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be attained. But they failed in getting enough of these secret promises; and therefore, for the sake, as the conclavist says, of not exposing their candidate to such an indignity as the discovery of an unsuccessful trick, did not make the attempt.

Of those whose election was openly and avowedly put forward and canvassed, it was thought at the beginning of the Conclave that the Cardinal di Carpi was the most likely to succeed. He had been the only cardinal who had lived on terms of intimacy with the late Pope; and as there was not a member of the Sacred College who was not in continual fear of the ever-vigilant severity of that terrible Pontiff, so there was hardly one who had not striven to be on good terms with Carpi; and, "inasmuch," says the Conclavist, "as nothing is so pleasing to an old cardinal as to give him to understand that you wish him to be the living Pope's successor," all the members of the College living in Rome had more or less promised him their votes. He himself thought himself sure of the tiara. But it was a great blow to Cardinal D'Este, the head of the French faction-who, being on bad terms with Paul IV., had long been absent from Rome to hear that Carpi was likely to be Pope; for that cardinal, so called from the name of his native city, which had once been an independent principality, but was now part of the domains of the D'Este family, was exceedingly anxious to restore the separate independence of Carpi, and was therefore a special enemy of the Duke of Ferrara, the brother of the Cardinal. In this danger the Cardinal Ferrara wrote to the Duke of Florence, who had recently become connected with the Duke of

Ferrara by marriage, promising that if he (the Duke) would induce the Cardinal Camerlengo, who was the leader of the Imperialist party, to oppose the election of Carpi, he (the Cardinal of Ferrara) with all the French party would give their votes to the Cardinal Medici. The Duke of Florence accepted the offer, and forthwith opened negotiations with the Cardinal Camerlengo, whom he found well prepared to fall in with his views, from a cause which, as the eonclavist remarks, might at first sight seem likely to have had quite a contrary effect. This was, that negotiations for a marriage (secret negotiations, the narrator says, though it is difficult to understand why they should have been secret, save from the general tendency of those classes of people and those times to be secret in everything!) had been going on between the brother of the Camerlengo and the sister of Cardinal Carpi. For the Camerlengo argued that Carpi, "being a man of a very proud disposition," would, if he became Pope, assuredly break off the marriage, for the sake of making some grander match! The Camerlengo, therefore, and Ferrara found themselves agreed in the determination to exclude carpi. The former, indeed, seems to have had some difficulty in finding any valid reason to give him for declining to support his candidature. He told him, says the conclavist, that if he was observed to show marked anxiety for his success, the secret of the proposed connection. between their families might be suspected! Really this puts one in mind of the French burlesque of a melo-dramatic mystery, "Feignons à feindre, à fin de mieux dissimuler!" And the incident is only worth

mentioning as a good example of the sort of considerations that often influenced the elections, and of the motives of their conduct which were put forward in the discussions between the electors.

However, so large a number of cardinals were more or less hampered by the promises they had given, or at least the expectations they had held out, to Cardinal Carpi, that even after the coalition between the Cardinal D'Este and the Camerlengo the way to the election of Medici was by no means clear. And it was once more the veteran Farnese who took the matter in hand, and was finally the maker of the new Pope. "At last," concludes the conclavist, "the Cardinal Farnese, seeing all the confusion, and the struggles it gave rise to, resolved energetically to end the business; otherwise the Conclave would have lasted much longer. He therefore threw all his weight and that of his friends into the scale in favour of Medici, who by virtue of this powerful assistance was elected all of a sudden, on the 23rd of October, 1559, at eight o'clock in the evening;" being thus the third Pope in succession elected by "Acclamation" or "Adoration."

CHAPTER IV.

Death of Pius IV.-Closing of the Council of Trent.-Ranke's Remarks on the work of the Council.-Action of the work of the Council on the Character of the Popes.-Anecdote of a plot to assassinato Pius IV.-Michael Ghislieri: his antecedents and character.Character of the Election.-Conclave which elected Pius IV.Rivalry between Cardinals Farnese and Borromeo.-Representative of the old and of the new time.-Cardinal Altemps.-Anecdote of Borromeo at Florence.-Conclavist's View of Borromeo's character. -Moroni's imprisonment and acquittal on Charge of Heresy held in Conclave to be sufficient reason against his Election.-Borromeo wishes to elect him.-It is found impossible, however, to elect him. Duplicity of Farnese towards Borromeo.-Cardinals Ferrara and D'Este hostile to Morone, and why.-Farnese and Borromeo agree to the Election of Ghislieri.-Dismay in Conclave at the result accomplished in the Election of Pius V.

Pius IV. reigned very nearly six years. He died on the 10th of December, 1565, having had the great pleasure and triumph of closing the Council of Trent two years previously. It has often been said that the work accomplished by the great Council was a fatal one for the Church. It was called for the reformation of abuses which it failed to reform; and it finally fixed and clenched doctrines which must ever act as a burning of their ships by the heads of the Church. The Council has cut off the possibility of retreat from positions which the Church has assumed; it has consolidated and fixed doctrines which must sooner or later be exploded and abandoned; and it needs but a sufficiently far look into futurity to see and understand the justification of those

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who maintain that the work of the great Council was, and will in time be seen to have been, suicidal. But for the time being it unquestionably strengthened the Church. There had ever been, as Ranke well remarks, a certain alloy of Protestantism within the Church. The Council expelled that virus. If it failed to accomplish aught towards healing the schism which had cut Christendom in half, but had on the contrary made the gulf between the two halves so wide that it seemed impossible to the men of those days-and might well so seem-that any one should pass from the one bank to the other, it at least marked out the frontier lines of the Church's dominion with no faltering or uncertain tracings, and thus enabled the rulers of the territory within the lines to govern it with a firmer and more vigorous sway and a more perfect uniformity of discipline. It also left the Church at peace and accord with the civil powers of the countries which remained faithful to it; and though this prepared the way for the sleepy epoch, when zeal was once more to run low, the more immediate effect was to leave the Popes free to labour for and to stimulate them in the work of more and more completely catholicizing the Church, and enabling their clergy to fasten a surer and tighter grip on the social life of the people.

The results of this intensification of Church action and Church feeling made themselves very sensibly felt by, and were very unmistakably visible in the conduct and fortunes of, the Popes and the makers of them. Pius IV., the third "zealous " Pope in succession, was already found not to be up to the mark. A Roman

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