The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere (41 page)

When she did return to Rome, in late
1531
, her education continued. The entry ‘Maestro Babuccio, tutor of Signora Clarice’ appears in Felice’s account books.
⁷
Clarice was by then seventeen, and formal education for girls often finished once they knew how to write their name and read. This suggests Clarice and her mother were both at pains to develop her intellectual ability. Clarice also took the threat of Napoleone very seriously. She was attentive to rumours about his movements and passed on whatever she heard to her mother. She sent her word from Pesaro of a young man ‘dressed in a red cassock and hat, riding a black horse, coming from Venice and now about thirty miles from Rome, who is said to be one of Napoleone’s men’. They feared that he might be acting as a scout for Napoleone, although Clarice added, ‘I doubt that this one is coming to start up something against us, since Napoleone is still in Venice.’
8
It is hardly surprising that this engaging, accomplished and thoughtful young woman would win the admiration of those who visited the court at Pesaro. Yet nobody expected her cousin Guidobaldo, the son of Francesco Maria della Rovere, to fall madly in love with her. Guidobaldo was sixteen when he first fell in love with Clarice. For two years, he carried a torch for her as only an ardent adolescent can. Love rarely, if ever, entered the matrimonial equations of the elite, and Guidobaldo’s father did not intend to use love in his matrimonial calculations for his son. He wanted him to marry Julia Varano, the daughter of the otherwise heirless Duke of Camerino, who would bring the estate, which adjoined the Duchy of Urbino, and title with her as her dowry. In
1532
, Guidobaldo begged permission to marry Clarice, turning to his mother for support when his father ignored his pleas. He wrote Eleonora a letter in which the words simply tumble out:

For two years now I have spoken at length, begging you that in giving me a wife, it would seem that in this act the principle matter is to satisfy me, given that I carried, and still carry such a love for the lady Clarice, due to her qualities, and her manners. To let me have her would give me such extreme happiness, and not to have her would cause me such infinite sadness, so I beg you with all my heart, if you have any regard for my sanity and health, satisfy and concede me this favour, knowing that in her is my all, perhaps if you wish to have any care of me, knowing that otherwise this will be my ruin, and I am certain that I will be sorrowful for ever.
⁹

Guidobaldo’s father Francesco Maria wrote a blistering letter to him in response:

Against all my expectations I understand you persist in wishing a marriage with the line of Signora Felice. Against my deliberate wishes you continue in this dishonourable practice, and because you seem detached from reason, I shall make it clear to you that as servants of our past we do not take in marriage the bastards of our house. And if you do not seek to honour and exalt your house then do not at least debase it. Moreover, if the present condition of the house of Orsini does not discourage you then you might remember how Renzo da Ceri [as Leo X’s General] sought to ruin our state, and if you had known the plainly crazy Gian Giordano you would be ashamed of proceeding so.

In another letter he also reminded Guidobaldo that marriage to Clarice would attract the enmity of Napoleone and he would be persecuted ‘not only for your property, but for your very life and soul’.

Felice had always stood by her cousin. She had supported him after he had murdered Cardinal Alidosi, Julius II’s adviser, in a fit of jealous pique and she had helped him get back his lands from Leo X. They had always corresponded in a warm and cordial manner. Not so very much earlier, he had told her that he thought of her children as his own. Yet there was a baseness and a snobbery at the heart of Francesco Maria that prevented him from making an alliance with his bastard cousin’s lineage. Guidobaldo attempted a spirited defence of Felice, Clarice, and their line, declaring that the Orsini were far more noble than the Varano family. But his father refused to listen.

It was Felice herself who decided matters. She perhaps blamed herself for leaving Clarice unsupervised at a busy court. She had not had this trouble with her elder daughter, Julia, who had grown up isolated at Vicovaro and had then gone straight to the far south to marry the Prince of Bisignano. Felice might have been in favour of Clarice’s marriage to Guidobaldo, but she could not afford any more discord with family members. Even as Guidobaldo begged Francesco Maria to let him marry her, Felice was arranging another marriage for Clarice with Don Luigi Carafa, the Prince of Stigliano. Carafa, like Julia’s husband, the Prince of Bisignano, was a prince with an estate deep into southern Italy, hundreds of miles from the court of Urbino and Guidobaldo.
¹⁰
The Carafa were on good terms with the Spanish, and the need to further an Imperial alliance was never far from Felice’s mind. Moreover, the Prince’s cousin, Giampietro Carafa, was a cardinal of increasing importance, and would become Pope Paul IV in
1555
.

Catherine de’ Medici, who had resided briefly with Felice when she was a little girl, wrote Felice a charming letter of congratulations, complimenting her on the choice of consort, which the Medici Princess declared could not have pleased her more. She asked that she be recommended to Clarice ‘as a sister’.
¹¹
By coincidence, as an infant, Catherine had been betrothed to Guidobaldo and. It was during this engagement that she had spent some months in Felice’s house. The intention had been for her to grow up in an environment less hostile to the Urbino della Rovere than the Medici household in Florence. The Medici quickly had Catherine removed from Felice’s care once the marriage negotiations broke down. Yet, despite her youth, Catherine had not forgotten Felice, and indeed perhaps remembered her example later in life, when she, in her turn, became a regent with sons too young to rule.

If Clarice was sorry to lose Guidobaldo, she kept it to herself. She wrote from Stigliano to her mother in loving terms and maintained an active interest in her family’s affairs from the castle in the south.

Guidobaldo married Julia Varano in
1534
. The famous
Venus of Urbino
by the painter Titian, the picture of the nude with the long golden hair, sprawled on her bed, is believed to have been commissioned to celebrate the event. Paintings of beautiful naked women were often hung in Renaissance bedchambers as an incentive to spur on a husband in the dutiful act of sexual intercourse. As Guidobaldo gazed at this fictive goddess, perhaps he thought ruefully that he would have had no need of her were it Clarice beside him. He and Julia Varano had no children. He soon acquired mistresses and had three illegitimate daughters. To name any of them Clarice would have drawn overt attention to his former love, who was by then respectably married. But he did name one of them Felice. He and Felice remained on good terms. In fact, a sign that Felice was aware of how Francesco Maria had insulted her is that she stopped writing to the cousin who had once addressed her as
soror amantissima
, ‘most beloved sister’. When she had news to impart, or was in need of help from the Urbino family, she wrote to his son instead.

chapter 12

The Boys

Felice now had to turn her attention to her sons, who were causing her far more in the way of problems. However unjust Francesco Maria had been in his dismissal of Felice as simply a bastard member of the house of della Rovere, he did have a point about the Orsini men. All the indications are that they shared a tendency to suffer from mental problems in varying degrees, as well as laziness and cruelty, rashness and impetuousness. Felice della Rovere was not a bad mother, but as sole parent there was only so much she could do. Renaissance sons did not look to their mothers to learn how to shape their characters; instinctively they looked to their father, and Francesco’s and Girolamo’s father was dead. That did not mean that Felice’s sons dismissed their widowed mother as being of no consequence; even as men they were remarkably dependent on her. Being unable because of their social conditioning to use their mother as a role model, Francesco and Girolamo did not know how to learn from her wisdom, her ability to manipulate situations to her advantage, or the necessity of looking after those who served them. They also did not have her hunger, her need to succeed. They had been born into privilege, and accepted all it had to offer them without question.

In
1530
, Felice’s eldest son, Francesco, who was now eighteen, received the abbothood of Farfa. Farfa had belonged to Napoleone, but he had relinquished the office in order to marry Claudia Colonna, although he continued to be referred to as ‘L’Abate’. The Abbey of Farfa was located to the south of Rome, with its territory bordering that of Vicovaro. It was an enormous holding, and its administration required as steady a hand as that guiding the rest of the Orsini estates. Unfortunately, Francesco, who never married but who did spawn a huge flock of illegitimate children, did not have his mother’s commitment to estate management. He left it in the hands of officials with whom he rarely corresponded, and who, left to their own devices, allowed corruption and anarchy to reign.

By
1531
, even Pope Clement VII had heard of the mistreatment of the vassals who laboured within the terrain of the Abbey and, given that Farfa was Church property, he was most displeased. Felice was equally unhappy with her son. She had spent almost twenty years working tirelessly to ensure as much contentment as possible on the part of those who served her, and Francesco’s inattentive ways were to cause her anxiety for the rest of her life. She was also worried that her son had angered the Pope, as she knew how much she and her children depended on his favour. In one stern letter to Francesco she told him that his vassals at Farfa had good reason to be unhappy. ‘Because I am your mother, and a good mother,’ she wrote, ‘I am obliged not to be remiss in any of the lessons I should provide for you and so you should know it causes me a great deal of bother to learn of your dealings at the Abbey.’ She went on to warn him that he should immediately change his representatives in charge at Farfa, as otherwise ‘all the water in the sea will not wash away the dirt your officials have brought’.
¹

She was also prepared to cover for his administrative failings. When Francesco was late with the payment of taxes, Felice wrote to the Roman auditor, ‘I am sure that this money has been paid to you, to the satisfaction of my son the Abbot. However, we will pay it again in order to satisfy you, so we will send you
5
scudi
if you will be patient.’
²
It seems more likely that Felice knew very well that Francesco had never sent the money at all and she was attempting to allow her son to save face.

Francesco, for his part, wrote letters to his mother assuring her that everything was under his control and then attempted to distract her with matters more pleasurable. He wrote to her in one letter, ‘I am sending you three figs from the trees that grow here and if for love of me they are to your taste, I will continue to send them to you.’ Lazy and incompetent as Francesco clearly was, he and Felice were close. She wrote to him often, in affectionate and vivid terms, with none of the rather chilly protocol usually evident in correspondence between a noble woman and her adult son in Renaissance Italy.

Girolamo, however, proved to be more complicated and less controllable. Although he was the younger son, Felice selected him to inherit the title of Lord of Bracciano. The grounds for her choice are not clear. Perhaps she thought him more intelligent than his brother, or more likely to make a good leader. He was certainly his father’s son in a way that Francesco was not. Francesco took after any number of his male della Rovere cousins, men such as the Riario cousins or Girolamo Basso della Rovere, who were content to receive innumerable benefices from their uncle Pope Sixtus IV and let them be run by others, as Felice’s stepfather Bernardino de Cupis had served Girolamo della Rovere. Felice’s Girolamo, on the other hand, although named for his della Rovere cousin, was very much Gian Giordano’s son. He was seized, from an early age, with the desire to be a
condottiere
and lead troops of his own. Eventually he would sever the traditional Orsini tie to France and serve the Holy Roman Emperor on expeditions against the Turks. Francesco Sansovino, however, in his
1565
biography of the family, in an attempt to whitewash the Orsini’s most recent history, was obliged to write somewhat obliquely that the extent of Girolamo’s international military deeds was limited by his ‘domestic commitment’. Such ‘commitment’ nearly cost Girolamo his life, not to mention the livelihood of the Bracciano Orsini.