‘If during this period you chance to find your ears are ringing it will be because I am communing with all those dark things and horrors and tears of yours, or else writing pages about you that will still be read a century after we are gone’
– Pietro Bembo to Lucrezia, 25 July 1504
During the high summer and autumn of 1503 the plague had raged through Ferrara; all those rich enough to escape had left, and the Este with their various households had retreated separately to their country villas. The poor and the artisanelli – literally ‘little artisans’ – had been the principal victims and some 850 had died. By November the disease had spread to the countryside: on I November, di Prosperi reported that he had heard that fifty-seven members of Lucrezia’s household were sick. Both Lucrezia and Alfonso remained outside the city, Lucrezia at Medelana, Alfonso at Ostellato.
Meanwhile, an event had occurred in Rome which was to have serious consequences for Cesare, the Este and indeed Lucrezia herself. On the night of 17 October the gentle, kindly but infirm Pius III died after a reign of only twenty-six days. Pius had protected and favoured Cesare; on 8 October, the day of his coronation, he had confirmed him as Captain General of the Church and Gonfalonier. Cesare had been preparing to leave for the Romagna as his enemies – the Orsini, Gian Paolo Baglioni and Bartolommeo d’Alviano – gathered in Rome. Even the Colonna joined them. Cesare tried to break out but the Orsini got wind of his plans and after a ferocious fight Cesare was forced to retreat to the Vatican for safety. Even there he was not secure as the Orsini and their allies raged through the Borgo, shouting, ‘Let us kill the Jewish dog!’ Protected by the cardinals and the castellan of Sant’Angelo, a Borgia partisan, Cesare fled along the covered way to the castle with his family – Rodrigo Bisceglie, Giovanni Borgia and his two illegitimate children. Two days later Pius died, leaving Cesare at bay in the Castel Sant’Angelo. News of his predicament caused the final crumbling of his states in the Romagna where, by the end of the month, he held only a few cities and castles. In Rome he still hoped to gain something by bargaining the support of his Spanish cardinals in the conclave to elect the new pope. But in reality there was only one candidate: the Borgias’ lifelong enemy, Giuliano della Rovere.
On 1 November 1503, Giuliano became pope, taking the title Julius II; Cesare had made an agreement with him over the election but the long-term prognostication for their relationship was not good. The former Giuliano della Rovere was sixty years old when he attained the papacy, the object of his lifelong ambition. Men said of him that he had the soul of an emperor and his appearance was as imperial as his manner was imperious. He was a man of volcanic temperament: when he acted it was with dynamic energy and he was given to fits of violent temper, often fuelled by too much wine. Guicciardini wrote of him that he was notoriously difficult by nature and formidable with everyone; that he had spent his long life in restless action, in great enmities and friendships and constant intrigues. The Venetian envoys Lippomano and Capello described him as extremely acute but tempestuous: ‘It is almost impossible to describe how strong and violent and difficult to manage he is. In body and soul he has the nature of a giant.’ He had the reputation of being a man of his word, which even the Borgias believed, but in fact he was subtle, devious and ruthless in pursuit of his aims. And Cesare had seriously misjudged him, as Machiavelli, always the acute observer, commented: ‘He does not love il Valentino, but nonetheless strings him along for two reasons: one, to keep his word, of which men hold him most observant, and for the obligations he has towards him, being recognizant to him for the good part of the Papacy; the other, since it seems to him, that His Holiness being without forces, the Duke [Cesare] is better placed to resist the Venetians.’1
Cesare’s predicament caused strains in the relationship between Lucrezia and her husband. Alfonso was not enthusiastic about her support for her embattled brother. While Ercole had taken the view that Cesare in charge in the Romagna would be less dangerous to Ferrara than a powerful Venice, Alfonso was more circumspect and courted Venice through the medium of the Venetian envoy, della Pigna. According to Sanudo, on 21 October Alfonso complained to della Pigna that the Venetian Signory ‘do not wish him well and he does not know why if it were not for the men sent by madonna Lucretia to help Valentino, and he has not given him a penny, etc. . .’ The envoy concludes that ‘it would be good to act together with Don Alfonso, who wishes evil to Valentino . . .’2 Ercole, eager to keep in with the new Pope, had dispatched Ippolito to Rome with Ferrante, the Pope’s godson, for Julius’s coronation on 3 November.
Whatever their differences over Cesare (and it is possible that Alfonso was playing games with the Venetians) and Alfonso’s distaste for Lucrezia’s literary circle, he was strongly physically attracted to his wife; from the first year of her marriage to the end of her life, Lucrezia was almost continually pregnant and getting her in that condition seems to have been almost an obsession with him. Numbers of children were associated with virility: Alfonso’s grandfather, Niccolò̀ III, had so many children, legitimate and otherwise, that official genealogists gave up after sixteen, adding after the sixteenth, Baldassare, ‘and many other bastards’. Ercole himself had fathered eight children. On 17 November, di Prosperi reported to Isabella that Lucrezia was said to be unwell due to a new pregnancy; her condition was confirmed by the end of the month. It was only just over a year since the stillbirth of her daughter when Alfonso had promised her another child. Her hopes were high but some time the following year she miscarried; the only written evidence is in a letter to her from Bembo of September 1505 which talks of ‘the cruel disappointment and vain hopes of last year’.3
Meanwhile, in Rome things were going from bad to worse for Cesare. Julius II was a warrior pope with vast ambitions. Like Alexander he was determined to have the States of the Church under his control, and even to extend them further than Alexander and Cesare had done. Cesare was merely a temporary instrument to be discarded once his usefulness was past. For some months the Pope played a cat and mouse game with il Valentino, intent upon gaining the surrender of Cesare’s remaining fortresses in the Romagna. On 1 December news came that Michelotto and Cesare’s cavalry had been captured near Arezzo. This report, according to Machiavelli, threw the Pope into ecstasies, ‘since it seemed to him that by the capture of that man he had the chance to uncover all the cruelties of robberies, sacrileges and other infinite evils which over the past eleven years. . . have been done in Rome against God and man’. Julius told Machiavelli gleefully that he was looking forward to interviewing Michelotto ‘to learn some tricks from him, so as to enable him to better govern the Church’. Devastated by the capture of Michelotto, Cesare promised to render to Julius certain fortresses in the Romagna. However, when the papal messenger arrived at Cesena, Cesare’s castellans, the Ramires brothers, beat him and hanged him from the castle walls, and sent an insolent message to the Pope. Julius fell into a rage and on 20 December confined Cesare to the Torre Borgia, the very room in which Michelotto had murdered Alfonso Bisceglie three years before.
Early in January 1504, Cesare suffered another blow when two wagonloads of his possessions destined for Ferrara were seized, one from Rome by the Florentines in Tuscany, the other coming from Cesena, by Giovanni Bentivoglio, as it passed through Bolognese territory. The latter contained many of the goods taken by Michelotto from Alexander’s room on the day of his death, including the jewel-studded mantle of St Peter, altarpieces and cups of gold and precious stones, eighty huge pearls and ‘a cat in gold with two most noble diamonds as its eyes’.4 They had been travelling in the name of Ippolito, an indication that under Lucrezia’s persuasion the Este were still prepared to help him. Ippolito and Lucrezia were acting to help Cesare, as is evident from a letter of 10 April 1504 written by Juan Artes, commandant of Cesare’s galleys, addressed to Ippolito but mentioning Lucrezia; he gave them what he described as ‘the good news’ that an agreement had been reached whereby Cesare’s castellans in the Romagna would hand over his fortresses to the Pope’s representative, after which Cesare would be freed from the fortress at Ostia, where he now was, to go safely to Naples.5 However, at Naples, Cesare, the great deceiver, was himself the victim of a double-cross from the quarter he least expected it, Gonsalvo da Cordoba, ‘the Great Captain’. On 26 May, the eve of his departure by ship for Tuscany, he went to take leave of Gonsalvo only to find himself arrested, despite the safe conduct he had received from him. He was the victim of an international intrigue between the Pope, who was afraid of what il Valentino might do once freed, and the King and Queen of Spain, who wanted two things from the Pope and were therefore desperate to please him—a dispensation enabling Catherine of Aragon to marry her dead husband’s brother, the future Henry VIII of England, and their own investiture with the Kingdom of Naples. Moreover, it was reported that Juan Gandia’s widow, convinced that Cesare had murdered her husband, pleaded in person with the Spanish sovereigns to bring him back to be tried for his crime. In August, Cesare lost his last possession in the Romagna when his loyal castellan, Gonsalvo de Mirafuentes, rode out of the Rocca di Forlì, lance held high.6 With this, Cesare had lost everything for within the Rocca di Forlì was stored the loot he had stolen from Urbino, including the famous library. With tears in his eyes Guidobaldo retrieved his possessions; the Pope’s agents seized the rest. A few days later Cesare was shipped as a prisoner to Spain.
To Lucrezia, in despair over Cesare’s fate, Ercole wrote a letter which showed how much she had captured his affections: ‘Be of good heart, for even as we love you sincerely and with every tenderness of heart as our daughter, so we shall never fail him, and we wish to be to him a good father and good brother in everything.’ But there was little in fact that Ercole could do beyond the pious exhortation to ‘hope in Our Lord God who does not abandon whoso trusts in him’.7
Indeed, at the moment when Artes’s letter had arrived with its message of false hope, Lucrezia had had no one to turn to beyond her father-in-law, now in failing health. Alfonso embarked on 13 April on a protracted tour of the European courts, in the course of which he visited Paris, then Brussels, where he met the future Charles V, and England where he was welcomed by Henry VII and ‘much caressed and honoured’.8 Ippolito had managed to quarrel both with his father and the Pope. A messenger had been sent by Julius to Ippolito to deliver a brief concerning the surrender of some of his benefices which the Pope wished to confer on someone else. Ippolito fell into a rage and had the unfortunate man soundly beaten. When an outraged Ercole ordered him to write a letter of apology to the Pope, he rudely refused and was exiled to Mantua, whereupon there was an exchange of angry letters between father and son. ‘Since you have been disobedient and ungrateful towards us, you need not wonder that we have dismissed you from our State; because behaving yourself as you do, we do not think you are worthy to be near us,’ Ercole wrote on 14 April in reply to an insolent letter from Ippolito.9 That day Francesco Gonzaga arrived by barge down the Po to effect a reconciliation between Ercole and Ippolito; his intervention was successful and the cardinal was back in Ferrara for the annual St George’s Day races, when Isabella’s horse won thepalio prize.
Despite the valedictory note of Bembo’s letter to her of 5 January 1504, Lucrezia continued to correspond with him. Although Bembo still wrote her occasional romantic letters from afar, referring to her as ‘f.f.’, he did not visit her, pleading ‘indisposition’. In late May she was also ‘indisposed’; she may even have miscarried then. In July he was planning to visit her in Ferrara but procrastinated so that she had gone to Modena at the time he was to arrive. Instead he went to his Paduan villa ‘so that I may finish those things which I began for you’. ‘If,’ he told her, ‘during this period you chance to find your ears are ringing it will be because I am communing with all those dark things and horrors and tears of yours, or else writing pages about you that will still be read a century after we are gone . . .’10 This is probably a reference to Gli Asolani with its dedicatory letter to Lucrezia dated 1 August 1504—although it was not published by Aldus Manutius until March 1505. Ercole Strozzi was still acting as a go-between on lightning visits to Venice and they were still in touch through him and Lucrezia’s ladies – Nicola, now the wife of the Ferrarese aristocrat, Bigio dei Trotti, Elisabetta senese and Madonna Giovanna. They also now had another friend of Bembo’s, Alfonso Ariosto, a relation of Ludovico, who acted as a private messenger. Alfonso Ariosto, Bembo wrote, ‘comes to you deeply desiring to render you homage and make your acquaintance, already afire with the flame that the rays of your great qualities have kindled in his breast, having heard them praised so many times. . .’ Towards the end of September, Lucrezia sent Bembo a poem by their mutual friend Antonio Tebaldeo, now acting as her secretary. In October, Bembo wrote that he had planned to come to Ferrara to see her but that he had heard that the Gonzaga would be there on account of Duke Ercole’s serious relapse, which would prevent him from paying his respects to her ‘as unhurriedly as I would desire’.
A long and most interesting letter from Venice dated 10 February 1505, addressed to ‘Madonna N’ (Nicola dei Trotti) but intended for Lucrezia, seems to indicate that somehow Bembo had succeeded in seeing her and that their passion had been reignited. ‘As long as I live,’ he wrote, ‘I cannot recall ever receiving a letter as gratifying as that which your Ladyship gave me upon my departure and in which you proved to me that I abide in your favour . . . you must know the first hour I saw you that you penetrated my mind to such a degree that never afterwards have you been able to quit it . . .’ There is a great deal in the ‘star-crossed lovers’ vein which was, no doubt, part of the attraction for both: his ill fortune is ‘more than ever arrayed against me now’, he tells her,
yet I have no fear, for it could never make me so afraid that I could cease to love you and not count you the one true mistress of my self and my life, ever serving you with the purest and warmest loyalty that a valiant and steadfast lover can offer the woman he loves and honours above all things human. I do beseech you never to alter and never to lose heart in this love, though there are so many things which oppose and obstruct our desires. . . But endeavour rather to be ever more deeply inflamed with love the more arduous you see your resolve become. . . in spite of ill fortune I love you and. . . nothing can take this from me and I fancy, if there be likewise nothing that can make you not love me, in the end the day must come when we two shall triumph and vanquish ill fortune. . . and when that day comes it will be so lovely and precious for us to recall that we were staunch and constant lovers. . .
There is no doubt that Bembo was deeply concerned at the possibility that their correspondence might be discovered – presumably by Alfonso. ‘Above all,’ he implores her, ‘I beg you to take care that no one may know or discover your true thoughts lest the paths which lead to our love become even more restricted and thwarted than they are at present. Do not trust anyone, no matter whom, until I come to you, which in any case will be soon after Easter if I am alive. . .’ She could trust the bearer of this letter and reply via him. ‘Indeed I beseech you to do so, for since we can talk so little face to face please speak at length with me in letters and let me know what life you lead, and what thoughts are yours and in whom you confide, which things torment you and which console. And take good care not to be seen writing, because I know you are watched very closely.’ After kissing ‘one of those prettiest and brightest and sweetest eyes of yours which have pierced me to the soul, first and lovely cause, though not the only one, of my ardour’, he begged her to accept his favourite medal, an Agnus Dei: ‘Out of love for me sometimes please deign to wear at night the enclosed Agnus Dei which I once used to wear upon my breast, if you cannot wear it in the day, so that your precious heart’s dear abode, which I should gladly stake my life to kiss but once and long, may at least be touched by this roundel which for so long has touched the abode of mine. . .’ 11
Bembo, it seems, did see her, as he promised, once again when he passed through Ferrara in April en route to take part in a Venetian embassy to Rome. He may even have seen her on his return journey early in June when he went on to Mantua to be presented to Isabella. He never saw Lucrezia again thereafter, although they were in touch sporadically until the end of her life. Bembo spent six years at the court of Urbino where he featured as one of the characters in a dialogue on love in The Courtier before spending the rest of his life in Rome, becoming secretary to Pope Leo X.
Lucrezia, or ‘f.f.’, had taken an enormous risk with this relationship even if it was romantic in the fashionable tradition of ‘courtly love’ rather than actually physical. Several people knew about it – her ladies Nicola and Giovanna, Ercole Strozzi and Alfonso Ariosto. The Este had a reputation for ruthlessness in similar circumstances. The Torre Marchesana, one of the four towers of the Castello in which Lucrezia’s apartments then were, had been the scene of a grim ending to a tragic love affair, that of Ugo and Parisina. In the dungeons of this tower just eighty years earlier, on the night of 21 May 1425, Alfonso’s grandfather, Niccolò III d’Este, had ordered the beheading of his second wife, Parisina Malatesta, and of his favourite, illegitimate son, Ugo Aldobrandino, for committing adultery together. Danger, however, was something to which Lucrezia, as a Borgia, had become inured; she may even have derived a certain thrill from risk—as long as that risk was something which, with her experience and charm, she could control and circumvent.
Yet even as her romance with Bembo was on the wane, Lucrezia had embarked on another very different and more long-lasting relationship. She had first met Francesco Gonzaga when, as the hero of the battle of Fornovo, he had passed through Rome in March 1496 and called upon her and Cesare when she was still —just—Countess of Pesaro. Born in 1466 in Mantua, the son of Federico I, the third Marquis of Mantua, and Margherita of Wittelsbach, he had succeeded his father aged not quite eighteen and married Isabella d’Este, aged sixteen, in 1490. He was not handsome: the bust by Gian Cristoforo Romano in the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua shows a man of exuberant carnality, with overblown, sensual lips, protuberant eyes and thick, wiry hair. Although he protected and helped Andrea Mantegna, whose greatest paintings were executed for the Gonzaga family, he was no intellectual. His overwhelming passion, apart from sex, was his stable of horses which was famous throughout Europe and won every race in Italy. Like most aristocrats of his time his chief preoccupations beyond the practice of arms and political survival were horses, hunting dogs and falcons. Beyond his undoubted military skills and extreme untrustworthiness, Francesco’s sexual overdrive was his most significant characteristic. Until at least 1497 he had openly kept a mistress, Teodora Suardi, by whom he had three illegitimate children, often accompanying her in public to the mortification of Isabella. His sexual interests were certainly not confined either to his wife or his mistress—young girls, who could be married to complaisant husbands, and young boys were equally desirable. Lodovico ‘Vigo’ di Camposampiero, with whom he carried on a scabrous correspondence for some years and who was with good reason hated by Isabella, acted as his pimp. One of his functions was to provide boys for Gonzaga. In October 1506 when Gonzaga was campaigning in leisurely fashion against his friends and connections, the Bentivoglio of Bologna, di Camposampiero wrote to him from Rome that he was sending him a boy: ‘As you are at war up there you will not be able to have all your usual comforts. . . you may not find him as beautiful as he has been depicted, but nonetheless he is at your command . . .’12
He revelled in the Rabelaisian, often actively pornographic letters of the distinguished Bolognese jurist Floriano Dolfo. The theme of many of Dolfo’s letters was sodomy, whether homosexual or heterosexual; Dolfo himself liked boys and despised women. He particularly enjoyed retailing the notorious practices at the Baths of Porretta near Bologna. He delightedly described an incident concerning Battista Ranuzzi, lord of the locality, ‘who, the other night, going to the baths with a nun, wanted to sodomize her in the water, and having placed his penis in her arse, both of them seated, he raised himself slightly to penetrate her further and both of them slipped right under the water; but thanks to the goodness of God who never inflicts an unjust punishment, knowing that this sin merited fire not water, both escaped the peril . . .’13 ‘The love of boys,’ Dolfo wrote, was ‘less wearisome, less dangerous and less expensive than the servile love of women.’ 14 Although careful not actually to say anything to the detriment of Isabella, he could not resist scurrilous fun at her expense. Condoling with Francesco that their firstborn, Eleonora, was a girl, he ‘comforted’ him, saying that as a girl her birth would have brought ‘less pain to the Most Illustrious Marchioness, and less stretching to her quim when she will have brought you a benefit and greater pleasure in your communal embraces, so that you won’t find such a large chamber that it would be like a dried pea in a rattle or a clapper in a bell’.15 Sodomy with either sex was not only a sin but a crime punishable by death by burning; only the rich, like Francesco’s brother Giovanni, married to Laura Bentivoglio but nonetheless a practising homosexual, might escape by paying a hefty fine. Unsurprisingly given his relentless sexual activity, Francesco, like Alfonso, Cesare and even the Pope, Julius II, had syphilis; the disease eventually killed him.
Francesco had charm and a powerful sexual magnetism; he liked to flirt with women and knew how to talk to them. To Lucrezia he was far more like the men she had loved—her father and Cesare—than the refined, eloquent Bembo. Biographers have called her relationship with Bembo ‘the great love of her life’ but a study of the relevant documents indicates rather that Francesco was her passion. The fact that he was Isabella’s husband can only have added spice to the affair. Francesco admired his wife for her cool and subtle political instinct, so necessary in restraining his own impulsive temperament and capacity for getting himself into trouble. He was proud of her as a celebrated collector of antique statues and works of art, her patronage of the arts, her skill and accomplishments in entertaining and her taste in dress, all of which passions cost him more than he could afford on his income from Mantua, even supplemented by his successful career as a condottiere. There was no question that intellectually Isabella was far his superior but physically, over the next few years, his interest in her waned and after she had borne him eight children, including the longed-for heir, Federico, in May 1500, their relations ceased. Increasingly her bossiness and vanity irritated him as did her coldness towards her daughters, particularly Eleonora, and perhaps also a little her passion for their son, of whom she once wrote that she hoped he would not inherit the vices of his father.16 Francesco and his brother-in-law Alfonso shared a mutual contempt which gave an affair with Lucrezia additional piquancy.
Lucrezia’s first letters to Francesco date from the spring of 1502: and, unlike her letters of the same period to Isabella, they are written, not by a secretary, but in her own distinctive, legible, spiky hand. Her first letter, written on 11 April of that year, has a distinctly flirtatious note and, since she refers to a letter he has written her, they were already in correspondence. ‘My illustrious lord,’ she wrote,
being on the verge of the confessional, I received a letter from you for which I kiss your hand and ask your pardon for the tardiness of my answer although it was caused by not wishing to disturb Your Lordship in your devotions in these Holy Days [a reference to Easter Week] and because of this I make my reply about ‘your falcon’ as brief as possible. I am advised that he is very well, and better, to judge by appearances, and is often examined by others who had heard from the confessor some things which have happened, although I understand that all this may be said without offence to God. . . because I desire as much as my own health to hear that Your Lordship is renewed from now on in the fear and service of God: and as a good son of San Francesco, as am I, although unworthy, and a Patron of so many excellent friars as much as of their religion. I want in every way to do honour to such as a father [padre]. I know that Your Lordship ridicules me and my preaching which is the fault of Sister Eufrosina and Sister Laura who want me to spite the world by becoming a preacher and martyr. I thank Your Lordship for the other particulars of your letter which Count Lorenzo [Strozzi] has told me in person at greater length and which have given me the greatest pleasure. But the too kind terms which you use to write to me [cum suportatione de quella] I regret that it does not seem suitable to me, holding Your Lordship as Lord and brother as I do . . .17
This altogether mysterious letter was clearly intended to be properly understood only by Francesco; for important people to write personal letters to each other was a risky business. Strozzi, one could assume, would have provided the key, which centred on the ‘falcon’. Indeed, Lucrezia’s second letter of the same date was a passionate recommendation of Lorenzo, Ercole Strozzi’s brother, and his affairs in Mantua, pleading with Francesco to continue his protection of Lorenzo: ‘and to this end I am sending the present bearer to Your Lordship so that he may explain more fully my feelings towards the said count’. Lorenzo Strozzi, like Ercole, would act as go-between for Lucrezia and Francesco. Closely watched as they knew themselves to be, the letters Lucrezia and Francesco exchanged tended to be circumspect, and important messages would be delivered personally by trusted emissaries such as the Strozzi. Indeed, several letters of this period concern favours which she wanted Gonzaga to do for Lorenzo Strozzi. A letter to Francesco that year, written on 30 December, has a playful note:
May Our Lord God be thanked that we have here a pledge from Your Lordship that you will be constrained to let yourself be seen here sometimes for to tell the truth it has been too long since you have been here. I do not joke, My Lord, but I have not been able to be of more service to you than I have been. But it has not been possible for the reasons Count Lorenzo wrote to you: and if they are not enough to excuse me to you I ask a thousand pardons because certainly I desire to serve Your Lordship in everything possible. I thank you as much as I can for the good expedition you have given to the affairs of the said Count . . .18
From 1503 only one letter survives, written in a secretarial hand and asking Francesco to help a member of her household in his affairs at Mantua, while for the same year there are nine letters from Lucrezia to Isabella, all of an administrative nature; this is presumably because Francesco spent a great deal of his time that year with the French armies going against Naples, leaving Isabella in charge.
In the spring and summer of 1504, when Alfonso was on his travels and Duke Ercole was ailing, Lucrezia, following the example of the Duchess Eleonora, took a regular part in the Esame delle Suppliche (Examination of Petitions) and much of her correspondence arose out of the cases presented to her there. Many of the requests were for pardons or the release of prisoners held in Mantua. When Gonzaga did nothing about them, she repeated her requests firmly until he complied. While in Ferrara, he had promised to release to her a certain Bernardino della Publica, imprisoned for murder. When he failed to do so, she wrote insistently and several times, finally and sharply five months later: ‘I beg you to fulfil your promise . . . release [Bernardino della Publica] and send him to me as soon as possible . . .’ Her competence must have impressed Francesco because in one letter she thanked him for all the kind things he had said about her to Duke Ercole which had been repeated to her.
Towards the end of April, Gonzaga (with Isabella) again visited Ferrara for the annual St George’s Day races, inspiring flirtatious letters of regret on his departure from Lucrezia and her ladies. From the beginning, immediately after Gonzaga had left Ferrara, she and her ladies had entered into a conspiracy to seduce him. On 8 May 1504, her ladies wrote a collective lament for his absence, feeling themselves half alive, they said, for the lack of his ‘benign, kind, sophisticated and divine presence’, his ‘divine virtues and exalted and angelic manner’. Angela Borgia and Polissena Malvezzi were particularly concerned to do his bidding, ‘principally when we see the affection borne by our most excellent Duchess, who in all our conversations never ceases to hold the sweetest memories of you’. The letter was signed ‘the most dedicated damsels of the most excellent Duchess’.19 Polissena wrote the same day describing court festivities and adding, ‘But every delight gave little pleasure to Her Ladyship or to me, her servant, since Your Illustrious Lordship was not present.’
Lucrezia was anxious to please her brother-in-law whenever the opportunity arose. Typically, Francesco was anxious to have some fine horses of Cesare’s which were being kept in the Rocca di Forlì by the castellan, de Mirafuentes, as he had made clear during his May visit. Lucrezia immediately contacted de Mirafuentes, as she told Gonzaga in a letter of 11 May, enclosing the castellan’s reply: ‘I only beg of you to signify if there is anything else you need in this case and if I can be of help to you because I assure Your Excellency that you will find me always most prompt and well-disposed in this and in anything else you know that I can be of service to you,’ At the end of July, responding to further requests from Francesco about the horses, she told him that she had written immediately and with the greatest urgency to the castellan and was sure that he would obtain what he desired.
As early as 1502 Lucrezia had taken under her protection the beautiful Barbara Torelli, maltreated wife of Ercole Bentivoglio, son of Giovanni, lord of Bologna. Barbara, a cultivated and intelligent woman of a noble family of Ferrarese origin, had taken refuge in Ferrara because of the Este friendship for her family and because she found the cultured Este court congenial. She seems to have been a difficult woman, and the nuns with whom she first lodged complained to Lucrezia that they did not wish to keep her, whereupon the compassionate Lucrezia had persuaded a Messer Alfonso Calacagnino to have her in his house,20 Two years later Francesco Gonzaga took up the cause of Ercole Bentivoglio at the instance of his own brother, Giovanni Gonzaga, who was related to Bentivoglio through his wife, Laura. He sent a trusted servant, Marcantonio Gatto, to request Lucrezia that Bentivoglio’s daughter, Costanza, be taken from her mother and sent to Mantua to Giovanni Gonzaga’s house. Lucrezia replied in the beautiful hand of Tebaldeo that she had hastened to do as he asked, despite her status as Barbara Torelli’s protector: ‘And in this case she has shown herself somewhat difficult: nonetheless, to satisfy Your Lordship’s desire, I have operated in such a manner that Madonna Barbara, her mother, has consented, albeit unwillingly. And so the girl will go with Marcantonio whom you sent here for this purpose . . .’ 21
As the summer months passed the tone of the letters became more intense and the two exchanged verses, mentioned by Luzio but which have since disappeared. On 10 July, Francesco wrote that he was sick from being deprived of ‘the air of Ferrara which so suits me and of Your Ladyship’s conversation which brings me such pleasure’, excusing himself for not being able to write in his own hand or send the sonnets he had promised her.22 ‘I received your letter and understand that your tardiness in writing was due to your indisposition which grieves me,’ Lucrezia replied, ‘but there was no need to use such terms to me because I am certain of your feelings towards me, for which I will always be truly grateful. And I applaud Your Lordship for passing these tiresome times in pleasures and delightful pastimes as you describe to me. Of ours here, there is no need to describe them since Your Excellency well knows of what sort and quality they are. I am happy you should make fun of us if it gives you pleasure. I and the other ladies here think you are right, and thus Madonna Giovanna, Dona Angela [Borgia] and I myself kiss your hand . . .’23 Five days later she was making plans to see him again: Ercole, who had been gravely ill in June, had been on a pilgrimage to Florence in fulfilment of a vow he had made. He had invited Lucrezia to meet him at the frontiers of Modena, on his return, which seemed to Lucrezia to provide a convenient opportunity to meet Francesco.24 That she did indeed go to Modena is evident from a letter written from there on 25 July, but there is no mention of a meeting, only of thanking him for news of Alfonso who had written to her himself from Paris informing her that he would be returning to Ferrara on 12 August.
Francesco appears, however, to have made a tentative attempt to see her, according to a letter from Alfonso to Isabella of 3 October which reveals a little of the manoeuvres required. Isabella had written to him informing him that her husband desired to go to Comacchio, the villa in the Po delta used by the Este for hunting and particularly fishing. Apparently Francesco had said that he did not want to disturb Alfonso, who was in the midst of taking the water treatment (‘questa mia aqua da bagni’), probably mud from Abano, but Alfonso said it would be a great displeasure for him not to accompany Gonzaga there; he had only not replied earlier, he said, because he had been waiting to see if Lucrezia wanted to go or not:
Yesterday morning she departed with our uncle Sigismondo and a goodly company of ladies and gentlemen to go to Comacchio which, with the journey, will be about ten or twelve days. As soon as she returns I will let you know so that you can tell the Marchese what day he can leave there [?Mantua] and come to Ferrara because I intend at all costs to accompany him [to Comacchio]. And in these few days I will finish my water treatment and His Lordship will be content to wait these few days in order to have the greater enjoyment. And to have better lodging than he could at present there because the people I have mentioned are there. . . Please remind him that the fewer people he brings the more comfortable he will be . . . 25
Presumably Francesco had hoped to have Lucrezia to himself at Comacchio without her husband’s surveillance; if so, he (and probably also she) was disappointed.
It is tempting to speculate that Alfonso had written to defer Francesco Gonzaga’s journey to Comacchio in order that he should not see Lucrezia there. Certainly it would appear so from a letter Lucrezia wrote to Francesco on 28 October after she returned to Ferrara: ‘Not having been able personally to see Your Excellency and speak to you on your journey to Comacchio as I greatly desired. . .’, she was sending her ‘major-domo’ to him with the request she would have made him. The object of this request was a strange one: the release to Lucrezia ‘in absolute freedom’ of a certain Antonio da Bologna, a formerly trusted courtier of both Francesco and Isabella, who had been condemned by Gonzaga for abusing his position by ordering expensive clothes for himself while pretending that they were for the Marquis and his family. Gonzaga had apparently bluntly refused Lucrezia’s request: she then wrote him, in her own hand, a passionate and imperious demand that he should do as she asked. Quite why she should have been so attached to Antonio da Bologna is a mystery; that he was a young man of charm and allure is, however, clear from other references. Gonzaga must eventually have released him because not long afterwards he secretly married (becoming her second husband) Giovanna d’Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi, the protagonist of Webster’s drama, and was murdered in 1513 by a Gonzaga connection, probably on the orders of her brother, Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona, a cousin and intimate of the Este. 26
Alfonso had in fact arrived in Ferrara on 8 August, earlier than expected, the reason for his hasty return being the severe illness of Ercole; there were rumours of rivalries among the Este brothers over the succession and mutual suspicions which were to erupt in violence over the next two years. Sanudo had reported on 7 June: ‘From Ferrara the news comes that the Duke is ill; Don Alfonso is in France and is going to England, so that a messenger has been sent after him for him to return, because his father is in great danger; and if at his death he should not be found in Ferrara, the second brother, Don Ferrando [Ferrante], who is loved by the people, could be made Lord.’27 Ferrante had returned from Rome, his head turned by the welcome given him there by the Pope, his godfather, whose favourable treatment of him had enraged his brother, Ippolito. This may well have given him ideas that he might have been invested with the Dukedom by the Pope in Alfonso’s absence. Bernardino Zambotti also recorded that Alfonso hurried back, ‘thinking that he was in danger of not succeeding to the lordship of Ferrara, if his father died in his absence’.28 Speculation as to the succession was rife in Rome and in Venice, as the Venetian envoy in Rome, Giustinian, reported to the Doge on 29 June: ‘It was said that there were letters from Ferrara that the Lord Duke had had a return of his malady and was in great danger of his life. As to what will happen in the event of his death, various judgements are passed, and all conclude that there must be great dissensions among his sons, and that the absence of Don Alfonso will be greatly to his disadvantage, since the Cardinal, who is popular with the people, is in Ferrara . . .’29
Lucrezia had clearly been relying on Francesco to help her if Ercole died while Alfonso was away and had obtained his promise to do so, as a letter to Francesco from Marcantonio Gatto makes clear. Gatto was one of the private messengers employed that year by Lucrezia and Francesco to convey letters and confidences too risky to be committed to paper. On 6 June, precisely at the time Ercole first fell ill, Gatto wrote to Francesco reminding him of the promise he had given to Lucrezia to go to Revere, within easy reach of Ferrara, should she have urgent need of him: ‘Everyone has offered the Lady their support should the Duke die and to dedicate their souls and their lives to her service – and above all the Cardinal [Ippolito] . . . although most people do not trust him,’ he wrote. ‘Many other things I will keep to tell you personally that I do not dare to write confirming that all this city will be in favour of the Lady, when they intend however to cry “Turco!” in the piazza. . . Believe Gattino, [little cat] My Lord, that you alone can do more in this city than all the house of Este together. . .’30 The story behind this last letter reflects the feverish atmosphere in Ferrara as Ercole’s reign was clearly coming to its close. Gatto was a very minor player who was in reality no more than a messenger. It does, however, demonstrate Lucrezia’s fears as to what might happen to her if Ercole, her principal protector, died while Alfonso was abroad, with Cesare out of the game and the Borgias’ greatest enemy on the papal throne.
Lucrezia’s last letter of that year, written on 17 December, was carried by hand to Mantua by Gatto. In it she asked Francesco to trust him as he would herself (the conventional formula for confidential messages) and ‘hold him as the most faithful servant which he is’, asking him to give effect to his promise that he would take him (Gatto) into his service. It was written when Ercole was on his deathbed; the content of her message via Gatto can never be known but clearly related to the latest situation and its possible dangers. Gatto was a fool who had got into deep water; Lucrezia, compassionate and appreciative of loyal servants, thought it better that he should stay out of Ferrara under Gonzaga’s protection. Ippolito for one would not have hesitated to eliminate him had he got wind of the gist of Gatto’s letter to Gonzaga.
Less than ten days earlier, on 8 December, Giustinian had reported Lucrezia as taking an important political initiative to protect herself and Alfonso in the event of Ercole’s death:
Letters from Ferrara announce that Duke Ercole is gravely ill, in imminent danger of death. On this occasion the Cardinal Regino told the Venetian orator that Donna Lucrezia, consort of Lord Alfonso, was his ‘comare’ [literally meaning co-godparent, which in those days implied a closer relationship than it does now], and in all her affairs bows [‘fa capo’] to your most Reverend Signory and that she serves you willingly, since she is a virtuous lady and well loved by him: with some other words spoken with considerable reserve and prudence, by which he tacitly wished to insinuate that, in case of the death of the aforesaid duke, she and her husband would be recommended to Your Serenity; saying, however, that she would not do otherwise, for her goodness and justice; . . . saying that it was almost common opinion among those who do not judge well of the affairs of Your Excellency from not understanding this, that she on the death of the Duke will be making some change in that state.31
Since the death of Alexander VI and the accession of Julius II, Ferrara was again a state suspended between the expansionist ambitions of the papacy on the one hand and Venice on the other. Julius II had made it clear in his dealings with Ercole that he was no friend to Ferrara and its ruling family; his favouring of Ferrante, which had led Ippolito to leave Rome in a rage, indicated that he might well cause trouble by using Ferrante as an instrument in any succession quarrels. Alfonso had chosen to placate Venice, the power on his borders, rather than the probably implacable papacy. In September he had made a journey to Venice with the specific aim of obtaining the support of the Signory. Now, as the crisis of Ercole’s death approached, he was supported by Lucrezia who well knew how to exploit her still-powerful connections. As Christmas of 1504 approached, Alfonso was beginning to throw off his ‘Prince Hal’ image while Lucrezia looked forward to attaining the supreme position she had always wanted, as undisputed Duchess of Ferrara. For the first time, they were a true partnership and, once again, Lucrezia was pregnant.