A PRINCESS OF THE ITALIAN REFORMATION.* IN Giulia Gonzaga, Countess
of Fondi, Mr. Hare has added a newand unusually attractive figure to his galleryof Renaissance ladies. She was a cousin by marriage of Isabella d'Este, and as a young girl in 1525 went under the protection of that great lady to Rome. There a marriage was arranged for her with Vespasiano Colonna, one of the chiefs of the warlike family whose armed raid on Rome in the following year, terribly revenged on their vassals by Clement VII., gave the city a foretaste of the horrors of the Imperialist invasion and the siege and sack of Rome in 1527. It was Giulia's brother, Luigi Rodomonte Gonzaga, who, after the death of Bourbon,
• A Princess of the Italian Reformation : Giulia Courage : 1813.1689: Her Family and her Friends. By Christopher Hare. London : Harper and Brothers. [10s. 6d. net.)
led the first rush of the Imperial troops through the city ; and he was one of those, Isabella's young kinsmen, who with difficulty protected her and her ladies and the two thousand helpless persons in the Colonna Palace from the plundering fury of the soldiery.
Giulia Gonzaga's married life was a mere child's dream, for her husband died in the spring of 1528, leaving her a widow of fifteen and possessor for life, unless she should marry again, of a large part of his estates and enormous• fortune. His daughter by a former marriage, Isabella, was married to Giulia's brother, Luigi Gonzaga, but he also died early, and in the end the vast possessions of both families descended to Vespasiano, the son of Luigi and Isabella, the builder of the wonderful city of Sabbioneta, the romance of which may be read with pleasure in Mr. Hare's picturesque pages.
The Countess of Fondi did not lack adventures, though she never married again,but having held her courtat Fondi for some years, entertaining there all that was best in Italian society, retired to a semi-religious life in a convent at Naples. This was after the death of her devoted friend Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici—a friendship which no scandal seems to touch— and also after a terribly narrow escape from the Barbary corsairs, who attacked Fondi with the intention of carrying her off, a woman whose "enchanting beauty" was famous throughout the south, to the Sultan Suleyman Giulia Gonzaga's second narrow escape, many years later, was from the fires of the Inquisition. Her life is so full of varied interest that we have hardly room to tell how, at Naples, after hearing Fra Bernardino preach, she became a disciple of Valdes, the Spanish reformer. The whole story of the Reformation movement in Italy is most remarkable and of thrilling interest, extraordinarily hopeful for the cause of true religion until the persecuting zeal of Paul IV. and Pius V. extinguished the new-born spirit that might have purified the whole Church.
Previous page
