Mistress of the Vatican (48 page)

But for all the scandal Olimpia brought to the church and to the pope personally, Innocent knew that he owed her everything. It was she who had jump-started his career back in 1612, helping him adjudicate his cases in the Rota. It was she who had thrown the right parties and given the right gifts to encourage Pope Gregory XV to make him papal nuncio to Naples. It was Olimpia who had arranged for him to become the number one Vatican ambassador, the nuncio to Madrid. And it was Olimpia who, in his absence, had connived at getting him made cardinal. And then, in the conclave of 1644, it was her smuggled letter that had convinced the Barberinis to swing their votes to his side and elect him pope.

For nearly forty years Olimpia had unflaggingly supported Gianbat-tista Pamphili, devoting her extensive fortune and her incisive intelligence to his worldly success. She had single-handedly raised the Pamphili family from living in a narrow tumbledown house to the pinnacle of power, wealth, and fame. True, Gianbattista had always been hardworking, intelligent, and fair-minded. But so were thousands of other Roman clerics who never became nuncio, let alone pope. With his strong sense of justice and gratitude, how could Innocent throw Olimpia to the dogs? How could he?

It was a crisis of conscience the likes of which he had never faced before. We can picture the blindfolded, Grecian-draped figure of Justice

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holding her scales. On the one side was the love and gratitude Innocent felt for Olimpia. On the other side was his duty as the Vicar of Christ to protect Jesus’ church. For so long they had been balanced, one side or the other dipping a bit but bobbing back up. Now a final decision must be made by the most indecisive pope ever. He must have felt that he was torn in two; either way his decision went, it would be the most hurtful, wretched choice anybody ever had to make.

It was Olimpia who actually decided it for him, her angry voice bellowing from the sedan chair before the porters even set it down in the Quirinal audience chamber. Emerging, she threw another hysterical tirade against Cardinal Panciroli in the presence of the pope.

And suddenly Innocent found that thirty-two years of minor irritations, when he had wanted to disagree with her but had held his tongue, and six years of major irritations, when she ran the Vatican for him and he felt compelled to obey her, came rolling out in a torrent. He told her to shut up. Just shut up. If she did not, he would throw her into a convent and lock the doors behind her and she would never be seen again. Urban VIII had done just that with his bossy sister, Lavinia Barberini, who had gone around town slandering
his
cardinal nephew. And Innocent would do it to Olimpia if she didn’t stop telling him what to do that very moment.

We can imagine Innocent with thunder on his brow, sitting grimly in his imposing high-backed papal chair, the father of all Christians, yelling at her that she is only a woman, that she has no right to say anything, no right to intervene in business affairs. That this is a man’s world, where men rule, and she would obey, not instruct.
That the only place for a woman like her is in the convent.
He rises, towering over her, his angry words melting into a blur as the blood throbs in her ears.

She stands before him, short and plump and old now, and becomes smaller and smaller, shrinking beneath the verbal blows, the insults, the threats. And as she shrinks, something inside her hardens. The pope, the one man who was supposed to love and protect her, is betraying her in the worst way possible. She will never forgive him. She will never forget. And she will find a way to wreak her revenge.

It was a betrayal far worse than Sforza’s had been all those years ago.

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After all, she had never placed her father at the peak of greatness. But she had labored for decades for Gianbattista, the only man she thought she could trust. All of that work for what? To be cast off as a useless woman, unwanted in the world of men’s affairs? To be locked up in the prison she had so deftly evaded for forty-four years? Was this what it had come to? The work of a lifetime had set her right back where she started, a defenseless fifteen-year-old whose father was going to put her away.

Sforza Maidalchini had not been able to force Olimpia into a convent, but her father had not been pope. If the Vicar of Christ and monarch of the Papal States decreed she had to go, then go she must. And here was the greatest irony: the pope that she had created was the only person in the world who was in a position to make her nightmare come true. The anger drained out of her and was replaced by icy fear.

She quietly turned on her heel and mechanically sat in her sedan chair, unnaturally calm. Silent, unmoving as a statue, she was carried down to her carriage and climbed in for the ride to the Piazza Navona. There would be no more temper tantrums. But Innocent, whose festering irritation was finally uncorked after forty years, was not through. He informed his staff that Olimpia was not to interfere any more in Vatican affairs, nor was she to ever visit him again, or even wait outside the door of his apartment.

Olimpia’s power vanished instantly. The day after that last horrible altercation, Amayden reported, “The new Governor did not post the arms of the signora above the door of his house as his predecessors had; and all the prelates of the court have taken theirs down.”
²²
The
avvisi
of October 23, 1650, noted, “When she sent someone to call the subdatary of the Vatican, who had been totally subordinate to her, he did not come.”
²³
The subdatary was none other than her close friend Francesco Mascambruno, for whom she had obtained the position. Now, seeing her disgrace, he immediately washed his hands of her.

The butler of the Quirinal Palace asked Olimpia to remove one of her carriages from the stables there as Cardinal Astalli-Pamphili needed the space for his own carriage. In response, Olimpia cleared all her carriages out of the stables.

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According to an
avvisi
of October 28, the pope sent a messenger to Olimpia asking her to return his undergarments, which she had been laundering. Appearing at the papal palace on her behalf clutching the pope’s underwear, Olimpia’s doctor, Fonseca, told the pope that she was unwell and that her indisposition was caused by her conflict with the pope. Innocent cut him off, saying, “Do not speak if not about your profession.”
²⁴

Word on the street was that Olimpia would be immured in a convent outside Rome.

With Olimpia disgraced, even more stories filtered up to the pope about her corruption. Innocent asked for a list of Olimpia’s servants and fired them. He had her accountant carted off to prison for questioning. He asked her butler for a list of visitors who called most frequently on her over the years to investigate their financial dealings. It was more than Olimpia could bear. On December 5 her carriage left Rome, headed for sanctuary in San Martino.

On the evening of December 24, the pope ceremonially laid the first bricks to wall up the holy door of Saint Peter’s. At the three other jubilee churches, three other cardinals performed the same task, and not one of them was Cardinal Maidalchini. In each holy door was a cask of medals stamped with Innocent’s likeness. These would be opened in 1675.

Later that night, Giacinto Gigli sat at his desk by the light of a candle and wrote, “So ends the Holy Year of 1650. . . . Many people died of suffering in the burning sun of the summer, and the unbelievable dust that was mostly on the streets leading to Saint Paul’s and Saint John Lateran, and then by the rains, which were infrequent but violent, and the ice and wind that afflicted many people on the visits to the four churches. There were many who for the discomforts and difficulties could not go to the churches thirty times and therefore could not hope of having obtained the jubilee. But the pope, who was rigorous with others, did not go there more than fourteen or fifteen times.”
²⁵
q

With Olimpia and the Holy Year out of the way, the pope was determined to embark on a new course. His first goal was to reconcile with

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his family. Though he had let himself be guided by his sister-in-law in alienating Camillo, the princess of Rossano, and Sister Agatha, Innocent was a tenderhearted man and had been deeply hurt by the estrangement. He first summoned Agatha from the convent, and she readily forgave him.

When the princess of Rossano received the long-awaited invitation to visit the pope, she was undeterred by the fact that she was nine months pregnant with Camillo’s second child. She raced to the Quirinal and waddled into the audience chamber, where she stayed tête-à-tête with His Holiness for three hours. Then she went home laden with gorgeous gifts and gave birth to a healthy daughter. The pope stood as godfather in a Vatican baptism.

On January 8, 1651, Camillo accepted his uncle’s invitation to call on him in the Quirinal with his two-year-old son. When Innocent saw little Gianbattista Pamphili for the first time, he burst into tears. Then he gave the child a silver statue of his patron saint, Saint John the Baptist.

Olimpia could not bear for her triumphant enemies to see her in such disgrace. Though the pope had only exiled her from the halls of power, it was Olimpia who, for the most part, had exiled herself from Rome. When she did come to Rome it was incognito, in an unmarked carriage. If she made too much noise, she feared Innocent might put her in a convent.

Olimpia stayed mostly in San Martino, the town she had created from scratch, and Viterbo, the town that still proudly pointed to her as the local girl made good. Here the intrigues of Rome were far away, and here Olimpia would always be queen, honored and fêted.

Ambassador Giustiniani of Venice praised Olimpia for confronting her disgrace “with matronly decorum, refusing to appear in public and showing not the least shadow of authority.”
²⁶
Another contemporary wrote, “After Donna Olimpia finally fell into the hole that she had been digging for herself for a long time, she learned, in her great need, to use prudence.”
²⁷

The new queen of Rome was the princess of Rossano, who showed neither matronly decorum nor prudence but gloated openly about the

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change of fortunes. For the Carnival of 1651, the princess held a magnificent joust outside her palazzo on the Corso and built wooden stands enclosed with glass for her noble spectators. She invited Olimpia’s enemies to lavish parties and made a point to insult and neglect those who had been close to her mother-in-law. Every week, the princess spent several hours alone with the pope, advising him on policy. This betrayal of Innocent’s must have rankled the most deeply in Olimpia, but she would never have given her daughter-in-law the satisfaction of knowing it.

The most famous image of Olimpia, the bust by Alessandro Algardi, is said to have come from the first months after her downfall. The artist had known Olimpia personally for many years, and those who knew her said he captured her likeness and character exactly. The sculpture shows steely resolve, incomparable determination in the face of disaster, the widow’s veil billowing behind her as if she remains erect in a hurricane wind through sheer strength of will. It reminds us of the captain of the
Titanic
grimly gripping his wheel as the ship starts to sink into the icy depths. Or Custer, tight-lipped and clench-jawed, looking his Last Stand in the eye.
Come and get me,
she seems to be saying.
Do your worst. I don’t care.

Sculpted subtly just below the strength are the bruises of the soul. Strength is, after all, only a defense against pain. We who boldly strike out to shape the world according to our tastes usually do so to prevent others from shaping it according to theirs and crushing us in the process.

I am alone,
she says.
I have to face this alone.

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Part Three

UNFORGIVENESS

q

19

Honor and Dishonor

q

Mine honor is my life, both grow in one. Take honor from me, and my life is done.

—William Shakespeare,
Richard II

here were worse things for a woman to do than retire to her palace in the countryside and queen it over her feudal territory. And while Olimpia must have spent many hours grieving privately and hating ardently, she was never one to sink into a paralyzing depression. Other than a few hours of emotional collapse after she realized she had lost her power, misfortune never seemed to have serious long-term effects on her health, as it did the pope’s. She had always remained vulgarly robust in the face of pregnancy, childbirth, epidemics, widowhood, and now public disgrace.