Part 19

The year 1503 proved an eventful one for him. No longer contented with his duchy, he prepared to attack Bologna and to threaten Florence. The day before he set forth on this great undertaking, on the 5th of August, he assisted, together with Alexander VI, at a banquet given in the vineyard of the Cardinal of Corneto, at the gates of Rome. On their return both were taken ill so suddenly that the cardinal was suspected of having poisoned them. The old man breathed his last on the 18th of August. Cæsar, younger and more vigorous, struggled against his malady with extraordinary energy. He wrapped himself, as in a cloak, in the still quivering carcass of a newly disemboweled mule to overcome the shiverings brought on by fever, and then was thrown, still covered with blood, into a vessel of iced water, to bring about the reaction necessary to save his life. This man of iron seemed to prevail against Nature herself. He knew that, once his father dead and himself unable to move, all his enemies would rush upon him at once to crush him. It was the decisive moment of his life. He first sent his bravo, Micheletto, to seize the pontifical treasure, thus making sure of a sum of three hundred thousand ducats, the sinews of resistance. The nine thousand men-at-arms under his orders, the one disciplined force in the city, made him master of Rome; the Sacred College set all their hopes upon this dying man, for he alone possessed sufficient authority to prevent anarchy.

It is a strange spectacle--the representatives of all nations accredited to the Holy See assembling at his bedside to negotiate with him, and Cæsar, weak and helpless as he is, making himself responsible for the preservation of order, while the Sacred College formed itself into conclave to elect the new Pope. In order not to put any pressure upon the cardinals by his presence, the Duke of Valentinois retired to Nepi. He left Rome, carried on the shoulders of his guards, livid and shivering with fever. Around his litter walked the ambassadors of Spain, France, and the empire, and mingled with the troops could be seen his mother Vanozza, his brother Squillace, and his sister-in-law Sancha--all three in danger of their lives in excited Rome. One of the Borgias had been killed, and Fabio Orsini, descendant of one of the Roman barons ruined by Alexander VI, had steeped his hands in the detested blood, and sworn to visit all who bore that hated name with the same fate.

CARDINAL WOLSEY.

BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[Thomas Wolsey, born of low origin 1471, died 1530. After a university education and taking priest’s orders he was rapidly made private chaplain to Henry VII, and, on the accession of Henry VIII, he became the favorite of the new king, and soon afterward lord chancellor and cardinal. Wolsey’s diplomatic and ministerial genius became one of the great powers in Europe while he managed English affairs, a period of about eleven years, and at home his magnificence rivaled that of the king himself. His fall from power grew out of his opposition to the king’s marriage with Anne Boleyn.]

Thomas Wolsey was the son of a wealthy townsman of Ipswich, whose ability had raised him into notice at the close of the preceding reign, and who had been taken by Bishop Fox into the service of the crown. His extraordinary powers hardly, perhaps, required the songs, dances, and carouses with his indulgence in which he was taunted by his enemies, to aid him in winning the favor of the young sovereign. From the post of favorite he soon rose to that of minister. Henry’s resentment at Ferdinand’s perfidy enabled Wolsey to carry out a policy which reversed that of his predecessors. The war had freed England from the fear of French pressure. Wolsey was as resolute to free her from the dictation of Ferdinand, and saw in a French alliance the best security for English independence. In 1514 a treaty was concluded with Louis. The same friendship was continued to his successor, Francis I, whose march across the Alps for the reconquest of Lombardy was facilitated by Henry and Wolsey, in the hope that while the war lasted England would be free from all fear of attack, and that Francis himself might be brought to inevitable ruin. These hopes were defeated by his great victory at Marignano. But Francis, in the moment of triumph, saw himself confronted by a new rival. Master of Castile and Aragon, of Naples and the Netherlands, the new Spanish king, Charles V, rose into a check on the French monarchy such as the policy of Henry or Wolsey had never been able to construct before.

The alliance of England was eagerly sought by both sides, and the administration of Wolsey, amid all its ceaseless diplomacy, for seven years kept England out of war. The peace, as we have seen, restored the hopes of the New Learning; it enabled Colet to reform education, Erasmus to undertake the regeneration of the Church, More to set on foot a new science of politics. But peace, as Wolsey used it, was fatal to English freedom. In the political hints which lie scattered over the “Utopia,” More notes with bitter irony the advance of the new despotism. It was only in “Nowhere” that a sovereign was “removable on suspicion of a design to enslave his people.” In England the work of slavery was being quietly wrought, hints the great lawyer, through the law. “There will never be wanting some pretense for deciding in the king’s favor; as that equity is on his side, or the strict letter of the law, or some forced interpretation of it; or if none of these, that the royal prerogative ought, with conscientious judges, to outweigh all other considerations.”

We are startled at the precision with which More maps out the expedients by which the law courts were to lend themselves to the advance of tyranny till their crowning judgment in the case of ship-money. But behind these judicial expedients lay great principles of absolutism, which, partly from the example of foreign monarchies, partly from the sense of social and political insecurity, and yet more from the isolated position of the crown, were gradually winning their way in public opinion. “These notions,” he goes boldly on, “are fostered by the maxim that the king can do no wrong, however much he may wish to do it; that not only the property but the persons of his subjects are his own; and that a man has a right to no more than the king’s goodness thinks fit not to take from him.” In the hands of Wolsey these maxims were transformed into principles of state. The checks which had been imposed on the action of the sovereign by the presence of great prelates and nobles at his council were practically removed. All authority was concentrated in the hands of a single minister. Henry had munificently rewarded Wolsey’s services to the crown. He had been promoted to the See of Lincoln and thence to the Archbishopric of York. Henry procured his elevation to the rank of cardinal, and raised him to the post of chancellor. The revenues of two sees whose tenants were foreigners fell into his hands; he held the bishopric of Winchester and the abbacy of St. Albans; he was in receipt of pensions from France and Spain, while his official emoluments were enormous. His pomp was almost royal.

A train of prelates and nobles followed him wherever he moved; his household was composed of five hundred persons of noble birth, and its chief posts were held by knights and barons of the realm. He spent his vast wealth with princely ostentation. Two of his houses--Hampton Court and York House, the later Whitehall--were splendid enough to serve at his fall as royal palaces. His school at Ipswich was eclipsed by the glories of his foundation at Oxford, whose name of Cardinal College has been lost in its later title of Christ-church. Nor was this magnificence a mere show of power. The whole direction of home and foreign affairs rested with Wolsey alone; as chancellor he stood at the head of public justice; his elevation to the office of legate rendered him supreme in the Church. Enormous as was the mass of work which he undertook, it was thoroughly done; his administration of the royal treasury was economical; the number of his dispatches is hardly less remarkable than the care bestowed upon each; even More, an avowed enemy, confesses that as chancellor he surpassed all men’s expectations. The court of chancery, indeed, became so crowded through the character of expedition and justice which it gained under his rule that subordinate courts had to be created for its relief. It was this concentration of all secular and ecclesiastical power in a single hand which accustomed England to the personal government which began with Henry VIII; and it was, above all, Wolsey’s long tenure of the whole Papal authority within the realm, and the consequent suspension of appeals to Rome, that led men to acquiesce at a later time in Henry’s claim of religious supremacy; for, proud as was Wolsey’s bearing and high as were his natural powers, he stood before England as the mere creature of the king. Greatness, wealth, authority he held, and owned he held, simply at the royal will. In raising his low-born favorite to the head of Church and state, Henry was gathering all religious as well as all civil authority into his personal grasp. The nation which trembled before Wolsey learned to tremble before the king who could destroy Wolsey by a breath.

FRANCISCO PIZARRO.

BY WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT.

[One of the Spanish conquerors of America, born about 1471, died 1541. The illegitimate son of a Spanish general, his childhood was spent in a peasant’s hut. Going as an adventurer to the New World, he took part in several important expeditions, among them Balboa’s settlement of Darien. In 1524, Pizarro, with a brother adventurer, Almagro, in an attempt on New Grenada, got intelligence of the great Peruvian empire of the Incas. It was not till 1531 that Pizarro, having secured full commission and extraordinary concessions from Charles V., was able to raise a force of two hundred and fifty men to attempt the conquest, which was brilliantly successful. He reigned as viceroy, and was finally assassinated by a son of his old comrade Almagro, whom he had put to death.]

Pizarro was tall in stature, well-proportioned, and with a countenance not unpleasing. Bred in camps, with nothing of the polish of a court, he had a soldier-like bearing, and the air of one accustomed to command. But, though not polished, there was no embarrassment or rusticity in his address, which, where it served his purpose, could be plausible and even insinuating. The proof of it is the favorable impression made by him, on presenting himself, after his second expedition--stranger as he was to all its forms and usages--at the punctilious court of Castile.

Unlike many of his countrymen, he had no passion for ostentatious dress, which he regarded as an incumbrance. The costume which he most affected on public occasions was a black cloak, with a white hat, and shoes of the same color; the last, it is said, being in imitation of the Great Captain, whose character he had early learned to admire in Italy, but to which his own, certainly, bore very faint resemblance.

He was temperate in eating, drank sparingly, and usually rose an hour before dawn. He was punctual in attendance to business, and shrank from no toil. He had, indeed, great powers of patient endurance. Like most of his nation, he was fond of play, and cared little for the quality of those with whom he played; though, when his antagonist could not afford to lose, he would allow himself, it is said, to be the loser--a mode of conferring an obligation much commended by a Castilian writer for its delicacy.

Though avaricious, it was in order to spend, and not to hoard. His ample treasure, more ample than those, probably, that ever before fell to the lot of an adventurer, were mostly dissipated in his enterprises, his architectural works, and schemes of public improvement, which, in a country where gold and silver might be said to have lost their value from their abundance, absorbed an incredible amount of money. While he regarded the whole country, in a manner, as his own, and distributed it freely among his captains, it is certain that the princely grant of territory, with twenty thousand vassals, made to him by the Crown, was never carried into effect; nor did his heirs ever reap the benefit of it.

Though bold in action and not easily turned from his purpose, Pizarro was slow in arriving at a decision. This gave him an appearance of irresolution foreign to his character. Perhaps the consciousness of this led him to adopt the custom of saying “No,” at first, to applicants for favor; and afterward, at leisure, to revise his judgment, and grant what seemed to him expedient. He took the opposite course from his comrade Almagro, who, it was observed, generally said “Yes,” but too often failed to keep his promise. This was characteristic of the careless and easy nature of the latter, governed by impulse rather than principle.

It is hardly necessary to speak of the courage of a man pledged to such a career as that of Pizarro. Courage, indeed, was a cheap quality among the Spanish adventurers, for danger was their element. But he possessed something higher than mere animal courage, in that constancy of purpose which was rooted too deeply in his nature to be shaken by the wildest storms of fortune. It was this inflexible constancy which formed the key to his character, and constituted the secret of his success. A remarkable evidence of it was given in his first expedition, among the mangroves and dreary marshes of Choco. He saw his followers pining around him under the blighting malaria, wasting before an invisible enemy, and unable to strike a stroke in their own defense. Yet his spirit did not yield, nor did he falter in his enterprise.

There is something oppressive to the imagination in this war against nature. In the struggle of man against man, the spirits are raised by a contest conducted on equal terms; but in a war with the elements we feel that, however bravely we may contend, we can have no power to control. Nor are we cheered on by the prospect of glory in such a contest; for, in the capricious estimate of human glory, the silent endurance of privations, however painful, is little, in comparison with the ostentatious trophies of victory. The laurel of the hero--alas for humanity that it should be so!--grows best on the battle-field.

This inflexible spirit of Pizarro was shown still more strongly when, in the little island of Gallo, he drew the line on the sand which was to separate him and his handful of followers from their country and from civilized man. He trusted that his own constancy would give strength to the feeble, and rally brave hearts around him for the prosecution of his enterprise. He looked with confidence to the future, and he did not miscalculate. This was heroic, and wanted only a nobler motive for its object to constitute the true moral sublime.

Yet the same feature in his character was displayed in a manner scarcely less remarkable when, landing on the coast, and ascertaining the real strength and civilization of the Incas, he persisted in marching into the interior at the head of a force of less than two hundred men. In this he undoubtedly proposed to himself the example of Cortés, so contagious to the adventurous spirits of that day, and especially to Pizarro, engaged as he was in a similar enterprise. Yet the hazard assumed by Pizarro was far greater than that of the conqueror of Mexico, whose force was nearly three times as large, while the terrors of the Inca name--however justified by the result--were as widely spread as those of the Aztecs.

It was, doubtless, in imitation of the same captivating model that Pizarro planned the seizure of Atahualpa. But the situations of the two Spanish captains were as dissimilar as the manner in which their acts of violence were conducted. The wanton massacre of the Peruvians resembled that perpetrated by Alvarado in Mexico, and might have been attended with consequences as disastrous if the Peruvian character had been as fierce as that of the Aztecs. But the blow which roused the latter to madness broke the tamer spirits of the Peruvians. It was a bold stroke, which left so much to chance that it scarcely merited the name of policy.

When Pizarro landed in the country, he found it distracted by a contest for the crown. It would seem to have been for his interest to play off one party against the other, throwing his own weight into the scale that suited him. Instead of this, he resorted to an act of audacious violence which crushed them both at a blow. His subsequent career afforded no scope for the profound policy displayed by Cortés, when he gathered conflicting nations under his banner and directed them against a common foe. Still less did he have the opportunity of displaying the tactics and admirable strategy of his rival. Cortés conducted his military operations on the scientific principles of a great captain at the head of a powerful host. Pizarro appears only as an adventurer, a fortunate knight-errant. By one bold stroke he broke the spell which had so long held the land under the dominion of the Incas. The spell was broken, and the airy fabric of their empire, built on the superstition of ages, vanished at a touch. This was good fortune, rather than the result of policy.

But, as no picture is without its lights, we must not, in justice to Pizarro, dwell exclusively on the darker features of his portrait. There was no one of her sons to whom Spain was under larger obligations for extent of empire, for his hand won for her the richest of the Indian jewels that once sparkled in her imperial diadem. When we contemplate the perils he braved, the sufferings he patiently endured, the incredible obstacles he overcame, the magnificent results he effected with his single arm, as it were, unaided by the government--though neither a good nor a great man, in the highest sense of that term--it is impossible not to regard him as a very extraordinary one.

HERNANDO CORTÉS.

BY WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT.

[The Spanish conqueror of Mexico, born 1485, died 1547. Born of a noble race, he was educated at the University of Salamanca, but soon devoted his attention to arms. He turned his eyes to America in 1504, and sailing thither, held various minor offices of trust, civic and military, till the discovery of Mexico. Cortés was appointed by Velasquez, the governor-general, to the command of the new expedition designed for Mexico in 1518. Though afterward superseded by his jealous superior, he succeeded in evading the enforcement of the decree, and landed at Tabasco, Mexico, on March 4, 1519. He burned his ships and committed himself to success or death. His army contained only five hundred and fifty Spaniards, but with these, and the native allies whom he seduced by his arts, he conquered the Mexican Empire in little more than two years. Though he was rewarded with titles and wealth, he was ungratefully treated by the king--a common fate of the great servants of Spain--and died in retirement, out of court favor.]

Cortés, at the time of the Mexican Conquest, was thirty-three or thirty-four years of age. In stature he was rather above the middle size. His countenance was pale, and his large dark eyes gave an expression of gravity to his countenance not to have been expected in one of his cheerful temperament. His figure was slender, at least till later life; but his chest was deep, his shoulders broad, his frame muscular and well proportioned. It presented the union of agility and vigor which qualified him to excel in fencing, horsemanship, and the other general exercises of chivalry. In his diet he was temperate, careless of what he ate, and drinking little; while to toil and privation he seemed perfectly indifferent. His dress--for he did not disdain the impression produced by such adventitious aids--was such as to set off his handsome figure to advantage, neither gaudy, nor striking, nor rich. He wore few ornaments, and usually the same, but those were of a great price. His manners, frank and soldier-like, concealed a most cool and calculating spirit. With his gayest humor there mingled a settled air of resolution which made those who approached him feel that they must obey; and which infused something like awe into the attachment of his most devoted followers. Such a combination, in which love was tempered by authority, was the one probably best calculated to inspire devotion in the rough and turbulent spirits among whom his lot was to be cast.

The history of the Conquest is necessarily that of Cortés, who is, if I may so say, not merely the soul but the body of the enterprise; present everywhere in person, out in the thick of the fight, or in the building of the works, with his sword or with his musket, sometimes leading his soldiers, and sometimes directing his little navy. The negotiations, intrigues, correspondence, are all conducted by him; and, like Cæsar, he wrote his own Commentaries in the heat of the stirring scenes which form the subject of them. His character is marked with the most opposite traits, embracing qualities apparently the most incompatible. He was avaricious, yet liberal; bold to desperation, yet cautious and calculating in his plans; magnanimous, yet very cunning; courteous and affable in his deportment, yet inexorably stern; lax in his notions of morality, yet (not uncommon) a sad bigot.

The great feature in his character was constancy of purpose; a constancy not to be daunted by danger, nor baffled by disappointment, nor wearied out by impediments and delays.

He was a knight-errant in the literal sense of the word. Of all the band of adventurous cavaliers whom Spain, in the sixteenth century, sent forth on the career of discovery and conquest, there was none more deeply filled with the spirit of romantic enterprise than Hernando Cortés. Dangers and difficulties, instead of deterring, seemed to have a charm in his eyes. They were necessary to rouse him to a full consciousness of his powers. He grappled with them at the outset, and, if I may so express myself, seemed to prefer to take his enterprises by the most difficult side. He conceived, at the first moment of his landing in Mexico, the design of its conquest. When he saw the strength of its civilization, he was not turned from his purpose. When he was assailed by the superior force of Narvaez, he still persisted in it; and when he was driven in ruin from the capital, he still cherished his original idea. How successfully he carried it into execution, we have seen. After the few years of repose which succeeded the Conquest, his adventurous spirit impelled him to that dreary march across the marshes of Chiapa; and, after another interval, to seek his fortunes on the stormy Californian gulf. When he found that no other continent remained for him to conquer, he made serious proposals to the emperor to equip a fleet at his own expense, with which he would sail to the Moluccas, and subdue the Spice Islands for the crown of Castile!