Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  THE DODDERING OLD Benedict XIII was succeeded by a man only three years younger. Pope Clement XII was a wealthy Florentine, already seventy-eight and—like so many of his predecessors3—in constant pain from gout. He was an intellectual and a scholar who in former days, as Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini, had maintained a distinguished salon in Palazzo Pamfili on Piazza Navona, but within two years of his accession he had become so blind that he could sign papers only if his hand was placed on the spot where his signature was required, and by August 1736 the imperial ambassador Count Harrach was writing, “He has almost completely lost the wonderful memory he once possessed, and his color is so pale that there is reason to fear his demise at the turn of the season.”

  On the other hand, Pope Clement had lost none of his youthful energy, and he was by no means ineffectual. He acted with firmness and promptitude against Coscia; in a determined attempt to rescue the papal finances, he revived the state lotteries, which Benedict XIII had forbidden, and approved the issue of paper money. He also created a free port at Ancona and canceled some of the more excessive examples of Benedict’s generosity. But although all these measures proved moderately beneficial, they failed appreciably to diminish the burden of debt.

  Moreover, as the economy of the Papacy continued to decline, so too did its international prestige. When Duke Antonio Francesco Farnese of Parma and Piacenza died in 1731 without male issue and Charles VI once again asserted his suzerainty over the duchy, Clement’s protests were simply ignored. He was similarly powerless a year later when it was transferred to Don Carlos of Spain, son of Philip V and his formidable Italian queen, Elizabeth Farnese.4 In 1732 Don Carlos, who, thanks to his mother, was far more of an Italian than a Spaniard, was formally installed as Duke of Parma and Grand Prince of Tuscany. Later in the same year the papal nuncio was expelled from Venice. In 1733 the French blockaded Avignon, which was still under papal control. In the spring of 1734 the pope watched with impotent anxiety while Don Carlos, backed by Louis XV, marched south through the Papal States and made his triumphal entry into Naples, and by the late autumn, despite some resistance from the citadels of Messina, Trapani, and Syracuse, he had effectively taken over Sicily as well. In 1735 the prince resigned Parma to the empire in exchange for recognition as King of Naples, and in 1736 Spain and Naples both broke off diplomatic relations with the Holy See. To restore them, Clement was obliged to invest Don Carlos unconditionally with the Kingdom of Naples.

  Meanwhile, the pope’s health was giving increasing cause for concern, his misery now increased by a painful hernia and bladder trouble. On January 28, 1740, he asked to be given the last rites, and on February 6, he died in his eighty-eighth year. Considering his sufferings, his energy had almost to the end been astonishing, and if so many of his diplomatic initiatives failed he can hardly be held responsible; the times were against him. Thanks to his family’s wealth and the profits from his lotteries, he left Rome richer and more beautiful than he found it, building a museum of antique sculptures on the Capitol—the first public museum of antiquities in Europe—providing St. John Lateran with a new façade and the superb Corsini Chapel (both by Alessandro Galilei), laying out the Piazza di Trevi, and commissioning the glorious Trevi Fountain from Nicola Salvi.5 He also enlarged and greatly enriched the Vatican Library, presenting it with some two hundred Etruscan vases and over three hundred antique medals. It was, for an octogenarian, an impressive record.

  THE CONCLAVE WHICH followed the death of Clement XII lasted over six months, the longest since the Great Schism. The final choice was a totally unexpected compromise candidate, the Bolognese Cardinal Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini. “If you want a saint, take Gotti; if you want a statesman, take Aldovrandi; if you want a good fellow, take me,” he is said to have joked during the conclave’s last days. The cardinals, it appeared, wanted a good fellow; Lambertini was duly elected, taking the name of Benedict XIV in honor of the pope who had raised him to the Sacred College. He proved worth waiting for. A deeply learned theologian and church lawyer who had written what is still the standard work on canonization, he was also genial and approachable, with a ready wit and an excellent sense of humor. He enjoyed nothing more than wandering informally around Rome, chatting to passersby; it was typical of him that when the King of Naples visited Rome in 1744 the pope received him not in his palace on the Quirinal but in a neighboring coffeehouse.6

  But Benedict’s easygoing charm concealed an underlying seriousness and unremitting industry. His task, as he saw it, was to restore the dignity and influence of the Holy See and somehow to drag it into the eighteenth century. Only two months after his accession, however, came the first and greatest crisis of his pontificate: the death, in October 1740, of the Emperor Charles VI. Charles had taken care to obtain solemn guarantees from all the principal European powers that they would respect the right of his twenty-three-year-old daughter, Maria Theresa, to succeed him in the monarchy, if not in the elected empire. The Papacy, the Republic of Venice, England, and Holland had all willingly agreed; Louis XV, though unwilling to commit himself, had been friendly and reassuring; while the new King of Prussia, Frederick II—later to be known as “the Great”—not only confirmed his recognition but even offered military assistance should it ever be needed. He spoke, as was soon apparent, with a forked tongue; but Maria Theresa was not to know it until, on December 16, 1740, a Prussian army of 30,000 invaded the imperial province of Silesia. The War of the Austrian Succession had begun.

  Charles’s body was scarcely cold before Elizabeth Farnese forced her ever-compliant husband, Philip V, to lay claim to all the Habsburg hereditary possessions. Their grounds were shaky, and she knew it. What she was really after, as always, was the Italian provinces, and she now had a valuable ally on the spot: her son Don Carlos, now King Charles of Naples. Within weeks a Spanish army had crossed the Pyrenees and was advancing, with King Louis’s blessing, through the Languedoc and Provence; meanwhile, the Spanish Duke of Montemar sailed a further division to Orbetello (near the modern Porto Ercole), where it was joined by Neapolitan troops. At this point King Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia threw in his lot with Maria Theresa, so henceforth Austria and Sardinia were pitted against the two Bourbon kingdoms of France and Spain. They had other allies, too: in August 1742 a British naval squadron commanded by the sixty-five-year-old Admiral Thomas Mathews appeared off Naples and threatened to bombard the city unless King Charles withdrew at once from the Bourbon coalition. The threat was gratifyingly effective; Mathews then turned against a squadron of French and Spanish ships, driving it back into Toulon and thus cutting off all naval communications between Naples and Spain.

  Throughout this period the attitude of the Holy See was uncertain. Despite previous papal assurances, the pope delayed his formal recognition of Maria Theresa’s hereditary right of succession until the very end of 1740. The empire, on the other hand, remained elective. There were two obvious candidates, Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis of Lorraine, and the Elector Charles Albert of Bavaria. Benedict secretly favored Charles Albert; since Francis was already Grand Duke of Tuscany,7 his election would bring the empire to the pope’s very doorstep. Benedict gave careful instructions, however, to his legate at Frankfurt, where the election was to be held, on no account to commit himself, simply to encourage the choice of a candidate who would be able and willing to protect the interests of the Church.

  When, on January 24, 1742, Charles Albert was unanimously elected as the Emperor Charles VII, being crowned three weeks later, Benedict lost no time in according him his recognition. Maria Theresa, on the other hand, showing all the spirit for which she would soon be celebrated, immediately declared the election null and void and sent an army to Bavaria. On February 13 it marched into Munich, and in August the furious queen announced the sequestration of all Church benefices in Austria. By that time, too, the Papal States had been overrun by Spanish, French, and Neapolitan troops. The pontificate of Benedict XIV had not begun well.

  It was a relief for a
lmost everyone—not least the pope, to whom the new emperor had been a considerable disappointment—when Charles VII died after a short illness on January 20, 1745, less than three years after his coronation. This time there was little question as to his successor, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany was duly crowned in October as Francis I. Despite heavy pressure from France and Spain and his own lively suspicions, the pope recognized him. There were still outstanding questions to be settled, and it was almost a year before Francis made his formal act of obedience; but the way was then clear for a resumption of relations, and diplomatic representatives were duly exchanged.

  When at last, after eight years, the war came to an end with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the only true victor was Frederick of Prussia, who had started it in the first place. Charles Emmanuel kept Savoy and Nice; the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, after twelve years as part of the empire, was entrusted to Philip of Bourbon, the younger brother of Charles III, who thus founded the House of Bourbon-Parme, which still exists today. Maria Theresa’s husband was duly recognized as the Emperor Francis I. To many people the War of the Austrian Succession must have seemed hardly worth the fighting.

  1. In 1720 he was obliged to surrender Sicily to the emperor, receiving in exchange the comparatively unimportant island of Sardinia. From then until 1861, when his distant cousin Victor Emmanuel II became the first king of the united Italy, he and his successors were also known as kings of Sardinia, though they continued to reign from their ancestral capital of Turin.

  2. Duffy, Saints and Sinners.

  3. So many, indeed, that one finds oneself wondering whether “gout” in those days was not a portmanteau word covering rheumatism, arthritis, and probably a good many other diseases as well.

  4. Elizabeth claimed it as of right, the duchy having been in Farnese hands since its creation in 1545 as a fief for Paul III’s illegitimate son Pierluigi.

  5. Begun in 1732, the fountain was completed after 1751 by Giuseppe Pannini and inaugurated in 1762 by Clement XIII.

  6. There is a splendid painting of this event by Giovanni Paolo Panini in the Capodimonte Museum, Naples.

  7. At the request of the emperor, who wished to compensate the ex–King of Poland Stanislaw Leszczyński, the father-in-law of Louis XV, for the loss of his kingdom, he had received Tuscany in 1736 in exchange for his former Duchy of Lorraine.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  The Jesuits and the Revolution

  Both during the war and after it, Pope Benedict spent much of his time in diplomatic negotiations with the European powers. Conciliatory by nature, he was not afraid to make substantial concessions in return for good relations and the smooth running of the Church machine. With Spain he even went so far as to negotiate the transfer of some twelve thousand ecclesiastical appointments to the king, retaining only fifty-two. The Curia was horrified; Benedict merely pointed out that King Ferdinand would almost certainly have appropriated them anyway and that by negotiating he had secured 1.3 million scudi in compensation.

  Turning his attention to Portugal, which had broken off diplomatic relations in the time of Benedict XIII,1 the pope willingly granted all King John’s demands and even awarded him the title Fidelissimus, “Most Faithful.” But the country began to cause him serious anxiety after John’s death in 1750, and the rise to power in that same year of Sebastião de Carvalho e Melo, better known as the Marquis of Pombal. Since the new king, Joseph I, was a pleasure-loving nonentity, Pombal soon became the most powerful man in the kingdom—and the most feared, to the point where in 1759 the papal nuncio in Lisbon wrote that he was the most despotic minister there had ever been, not only in Portugal but in the whole of Europe. Pombal believed—as it happened, nearly always mistakenly—that he knew what was best for his country, and he brooked no opposition: those who expressed contrary opinions or stood in his way were imprisoned or executed. Not surprisingly, he hated the Church, which he made every effort to bring under his control, and had a particular detestation for the most active group within it, the Society of Jesus.

  For some years already the Jesuits had been growing increasingly unpopular. Founded in 1534 as a humble order of missionaries, they were now seen as a vast, intellectually arrogant, power-hungry, and hugely ambitious organization, enmeshed in international intrigue and totally unscrupulous in their operations. For years they had been pilloried by Jansenist pamphleteers; Blaise Pascal in his Lettres provinciales had attacked them as shameless hypocrites. They were blamed for every atrocity, every outrage. Who else, people asked, had been responsible for the assassinations of Henry III and Henry IV of France and the attempts on the lives of Queen Elizabeth and James I of England? Had not the English Civil War been the fruit of a Jesuit conspiracy?

  In Portugal the Society had five confessors at court and a near monopoly on colleges and schools. Its power had to be broken, and Pombal was determined to break it. In 1755, the year of the great Lisbon earthquake, a Jesuit was expelled for having preached a disloyal sermon, despite the fact that none of those who heard it had noticed anything to which the king might have objected. Two years later, the Jesuit confessor to the royal family was forcibly evicted, and the next day all Jesuits were forbidden the court and struck off the list of preachers in the cathedral. Pombal told the nuncio that the principal reason was the conduct of the Society in its missionary colonies in Spanish Paraguay and Portuguese Brazil, where Jesuit missionaries were alleged to have incited the Indians to rebellion. At much the same time the Portuguese envoy in Rome strongly hinted to Pope Benedict that if he did not take firm measures against the Society, King Joseph would expel it altogether from his realm.

  It was always the pope’s instinct to temporize. He had no wish to offend the king, but he resented Pombal’s attitude, which demanded his unquestioning acceptance of the truth of his accusations. He politely replied that he would appoint one of his cardinals to investigate the charges and on consideration of his report would take whatever measures appeared appropriate. On April 1, 1758, just a month before his death, he duly named the Portuguese Cardinal Francesco Saldanha as reformer and visitor of the Jesuits of Portugal.

  In his dealings with Prussia, Benedict smoothed his path by recognizing the Protestant Frederick II, whose conquest of Silesia had greatly increased the number of his Catholic subjects, as king, a title previously denied him by the Holy See; on the other hand, he refused absolutely to allow him to transfer to Berlin the seat of the Cardinal Bishop of Breslau, vicar general of all the Catholics in his realm, even when the king promised to upgrade the Catholic chapel there to the status of a cathedral. The result, the pope realized, would have been tantamount to the establishment of a Prussian state church, effectively independent of Rome—and he would have none of it.

  Another serious problem was the heavy burden of debt which he had inherited. He instituted drastic economies in every department of the administration, but they did little more than counterbalance the depredations of the foreign armies; the burden remained crushing. In his canonical and liturgical reforms he had rather more success. Mixed marriages were regularized; Christians of the Eastern rite in communion with Rome—the Maronites of Lebanon, for example, and other uniate churches of the Middle East—were formally assured that they might continue in all their traditional forms of worship. The Congregation of the Index—effectively the papal board of censorship—was instructed to avoid excessive zeal, interpreting its instructions as liberally as possible. (Freemasonry, however, and the works of the pope’s openly confessed admirer Voltaire2 remained proscribed.)

  As might have been expected, Benedict XIV was an enthusiastic patron of the arts and sciences. Unlike his predecessor, he had never been a rich man; no magnificent buildings stand to his memory. He managed nonetheless to found chairs of mathematics, chemistry, and physics at the Sapienza University, and a chair of surgery (with an institute of anatomy) at the University of Bologna; and he greatly enriched both the Vatican Library and the Capitoline Museum. It was thanks largely to him that, d
uring the mercifully peaceful last ten years of his pontificate, Rome became not only the religious but also the intellectual capital of Catholic Europe—the Rome in which Johann Joachim Winckelmann invented art history, the Rome that was also a few years later to inspire Edward Gibbon. Gibbon’s contemporary Horace Walpole summed up Benedict accurately enough: “A priest without insolence or interest, a prince without favourites, a pope without nephews.” His Roman flock adored him, and when he died on May 3, 1758, the whole city went into mourning.

  —

  “WHO WOULD HAVE thought it?” wrote Cardinal Carlo della Torre Rezzonico to his brother on hearing that he had been elected pope. “I am completely bewildered before God and man.… You know my failings; if others had known them, they would never have acted as they have.” When his mother was informed, she died of shock.

  Rezzonico, who took the name of Clement XIII after the pope who had raised him to the purple, came from a rich Venetian family which had bought itself into the nobility some seventy years before. The Jesuit historian Giulio Cesare Cordara, who knew him well, wrote:

  He had all the virtues which could grace a prince and a pope. He was naturally kind-hearted, generous, candid, and truthful, abhorring any kind of dissembling or exaggeration. He had a lively mind, great powers of endurance, and an indefatigable capacity for work. It was easy to gain admittance to him; his conversation was kind but not unmeasured; pride and contempt for others were utterly foreign to his nature. Although destiny allotted him the highest dignity, he succeeded in preserving a notable humility and meekness.