formally requested Alfonso to guarantee Giulio’s safety. Alfonso replied that he promised to stand surety for Ippolito’s actions but warned Giulio that he could not protect him from the law if he was to be found guilty of treason.
Finally it was Ferrante who betrayed the conspirators and told of Giulio’s involvement in the affair. Alfonso was appalled at the realization that his own brothers were plotting his assassination. Ferrante was arrested, along with the other plotters, with the exception of Giulio, who preferred to remain in Mantua under the protection of Francesco and Isabella.
The trial opened on August 3; and a month later all were found guilty and condemned to death by execution. Alfonso, however, had been fond of his brothers and decided to reprieve them, sentencing the two young men instead to life imprisonment in the castle dungeons. For Ferrante, life imprisonment entailed captivity for forty-three years until his death; for Giulio, fifty-three years, until he was released by his great-nephew, Lucrezia’s grandson Duke Alfonso II.
At the end of November 1506, after a year that had seen her husband suffer so much anguish, Lucrezia brought him news that gladdened both their hearts; she was pregnant again and would, God willing, bear this child. At the same time welcome news arrived from Spain: Cesare had escaped from prison and was on his way to the safety of the court of his brother-in-law, who was now king of Navarre. Lucrezia awaited eagerly to hear what he would do next; she herself was prepared to do all she could to help him.
Her gaiety was plain for all to see that year during Carnival in 1507, when Francesco Gonzaga, now captain-general of the papal forces, came to Ferrara to discuss future operations with Duke Alfonso, who, by now quite unconcerned by his wife’s obvious attraction to this man, raised no objection to the attentions that she and Gonzaga paid to each other, to the time they spent in each other’s company, to their dancing together at ball after ball. Abandoned yet graceful, she threw herself energetically into the excitement of the palace dances until she had to take yet again to her bed.
All the excitement had proved too much for Lucrezia, who, in the middle of January, suffered yet another miscarriage. Alfonso despaired and chided his wife for her lack of proper care for her condition; too much dancing, he remonstrated, and too much revelry. She also had to endure the news, which arrived a few weeks later, that Isabella had given birth to her third son, whom she named Ferrante, in honour of her brother, languishing a prisoner in the castle dungeons.
— CHAPTER 27 — The End of the Affair
‘THE HARDER I TRY TO PLEASE GOD, THE HARDER HE TRIES ME’
ONCE SHE HAD RECOVERED from her miscarriage, Lucrezia took up with a reforming friar in the tradition of Savonarola who proposed, among many other penances, a tariff of ‘fines to curb profanities’ — 1 ducat for taking the name of a saint in vain, for example, or 2 ducats for an oath involving Our Lord or the Virgin Mary. This was too much for the good citizens of Ferrara, who proposed invoking the help of Duchess Lucrezia by sending a deputation asking her to propose to the friar that, rather than urging the punishment of blasphemers and the forsaking of cosmetics and decolletages, he should preach against more heinous sins. Lucrezia undertook to speak to him but seems to have contented herself by remonstrating with her ladies about their often scandalous behaviour.
Then, on April 22, 1507, an unexpected visitor arrived in Ferrara with dreadful news. It was one of Cesare’s squires, who had travelled from Navarre to tell Lucrezia that her brother was dead, killed in battle, as Cesare had always suspected he would be, some six weeks earlier, fighting for the king of Navarre. ‘The harder I try to please God, the harder he tries me,’ wept Lucrezia when she heard. In reply to a letter from her husband, who was in Genoa with Louis XII and had penned a hasty note to her commiserating with her loss, she wrote that she hoped he could ‘return home as soon as possible, which is what I wish with all my heart.’ She then, in her grief, took to her bed; indeed, she was not seen in public for so long that rumours abounded that she was pregnant again.
By the summer, however, she had recovered enough to renew her affair with Francesco Gonzaga, who she knew was deeply attracted to her and with whom she was in love. This was a dangerous liaison and became even more so when Ercole Strozzi — who had acted as go-between when Lucrezia was entangled with Pietro Bembo — and Ercole’s brother Guido Strozzi, who lived in Mantua, now became carriers of letters between the marquis and Lucrezia.
Their correspondence was interrupted at the end of 1507 when Lucrezia again became pregnant. On this occasion she was far from being so nervous as she had been during previous pregnancies. Indeed, she entered enthusiastically into discussion about the design of the baby’s elaborate cradle and its clothes and the interviewing of would-be wet nurses. She relished the sweetmeats that were sent to her from Spain by her sister-in-law as well as the almond pastries filled with honey and nougat that she ate in the steaming water of her bath or while playing idly with her countless pearls.
And during Carnival at the beginning of 1508, it was noted, with relief, that Lucrezia was finally heeding the advice of her doctors, and the urgent entreaties of her husband, and was avoiding the excesses in which she had indulged in previous years, even to the extent of forgoing her pleasure in dancing. There was, however, plenty for her to enjoy: watching the jousts and the other displays of horsemanship; enjoying the daring feats of the tightrope walkers and acrobats; laughing at the ribald comedies performed in the theatre; and listening to the new songs she had commissioned specially for Carnival, which were performed, along with some of her old favourites, by the court musicians.
On April 3 Duke Alfonso had to leave his heavily pregnant wife for a few days to go to Venice on urgent business, no doubt optimistic that this pregnancy would end more satisfactorily than its predecessors. So he was absent when, the next day, Lucrezia gave birth to a boy, which, all who saw the baby agreed, appeared to be perfectly healthy; and he was named Ercole after his paternal grandfather.
The birth of an heir was greeted with great excitement and joy in Ferrara; the church bells rang out across the city; guns were fired; fireworks lit the skies. In their enthusiasm for celebrations, according to a local chronicler, the populace made bonfires of
all the screens in the market place and elsewhere and all the benches of the notaries and the table of the judges from the Palazzo della Ragione, as well as all its windows and doors, and they also burnt the ladies’ pews from the cathedral and the other large churches, and all the benches, tables, stools and doors in the public schools at San Domenico and San Francesco, and the celebrations went on for three nights.
Ercole was christened in the chapel of the ducal palace soon after his birth. ‘He was not baptized in public,’ reported the chronicler, ‘and it is not known who held him at the font,’ though he did know the identity of the wet nurse employed to feed him, who was the daughter of a carpenter in the city. Nor is there any evidence that the apparently hasty and private christening betokened any infirmity on the part of the baby. Indeed, once Duke Alfonso returned from Venice a few days later, he proudly displayed his little heir to the ambassadors and other dignitaries, who were asked to examine little Ercole lying naked on his back, less handsome than he had first been reported but evidently ‘complete.’
Alfonso announced the birth of his heir in jubilant letters dispatched to courts throughout Italy and beyond. The duke had informed his brother-in-law Francesco Gonzaga in a letter sent before he left Venice, and the marquis returned this gesture of friendship by sending his own secretary to Ferrara to offer congratulations on his behalf. Lucrezia, following the conventions of the period, sent her news to Isabella d’Este. Aware that the friendship between his wife and his brother-in-law was causing food for gossips at court, Alfonso was determined that Lucrezia should behave in the usual formal manner and forbade her to communicate the news to the marquis; Lucrezia had been furious and made it quite plain that she was so. Could it be, the question was inevitably asked, that the baby was not the child of Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, but of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, a man whom Alfonso much disliked? Certainly the baby’s nose looked rather squashed as does Francesco Gonzaga’s in Mantegna’s
