robert bellarmine

 

rises to new dignities.

When Bellarmine left Capua, he thought it likely that his services would be acceptable at Court. His wordy patron had been equally careful to remove him thence, and to measure out revenue so moderately, that no very influential treasury should be at his disposal. Clement being no more, he had, probably, good reason to infer from the correspondence of old friends that his position would be altered. And in a valedictory sermon, he even ventured, “although not a prophet”, to predict that the new Pope would not suffer him to quit Rome, and that, therefore, the Capuans would not see his face again. The stroke of pathos told upon the congregation, and there were who cried aloud : “Good shepherd, do not leave us. Leave us not fatherless. We have sinned against thee, Father, but will be better children for the future”. Such acclamations were not unusual in Italian congregations, and even now are sometimes to be heard.

As he divined it came to pass. Leo XI first desired him to stay in Rome; and Paul V also showed him favor. Having so often condemned Prelates who dismissed their wives, the churches, and yet retained the dowries, he could not consistently retain the archbishopric of Capua, but surrendered charge and a great part of the revenue to Paul. He received, however, an annuity of four thousand crowns, rich compensation flowed from other quarters, and he remained a pillar of the Roman Church, bearing no small weight of responsibility for counsel, while more courtly men were employed in diplomacy and political administration.

My leading authority, Fuligatto, is just now singularly barren. No small proportion of his volume is occupied with details intended to illustrate the wisdom and piety of his hero; but some of them are incredible, and most of them are trifling. As for his wisdom, it was expended in Congregations and in monasteries, the affairs of which cannot interest the reader. And as for his piety, I shall presently refer to other documents. Enough to say, that he governed the bishopric of Montepulciano, his native place, with diligence, although he never visited the diocese, but took the office of ecclesiastical governor with an understanding that the duties of residence and visitation would be devolved upon a Vicar.

In common with other Cardinals he exercised rights of patronage. “Among other occupations undertaken by the Cardinals at Rome, that they may assist the Supreme Pontiff in the government of the universal Church, are numbered patronages; not only of kingdoms and provinces, but also of religious orders. The Pope himself distributes prefectures of this kind among them. Cardinal Bellarmine had to discharge this function; and the order of Celestines, a monastery in the city of Sacred Virgins of St. Matthew, and the College of the Germanic Nation, were placed under his protection”. Protection, however, and patronage, are merely words that cover the idea of supreme government. Nominally, supremacy belongs to the Pope alone, and to him only it is ever attributed; but sixty or seventy Cardinals actually govern. They are called Patrons or Protectors, to save the fundamental doctrine of a monarchy that scorns to share its honors with another; and to exalt the personage that would imitate Him who is indeed almighty and omnipresent.

Bellarmine, acting as a lieutenant of the Pope, sometimes gave proof of much practical wisdom. In his patronage of the Celestines, for example, he restored a wise provision of the founder himself, Celestine V, that although the Supreme Abbot was only elected for three years, he might be re-elected for a similar term. Pope John XXII had abrogated this power of the fraternity, under the idea that ambitious brethren would manage to get repeated appointments to the exclusion of others. The necessity of changing the government of the community every third year, thus induced, however effectually it might frustrate, ambition, and also tended to chill the hopes and depress the spirit of the brotherhood. “It was found by experience that the space of three years, when the Abbot was a good one, was too small for the continuance and establishment of what had been usefully begun”. He obtained authority from Paul V for the restoration of the primitive license, and saw it twice used with great effect. Both the sexennial Abbots took heart, in prospect of lengthened occupation, and revived the order in France, Belgium, and Italy. The Court of Rome saw that in the struggle with Protestantism no advantage of consolidation and persistency was to be lost even to one of the least of their institutions. And this may be recorded as one of the best examples of the wisdom of our Cardinal, by whose means the improvement was effected.

promulgates treason.

Occasion soon came for giving Bellarmine far more important work than the patronage of monkeries. His own patron, Paul V, was resolved to make such a stand as had not been made since the Reformation against anti-Papal doctrines throughout the world. Everywhere the temporal powers resisted him; but almost everywhere he overawed them by some stroke of authority that none but himself would have attempted. Princes condescended to be absolved and reconciled, after having done no more than their duty in objecting to his exorbitant assumption of power over their subjects by means of canon law. One state, however, refused to follow the general example of submission. Venice had been subjected, in common with others, to the extortion of the priesthood. Delegates from Rome demanded power over the Venetians by means of the Inquisition and other ecclesiastical courts. The Venetian Clergy were required to surrender national privileges, and submit to be absorbed in the vortex of Roman jurisdiction. The Congregation of the Index prohibited, one by one, the best books printed in Venice, the sale of which constituted a main part of Venetian commerce. The printers had put forth their utmost energy, and by issuing magnificent Missals, and other Church-books, were partially recovering themselves, when a revision of those formularies superseded the existing editions, and a prohibition of printing new editions, except in Rome, threatened them with ruin. The spirit of the Venetians was aroused. Then Rome endeavored to encroach on the boundaries and on the fisheries of the Republic. The Republic made reprisals. For the sake of self-defense restraint was laid upon the rapacity of the Clergy. The Senate enacted a law of mortmain to protect families from robbery by Confessors who beset the death-beds. The civil authorities treated Papal decrees and constitutions with just contempt, whenever they were contrary to the law of the land. Some seditious Monks were imprisoned, and the Nuncio in vain demanded their release. On the 17th day of April, 1606, to crush the temporal power, Paul set the seal of the Fisherman, in fury, to an excommunication of the Doge and his assessors, and an interdict laid on the Republic. It then became necessary to justify the Roman aggressions and extortions by a plea of Divine right. For doing this Bellarmine was best fitted by a concurrence of principle and habit; and him, therefore, the Pontiff set to work. It was in a juncture when the excommunication was despised and the interdict resisted, and when the Jesuits, as adherents of the Pope, were expelled from Venice, that Bellarmine again pleaded for Papal supremacy, as coolly as if all Europe were content to suffer it.

This is his doctrine: Princes have no power over Clergymen, who by the testimony of all Catholic lawyers, and by the letter of God’s law, are exempt from earthly jurisdiction. It is manifestly false to say that the Most Christian King has power from God over the French, the Catholic King over the Spaniards, or the Republic over the Venetians; for Sovereigns possess their dominion by some human right only, never by Divine. The Pope has received from God the immediate grant of sovereignty over all Christians. Kings may surrender their states, because the tenure is only secular; but the Pope cannot surrender a province, a town, nor even an individual: for his kingdom, like that of Christ, is inalienable and without end. His tenure is Divine and eternal. If Princes have no power immediately from God over the laity, certainly they can have none over the Clergy; nor can they deal with the Clergy as if they wore subjects either by Divine or human right. It is true that every power is of God. Some power is immediate, as that of Moses and the Pope; and some is from the people by election, or other means. The Clergy, therefore, first obey him who has power immediately from God, and then they obey such human and secondary laws as are not contrary to the Pope’s laws. But if a Clergyman breaks a human law, no human power can justly punish him. Secular Princes, it is acknowledged, are called gods of the people, but the Priest is god of the Prince. Priests may judge Emperors, but an Emperor may not judge a Priest. Priests are shepherds, and laymen sheep: sheep cannot rule their shepherd. “As in a man reason and flesh are united, and so make up the man; even so in holy Church there is the ecclesiastical or spiritual power, and the secular or temporal, which both make up the mystical body of the Church. And as in the man reason is superior to flesh, not flesh to reason, except when it rebels; so reason leads and governs flesh, and even subdues and punishes flesh with fasts and watchings, but flesh never guides or punishes reason. Thus is the spiritual power superior to the worldly, and therefore both may and can guide, govern, command, and punish it, when it does wrong. But the secular power, not being superior to the spiritual, cannot guide or govern it, except de facto, and by way of rebellion and tyranny, as heretical Princes have sometimes done”. Princes are hired servants of the people, but Priests are ministers of God. All persons and all things are theirs. Whatever heretics may say, the Church has the right to put heretics to death; for she has two swords, temporal and spiritual. In her great tenderness she refrains from using the former, but requires the temporal power to use it in her behalf. From these propositions, and much, very much more of the same kind, Bellarmine teaches the Venetian Republic how fearfully it has offended God by imprisoning those Priests; and at the close of one of his writings he broadly hints that the Doge will be worried to death by his own subjects, who will act as ministers of Divine vengeance. He tells him that he will perish, as other tyrants have perished, in punishment of resisting Rome, unless he repents and yields.

The quarrel was compromised at last, leaving the Pope conqueror in reality, and in full enjoyment of the benefit of this outrageous theology. But outrageous as it was, it was precisely the dogma that Rome needed to have established. What could be more grateful to the vulgar ear than a denial of the Divine right of Kings? What could be more politic for the Papacy than to depress royalty to the level of republicanism? Henceforth Roman diplomatists and Priests might coolly accommodate themselves to any change of government; or they might aid in subverting kingdom, empire, or commonwealth; or become accomplices with any despot, or with any demagogue in tearing up ancient landmarks. They were not to be respected, because they were but accidental, only the effect of some compact or of some capitulation. The Church could sit calmly amidst revolutions of her own creation, and obtain from the dominant faction, or the de facto government, the price of her complicity. Under this theory, and with the practice corresponding, especially as seen in Europe within the last five years, there is nothing in the world sacred, and nothing safe; there was not a sentiment conveyed in the controversy with the Venetians that had not been published long before, in his treatise De Pontifice Romano. Yet this was one of the confidential correspondents of James I of England; for a statement of Bellarmine himself in his answer to “the triple knot” of that King is amply corroborated by other evidence. The Cardinal, speaking in the third person, says, that “the King had written to the Pope himself, as well as to the Cardinals Aldobrandini and Bellarmino, letters full of civility, in which, besides other things, he desired that some one of the Scots should be created Cardinal of the holy Roman Church, in order that he might have some one at Rome by whom to transact business with the Pope more easily”. But afterwards, about the time of the Gunpowder Plot, King James performed the part of a zealous Protestant, either through fear of the Jesuits, or for the sake of keeping up his character in England; and then he wrote a book against the Pope and Bellarmine. The coolness of the latter enabled him to appear much better on paper than his royal antagonist. An incidental specimen of his coolness appears in a letter from his band, which I find in manuscript in the British Museum, and translate underneath. It is addressed to the Cardinal D'Este, and would suggest even to a reader, uninformed of the constant usage, that all these controversial productions underwent censorship, and therefore expressed authentically the mind of the Court of Rome.

Tyrannicide, as the phrase went, that is to say, the killing of Kings, was openly advocated by Jesuits, and defended at Rome. When Jean Chastel, a student of the Jesuit College in Paris, attempted to assassinate Henry III, and the Court of Parliament proceeded against the criminal, their act was censured at Rome. The Spanish Jesuit, Mariana, wrote a treatise tending to establish the same horrid doctrine; and Bellarmine, in answer to a work of an Englishman, George Barclay, maintained the same. This work, which is a fair exposition of Roman doctrine, may be found in its place. It exhibits an array of sentences confirmatory from “illustrious writers” of Italy, France, Spain, Germany, England, and Scotland, with sentences of Councils. The alleged prerogative of the Supreme Pontiff, and the duty of the people in regard to heretical Princes, are laid down under great variety of argument, precedent, and figure. The conclusions are such as these :

Princes, in these latter times, may be deprived of their princedom without any detriment of the people, and without any injustice, by authority of the Church.

Kings are the rams of the flock. If the rams injure the sheep with their horns, they must be put away from the flock by the shepherd. The Pope is the universal shepherd; and if Kings tyrannize over the people, he has the right to put them out of the way, and is under the obligation so to do. However, as he does not use the sword himself, he must necessarily call on armies, magistrates, or people, to employ such means as may elfect the purpose.

Heretical Kings are wolves that destroy the flock. The good shepherd will drive away the wolf; (and elsewhere Bellarmine has said that wolves are to be killed;) and even so the Pope, supreme power on earth, and universal shepherd, should require the services of all who can render it, to drive those wolves away.

These books not only made great stir in Venice and England, but wrought powerfully in France among the Clergy and on the least worthy part of the laity, as appeared May 13th, 1610, when Ravaillac stabbed Henry IV, who fell mortally wounded; and it became evident that the followers of Mariana and Bellarmine, with all the vassals of the Roman Court, deemed that act to be heroic and meritorious. On the 10th of June the Parisian Parliament ordered the book of Mariana to be burnt before Notre Dame; but, unhappily for France, the deceased King, blind to the fact that the Jesuits, the Romans, and the Spaniards were combined to overturn his throne, had patronized the Jesuits, and made one of them tutor of his son. They had, therefore, sufficient influence at Court and in Parliament to shield their order, and suppress in the Arrêt of Parliament the designation of Mariana as a Priest of the Society of Jesus.

Still the Jesuits were accused of being accessory—at least by consequence of their teaching —to the murder of the King, and a day was appointed for their cause to be pleaded at the palace. The Rectors and Doctors of the Sorbonne came in a body to the widowed Queen, ready to establish their complaint; but the Jesuits had succeeded in persuading Her Majesty to merge the duties of a Queen and the affections of a widow in the submission of a devotee; and she dismissed her most faithful subjects with an injunction to cease their pleading. The Sorbonne obeyed; but the same day the public prosecutor demanded judgment of the Parliament against Bellarmine’s answer to Barclay, and on that day week an order was issued forbidding “all persons under penalty of treason to receive, retain, circulate, print, cause to be printed, or expose to sale the said book, tending to the overthrow of sovereign powers ordained and established by God, to the revolt of subjects against their Prince, to the withdrawal of their obedience; inducing them to make attempts against their persons and estates, and to disturb public quiet and tranquility”.

Thus did that court fulfill its duty, refraining only from ordering Bellarmine’s book to be burnt, in consideration of his rank as Cardinal, and of the Queen’s love of the Jesuits. But their loyalty was displayed in vain. The Nuncio hurried away in anger to the palace, and threatened that, unless the Queen made reparation, he would no longer stay in France. She was alarmed, summoned the Parliament into her presence, and demanded the reason of their proceeding. They gave it with great firmness. The first President represented that she and her son, now King, were brought under subjection to the Pope, and in danger of being deposed whenever it should please him. Bellarmine, they said, at a time when the Pope ought to have sent her a letter of condolence and consolation in her sorrow, had published that book in France, and so thrown a firebrand of sedition among her people. Her husband, they believed, would have gone to Rome and demanded the person of the author. But Henry was murdered now, and the book was a canonization of Ravaillac his murderer, and an authentication of the crime. “Madam”, he added, “we have found the sword drawn against you and your state: we had been traitors to you and to our places, if we had not raised our arms to parry the blow”. She could not reprove the Parliament, but she bade them suspend the execution of their order for the present. Meanwhile the Nuncio persisted in his complaint. The Jesuits gave her no rest. Bellarmine, on hearing what had happened, wrote a letter to defend his doctrine, protesting that he only meant it to be applied for the deposition of Princes that were heretics, as in England, and assured her Majesty of his good intentions. The Queen professed herself well satisfied, all opposition was turned aside, and the King-killing doctrine was propagated without restraint. The Tocsin, a publication that its authors were compelled to issue anonymously, at a time when it was dangerous to be a patriot, was suppressed, and gathered up with such religious diligence that even the British Ambassador at Paris could not obtain a copy. One copy, at any rate, is preserved, and it has afforded me a reference on a preceding page.

The general reader must here be cautioned against the artfulness of some writers and the simplicity of others, who would cover the guilt of partisans in those days with the cloak of misrepresentation, or the mantle of a blind charity.

Cretineau-Joly, for example, says that our Cardinal wrote to Arch-Priest Blackwell, in England, blaming the proceedings of the Romanists here. He wrote, indeed, to Blackwell; but what did he say? His letter, written not long after the Gunpowder Treason, contains an assertion,—anything but true,—that no Pope had ever killed any King, or approved of any such murder, and treats the fear of danger to the life of James I as idle. But the writer says nothing condemnatory of the conduct of the traitors of the 5th of November. On the contrary, he censures Blackwell most severely for taking an oath of allegiance, which he calls unlawful. “Neither, dearest brother, could that oath become lawful by being presented to you in any way tempered or modified. For you know that such modifications are nothing else than snares and tricks of Satan. For it is certain that in whatsoever words an oath may be framed by the adversaries of the faith in that kingdom, it can only tend to transfer the authority of the Head of the Church from the successor of St. Peter to the successor of Henry VIII in England”. And as by taking an oath of allegiance to his rightful Sovereign he has fallen like St. Peter and St. Marcellinus, he entreats him, in the Lord’s name, to repent like them, and renounce that allegiance; thus returning to the path of truth and virtue, he endeavors’ to stimulate the Arch-Priest to lead all the Romanists in England to withdraw their allegiance from the King, against whose life, as he well knows, enemies are plotting, both at home and abroad. And he tries to stir them up to sedition by arguments from Gregory the Great, St. Leo, and the Jesuit Sanders; and by the examples of the Bishop of Rochester and Sir Thomas More. “For the sake of that single and most weighty article of doctrine alone (the dominion of the Pope over the King) they were leaders unto martyrdom of very many others”. A clear confession that the Romanists who suffered in the reign of Queen Elizabeth were not punished for any other article of their “religion” than that which led them to sedition and to regicide. And we must not attribute zeal for this article of doctrine to the Jesuits alone, inasmuch as Paul V, following the traditions of his fathers, announced the same repeatedly, and especially in a Brief published more than five weeks before the famous letter of the Cardinal.

It is therefore evident that Bellarmine, far from condemning treason, inculcated most earnestly the doctrine by which treason is a virtue; and having no official reason for writing to the less disloyal Arch-Priest of England, went out of his way to do so, just on the strength of having known him more than forty years before.

His blessing or his curse was always ready to be addressed to the friends of his Church and order, or to their foes. While prosecuting, with unflinching perseverance, the ruin of every Protestant Sovereign, and of every untractable state, he repaid subservient Princes with his best offices. For example: The crown of Bohemia, being elective, was to be set on the head of a new ruler; and as the doctrines of the Reformation had gained ascendency in the land of Huss, until the Jesuits succeeded in bringing round what is called a counter-Reformation, our Cardinal and his Company set their heart on bestowing that kingdom on the King of Hungary. Although not Superior of Jesuits in Bohemia, or anywhere else, Bellarmine kept up correspondence with the Society in that country, carried their letters into the Pope’s closet, and, being assured that Matthias would raise them up into power, and spare no means to slaughter his subjects of the Reformation, engaged the highest interest that the Popedom could afford to dethrone his brother Rudolf, the tolerant Emperor, and obtain the election of Matthias to be King of Bohemia, King of the Romans, and then Emperor in his stead. Matthias promised the Bohemians toleration, to obtain their votes, and offered the Jesuits patronage for the same reason; and having, by assistance of the latter, gained his point, he let them loose upon the others. To the conscience of Bellarmine, this management was all “for the greater glory of God”.

enforces his doctrine.

This Cardinal theologist had a vast advantage in the propagation of doctrine, inasmuch as he was also an Inquisitor. And, although the Inquisition had not a tribunal in France, it had agencies and power there, as it has in every country where the Church possesses influence, either direct or indirect. Take a proof.

During the outburst of indignation in France on the proclamation of death to heretical Kings in the answer to Barclay, and after the execution of death on King Henry IV, who, having sought peace with Rome by apostasy, fell by the dagger of a Jesuitised assassin, the Parisian preachers were divided. Many passed over the subject in silence. A few lauded the Society of Jesus. Some dared to speak the truth, but with various degrees of hesitation or of liberty. One honest Frenchman, an Abbé de Bois, “a man very famous for his gallant preaching, and for his knowledge in matters of the world”, preached freely in one of the largest churches in Paris, both against the Pope’s assumption of temporal power, and against the practices of the Jesuits. The Jesuits, however, being supported by the Nuncio, compelled, or persuaded, him to make in private a kind of recantation; and, as he abstained from any further animadversions on their doctrine or conduct, he might have thought himself at peace. But not so. He happened to be the Queen’s almoner, and, by some allurements of the Nuncio, was induced to go to Rome, with a commission from Her Majesty. No sooner did the Abbé come within the jurisdiction of Bellarmine, whom shame never could restrain when he felt the impulse of bigotry, or was bidden by his General, than he was convicted of heresy, and thrown into the Inquisition. The act exceedingly offended “all the world” in Paris, and especially the Clergy; but the force of public opinion could not be felt by Inquisitors at Rome.

About this very time (ad 1611) Galileo first appeared as a culprit in the presence of Bellarmine. The Jesuits, more earnestly than many, had taught the physics of Aristotle, as well as his philosophy. Aristotle knew nothing of the system conjectured by Copernicus, and by others before him, and even propounded by that learned German in Rome less than a century past. Therefore the Aristotelians, and most especially the Jesuits, abhorred the notion of the revolution of the earth; and, although the book of Copernicus, “De Revolutionibus”, did not appear in the Index of prohibited books, it was in all probability suppressed. Bellarmine had once taught the immobility of the earth to his hearers at Louvain; and now Galileo, the Tuscan innovator, was to be put to silence. Provincial censors denounced his theory as absurd and false in philosophy, and expressly contrary to holy Scripture, and therefore heretical. The case was laid before the Congregation of the Holy Office, who caused it to be examined by theologians; the theologians in their wisdom confirmed the hard sentence of the Florentines, and Galileo was commanded to appear at Rome. He dared to go; or perhaps it would be more correct to say, that he durst not attempt to flee. He was brought into the Minerva, and found Inquisitor Bellarmine there, seated as his judge. He might have pleaded that, under apostolic license, the same theory had already been propounded in a book printed in the eternal city; but no argument could avail, and the Cardinal gave him his choice—to be shut up in a dungeon in that fearful palace, or to make a promise never to teach the revolution of the earth again by word or writing. Not to ignorance, but to impatience of contradiction, must be attributed the sentence.

I have no means of estimating the extent of Bellarmine’s labours in the Inquisition, but find that instructions were then issued for levying charges on victims for each act of accusation, for each “witness in accusation or defense, for clerks, for familiars, for tormentors, for jailors; so much for the sentence, and so much for the stake”. The precision of these arrangements, and the regard paid to the dignity of the Superiors and the compensation of the subordinates, indicate the same hand that prescribed capitular and monastic reformation in the archdiocese of Capua, and sustained so exact discipline in the Roman College. At least, it is unquestionable that the same hand gave the sanction and enforced the execution. The same hand, also, wrote some pieces of mystic devotion, which were done into English by clerical admirers in this country, and circulated among the simple folk, with prefaces laudatory of the pious and learned Cardinal. The translators might have been far more usefully employed.

Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564– 8 January 1642)

 

looks towards the tiara.

Perhaps no one would have made a better Pope than Bellarmine. That he was not without hope of attaining to the supremacy is apparent from a paper once written by himself, when secluded for “spiritual exercises”, as they were called. It is very short, and shall be translated entire, thus :

“Wednesday, September 26th, 1614. Being in the House for Novices, St. Andrew’s, occupied in spiritual exercises, and after mature deliberation, at the sacrifice of the mass, when I was about to receive the most holy body of our Lord, I vowed a vow to the Lord, in this form: I, Robert, Cardinal Bellarmine, of the Society of Jesus, a Religious professed, vow to Almighty God, in the presence of the blessed Virgin Mary, and of all the court of heaven, that if haply (which I do not wish, and pray God may not come to pass) I be advanced to the Pontificate, I will not exalt any of my relatives, by blood or by affinity, to the Cardinalate, or to be temporal Prince, or Duke, or Count, or to have any other title; neither will I make them rich, but will only help them to live comfortably in their civil state. Amen. Amen”. That is to say, he vowed that he would still be a Jesuit, and would enforce the same artificial humility upon his relatives. This is all. The spiritual exercises of that month did not produce any grand purpose for the reformation of the Clergy, nor any fervent resolution to promote the glory of Christ.

Again was manifested a marvelous faculty of prevision. But four months after these very pious resolutions, the throne was vacated by the unexpected demise of Paul V. So vigorous was his constitution, that he seemed likely to bury all the elder Cardinals, when the stroke of death fell on him, and, after three days’ suffering, he breathed his last on the 28th of January, 1615.

The Roman population abandoned themselves to the irregularities that are repeated on such occasions, and every appearance of good order and morality vanished both in town and country. “Highnesses, adored and idolized by courtly flattery, were suddenly laid low, and covered with confusion. He that had shown a spirit of lordliness and pride, contending for the highest station, found himself humbled in the first days of that interregnum. Then he might be seen bowing, and paying low obeisance to the man that he had despised but a few days before. Then the ancient magistrate laid aside his pomp, and another, that was thought quite unequal to open or to close the ascent to the sublime region of the Pontificate, took courage, and carried himself sternly towards persons with whom he had been formerly courteous and obliging. The authority of the tribunals ceased, and everyone was free to speak and write at pleasure, and say things openly that a moment before he would have kept hidden in the silence of his own thoughts”. The tumults of the city were such as ever had been when the reins of Papal authority were snapped; but each Conclave has had a history of its own, and anonymous conclavists have divulged several. When fifty Cardinals went in procession to the Vatican, they resolved themselves into factions, domestic and political, and, before the solemn closing of the doors, the Ambassadors of all the foreign courts were closeted with their adherents, and laboring to exclude all Cardinals obnoxious to their masters, but leaving the field open to the rest. The first night of their entrance into the Vatican was nearly all spent in this way. As for Bellarmine, it was not his manner to hold much intercourse with Princes: therefore, he quietly crept into his cell, and went to sleep. In the dead of the night Cardinal Borghese ran to solicit his vote for a member of his faction; but he coldly bade him wait until the morning, when they might all say mass, according to the rules, and pray for inspiration to elect a fit person. Again, before break of day, taking other Cardinals with him, he bolted into the cell, awoke him, and asked his vote. “This is not an hour”, said he snappishly, “to make the Pope. These are works of darkness : pray let me rest”. Borghese begged his pardon, but entreated him to say what he meant to do. “I can tell you nothing now”, replied Bellarmine, most angrily : “I want to sleep. If you want to know anything, the chamber of Ubaldino is near: go there, and let me sleep”. Thus did he spare himself the trouble of leading a party, or the indignity of serving one, receiving applications from hostile candidates, or their agents, but not giving his interest to any, and also receiving, as before, the first votes of the undecided, who meant to transfer them, in due time, to someone concerning whom they might agree. With this tacit understanding he had more votes than anyone else, again, at the first scrutiny, but not one afterwards. At length Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisio, transformed into Gregory XV, received the adoration of the Conclave, and Bellarmine came out with the others, never more to take part in a similar transaction.

is an ascetic.

Pope Gregory XV (by Guercino)(9 January or 15 January 1554 – 8 July 1623), born Alessandro Ludovisi, was pope from 1621, succeeding Paul V on 9 February 1621