprising to the Bishop that the Grand Duke, so ‘melancholy and sombre’ himself, should be so continually at variance with her. Yet the Bishop hoped that some sort of reconciliation could nevertheless be patched up. Between the dancing and the dinners, the music and comedies with which the tireless Grand Duchess regaled him, he managed to find out what her principal grievances were. But when the Grand Duke promised to redress them, she was still not satisfied. ‘Having tried in vain for twelve long years to change her feelings, she could not alter them now.’ Besides, she could not continue to live with him ‘without offending God’ for she had been married to him under duress so was not really his wife at all. At length the Bishop was forced to conclude that his mission was hopeless, and in May 1673 he returned to France to report to the King.

Louis and Cosimo both thought that, if a formal separation had to be approved, Marguerite-Louise ought to remain in Tuscany for the sake of appearances. But the Grand Duchess was determined to go home to France, and on 26 December 1674 permission was at last given her to do so. She was to retire to the convent at Montmartre. She saw to it that she did not go empty-handed. As well as a generous pension and lavish expenses for her journey, she was to be allowed to take hangings and beds as well as 10,000 crowns’ worth of silver. In fact, she took a great deal more. She removed several valuable articles from Poggio a Caiano, and gave away so much money before
she left that she had to ask for more in case she found herself ‘penniless on the highway’.

As might be expected, she did not remain long in seclusion at Montmartre. At first she behaved with due piety and resignation, but soon she was off to Versailles, with Louis XIV’s permission. Letters from her demanding more money arrived in Florence by regular posts. She took to gambling, to wearing double layers of patches, thick rouge and a yellow wig. She was as talkative and restless as ever. She was rumoured to be having an affair with the Comte de Louvigny, with an adjutant in the Maréchal de Luxembourg’s guards, as well as with a guardsman in the same regiment. Later she took a fancy to her groom who cracked nuts for her with his teeth, was allowed to win money from her at cards and who helped her to take a bath. She got deeper and deeper in debt, demanding another 20,000 crowns from Cosimo, who exasperated her by the inordinately long time he took in replying to her urgent letters. She created uproar at Montmartre by furiously chasing a young, newly appointed abbess through the convent for having dared to criticize her conduct, brandishing a hatchet in one hand and a pistol in the other. After this escapade she obtained permission to leave Montmartre for the smaller community of Saint-Mandé where she soon took another lover, this time a renegade monk.

But she was now forty-seven and beginning to show signs of becoming less unruly. She professed herself shocked by the goings-on at Saint-Mandé where the nuns climbed over the walls at night and the Mother Superior, dressed as a man, disappeared for months on end. Impressed by her reformist zeal, the Archbishop appointed her Mother Superior in place of the absconding transvestite. Four years later she inherited a handsome fortune from her sister, and so had no further need to bother Cosimo for money. She lived to the age of seventy-six, endlessly talking about her past, yet protesting that she never regretted having left Tuscany. ‘Ah!’ she would say. ‘I care little about that so long as I never have to set eyes on the Grand Duke again.’

The Grand Duke, for his part, had marked the departure of his
tiresome wife by loading his tables with the most exotic foods and his guests with the most splendid presents as if anxious to show that he was far from being as mean as the Grand Duchess’s supporters had suggested, and that he was still as rich as the Medici had always been supposed to be, though in fact no longer were. His banquets were supervised by foreign servants in their national costumes; his capons, weighed in front of him, were sent back to the kitchen if they did not turn the scales at twenty pounds; his pastries and jellies were presented to him in the form of castles and heraldic beasts; his wines were cooled in snow. He himself consumed gargantuan platefuls of the richest delicacies, becoming fatter than ever with a complexion not so much ruddy as inflamed.

In other ways he was less indulgent. His Christianity became more and more narrow. Sexual intercourse between Jews and Christians was strictly forbidden, and any Christian prostitute who leased her body to a Jew was whipped before being sent to prison, while the Jew who hired her was heavily fined. Fines were also imposed on Christians who worked as servants or shop assistants for Jewish masters. If they could not pay the fine they were stretched on the rack when fit enough to bear the torture or, when not, imprisoned. In obedience to the wishes of the Inquisition, scientists and philosophers were no longer afforded the protection they had been accustomed to receive from the Medici. The staff at the University of Pisa were expressly forbidden by the Grand Duke’s personal command’ to read or teach, in public or in private, by writing or lecturing the philosophy of Democritus’, expounder of the atomic theory of the universe. And, for fear lest they should be contaminated by contact with such theories at other universities, Tuscan students were not permitted to attend any academic institutions beyond the borders of the Grand Duchy.

In his determination to stamp out immorality as well as heresies, Cosimo banned the May Day festival of the
Calendimaggio
on account of its supposedly pagan origins. Girls who persisted in singing the songs of May in the streets were liable to be whipped. At the same time an edict was issued forbidding young men and girls to dally at doors and windows by night, a practice condemned as ‘a great
incentive to rapes, abortions and infanticides’. Men could be, and were, tortured on the rack for making love to girls with whom they were officially forbidden to consort, and beheading was the punishment for sodomy as well as for all manner of crimes against property. Public executions became so common, in fact, that in one year well over two thousand were carried out in the city. Murderers were not merely executed but afterwards quartered, and Cosimo would have have had one particular murderer tortured with red-hot pincers had not the magistrate advised him against it ‘because of the disgust that it would give the city’.

Yet Cosimo constantly did disgust the city by his burdensome taxes and other financial exactions. Scarcely a month passed without the imposition of some new tax, while the existing rates were perpetually being increased. The clergy were largely exempt, just as they usually escaped punishment for criminal offences, except in the case of particularly notorious crimes like those of the priest who persuaded numerous young women of his congregation that, with his help, they might give birth to the Holy Spirit whose appearance in human shape was imminent. But if little money was exacted from the clergy, prostitutes were a lucrative source of revenue. They were compelled to buy licences to perambulate the streets at night, and they were fined if they did so without a lighted torch. They had to pay six crowns a year for immunity from arbitrary arrest by agents of the Office of Public Decency who might otherwise pounce on them for some such trivial breach of the regulations governing their conduct as not wearing the prescribed yellow ribbon in their hat or hair. Women thus caught were then marched off to prison from which the public executioner would whip them to the old market place with a placard reading ‘For Whoredom’ hung over their breasts.