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number of sixteen. One voice alone was wanting for the exclusion. Yet some among them began to waver, to shrink from the consequences of their opposition. But there was no less irresolution in Santorio's party. There was a stir, a commotion, a whispering; they began to count the voices, as though in doubt. The bold man was wanting who should dare to express the sentiments entertained by many. At length Ascanio Colonna took courage. He belonged to the Roman baronage, which dreaded the inquisitorial zeal of Sanseverina. He cried aloud, God will not have Sanseverina, neither will Ascanio Colonna !' He passed from the Paolina to the Sistine Chapel. Others who dared not openly, secretly followed the example of Colonna. When the scrutiny took place, only thirty votes appeared for the candidate. Sanseverina had come to the conclave in perfect security; he already grasped the high-prized object of his ambition; he had to pass seven hours in the mortal agony between the fulfilment of his proud hopes and the degrading bitterness of rejection; now feeling himself the lord of the world, now a subject. It was decided at length-he retired to his plundered cell. The following night,' he writes in his autobiography, was more miserable than the most distressing instant of my life. The load of affliction on my soul, my inward anguish, incredible as it may sound, wrung from me a bloody sweat!' Santorio knew the Conclave too well to encourage any further hope; once again he was named by his partisans, but without success.2

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The King of Spain had purchased the support of Montalto and the party of the late Pope's adherents for his own nomi

2 The passage from Sanseverina's memoirs concerning this Conclave, quoted in the appendix, is very curious. He assigns the motive either of animosity, jealousy, or personal ambition, which induced each of his several opponents to resist his claim, or by defection to prevent his election. In his bitterness he attributes their perfidy to the obligations which most of them owed to him. Madrucci, the head of the Spanish party, played him false, from the hope he himself entertained of the pontificate. One of the causes assigned for Colonna's hatred is very singular: Si ricordava del Talmud impedito da me contra li Giudei.' Sixtus V. had been favourable to the Jews, and this probably relates to some proposition for the destruction of the Talmud; but one would not expect to find the Talmud thus influencing the election of a Pope.

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nation of Sanseverina, by renouncing the exclusion of the Montalto party. The Cardinal Aldobrandino had been put in nomination, as a supernumerary candidate, with Santorio. was of an exiled Florentine family. His father had been professor of civil law; he had five sons, and the father had serious apprehensions that he would not be able to give Hippolito, the youngest, the education which his talents seemed to deserve. The boy was taken into the service of the Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, rose to the prelacy, to the cardinalate. During a mission into Poland he had conferred a signal service on the house of Austria by interfering to deliver the Archduke Maximilian from captivity. Aldobrandino became Pope, and took the name which Santorio had announced as his own, Clement VIII.

Clement was a man of remarkable method in business, and strictly regular in all the ceremonial of the Church. Every morning he performed the mass himself, every evening the Cardinal Baronius heard his confession. The daily guests at his table were twelve poor people. He laboured assiduously at the affairs of the see all the week; his relaxation on the Sunday was conversation on religious subjects with some of the more learned monks.

He conducted the two great events of his reign with consummate dexterity and moderation, the reunion of France to the Roman See by the absolution of Henry IV., and the incorporation of Ferrara with the temporal dominions of the Pope. Under Clement,' observes Mr. Ranke, the Papacy appears under its proper and praiseworthy character, as the mediator, the pacificator of Europe.' The peace of Vervins may chiefly be attributed to the influence of Clement VIII. The feud within the Jesuit order, and the collision of that body with other monastic orders, were matters of scarcely less importance to the interests of Catholicism. Power had its usual consequences struggles within the body, envy and animosity without. The Jesuits, it has been said, were almost exclusively Spanish in their origin; of the twenty-five who

composed the general congregation, eighteen were Spaniards; the three first generals of the order were of Spanish birth. Gregory XIII. seems to have felt some jealousy and apprehension lest this powerful engine should be less at the command of the Pope than of the King of Spain. By his influence Mercuriano, an Italian, became the fourth general. Mercuriano was a weak man, governed by those around him; factions grew up between the older members in the Spanish, and the younger in the foreign interest. Mercuriano was succeeded by Acquaviva, a Neapolitan, who united the courage and perseverance of a Spaniard with the address and subtlety of an Italian. The King of Spain determined on a visitation of the order, and named for that purpose Manriquez, Bishop of Carthagena. A general congregation was likewise threatened, and the generals of the Jesuit order,' observes Mr. Ranke, 'hate a congregation as much as the Popes a general council.' Acquaviva averted the first danger by suggesting to Sixtus V. that Manriquez was a bastard, and Sixtus had a singular but insuperable aversion to bastards. The general congregation was likewise delayed, but during Acquaviva's absence the consent for its convocation was obtained from Clement VIII. Acquaviva met the trial, which embraced his whole administration of the affairs of the order, with unbroken courage, and conducted it with consummate address. He made some well-timed concessions; the privileges claimed by the Jesuits of examining heretical books, and the surrender of all estates and even benefices into the hands of the society by all those who entered the order. The first of these privileges clashed with the powers of the Inquisition, the second with the civil law. He gave a reluctant assent to the triennial election of the general, the sexennial meeting of the congregation. In all other respects he came forth triumphant. The collision of the Jesuits with the Dominicans in Spain tended at once to weaken their authority in that country, and to throw them, as it were, on the rest of Europe. The Dominicans watched with jealousy the rapid growth of this rival order. The In

quisition seized on a provincial and some of his brethren, who were accused, by a malcontent member of the body, of concealing the heretical opinions of some of their order. The affair, it might be supposed, created an extraordinary sensation in Spain. A dark rumour spread abroad that the Jesuit order had been found guilty of heretical pravity. This was one of the chief reasons which induced the King of Spain to urge a visitation of the order, the measure averted by the dexterity of Acquaviva. At a somewhat later period real differences of religious belief arose between the Jesuits and the Dominicans. The Jesuits revolted from the tenets of Thomas Aquinas, and embraced those of Molina on the mysterious subjects of grace and free will. This was strictly in character. The austere and bigoted and more illiterate Dominicans adhered to the severe and definite dogmas; the Jesuits, learned, subtle, pliant, inclined to the latitude of the milder and more moderate opinions. By the action of these and other causes, from an exclusively Spanish the Jesuits became, to a certain degree, a Papal, but, even more, a French power. This is, no doubt, the secret of their re-admission into France by Henry IV., who appalled his old Protestant friends, and alarmed even many of his warmest Catholic partisans, by his appointment of the Jesuit Cotton as his confessor. His own light speech, that he would rather have them for his friends than his enemies, was, no doubt, as true as it was characteristic; but there were deeper grounds for this change in the policy of France.

This agitation in the Jesuit body lasted till the accession of Paul V. On the death of Clement, Leo XI. succeeded-to wear the tiara only twenty-six days. Aldobrandino and Montalto, the partisans of the two last Popes Clement and Sixtus, suddenly united, and anticipating the intrigues of Spain, elevated to the Papal throne the Cardinal Borghese. Paul V. attributed this unexpected event to the special and immediate intervention of the Holy Ghost. Even the Roman court, accustomed to such alterations, were astonished at the total change in the demeanour and bearing of Paul V. Paul had

been bred in the study and practice of the canon law; he brought into the administration of affairs that strict adherence to the letter of the law, that inflexibility, that severity, which arises from such studies, not counteracted by intercourse with mankind. He was thoroughly imbued with the most exalted notions of the Papal dignity, and the power of the keys. As the Holy Ghost had chosen him for the successor of St. Peter, so it had invested him with the fullest apostolical authority. So great, too, was the change in the state of Roman Catholic Europe, so completely were its whole energies concentered on the progressive successes against Protestantism, that these exorbitant pretensions, instead of awakening general jealousy among the temporal sovereigns, seemed to add strength to the cause, and to inspire confidence into its active partisans. From Venice, indeed, were heard vigorous and unanswerable protests against the supremacy asserted by the Pope over the civil authorities. The doctrines of Paolo Sarpi, in this respect almost as hostile to the Papacy as Protestantism itself, were embraced by the proud and inflexible republicans. In France, though in some respects Henry IV. displayed the ardour of a proselyte, in Mr. Ranke's words, 'he thought more of gaining new friends than of rewarding old ones; yet the comparative independence of the Gallican Church was by no means surrendered by either the king or the clergy. During the papacy of Paul, Romanism was everywhere in the ascendant. In France, in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Hungary, in Poland--zeal and power, the preaching of the Jesuit and the edict of the prince,-all that could encourage the ardent, win over the wavering, affright the timid, break the spirit of the conscientious, all that could dazzle the imagination or subdue the courage, soften the heart, or bribe the interests; the re-established splendour and propriety of the services attracting to the Church; the decree of banishment severing the ties of home or of kindred; the persecution, the prison; the unwearied charities, the careful education, the discharge of the pastoral office with all its

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