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and popular in the College, though very far from possessing any such qualities as would fit him for being made Pope, sent his conclavist, Fernando di Torres, to ask sundry cardinals, both of the Imperial and the French party, to pay him this compliment. But Torres did his work so well and zealously, going round to each of the cardinals privately in his cell, that he obtained the promises of a number of votes sufficient to make the election, while each of those who had promised him theirs did so in the firm persuasion that nobody had the slightest idea of electing Cueva, or that there was the remotest chance of such a result. It was, however, the merest chance that prevented such a result from having been realised! On going into the chapel for the scrutiny, the Cardinal Capo di Ferro in an otiose sort of manner asked those who chanced to be next to him for whom they were going to vote, which he would by no means have done if it had not been perfectly well understood on all sides that the business in hand was not serious, but merely a formal and complimentary voting. "Oh! I am going to vote for Cueva!" said the man asked. "So am I!" said the man on the other side of Capo di Ferro! "Per Bacco! And so am I!" cried Capo di Ferro. And a sudden suspicion darted into the minds of all three, that if they did not mind what they were about, that might happen which so very nearly had happened! The three cardinals, whose chance communication had thus saved the College from doing what it had not the smallest intention of doing, instantly destroyed the voting papers they had prepared and made new ones, openly declaring their reasons for

doing so amid the general laughter of the assembly, in which his Eminence Cardinal Cueva heartily joined !

"Many other kinds of tricks were tried," says the conclavist, some of which being in connection with candidates qualified to aspire in earnest to the Papacy were much praised,* and carefully recorded of the authors of them. Such was the plot of some of the leaders of the French party with a view to the election of Cardinal Tournon, a man, says the conclavist, very worthy of being elected by reason of his exemplary life, prudence, discretion, and administrative abilities, especially (as he notably adds) now that the fear that a French Pope might again take the Roman Court to Avignon has vanished. Now the French party were able to muster about twenty-four votes among themselves; and they had reason to think that they could rely on four or five "accessits" from among the Imperialists. But still the twenty-eight or nine votes thus obtained were not enough to make an election-all which calculations were perfectly well known to everybody in Conclave. Their plan was therefore to obtain the secret promise of some four or five accessits, besides those which they could count upon as merely complimentary and given by men who were convinced that no election would be the result, which might be given unexpectedly at the last, after the others had been recorded, and thus an election

* It is fair to say that the word lodate is often used in such a manner as to justify the translation of it as simply "talked about," chiefly in the use of" sulodate " in the sense of "aforesaid."

The exact meaning of this term, and the method of proceeding to the "accessit," will be described at a future page. After each scrutiny the voters were at liberty to change the vote they had just given for an "accession" to the numbers of those who had voted for another.

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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 diffi cult 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.

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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."

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