Page images
PDF
EPUB

of his own Church, and an Italian prince of moderate dominions. The only considerable encroachment on the interests of Protestantism was the revocation of the edicts of Nantes and the persecution of the Protestants. But this, though its primary motive was the bigotry of a mistress working on the enfeebled mind of an aged king, was after all an act of political despotism rather than of genuine religious zeal. It was effected altogether by force; the missionaries would have done little without the dragoons. It was neither sanctioned nor applauded by the general voice of Catholic Europe. Not only was the Pope in no respect the prime mover in these affairs, but he expressed, to his honour, his public disapprobation of these unchristian modes of conversion by the sword. But his remonstrances were unheard or unnoticed; and he must have looked on equally without power of interference, if that capricious tyranny had taken another course.

The Papal annals now become barren of great events: they had nothing to call forth great minds, if great minds there were in the long line of pontiffs from the middle of the seventeenth century to the present age. The election to the Papacy became an affair of comparative apathy; instead of being watched in anxious suspense by wondering Europe, it created some stir in the city, and some activity among the diplomatic agents of the different courts, and that was all. The fortunate candidate was announced, but whether it was an Innocent or a Clement, a Pius or a Gregory, created little interest. The temporal power was in the ascendant; the spiritual in the wane. personal character therefore was less developed, or if developed, its influence was confined within the narrow sphere of his temporal dominions. Mr. Ranke seems conscious that the interest of his story is dying away, and conducts the several pontiffs across the scene with rapid indifference. The chapters which relate to the finances of the Papal dominions are however very curious. The late Popes had succeeded in adding Urbino and Ferrara to their dominions, Urban made a desperate attempt to dispossess the Farneses of Parma. His death is said to have

The

been hastened by his disappointment; instead of leaving an accession of territory, he left an enormous increase of debt.

Modern Rome is another striking illustration of the bad policy and, unhappily, of the fatal financial system, adopted by all the later Popes of the seventeenth century, and pursued till the Romagna has gradually become what it is a vast wilderness, a comparatively dispeopled waste. The vestige

of splendour which each Pope has left is the palace of his descendants; and to enrich these descendants there were no resources but the taxation of the country, the accumulation of the debt, or the alienation of the domains of the see. The memory of the four last Popes whose lives we have briefly related, the Aldobrandini, the Ludovisi, the Borghese, the Barberini, lives, or did recently live, in the noble family which each created and endowed. The next Pope, Innocent X., was a Panfili. Excepting that a new influence, that of female relations, rose up and distracted the Papal court, Innocent was an active, just, and influential pontiff. He inclined strongly to the Spanish interest, and by renewing a friendly intercourse with the Italian powers, who had been alienated by Urban VIII., he did not, indeed, reduce the Farneses to subjection, but he forced them to submit to the claims of justice. Alexander VII. (Chigi) succeeded in 1655. Chigi at first showed an unprecedented and heroic' resistance to the claims of kindred. But the unanswerable arguments which were urged in favour of the good old practice of nepotism-the indecency of permitting the Pope's relations to remain the simple citizens, perhaps of some insignificant town -- the greater confidence entertained by foreign powers if the missions should be filled by the Pope's relations-overcame his narrow scruples; he yielded, and surrendered himself with the zeal of a proselyte to the venerable usage. It was this Pope, if we remember right, the smallness of whose mind Cardinal de Retz inferred from his boasting that he had written almost all his life with only one pen! Cardinal Bernini came to the same conclusion, because, when a fine statue was shown him, he seemed to

[ocr errors]

observe nothing but the border at the bottom of the robe. Such remarks,' says the shrewd De Retz, 'may appear trifling, but they are conclusive.' Mr. Ranke, we observe in passing, does not seem to have availed himself much of the clever French cardinal's account of his share in the intrigues of the Roman court. Under Alexander the management of affairs fell into the hands of the Congregation of State, which gradually became the ruling power.

The next Pope was Clement IX., Rospigliosi, and his successor Clement X., Altieri. The first less openly, the second avowedly, espoused the Spanish interests. Innocent XI. (Odescalchi) was a man of higher character-the mildest of men he was accustomed to request the attendance of his servants if they were not otherwise engaged.' His confessor declared that he had never discovered anything in the soul of Innocent which could estrange him from God. With all this gentleness, Innocent undertook the papal function with the most pure and conscientious determination to discharge the duties of that supreme dignity. He turned his attention to the appalling disorder of the finances. The successive Popes had gone on gradually increasing the capital of the debt, which even at the end of the reign of Urban VIII. had grown to an overwhelming magnitude. At length the dataria, the revenue from foreign countries, hitherto religiously reserved for the expenses of the Pope and his court, was burthened with Luoghi di Monte. Still, however, the price of Papal funds was high, and Alexander VII. obtained temporary relief by lowering the whole debt, first the unfunded, then the funded, from 10 to 6 per cent.: it seems subsequently to have been reduced to four, and Innocent XI. entertained the design of bringing it down to three. But on the accession of Innocent, the Papal expenditure amounted to 2,578,106 sc. 91 baj.-the income, including the dataria, only to 2,408,500. 71.—leaving an annual deficiency of 170,000 scudi, and threatening almost immediate bankruptcy. By prudent and rigid economy, by abstaining from nepotism, by the suppression of useless places, and the general investiga

tion of abuses, Innocent brought the expenditure within the income.

The firmness of Innocent was severely tried in his conflict with Louis XIV. We have no space to enter into the detail of the encroachments which Louis, in the overbearing consciousness of power, ventured against the See of Rome. Innocent resisted with decision and dignity. He received at his court with signal favour two Jansenist bishops who had been disgraced on account of their resistance to the ecclesiastical measures of Louis. He addressed three several admonitions to the king. When Louis, in the assembly of 1682, caused the four famous articles declaratory of the independence of the Gallican Church, and almost amounting to the total abrogation of the Papal authority, to be passed by the clergy of his kingdom, Innocent declared that he would endure every extremity rather than yield; 'he gloried only in the cross of Christ.' He resolutely refused the canonical institution of all those whom Louis, for their service in that assembly, hastened to promote to bishoprics. When the French ambassador, to defend the privilege of asylum which he claimed in Rome, not merely for the precincts of his own. palace but for the neighbouring streets, rode through Rome with a bodyguard of two troops of horse; and thus armed, defied the Pope in his own capital-Thou comest,' said Innocent, with horse and chariot, but I will go forth in the name of the Lord.' The Pope's disapprobation of the persecutions against the Protestants at this time, when he was committed with Louis on other points, and might have been tempted to win the favour of the king by recognizing him as the champion of Catholicism, is a still higher testimony to his noble courage. He has been suspected at least of secret connivance at these barbarous proceedings. Mr. Ranke entirely acquits him of this charge, and declares that he couched his protestation in the remarkable words, 'It is right to draw men into the temple, not to drag them by force.' Innocent died before the termination of these disputes. The short papacy of Alexander VIII. and that of Innocent XII. (Pignatelli) occupy the few

remaining years of the seventeenth century. In 1700 Clement XI. (Albani) ascended the Papal throne. The close of this century was the proposed limit of Mr. Ranke's labours; but he has subjoined a chapter or two on the later history, which we could have wished had been more full and complete. The eighteenth century might have afforded ample matter for another volume.

We conclude our article with some few remarks (chiefly from Mr. Ranke) on the state of the city and of the Roman territory during this period. In the seventeenth century the Popes gradually became men of peace; the energies of foreign reconquest had died away; the quiet maintenance of their power and dignity contented their subdued ambition; they had shrunk into the sovereigns of Rome, and their pride seemed now to be to embellish their capital, and to make Rome, as it had been the seat first of civil, then of spiritual government, now the centre of European art. Modern Rome is almost entirely the growth of this century. St. Peter's was finished under Paul V.; considerable additions were made to the older churches, the Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore; and most of the other sacred edifices which at present attract the stranger by their interior splendour, and, we must add, in general offend him by their deviations from the great principles of architecture, bear evident signs of this age; for with the impulse of reviving Catholicism, the creative powers, the grandeur of conception, and the boldness of execution, in Catholic art, either altogether failed, or gave place to the love of tasteless ornament and unharmonized extravagance. Even in St. Peter's, in Forsyth's bitter language, a wretched plasterer came down from Como to break the sacred unity of Michael Angelo's [or rather Bramante's] master idea.' The modern ecclesiastical architecture of Rome seems to indicate the residence of a wealthy hierarchy reposing in peaceful dignity and luxuriating in costly building, but having departed from the pure and simple nobleness of classical antiquity, the passion of the preceding age, without going back to the harmonious

« PreviousContinue »