XXIV
THE LAST OF THE MEDICI
‘Florence is much sunk from what it was’
SINCE NO heir could be expected from Ferdinando, the Grand Duke Cosimo turned his attention to his second son, Gian Gastone. Previously he had not given much thought to him, and Gian Gastone was certainly not a young man who commanded much attention. Introspective, lonely, unhappy, he spent most of his time by himself, shunning the noisy, extravagant circles in which his brother and uncle lived, preferring to spend his time in botanical or antiquarian studies or in learning foreign languages, including English. He was a pleasant-looking man, gentle and considerate, but he had no close friends of either sex and evidently no ambitions. He certainly had no ambition to be a husband, and he contemplated the prospect of marriage to the bride selected for him with the deepest apprehension. The apprehension turned to horror when he saw her, for Anna Maria Francesca, daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Lauenberg and widow of the Count Palantine, Philip of Neuberg, was a woman of truly exceptional ugliness. She was also stupid and quarrelsome, ‘of enormous weight, immense self-will and no personal attractions’. She had few interests other than the more strenuous outdoor sports, and seemed quite content to spend the rest of her life in her dank, ugly castle in the gloomy, dispiriting village of Reichstadt near Prague to which she took her reluctant husband after their marriage in the chapel of the Elector’s palace in July 1697. Both the place and the woman disgusted him. Of stronger homosexual tendencies than his brother, he comforted himself with a sly but pretty groom, Giuliano Dami, and thought of little but escape from the slough of hovels and sedgebeds that was his prison.
In the spring of the next year he went unaccompanied and incognito to Paris, to the fury of his father who upbraided him for demeaning the Medici by a visit conducted in such poor style. Soon after his return he left for Prague, taking his paramour, the groom, with him. There, he tried to forget the misery of his life at Reichstadt by gambling, making love with impoverished students and street-boys, and getting drunk in low taverns where he ‘grew accustomed to wallow and debauch, smoking tobacco and chewing long peppers with bread and cummin-seed in order to drink more heavily in the German fashion’. After a time he braced himself to return to his wife at Reichstadt where he was more miserable than ever. He spent hours on end alone in his room, gazing out of the window at the doleful view, bursting into tears, rarely able to bring himself to answer letters or even to sign documents written for him by his secretary. Occasionally he roused himself from his torpor, drinking to excess and gambling with his Italian attendants – to whom he lost so much money that he was driven to pawn his wife’s jewels for less than half their value. He begged his wife, who spent most of the day ‘holding conversations in the stables’, to come with him to Florence where they could be miserable in less depressing surroundings. She refused, however, to leave Reichstadt for which she had an unaccountable attachment. In any case, so her confessor warned her, she would undoubtedly be murdered in Florence, a fate that sooner or later overtook all wives of the Medici.
In Florence, Cosimo grew old in worry and disappointment. Years of over-eating and lack of exercise had led to a breakdown in his health, an ‘overflow of bile’ which he had been advised to counteract by ‘a severe Pythagorean regimen’, a plain diet of fruit and vegetables, and vigorous hunting and riding. He had followed the advice, but an improvement in his health had not been matched by any elevation of his spirits. He had been much disheartened by the difficulties he had encountered in finding a husband for his favourite child, his daughter, Anna Maria, a tall, dark-haired, rather gauche girl with a masculine voice and a loud laugh. She had been turned down not only by Spain and Portugal, but also by the Duke of Savoy and the Dauphin. Eventually she was accepted by William, the Elector Palatine, who married her at Innsbruck and soon afterwards infected her with a venereal disease which was held responsible for the miscarriages that marred her early life.
Despairing of ever seeing an heir produced by any of his children, Cosimo turned to his brother, Francesco Maria. The Cardinal was horrified. He had never felt the need of a wife, and he certainly did not want one now. To marry would entail foregoing most of the pleasures of Lappeggi; it would also mean giving up his cardinal’s hat. He was forty-eight, set in his ways, and he had not been feeling very well lately. In the end, though, he had to give way. But the bride that was found for him, the twenty-year-old Princess Eleonora, daughter of the Duke of Guastalla and Sabbioneta, was as reluctant to marry him as he was to marry her. She was reminded of the great honour which was being bestowed upon her family, but she was not so much concerned with honour as with the prospect of having to go to bed with a gouty, fat, blotchy-faced man who was known to prefer pretty boys. For the first few weeks of the marriage, indeed, she could not be persuaded to go to bed with him at all; and when she did, induced at last by her husband’s kindness and patience, she was unable to hide her distaste. Francesco Maria seems to have found the experience painful as well as debilitating. It was, in fact, altogether too much for him, and within two years he was dead.
His nephew, Ferdinando, whose marriage to Princess Violante had been quite as disastrous, did not long survive him. Ferdinando had never been properly cured of the disease he had contracted in Venice. At the time of Francesco Maria’s marriage his memory had gone, and he spent most of the day in a kind of stupor broken by epileptic fits. He died at the end of October 1713. Less than three years later his brother-in-law, the Elector Palatine, also died; and the Elector Palatine’s widow, Anna Maria, prepared to go home to Florence.
Her brother, Gian Gastone, was already there. Leaving his wife in her grim valley, Gian Gastone had returned to Florence in 1708, at the age of thirty-seven. Since then he had been living in seclusion, talking to few people other than Giuliano Dami, frequently so drunk that he was unable to keep a seat on his horse, spending every evening in an alcoholic daze, suffering from asthma, so apathetic that he declined to open any letters to avoid having to answer them. ‘Some fear that he will predecease his father which would not be surprising,’ wrote a French visitor to Florence, ‘because the Grand Duke has a robust constitution and takes great care of his health, whereas his son seems merely to accelerate his death.’
Cosimo had long since dismissed Gian Gastone from his affections, and in the problem of the Tuscan succession had been anxious only to protect the interests of his daughter, Anna Maria. At one time he had been inclined to follow the advice of his Council and decree that the sovereignty of the State should revert to its citizens as in the days of the early Republic. But then he had decided that if Anna Maria survived her brothers, she ought to be Grand Duchess before the Republic was revived. This led to a diplomatic squabble which went on for years: the Emperor, Charles VI, put in a claim to the succession; the House of Este also came forward as claimants; so did Philip V of Spain and Elizabeth Farnese. Worried and harassed by the apparently intractable problem, Cosimo endeavoured to escape from it into the comfort of his religion.