Part 4

Thus in 1298, that is to say only sixteen years after the Florentines had conquered their constitution, Arnolfo di Lapo received from the rulers the order to build a palace for them.

[Illustration: PALAZZO VECCHIO, ITALY.]

Arnolfo di Lapo had visited the site reserved for him and had prepared his plans accordingly. But at the moment of laying the foundations of his edifice, the people loudly forbade him to place a single stone upon the spot where the house of Farinata des Uberti had stood. Arnolfo di Lapo was forced to bow to this popular clamour; he pushed his edifice back into a corner and left the accursed spot unoccupied. Even to the present time neither stones nor trees have planted their roots there and nothing has intruded for more than six centuries where Guelph vengeance drove the plough and sowed with salt.

This palace was the residence of a standard-bearer and eight priors, two for each quarter of the city; their charge lasted for sixty days and during that time they lived together, eating at the same table and not being able to leave their residence: that is to say, they were almost prisoners. Each had two domestics to serve him and there was always a notary at their orders ready to write down their deliberations: he ate with them and was a prisoner like themselves. As a recompense for the sacrifice of his time and liberty that each prior made for the republic, he received ten pounds a day, or nearly seven francs of our money. At that day, private parsimony ruled in public economy, and the government thus found itself in a position to execute great things in art and in war. Thence resulted its surname of the Magnificent Republic.

You enter the Palazzo Vecchio by a door situated about a third of the way along the front and find yourself in a little square court, surrounded by a portico supported by nine columns of Lombard architecture embellished with applied ornaments. In the centre of this court is a fountain surmounted by a rococo Cupid holding a fish and reposing on a porphyry basin. At the time of Ferdinand’s marriage this portico was adorned with fresco paintings representing bird’s-eye views of the cities of Germany.

On the first floor is the great Council Hall, executed by the orders of the Republic and at Savonarola’s suggestion. A thousand citizens could deliberate there at their ease. Cronaca was the architect, and he pushed the work so rapidly that Savonarola used to say that the angels served as his masons.

Cronaca had need of haste, for three years later Savonarola was to die and thirty years afterwards the Republic was to fall.

Therefore this immense hall has retained nothing of that period but its original form: all of its ornamentation belongs to the time of the principality; its frescoes and ceiling are by Vasari; its pictures by Cigoli, Ligozzi and Passegnano; and its statues by Michelangelo, Baccio Bandinelli and John of Bologna.

All is to the great glory of Cosmo I.

In fact, Cosmo I. is one of those gigantic statues that history raises like a pyramid to mark the limit where one era ends and another begins. Cosmo I. is at the same time the Augustus and the Tiberius of Tuscany, and this is so much the more true in that at the moment when Alexander fell beneath the poniard of Lorenzino, Florence found herself in the same situation as Rome was after Cæsar’s death: “There was no longer a tyrant, but there was no longer any liberty.”

At fifteen years of age his character was already outlined and those who approached him could form an idea of what he would be later. His appearance was grave and even severe; he was slow to form familiar relations and would seldom allow any familiarities; but when he granted this double concession it was a proof of his friendship, and his friendship was sure; nevertheless, even with his friends he was discreet in all his actions and did not want any one to know what he intended to do until it was done. The result was that he always seemed to be seeking some end contrary to his real one, which always rendered his answers brief and sometimes obscure.

This was Cosmo when he learnt the news of the assassination of Alexander and the flight of Lorenzino; this flight left him without a competitor for the princedom and therefore his measures were quickly taken. He gathered together a few friends on whom he could depend, mounted his horse, and set out for Florence.

Cosmo was rewarded for his confidence by the welcome that he received: he entered the city amid the joyous acclamations of all the inhabitants. Two days after, he was named chief and governor of the republic on four conditions:

To dispense justice indifferently to the rich and to the poor.

Never to consent to restore the authority of Charles the Fifth.

To avenge the death of Duke Alexander.

To treat well Giulio and Giula, the natural children of the latter.

Cosmo accepted this species of charter with humility and the people accepted Cosmo with enthusiasm.

But there happened to the new grand duke what happens to all men of genius who are raised to power by revolution. On the lowest step of the throne they receive laws, from the top step they impose them.

The position was difficult, particularly for a youth of eighteen. It was necessary to fight external and internal foes at the same time; to substitute a firm government, a single power and a durable will for all those flabby or tyrannical governments, for all those powers that were opposed and consequently destructive to one another, and for all those wills which sometimes starting from above and sometimes from below caused a perpetual ebb and flow of aristocracy and democracy upon which it was impossible to establish anything solid and durable. And yet with all that it was necessary so to manage the liberties of this people that neither nobles, citizens, nor artisans might feel the master. In fact it was necessary to manage this horse, that was still rebellious under tyranny, with an iron hand beneath a silken glove.

Cosmo was in every respect the man needed to carry through such a work. As dissimulating as Louis the Eleventh, passionate as Henry the Eighth, brave as Francis the First, persevering as Charles the Fifth and magnificent as Leo the Tenth, he had all the vices that make private life sombre and all the virtues that make public life brilliant. Therefore his family was unhappy and his people happy.

Cosmo was one of the most learned men of his time. Among other things he knew a great number of plants and the places where they grew, where they lived the longest, where they had the strongest scent, where they produced the most beautiful flowers, or bore the finest fruits, and what were their virtues for curing the diseases or wounds of men and animals; then, as he was an excellent chemist, with the plants he made waters, essences, oils, medicaments, and balms, and gave his remedies to all who asked for them whether they were rich or poor, Tuscan subjects or foreigners, inhabitants of Florence or any other part of Europe. Cosmo loved and protected letters. In 1541 he founded the Florentine Academy which he called his “very dear and happy Academy”: Plutarch and Dante were read and commented on there. The sessions were first held in the Via Larga Palace and afterwards, so that it might have more ease and freedom, he gave it the great council-room in the Palazzo Vecchio. After the fall of the republic this great hall had become useless.

Cosmo was an artist and it was not his fault if he arrived at the moment when great men were departing. Of all that brilliant galaxy that had illuminated the reigns of Julius the Second and Leo the Tenth, Michelangelo alone remained. He did everything he could to get the latter: he sent a cardinal and an embassy offering him any sum of money he might name, the title of senator and any office he wished; but Paul the Third kept him and would not give him up. Then, in default of the Florentine giant, he gathered together the best he could find. Ammanato, his engineer, built for him the fine bridge of the Trinity after the plans of Michelangelo, and carved for him the marble Neptune in the Palazzo Vecchio Square. He made Baccio Bandinelli produce the statues of Pope Clement the Seventh, Duke Alexander, Giovanni de’ Medici, his father, and his own statue; the Loggia of the Mercato Nuovo and the choir of the Cathedral. Benvenuto Cellini was recalled from France to cast his _Perseus_ in bronze, to carve agate cups and to engrave gold medals for him. Then as there had been found in the environs of Arezzo a lot of little bronze figures, some of which lacked the head, others the hands, and others the feet, Cosmo cleaned them himself and carefully removed the rust so that they might not be damaged.

By means of his chemical researches, Cosmo, with Francesco Ferruci of Fiesole, recovered the art of cutting porphyry, which had been lost since Roman times.

Lastly, he brought together in the Via Larga and Pitti Palaces all the pictures, statues and medals, whether ancient or modern, that had been painted, carved, engraved or discovered in excavations by Cosmo the Elder, Lorenzino, and Duke Alexander, and that had twice been pillaged and dispersed:--first, when Charles VIII. passed through, and again at the assassination of Duke Alexander by Lorenzino.

Therefore the praise of his contemporaries outweighed the blame of posterity: the dark side of his life was lost in the brilliant side, and people forget that this protector of art, science and literature slew one son, poisoned one daughter and violated another.

We see then that there was something of both Augustus and Tiberius in Cosmo I.

Now let us return to the hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. The picture, not the most remarkable from an artistic point of view, but certainly the most extraordinary as a recorded fact, is one by Ligozzi representing the reception given by Boniface VIII. to twelve ambassadors of twelve powers, who were all found to be Florentines; so incontestable throughout the world was the political genius of the Magnificent Republic during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.

These twelve ambassadors were:

Muciato Franzizi for the King of France.

Ugolino di Vicchio for the King of England.

Raniere Langru for the King of Bohemia.

Vermiglio Alfani for the King of the Germans.

Simone Rossi for Rasca.

Bernardo Ervai for the Lord of Verona.

Guicardo Bastai for the Khan of Tartary.

Manno Fronte for the King of Naples.

Guido Tabanca for the King of Sicily.

Lapo Farinata des Uberti for Pisa.

Gino di Dietaselvi for the lord of Camerino.

Bencivenni Folchi for the Grand Master of the Hospital of Jerusalem.

It was this strange gathering that made Boniface VIII. say that a fifth element had come into the world, and that the Florentines constituted this element.

The enormous frescoes that cover the walls, as well as all the pictures on the ceiling, are by Vasari. The frescoes represent the wars of the Florentines against Siena and Pisa. It was for the latter that Michelangelo prepared those beautiful cartoons that disappeared without any one knowing what had become of them.

In the other chambers of the palace, which are the living-rooms, there are also a considerable number of paintings of almost the same period. One exception is a charming little chapel by Rodolfo Guirlandaio, the restrained and religious execution of which forms a strange contrast to the facile and pagan painting of the beginning of the Decadence.

Entirely upset as it was by the arrangements of Cosmo I., the Palazzo Vecchio yet materially preserves one memory of the Republic: this is the Barberia Tower in which Cosmo the Elder was confined, and at the door of which, later during the Pazzi conspiracy, the brave standard-bearer, Cesare Petrucci, mounted guard with a spit. In this tower, Cosmo the Elder spent what were certainly the four worst days of his long life, the fear of being poisoned by his enemies preventing him from taking any nourishment.

KENSINGTON PALACE

LEIGH HUNT

It is not improbable that Kensington Palace and Gardens originated in the royal nursery established in this district, for the benefit of his children, by King Henry the Eighth. If so, here Queen Elizabeth grew up awhile, as well as Queen Victoria, and here health was in vain attempted to be given to the sicklier temperaments of Edward the Sixth, who died young, and his sister, Queen Mary, who lived only to be an unhappy bigot.

As the circumstance, however, does not appear ascertainable, antiquaries must put up with the later and less illustrious origin which has been found for these distinguished premises, in the house and grounds belonging to the family of the Finches, Earls of Nottingham, whether the tenement which they occupied had once been royal or not, it seems to have been but a small mansion in their time; probably consisting of nothing more than the now least-visible portion of it north-west; and indeed, though it was subsequently enlarged under almost every one of the sovereigns by whom it was occupied, it was never, in one respect, anything but what it is still, namely, one of the plainest and least pretending of princely abodes.

In vain we are told, that Wren is supposed to have built the south front, and Kent (a man famous in his time) the east front. We can no more get up any enthusiasm about it as a building, than if it were a box, or a piece of cheese. But it possesses a Dutch solidity; it can be imagined full of English comfort; it is quiet; it is a good air; and though it is a palace, no tragical history is connected with it; all which considerations give it a sort of homely, fireside character, which seems to represent the domestic side of royalty itself, and thus renders an interesting service to what is not always so well recommended by cost and splendour. Windsor Castle is a place to receive monarchs in; Buckingham Palace to see fashion in; Kensington Palace seems a place to drink tea in; and this is by no means a state of things, in which the idea of royalty comes least home to the good wishes of the subjects. The reigns that flourished here, appositely enough to this notion of the building, were all tea-drinking reigns--at least, on the part of the ladies; and if the present queen does not reign there, she was born and bred there, growing up quietly under the care of a domestic mother; during which time, the pedestrian, as he now goes quietly along the gardens, fancies no harsher sound to have been heard from the Palace windows, than the “tuning of the tea-things,” or the sound of a piano-forte.

[Illustration: KENSINGTON PALACE, ENGLAND.]

We may thus, in imagination, see the house and the gardens growing larger with each successive proprietor. First, there is Heneage Finch, the Speaker of the House of Commons, at the accession of Charles the First; for he is the earliest occupant we can discover.

This gentleman possessed but fifteen acres of ground; which his son, Sir Heneage Finch, afterwards Earl of Nottingham, increased by a grant that was made him out of Hyde Park. To the Earl’s son and heir, Daniel, succeeded King William the Third, who bought the house and grounds of Daniel, and enlarged them both, the latter to the extent of twenty-six acres. Anne added thirty acres; Queen Caroline, wife of George the Second, added three hundred; and the house, which had been growing all this time, was finally brought to its present size or appearance by the late Duke of Sussex, who added or rebuilt the rooms, with their still fresh-looking brick-work, that form the angle on the south-west.

The house nominally possesses gardens that are miles in circumference; but these having become public every day in the week, which in the early times of the Georges was not the case, it has, in reality, to any sequestered purpose of enjoyment, no gardens at all, except at one corner.

The gardens in the time of the Finches consisted of little but the ground squaring with the north side of the Palace, laid out in the first formal and sombre style of our native gardening, and originating the still existing circle of yew trees, a disposition of things congenial with the owners. Heneage Finch, the Speaker, and his sons, the first and second Earls of Nottingham, were all lawyers and statesmen; and though a clever, and upon the whole, a worthy, appear to have been a melancholy race. The first Earl suffered under a long depression of spirits before he died; the second was a man of so atrabilarious a complexion that he was nicknamed Dismal; and Dismal’s son, from a like swarthy appearance, and the way in which he neglected his dress, was called the chimney-sweep. Hanbury Williams, the reigning lampooner of the days of George the Second, designated the whole race as the “black funereal Finches.”

These unusual “Finches of the Grove,” made way for a kind of Jupiter’s bird in the eagle-nosed, hawk-eyed, gaunt little William the Third; a personage as formal and melancholy as themselves, though not so noisy (for Dismal, notwithstanding his formality, was a great talker); and under William, the Gardens though they grew larger, did but exchange English formality for Dutch. The walks became longer and straighter, like canals; the yews were restrained and clipped; there was, perhaps, a less number of flowers, comparatively; for the English had always been fond of flowers, and the Dutch had not yet grown mad (commercially) for tulips; in short, William the Third with a natural love for his Dutch home, made the palace and gardens look as much like it as he could.

And his Court, for the most part, was as gloomy as the gardens; for William was not fond of his new subjects; did not choose to converse with them; and was seldom visible but to his Dutch friends. Yet here were occasionally to be seen some of the liveliest wits and courtiers that have left a name in history, forsakers, indeed, of reserved and despotic King James, rather than enthusiasts for the equally reserved and hardly less power-loving King William, who had become, however, by the force of circumstances, the instrument for securing freedom. Here came the Earl of Dorset, Prior’s friend, who had been one of the wits of the Court of Charles the Second; Prior, himself, who had stirred William’s Dutch phlegm so agreeably as to be made one of the gentlemen of his bedchamber; Congreve, whose plays Queen Mary admired; Halifax, a minor wit, but no mean statesman; Sir William Temple, who combined public with private life to so high a degree of wisdom and elegance; Swift (probably) then a young man, whom Sir William made use of in his communications with the king; Burnet, the gossiping historian, sometimes wrong-headed, but generally right-hearted, whose officious zeal for the Revolution had made him a bishop; the Earl of Devonshire, whose nobler zeal had made him a duke, one of a family remarkable for their constant and happy combination of popular politics with all the graces of their rank; Lord Monmouth, afterwards the famous, restless Earl of Peterborough, friend of Swift and Pope, conqueror of Spain, and lover, at the age of seventy, of Lady Suffolk; Sheffield, afterwards Duke of Buckinghamshire, a minor wit and poet, in love with (the rank of) the Princess Anne; and last, not least in anything, but good-breeding, and a decent command over his passions, Peter the Great, semi-barbarian, the premature freer of Russian pseudo-civilization, who came to England in order to import the art of ship-building into his dominions, in his own proper mechanical person, and out of the five months which he spent here, passed a good many days out of one of them in interchanging visits with King William at Kensington. The only distinct personal anecdote recorded of William the Third in connection with Kensington will remind the reader of similar paternal stories of Agesilaus and others.

A tap was heard one day, at his closet door, while his secretary was in attendance.

“Who is there?” said the king.

“Lord Buck,” answered the little voice of a child of four years of age. It was Lord Buckhurst, the son of his Majesty’s lord high chamberlain, the Earl of Dorset.

“And what does Lord Buck want?” returned William, opening the door.

“You to be a horse to my coach,” rejoined the little magnate. “I’ve wanted you a long time.”

William smiled upon his little friend, with an amiableness which the secretary had never before thought his countenance capable of expressing, and taking the string of the toy in his hand, dragged it up and down the long gallery till his playfellow was satisfied.

The Court and Gardens of Kensington were not livelier in Queen Anne’s time than in that of King William. Anne, as we have seen at Campden House, was a dull woman with a dull husband. They had little to say for themselves; their greatest pleasures were in eating and drinking; the Queen was absurdly found of etiquette; and as there was nothing to startle decorum in the court morals, the mistress in King William’s time had given something of a livelier stir to the gossip. Swift describes Anne in a circle of twenty visitors as sitting with her fan in her mouth, saying about three words once a minute to some that were near her, and then upon hearing that dinner was ready, going out. In the evening she played at cards; which, long before, and afterwards, was the usual court pastime at that hour.

She does not appear to have been fond of music, or pictures, or books, or anything but what administered to the commonest animal satisfactions, or which delivered her mind at all other times from its tendency to irresolution and tedium.

Addison and Steele might have been occasionally seen at her Kensington levees among the Whigs; and Swift, Prior, and Bolingbroke among the Tories. Marlborough would be there also; ever courtly and smiling, whether he was victorious as general and as the favourite Duchess’s husband, or only bowing the more obsequiously alas! for fear of losing his place and his perquisites.

Anne enlarged the Gardens, but she did not improve the style of gardening. Addison in a paper of the _Spectator_, written during the last year but one of her reign, catching the last glimpse of a variation, speaks with rapture of the conversation of a disused gravel-pit, which had been left remaining, into a cultivated dell; but it would seem as if this exploit on the part of the gardeners was rather in the hope of making the best of what they considered a bad thing, than intended as an advance towards something better; for they laid out the Queen’s additional acres in the same formal style as King William’s.

Long, straight gravel-walks, and clipped hedges, prevailed throughout, undiversified with the present mixture of freer growing wood. An alcove or two, still existing, were added; and Anne exerted herself to build a long kind of out-house, which still remains; and which she intended, it is said, for the balls and suppers which certainly took place in it; though we suspect, from the narrowness of its construction, it never was designed for anything but what it is, a green-house.