Will Cuppy Tonight: "Lucrezia Borgia" (from "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody")

No getting around it, the Borgias are hot. They've even got their own series coming up on Showtime, debuting April 3, with Jeremy Irons playing the patriarch of the clan, that sweetheart Rodrigo Borgia, better known to us by his later professional name, Pope Alexander VI. Always ahead of his time, Will Cuppy here offers a characteristically affectionate portrait of the apple of Rodrigo's . . . er, Pope Alex's eye, his cutie pie of a daughter, Lucrezia. It's in this piece, by the way, that Will describes the Italian Renaissance as "that great flowering of this and that."


"All children are natural, but some are more so than others and are therefore known as natural children. These appeared in large numbers during the Italian Renaissance, that great flowering of this and that, when men began to awaken to the possibilities of life as it might be lived if you went right ahead and lived it."

"Once away from her awful family, she was a different Lucrezia, devoting herself to her housework, her embroidery, deeds of charity and piety, and all like that."

-- Will Cuppy, in "Lucrezia Borgia"

LUCREZIA BORGIA
(from The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody)

Lucrezia Borgia was the natural daughter of Rodrigo Borgia and a lady called Giovannozza, or Big Jenny.¹ According to those who should know, she was just an ordinary girl, neither better nor worse than the average natural daughter, but there has been so much talk that no history would be complete without her. You would feel that something was missing.

Lucrezia was born in 1480, four years after Cesare, a natural son of the same parents. While they were at it, Rodrigo and Vannozza had a couple of other natural children, Giovanni and Goffredo, who never amounted to much.² Rodrigo had quite a few more by various lady friends whom I have been unable to trace with any degree of accuracy. He probably couldn't do it himself.

All children are natural, but some are more so than others and are therefore known as natural children. These appeared in large numbers during the Italian Renaissance, that great flowering of this and that, when men began to awaken to the possibilities of life as it might be lived if you went right ahead and lived it. Inevitably, natural children were soon popping up all over the place. This tendency among the Italians of that period may well be called the Spirit of the Renaissance.

Rodrigo Borgia was one of the key men in the movement. He was a gay old dog and liked to have beautiful ladies around him, the more the better.³ He would even date those to whom he had not been properly introduced, and the vital statistics would go up again. This was very wrong of Rodrigo, but he couldn't seem to help it. Perhaps he did not try. He liked blondes.⁴

Cesare was the really bad one. He was a dreadful bore, always talking of politics and social conditions. He was trying to establish a Borgian kingdom in central Italy or some such nonsense, a scheme which came to nothing because of the foolish methods he employed in the attempt. You, too, can do this if you read The Prince, or How to Wind Up behind the Eight Ball, by Machiavelli, one of Cesare's admirers, a volume still recommended by leading thinkers for reasons into which we need not go at the moment. It is one of the Hundred Great Books.⁵

Which brings us to the poisonings. We all know that the Borgias, especially Lucrezia, had a habit of poisoning all and sundry whenever they got the chance; only it doesn't seem to be strictly true. There is every reason to believe, if one goes into the matter at all, that Lucrezia never harmed a fly in all her born days. It may be that Rodrigo and Cesare slipped a little something into the wine at times when drinking with persons who had any money or property to confiscate or who were otherwise objectionable, but it has never been proved. It seems that there were occasional casualties during and after the Borgia banquets. So what? Could they help it if some of their guests dropped dead of old age?

Much has been written about the kind of poison employed by Cesare and Rodrigo. Some called it La Cantarella and said it was made by a secret process involving a dead pig or possibly a deceased bear.⁶ They also said it was capable of causing death after any interval desired by the party of the first part. If he wanted the victim to die three weeks from next Friday afternoon, he would give him some La Cantarella wound up for that particular period. I find there is only one poison of that kind, and it doesn't work.⁷ Let's not be too certain that Cesare and his father poisoned anybody at all with their Borgia bane. Besides, it was probably just good old arsenic.

As for Lucrezia, there wasn't even a rumor in her own day that the strawberries at her Wednesday luncheons were dipped in sugar of lead and the other dishes tastefully sprayed with antimony, hellebore, corrosive sublimate, and deadly nightshade, all popular Renaissance flavors. It is not recorded that she was ever caught furtively sprinkling a certain white powder labeled "La Cantarella -- For External Use Only" over everything in sight, nor was she always backing you into a corner and hissing, "Do have some of this delicious henbane, my own make." That was all thought up afterwards by somebody who, apparently, had nothing better to do.

So it does seem unfair for the newspapers to flash "Borgia Confesses!" and "Borgia Burns!" whenever a feminine mass poisoner has told all or has paid the penalty for her crimes. And they don't mean Rodrigo and Cesare. They mean Lucrezia. But just try to convince any acquaintance chosen at random that Lucrezia was all right. He'll only inquire, "Then what about all those funerals?" There must be an answer to that if one could think of it.

I'm afraid we must also give up the legend of Lucrezia's far too romantic temperament -- I mean the widespread belief that she was a little too friendly with Tom, Dick, and Arrigo. She was never accused of anything so awful as a love affair when she was a home girl in Rome, and you may be sure the neighbors were watching. She didn't seem to be even normally crazy about the boys, let alone a nymphomaniac from the cradle. Indeed, she was almost odd in that way. Out of tune with the times, you might say.

She was not an ugly girl, either, though she was not the raving beauty of song and story. She was fairly pretty, with a strong nose, a retreating chin, and eyes of indeterminate color. But she had a nice figure, and men of the Renaissance noticed those things. She also had bright yellow hair, which she washed once a week with a mixture of saffron, box shavings, wood ash, barley straw, madder, cumin seed, and one thing and another to bring out the hidden glints and restore its natural color. You left it on your head for twenty-four hours and washed it off with lye made of cabbage stalks, the only hazard of which was the second-degree burn. If your hair remained on the scalp, you were a blonde.

Some people still prefer to think of her as a brunette. If it makes them happy, that's all right with me.

Of course Lucrezia did marry a few times. Like a dutiful daughter and sister, she married whenever Rodrigo and Cesare told her to do so. They found her behavior in this respect very useful in their diplomatic work, and she didn't seem to care one way or the other. When the male Borgias had enough of any one union, they told her that would be all and she should marry somebody else. She did whatever they said. It was all the same to her.⁸

First of her husbands was Giovanni Sforza, natural son of Costanzo of Pesaro, a fellow with a full beard and the right party line at the time. They had a June wedding in 1493 and she left him four years later on the grounds, thought up by Rodrigo and Cesare, that he was incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial, and no fun to live with. Giovanni was hopping mad over it all and what he said about the Borgias is usually printed in Latin.⁹ This was the year in which Cesare murdered his older brother Giovanni, a stabbing case. Always up to something, that one.

Sforza's statements about the Borgias' home life, including charges I do not care to repeat, really started something from which the Borgian reputation never recovered. I wish I could assure you that the allegations were entirely false and that there were no further occasions for gossip, but then one runs into the mysterious infant born in Lucrezia's bedroom about a year after her husband had been sent on his way. Personally, I am not at all certain that this natural child was Lucrezia's, or that ---- I mean I'm surprised that I mention it. Besides, it was such a little one.

Next in line was Alfonso of Aragon, a natural son of Alfonso II of Naples, who was the natural grandson of Alfonso the Magnanimous. This made him the catch of the season.¹⁰ He was a pretty stripling of seventeen, extremely timid and given to running away from Lucrezia now and then. They always caught him and brought him back. He was not used to being married, and Cesare was always pushing him around. Pretty soon Lucrezia gave birth to a son who, as everybody hastened to remark, did not in the least resemble Alfonso. But Lucrezia was rather fond of her young husband, and the marriage might have grown into something fine and permanent if Cesare hadn't strangled him after a couple of years.¹¹

The third lucky man was Alfonso d'Este, son and heir of Ercole d'Este, Duke of Ferrara. This Alfonso was legitimate for a change and inclined to be uppish about it. He refused at first to marry into any Juke family,¹² but when the Borgias raised Lucrezia's dowry to $3,000,000 and threw in some land he decided to go through with it, as who wouldn't? The Este were all rather startled to find themselves in such company, as they were among the very best people, tracing their house back to Welf IV, or Guelph IV, than whom one cannot possibly have a more respectable person on one's family tree.¹³ Alfonso's sister Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua, was fit to be tied. She was so legitimate that it hurt.

Alfonso's father, Duke Ercole, took care of the business end and raised no difficulties about the more delicate point. He was a thorough man of the world. Before his marriage to Eleanora of Aragon, mother of Alfonso and Isabella, he sent her a portrait of himself and one of his natural daughters painted by Cosimo Tura. Eleanora was in raptures over the gift.

And so they were married by proxy on December 30, 1501, and Lucrezia made the long trip to Ferrara. She stopped just outside the city at the palace of Alberto d'Este, Duke Ercole's natural brother, and was entertained overnight by Lucrezia Bentivoglia, Ercole's natural daughter -- the girl of the portrait. Next day Alfonso came and took her to his own palace where, by a neat touch of history, she was greeted at the front door by the Countess of Carrara, the Countess of Uguzoni, and Bianca Sanseverino, the three natural daughters of Sigismundo d'Este, Ercole's legitimate brother. She felt quite at home from the first.

Our heroine spent the last seventeen years of her life in Ferrara as the dutiful if hardly adoring wife of Alfonso, and practically everybody agrees that she was as good as good can be all that time. Once away from her awful family, she was a different Lucrezia, devoting herself to her housework, her embroidery, deeds of charity and piety, and all like that. Her father died in 1503, some said by poison, and it was reported on excellent authority that seven devils were seen in his chamber at the moment of passing. They had come for him, I guess. After that everything went wrong for Cesare, who died a few years later in Spain. He hadn't been well for a long time. He had something you get from staying out nights.

Lucrezia became Duchess of Ferrara and a complete social success in 1505 when old Ercole died and Alfonso ascended the throne.¹⁴ Even Isabella rallied round, wouldn't you know it? It would have been too wonderful, if only Alfonso had been a little livelier. He was a sober-sided type, always busy at his cannon foundry or off to the wars, with no time for foolishness. Eventually, however, there were five children, four boys and a girl.

And what do you think Lucrezia did with her spare time? She went in for Renaissance culture, of which Ferrara was a regular hotbed, not quite the best, but fairish, and she found herself right in the middle of it, willy-nilly.¹⁵

She was much admired by the many poets who frequented the palace, especially at mealtimes, often inspiring them to poems of some length. If I know poets, they would read her their works by the hour, day, and week, year in and year out, all exactly alike, all extolling her beauty, intelligence, chastity, and modesty, somewhat as if these matters had been in considerable doubt, and all a little too long. It is worth noting here that none of these persons died of poison. If anybody ever asked for it -- well, there you are.

Among those who testified to Lucrezia's sterling qualities was the great Ludovico Ariosto, whose Orlando Furioso will hold an honored place among the world's poetic achievements as long as enough people like that sort of thing. You will recall that in the eighty-third stanza of the forty-second canto of his epic the master ranks Lucrezia, for all-around feminine virtue, even above the Lucrezia of old.¹⁶ As no breath of scandal ever sullied their relations, one gathers that the friendship was a bit on the dull side.

It is true that Lucrezia saw a lot of Pietro Bembo, the handsomest poet of his day and the smoothest courtier in Ferrara, a man who outshone Alfonso on every count and who seems to have aroused the duke's displeasure in some way. It is also a fact that Bembo left town hurriedly, a move which proves nothing whatever against him or the duchess. Perhaps he was going to Urbino anyhow. The incident hardly justifies us in believing, as so many people do, that whenever Alfonso was away from home Lucrezia would slip on something comfortable and curl up with a good author.

Of course Lucrezia was fond of Ercole Strozzi, too. He had written a Latin epigram comparing her to a rose, a compliment that might well turn a girl's head for the moment without necessarily bringing on a mad infatuation. As for Ercole, I am convinced from a study of the composition in question, with its careful diction and the usual allusion to Venus in exactly the right place, that any passion he felt for her was all in his head.

So one day Ercole and Lucrezia were strolling arm in arm through the gardens and forest paths of the ducal grounds, as they had been doing right along for some time. Early the next morning Ercole was found murdered near the palace -- whether he was coming or going is not quite clear — and some think he was stabbed by Alfonso, for the duke was jealous again. Alfonso could not write an epigram in Italian, let alone Latin. Well, I still believe that Lucrezia and Ercole had been up to no harm. And I know just what you are going to ask me: "Then what were they doing out in the woods all that time? Picking daisies?"

NOTES
¹ Or Vannozza for short.
² Vannozza was respectably married, though not to Rodrigo, when 
the kiddies arrived.
³ He was Spanish, you know.
⁴ Vannozza was a blonde, as was Giulia Farnese, mother of Laura
 Borgia, born in 1492, the year Rodrigo became Pope Alexander VI.
⁵ Niccolò Machiavelli was the natural son of Bernardo Machiavelli. 
He died in 1527 after taking too powerful a purgative.
⁶ Frederick Baron Corvo maizes a point, though not a decisive one, when he states that neither Rodrigo nor Cesare ever killed a bear. No bear, no poison, he argues.
⁷ Peter of Abano lists cats' brains as extremely lethal. Cats' brains are harmless if used in moderation.
⁸ A modern physician says that Lucrezia was "the neurasthenic, soft-fleshed, visceroptotic type of girl." I should not be in the least surprised.
⁹ His next wife told a different story, and they had a baby to prove it.
¹⁰ Some time before this, Alfonso's natural half sister Sancia had married Rodrigo's natural son Goffredo.
¹¹ In fairness it must be said that Cesare did not always commit his own murders. He had most of them done by one Micheletto, a natural son of Old Man Micheletto.
¹² You won't believe it, but the name of the Juke family was Juke, not Jukes. "Jukes" is the plural, see?
¹³ Queen Victoria herself was a Welf, or Guelph. She could have claimed relationship by marriage to Lucrezia Borgia if she had cared to do so.
¹⁴ Duke Ercole left his mark on Ferrara. Shortly before his death he issued an edict forbidding bakers to knead the dough with their feet.
¹⁵ Although the learned Isabella may have regarded her as slightly subhuman, intellectually speaking, you mustn't think that Lucrezia was completely illiterate. She owned seventeen books bound in purple velvet with gold and silver trimmings.
¹⁶ Oh, you know -- the one who was raped.

SUNDAY in THURBER TONIGHT: We dip into The Years with Ross.


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY TONIGHT and WILL CUPPY TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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