The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (32 page)

chapter 15

Dowries and the Great Queen

In October
1519
, Felice had arranged the marriage of her stepdaughter Carlotta to Giovanni Pico, the Count of Mirandola. This decision was not one she could make on her own. Because Carlotta was only her stepdaughter, she needed the acquiescence of Carlotta’s now eighteen-year-old brother Napoleone, Renzo da Ceri and Felice’s main ally among the Orsini, Cardinal Franciotto. Felice wanted to ensure that Carlotta’s husband was not too powerful a figure, as that would not only require a very large dowry but might also run the risk of providing the Orsini with an over-influential ally against her. At the same time, family prestige demanded a spouse of some rank and stature. The terms of Carlotta’s dowry were negotiated at Bracciano on
28
October
1519
:‘
16
,
000
gold ducats, of which
12
,
000
are the legacy of her father,
1000
are promised by Donna Felice, another
1000
in ornaments,
corredo
[trousseau] and jewels, and
2000
will come from Napoleone, Abbot of Farfa, on the profits of the Abbey’.
¹
Sixteen thousand ducats was not a vast dowry, only a thousand more than Julius had provided for Felice herself. But the Count of Mirandola had difficulty in extracting it from the respective parties. In January
1520
, Felice’s servant Philippo da Bracciano wrote to tell her that he and Statio were trying to renegotiate the terms of the dowry payment on her behalf, which they felt were ‘too narrow’.
2
In
1525
, six years later, Napoleone had yet to pay his provision of
2000
ducats to the Count.

With Carlotta married, Felice immediately turned her attention to her own daughter and eldest child, Julia. Felice had considered betrothals for Julia since the child was four years old, including the son of Alfonso d’Este, and the son of the Duke of Nemours, Giuliano de’ Medici. In the end, however, she looked to the far south not to the north for Julia’s husband. She found a suitable candidate in the Calabrian principate of Bisignano: its ruler, Pier Antonio da Sanseverino.
³
Felice’s contact with the Prince probably came through his brother-in-law, the Count of Nola, to whom she had recently sold the Orsini palace in Naples.

Ordinarily, the marriage of a daughter saw only the exit of money from her family in the form of her dowry. In this instance, however, Felice had the opportunity to turn a profit. What the Prince of Bisignano wanted as much as a wife was a cardinal in the family. Felice’s rapport with Leo X was well known and the Orsini
gubernatrix
was widely respected. Felice could assist the Prince in securing the Sanseverino family the honour and influence they lacked. On
9
August
1520
, Gian Domenico wrote to Felice, ‘In the last hour a gentleman came here who asserts that he is the secretary of the Prince of Bisignano who charged him to find you to discuss the matter of the betrothal to Madonna Julia. We have offered as a dowry
40
,
000
ducats on your part and the agreement that Signor Antonio, the uncle of the Prince, will be made a cardinal. I told him that only the Pope makes cardinals, but that your ladyship would do everything possible, given the love that His Holiness bears towards you.’
4

However great Leo’s love for Felice, a cardinal’s hat was too precious a commodity for him to give away for nothing. But he was prepared to consider a proposal that would be to his material advantage. Leo was as big a spender as his predecessor, and more than willing to accept funds to swell the coffers that paid for, among other things, Raphael and his work at the Vatican and New St Peter’s, as well as the Pope’s hunting villas and lavish parties. Nor was any secret kept of the deal negotiated by the Pope, the former Pope’s daughter, and the southern Prince. Such an accord only confirmed the view of the north’s emergent Protestants of the Catholic Church’s inherent corruption. In March
1521
the Prince of Bisignano arrived in Rome. Baldessar Castiglione wrote to Mantua to tell the Gonzaga court, ‘The Prince of

Bisignano has arrived, and has been most fondly embraced by His Holiness, and he has made the betrothal which in so doing means he will take Madonna Felice’s daughter. The Pope has a petition from Madonna Felice which declares if the betrothal succeeds, he will make a cardinal of Signor Antonio Sanseverino.’
⁵
The Venetian Sanuto was much more explicit about how the Pope and Felice would profit: ‘[The Prince] will give the Pope
25
,
000
ducats,
8000
of which he will receive now, in cash, and he has promised to give
16
,
000
to Madonna Felice.’
⁶
The Prince’s family was delighted with the match. His sister, the Countess of Nola, wrote to Felice to express her happiness at the betrothal. ‘It is’, she wrote, ‘as if he had taken the daughter of a great queen.’
⁷
For her part, the ‘great queen’ expressed her happiness by appearing in public in a white veil.
⁸

The Prince of Bisignano paid a high price for a cardinal’s hat for his uncle. In order to marry Julia Orsini, he broke a betrothal to the sister-inlaw of the Viceroy of Naples, for which he had to pay a fine of
26
,
000
ducats to his liege lord, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Charles V. Sanuto reported, ‘He will need to live with little expense, in order to pay such a debt.’
9
‘Living with little expense’ was not something to which the Prince of Bisignano was accustomed. After his marriage, he and Julia frequently petitioned Felice to advance them instalments of her dowry. Julia wrote regularly to her mother, long, largely indecipherable letters. She often sent her mother the same kinds of requests she had made when she was a young girl at Vicovaro, for clothes and shoes. ‘Now that I must dress in white clothes,’ she wrote, ‘please could you send me two lengths of white silk twist, and two all-white large headscarves.’
¹⁰
Julia’s letters give little sense of Felice’s eldest daughter possessing an inner life, although she was under a certain amount of pressure to produce a son. Julia gave birth to two daughters, the first named after her husband’s mother, Eleonora, and the second after Felice. Letters Felice received from the Prince’s secretaries described the first little girl as ‘most beautiful, all the house takes joy in her’. With the appearance of a second daughter, in July
1525
, the Duchess of Nerito, the Prince’s aunt, wrote to Felice, saying, ‘The Princess has again made a girl; let us hope that in a year we will be blessed with a boy, and not be discontented with a girl as they are at times useful for the house ...’
¹¹
Bisignano himself, however, wrote with pride to Felice, telling her, ‘The Princess has made a beautiful baby girl, and to this one I have attached the name Lady Felice, after you.’
¹²
‘Lady Felice’ was the first in a succession of girls to be named after the daughter of Julius II, who thereby succeeded, for a time, in feminizing what had hitherto been an exclusively male name.

Julia’s marriage to the Prince of Bisignano had secured Felice a substantial cash sum, and allies of her own in southern Italy. But the southern alliance opened up the floodgates of Felice’s enmity with the Orsini men. ‘The Orsini are unhappy with the marriage of the daughter of Gian Giordano with the Prince of Bisignano, and Signor Renzo da Ceri most particularly,’ wrote Sanuto.
¹³
They were angered by her decision to grant her own daughter a dowry from Orsini funds much more than twice the one her stepdaughter Carlotta had received. But none was angered more than her stepson Napoleone. He was incandescent with rage that Felice had used her influence with Leo to procure a cardinal’s hat for her daughter’s new family – a hat he thought should have been his.

chapter 16

Napoleone

For many chroniclers of the Orsini house, Felice della Rovere earns no credit for her considerable abilities as regent. She is little more than a wicked stepmother, plotting and scheming to prevent Napoleone, Gian Giordano’s eldest son, from succeeding to his rightful inheritance.

When Felice della Rovere entered the house of Orsini, there was a tacit agreement that were she to have a son he would be the heir to the lordship, thereby deposing the incumbent heir, Gian Giordano’s son Napoleone, born in
1501
. This situation was not unusual; the same provision would have applied had she married the Lord of Piombino. But several of the men of the Orsini house, in particular the
condottiere
Renzo da Ceri, who was married to Napoleone’s sister Francesca, viewed the provision with suspicion and resentment. Gian Giordano was ttwo decades Felice’s senior; they knew the likelihood was that he would die before her sons were old enough to govern. This interloper, the bastard daughter of a pope, would take over. And when she did, she made it plain that she had no interest in their counsel. Nobody resented this more than Napoleone Orsini. He was eleven by the time his brother Francesco was born, old enough to be conscious of having been disinherited, with all its attendant disappointment and humiliation. As compensation, Felice’s father Julius had endowed Napoleone with the Abbey of Farfa, although the boy was not required to take holy orders. Farfa, located to the south of Rome, was one of Italy’s largest monastic benefices, a holding of over eighty square miles. When Leo became pope, he granted Napoleone, as abbot, an additional income of
1000
ducats a month.

Was Felice really a wicked stepmother, determined to deprive the eldest son of his rightful inheritance? She certainly did attempt to have Napoleone excluded from provisions relating to the Orsini estate; some documents regarding the disbursement of Gian Giordano’s property show that Napoleone’s name was clearly added only later to those of Felice’s two sons. From Felice’s perspective, Napoleone had received more than adequate compensation for the loss of a future title. Farfa encompassed almost as much terrain as did the Orsini estate, and she was reluctant for him to receive anything else. She also did not want him near her own sons. The boy was fast growing into a headstrong, aggressive and unstable young man, and she perhaps feared he might contrive a means of eliminating her own children, his competition for the Orsini inheritance. Felice insisted that Napoleone live at Bracciano, isolated from her boys at Vicovaro. (The
1518
Bracciano inventory shows that the seventeen-year-old’s bedroom was decorated entirely in black.) However, her attitude towards Napoleone’s sister Carlotta was different. Carlotta stayed at Vicovaro along with Felice’s children. She and her stepmother exchanged cordial messages both before and after her marriage. Felice had commuted the death sentence of Michelangelo da Campagnino after being petitioned by Carlotta and in her will of
1518
she left her stepdaughter a bequest of
3000
ducats. To Napoleone she left nothing. On one level, in stripping Napoleone of his power, Felice was striking a blow for her past. This illegitimate woman had turned the tables on convention. She had an unprecedented degree of power over a legitimate male, and she was not afraid to wield it.

Felice knew that, as a Machiavellian-style
principessa
, any kind of conciliatory gesture she made towards her stepson would be taken by him and the relatives who supported him – Renzo da Ceri, Mario Orsini, Roberto Orsini – as a sign of weakness. They would not hesitate to use it to try to take advantage of her and depose her. Compromise, as far as Felice was concerned, was not an option. But nor could Felice ignore Napoleone. He might not succeed his father as Lord of Bracciano, but he had not been disinherited entirely. He was entitled to his share of the estate’s produce and, when his brothers reached their majority, to some part of his father’s patrimony. So Felice adopted a policy of trying to keep her relationship with her stepson one where she was most emphatically in financial control. Napoleone was obliged to pay yearly taxes on the Abbey of Farfa to the papacy. As a minor, these were actually paid on his behalf by Felice, so she was kept fully informed of the state of affairs at Farfa. She kept a sharp watch on his access to goods from the estate. When he wanted to obtain linens from Bracciano, Felice, on her way from Rome, wrote somewhat exasperatedly to Daniela, her maidservant, ‘My dear Madonna Daniela, go immediately to the linen chest, and send to Signor Napoleone: four table cloths for himself and thirty napkins; four credenza covers and four hand towels; and do send them to him very quickly, and do not look for my signature because I am having to dictate this letter from horseback.’
1