a posse of lacqueys in the same liveries and two mules laden with coffers draped with cloth of gold, which contained the gifts of which Cesare was the bearer. Behind these rode the duke's thirty gentlemen, in cloth of gold and silver, and amongst them came the duke himself.
Cesare was mounted on a superb war-horse that was all empanoplied in a cuirass of gold leaves of exquisite workmanship, its head surmounted by a golden artichoke, its tail confined in a net of gold abundantly studded with pearls. The duke was in black velvet, through the slashings of which appeared the gold brocade of the undergarment. Suspended from a chain said by Brantome's poet to be worth thirty thousand ducats, a medallion of diamonds blazed upon his breast, and in his black velvet cap glowed those same wonderful rubies that we saw on the occasion of his departure from Rome. His boots were of black velvet, laced with gold thread that was studded with gems.
The rear of the cavalcade was brought up by more mules and the chariots bearing his plate and tents and all the other equipage with which a prince was wont to travel.
It is said by some that his horse was shod with solid gold, and there is also a story—pretty, but probably untrue—that some of his mules were shod in the same metal, and that, either because the shoes were loosely attached of intent, or because the metal, being soft, parted readily from the hoofs, these golden shoes were freely cast and left as largesse for those who might care to take them.
The Bishop of Rouen—that same Georges d'Amboise for whom he was bringing the red hat—the Seneschal of Toulouse and several gentlemen of the Court went to meet him on the bridge, and escorted him up through the town to the castle, where the king awaited him. Louis XII gave him a warm and cordial welcome, showing him then and thereafter the friendliest consideration. Not so, however, the lady he was come to woo. It was said in Venice that she was in love with a young Breton gentleman in the following of Queen Anne. Whether this was true, and Carlotta acted in the matter in obedience to her own feelings, or whether she was merely pursuing the instructions she had received from Naples, she obstinately and absolutely refused to entertain or admit the suit of Cesare.
Della Rovere, on January 18, wrote to the Pope from Nantes, whither the Court had moved, a letter in which he sang the praises of the young Duke of Valentinois.
"By his modesty his readiness, his prudence, and his other virtues he has known how to earn the affections of every one." Unfortunately, there was one important exception, as the cardinal was forced to add: "The damsel, either out of her own contrariness, or because so induced by others, which is easier to believe, constantly refuses to hear of the wedding."
Della Rovere was quite justified in finding it easier to believe that Carlotta was acting upon instructions from others, for, when hard pressed to consent to the alliance, she demanded that the Neapolitan ambassador should himself say that her father desired her to do so—a statement which, it seems, the ambassador could not bring himself to make.
Baffled by the persistence of that refusal, Cesare all but returned a bachelor to Italy. So far, indeed, was his departure a settled matter that in February of 1489, at the Castle of Loches, he received the king's messages for the Pope. Yet Louis hesitated to let him go without having bound his Holiness to his own interests by stronger bonds.
In the task of tracing the annals of the Borgias, the honest seeker after truth is compelled to proceed axe in hand that he may hack himself a way through the tangle of irresponsible or malicious statements that have grown up about this subject, driving their roots deep into the soil of history. Not a single chance does malignity, free or chartered, appear to have missed for the invention of flagitious falsehoods concerning this family, or for the no less flagitious misinterpretation of known facts.
Amid a mass of written nonsense dealing with Cesare's sojourn in France is the oft-repeated, totally unproven statement that he withheld from Louis the dispensation enabling the latter to marry Anne of Brittany, until such time as he should have obtained from Louis all that he desired of him—in short, that he sold him the dispensation for the highest price he could extract. The only motive served by this statement is once more to show Alexander and his son in the perpetration of simoniacal practices, and the statement springs, beyond doubt, from a passage in Macchiavelli's Extracts from Dispatches to the Ten. Elsewhere has been mentioned the confusion prevailing in those extracts, and their unreliability as historical evidences. That circumstance can be now established. The passage in question runs as follows:
"This dispensation was given to Valentinois when he went to France without any one being aware of its existence, with orders to sell it dearly to the king, and not until satisfied of the wife and his other desires. And, whilst these things were toward, the king learnt from the Bishop of Ceuta that the dispensation already existed, and so, without having received or even seen it the marriage was celebrated, and for revealing this the Bishop of Ceuta was put to death by order of Valentinois."
Now, to begin with, Macchiavelli admits that what passed between Pope and duke was secret. How, then, does he pretend to possess these details of it? But, leaving that out of the question, his statement—so abundantly repeated by later writers—is traversed by every one of the actual facts of the case.
That there can have been no secret at all about the dispensation is made plain by the fact that Manfredi, the Ferrarese ambassador, writes of it to Duke Ercole on October 2—the day after Cesare's departure from Rome. And as for the death of Fernando d'Almeida Bishop of Ceuta, this did not take place then, nor until two years later (on January 7, 1499) at the siege of Forli, whither he had gone in Cesare's train—as is related in Bernardi's Chronicles and Bonoli's history of that town.
To return to the matter of Cesare's imminent departure unwed from France, Louis XII was not the only monarch to whom this was a source of anxiety. Keener far was the anxiety experienced on that score by the King of Naples, who feared that its immediate consequence would be to drive the Holy Father into alliance with Venice, which was paying its court to him at the time and with that end in view. Eager to conciliate Alexander in this hour of peril, Federigo approached him with alternative proposals, and offered to invest Cesare in the principalities of Salerno and Sanseverino, which had been taken from the rebel barons. To this the Pope might have consented, but that, in the moment of considering it, letters reached him from Cesare which made him pause.
Louis XII had also discovered an alternative to the marriage of Cesare with Carlotta, and one that should more surely draw the Pope into the alliance with Venice and himself.
Among the ladies of the Court of Queen Anne—Louis had now been wedded a month—there were, besides Carlotta, two other ladies either of whom might make Cesare a suitable duchess. One of these was a niece of the king's, the daughter of the Comte de Foix; the other was Charlotte d'Albret, a daughter of Alain d'Albret, Duc de Guyenne, and sister to the King of Navarre. Between these two Cesare was now given to choose by Louis, and his choice fell upon Charlotte.
She was seventeen years of age and said to be the most beautiful maid in France, and she had been reared at the honourable and pious Court of Jeanne de Valois, whence she had passed into that of Anne of Brittany, which latter, says Hilarion de Coste,(38) was "a school of virtue, an academy of honour."
Negotiations for her hand were opened with Alain, who, it is said, was at first unwilling, but in the end won over to consent. Navarre had need of the friendship of the King of France, that it might withstand the predatory humours of Castille; and so, for his son's sake, Alain could not long oppose the wishes of Louis. Considering closely the pecuniary difficulties under which this Alain d'Albret was labouring and his notorious avarice, one is tempted to conclude that such difficulties as he may have made were dictated by his reduced circumstances, his impossibility, or unwillingness, to supply his daughter with a dowry fitting her rank, and an unworthy desire to drive in the matter the best bargain possible. And this is abundantly confirmed by the obvious care and hard-headed cunning with which the Sieur d'Albret investigated Cesare's circumstances and sources of revenue to verify their values to be what was alleged.
Eventually he consented to endow her with 30,000 livres Tournois (90,000 francs) to be paid as follows: 6,000 livres on the celebration of the marriage, and the balance by annual instalments of 1,500 livres until cleared off. This sum, as a matter of fact, represented her portion of the inheritance from her deceased mother, Francoise de Bretagne, and it was tendered subject to her renouncing all rights and succession in any property of her father's or her said deceased mother's.
Thus is it set forth in the contract drawn up by Alain at Castel-Jaloux on March 23, 1499, which contract empowers his son Gabriel and one Regnault de St. Chamans to treat and conclude the marriage urged by the king between the Duke of Valentinois and Alain's daughter, Charlotte d'Albret. But that was by no means all. Among other conditions imposed by Alain, he stipulated that the Pope should endow his daughter with 100,000 livres
