The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections (16 page)

It might have been otherwise had Pius III lived longer. Francesco Tedeschini Piccolomini was a nephew of Pius II and a man committed to reform of the Church. When the by now usual capitulation was drawn up it included the provision that a general council would be held within two years, and every five years after that, to oversee such reforms. Tedeschini, who had refused to be bribed in the conclave which had elected his predecessor, might have carried this through. His pontificate, however, lasted less than a month; he was elected after a somewhat longer conclave than had become customary – 16–22 September 1503. There was the prob- lem of the capitulation, but several other factors held up the elec- tion. There was, for instance, an unusually large number of electors

– thirty-seven – and such had been the effect of the Borja aggrandizement in the papal states, together with the fear of inter- vention by Cesare Borja himself, that the traditional battle lines

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had disappeared. Cesare had once been a cardinal himself, but had resigned the o
ffi
ce. There were nonetheless two other Borja cardi- nals in the conclave, and several more Spaniards. In this new state of affairs the Archbishop of Rouen, Georges d’Amboise, fancied his chances, but della Rovere and the Spaniards lined up against him. Pius was a stopgap. He was already ill when elected, and the ceremonies of his coronation proved too much – he died ten days after the service, on 18 October.

Presumably Giuliano della Rovere thought it now or never. He was not quite fifty when he was elected after the shortest conclave in history, effectively less than a day, 31 October to 1 November 1503, taking the title Julius II. Although driven from Rome during the pontificate of Alexander VI he had been one of the most significant players in a series of conclaves. He was a powerful char- acter who restored the papal states and enhanced the beauty of Rome – it was he who brought in Raphael, Bramante, and Michelangelo and conceived the idea of rebuilding St. Peter’s. But none of this explains his swift election. He bribed his way to the papacy and then cynically ensured that the fifth council of the Lateran, which met between 1511 and 1517, forbade simony, especially the buying of votes in a conclave. “In the election of the pontiff,” declared the council in February 1513, “in order that the faithful may look upon him as a mirror of purity and honesty, all stain and trace of simony shall be absent” – which it therefore was, in the choice of his successor.

Julius died on 21 February, less than a week after the Lateran Council’s promulgation of its stern condemnation of simony, especially in papal elections. There were twenty-five cardinals present for the conclave of 4–9 March. The capitulation was agreed, especially regulations affecting cardinals, who had been browbeaten by the late pope; proceedings against members of the college required a two-thirds majority before they could go ahead (Julius had excommunicated four of their number who were therefore unable to take part in the vote); the same majority was to

Princely Ponti
ff
s
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be required for the appointment of new cardinals, and for signi- ficant acts in the papal states and foreign affairs. The cardinals, who had been sidelined, were desperately trying to recover ground. Giovanni de’Medici was one of those who gladly signed up to these conditions of o
ffi
ce. He was swiftly elected, probably because of his well-known ability in politics, abetted by the fact that he was ill when the conclave began and had to be carried in. Here again, some may have thought, is a stopgap pope. He took the title Leo X and behaved in every way, in politics, in his patronage of the arts (though not, oddly, of the building of St. Peter’s), in the aggran- dizement of his family, and in his love of ostentation and spectacle, as a Renaissance prince.

But the Lateran Council, which he had inherited and which continued until 1517, was a reforming council. Meanwhile, that same year in Wittenberg, Martin Luther was nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the church. Much of the abuse in the Church against which he was protesting could be laid at the door of the papacy. A change of style was long overdue. It came with Leo’s successor, Hadrian VI.

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There were thirty-nine cardinals in the conclave following the death of Leo X, and nine more (including the English Cardinal Thomas Wolsey) who were absent. It was a large number from which to extract a two-thirds majority, particularly as the college was, as usual for the period, riven by political rivalries. The conclave lasted from 27 December 1521 to 9 January 1552. When it became clear that no one present was able to command the required number of votes, Giulio de’Medici proposed Cardinal Adriaan Florenz Dedel, who was in Spain, engaged in the govern- ment of Castile. This may seem an odd thing for a cardinal to be doing, even if he was Bishop of Tortosa, but Dedel was close to, and trusted by, the Spanish King Charles V, who was away from the country being crowned emperor. Dedel had been Charles’s tutor, appointed by Charles’s grandfather, the emperor Maximilian I. It was Charles who had asked that Dedel should be raised to the cardinalate, and it was possibly this trust between the two which ensured that this dour Dutchman (he was born in Utrecht in what was then the Spanish Netherlands) received the necessary votes in the conclave; Luther’s revolt within Charles’s empire, along with reform of the papal curia, had become one of the major challenges facing the Church. Hadrian VI (he kept his baptismal name) was a pious, upright man, committed to reform as well as to the extirpa- tion of heresy – in Spain he had served as Inquisitor and had thus come into contact with Lutheran ideas, to which he was steadfast- ly opposed. He was also committed to uniting Christian monarchs

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in yet another crusade against the Turks, as he said in his speech at his coronation, a ceremony which did not take place until the very end of August.

Though he may have been committed to reform, Hadrian achieved little, partly because he was not an Italian and was therefore resented by many at the papal court as well as by the citizens of Rome and not trusted, and partly because his pontificate was short. He died little more than a year after his coronation. There were still a large number of cardinals in total (forty-five) but the same number took part in the next conclave as had elected Hadrian. The same problems therefore persisted from one con- clave to the next. Giulio de’Medici was the obvious candidate – urbane, politically astute, and, as a cousin of Leo X, a scion of one of the great families of Italy. This last, of course, brought him enemies as well as wealth, among them the Soderini family – Cardinal Francesco Soderini was among the electors – who had fanned revolt in the Medici homeland of Florence during Hadrian’s pontificate. Another potential opponent was Pompeo Colonna, but he headed the pro-imperial group among the cardinals, and Giulio de’Medici was a prominent imperialist. Given the tensions, the conclave not surprisingly dragged on. It met on 1 October and did not bring itself to elect Giulio de’Medici until 19 November. He took the name Clement VII – and proved something of a disas- ter, not least because of his inept handling of the English King Henry VIII’s divorce petition against Catherine of Aragón, who had the inconvenience – from the pope’s point of view – of being the aunt of the Emperor Charles V.

Clement died in September 1534. On 13 October, after only a two-day conclave, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese became Pope Paul

III. Despite the efforts of Hadrian VI and Clement VII, Paul is sometimes hailed as the first pope of the Catholic reform because he saw the need for a council of the Church. This perspective is a mite paradoxical, because he was still a Renaissance prelate in his cultivation of ostentatious display and his patronage of the arts.

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And whatever his commitment to reform – and it was real – he was a flagrant nepotist, creating his two grandsons cardinals when they were only fourteen and sixteen years old (before his “conversion” in 1513 when Bishop of Parma, he had produced, as one biogra- pher has put it, “a constant scattering of illegitimate children”). He himself had owed his own elevation to the cardinalate at the early age of 25 to the fact that his sister Giulia, though married to an Orsini, was the mistress of Pope Alexander VI.

After his own personal reformation, Pope Paul III had devoted most of his energies to diplomacy, and had become a master of the art. He had been close to Leo X, advising him on affairs of state. He had expected to be elected to the papacy at the death of Hadrian. By the time he was finally elected he was Bishop of Ostia and dean of the college of cardinals, and at sixty-seven years the college’s oldest member.

Despite his considerable age he reigned as pope for fifteen years, advancing the cause of the Farnese family, calling the Council of Trent, and attempting to steer a neutral course between the competing interests of the Emperor Charles V – to whom he was related through the marriage of his grandson Ottavio to Charles’s illegitimate daughter Margaret – and Francis I of France. All of which created the tensions at the conclave which followed his death in 1549. It lasted from 29 November 1549 until 7 February 1550 and was made up of three factions. There were those who gathered around Cardinal Alessandro Farnese junior, the late pope’s grandson; there was a pro-French faction; and there was a pro-imperial one. The Farnese cabal and the Imperial party put forward two candidates: the Dominican Bishop of Burgos, Juan Álvarez de Toledo, and the English exile Reginald Pole. Pole was one of the leading members of the group of devout clerics and laypeople – the
spiritali
– who were eager for radical reform of the Church. Had he been chosen, the course of the Reformation might have been very different, for the
spiritali
were more sympathetic to at least some of the aims of the Protestant reformers.

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Pole apparently came to within a single vote of being elected, but instead the choice fell on the affable and well-liked Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte, a compromise agreed between the French and the Farnese factions. The emperor was implacably opposed because, as one of the presidents of the Council of Trent, del Monte had agreed to move the gathering to Bologna, and therefore outside the frontiers of the Empire. Ultimately, Charles V could not prevent the election, but as events turned out, disputes over the Farnese inheritance forced Julius III, as del Monte chose to be named, into the imperial camp.

On Julius’s death in 1555 the cardinals – fifty-fi of them by this time – were evenly divided once again between the French and the Imperialist camps. The French backed Ippolito d’Este, who would have been a throwback to the old model of popes as Renaissance princes. D’Este, however, alienated what support there might have been by intriguing for the o
ffi
ce of pope. The compromise at last was to choose one of the
spiritali
, Marcello Cervini, who, like his predecessor, was one of the presidents of the council and had similarly incurred the emperor’s dislike. The two main camps, having rapidly realized that neither side would command the required two-thirds majority, gave way to Cervini, and he was elected unanimously. The conclave began on 5 April 1555 and ended on 9 April – though Cervini was not formally proclaimed until the following day, when he was also crowned. It was Lent, so the ceremonial was naturally muted, but Cervini, who did not abandon his baptismal name and became Marcellus II, insisted on moderating the pomp; the money thus saved, he said, would go half to the Vatican’s treas- ury, half to the poor.

Much was expected from Marcellus, in whose memory Palestrina composed his
Missa Papae Marcelli
, but his pontificate was one of the shortest on record. He died suddenly on 1 May 1555. The same cardinals, with the same political agendas, gath- ered again on 15 May. The conclave lasted until 23 May, once again

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divided into pro-French and pro-imperial parties, neither of which could command a majority. The Imperialist party pushed hard for the election of the Archbishop of Bari, Giacomo Púteo (or Jacques Dupuy). The one person they did not want was the Neapolitan Gian Pietro Caraffa, from 1549 Archbishop of Naples, whose aversion to Protestantism was only equalled by his aversion to (Catholic) Spain and the Emperor Charles V. It was Carafa, how- ever, who was elected. He was ultra devout, almost fanatical; he was the leading member of the newly established Roman Inquisi- tion and, as Pope Paul IV, was to create the first papal index of forbidden books. Although a reformer, he was not sympathetic to the humanistically inclined
spiritali
and was so actively hostile to the newly founded Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) that Jerome Nadal, who was vicar-general of the society, expressed the hope that God would soon bestow on the pope his eternal reward. It was as much a surprise to the seventy-nine-year-old dean of the college of cardi- nals that he was elected as it was to everyone else: “I have never conferred a favor on a human being,” he was reported to have said. When it seemed likely that his unexpected candidacy would win the requisite majority, Cardinal Francisco Bobadilla de Mendoza, the Archbishop of Burgos, voiced the emperor’s opposition. It may well have been this attempt to interfere in the choice of a pope which persuaded Caraffa to accept.

Nadal’s somewhat cynical prayer for Paul IV was realized on 18 August 1559. In the four years of his pontificate his intransi- gence had made him thoroughly disliked. Rioters in Rome attacked the palace of the Inquisition, released its prisoner, and toppled the statue of the pope which stood on the Capitol. In the course of his reign he, and the Council of Trent, had produced a number of decrees of one kind or another which directly affected the status of cardinals and the holding of conclaves.

In
Sanctissimus Dominus noster
(26 January 1554) Julius III had already banned the creation of cardinals who were brothers. Now, in
Compactum
, published soon after his election, Paul forbade