The loans of Innocent XI to William of Orange
Unfortunately, Atto Melani was right when he told of the trial of Fouquet: history is written by the victors. And, to this day, official historiography has always been the victor. About Innocent XI, no one has been able (or willing) to write the truth.
The first to speak of the loans of Innocent XI to William of Orange were a few anonymous pamphlets which the French put into circulation following the Protestant prince's landing in England (cf. J. Orcibal,
Louis XIV contre Innocent
XI,
Paris 1949, pp. 63-64 and 91-92). According to the memoirs of Madame de Maintenon, moreover, the Pope is said to have sent William sums to the tune of 200,000 ducats for the landing in England; but these memoirs are of dubious authenticity. These were all rumours promulgated by the French for the evident purpose of defaming the Pontiff. Hearsay was spread by essayists and pamphleteers, who provided no proof of their assertions.
Rather more insidious for the memory of Innocent XI was Pierre Bayle's entry in his famous
Dictionnaire historique et critique.
Bayle issues a reminder that Innocent was born into a family of bankers and reports a satirical comment which was appended beneath the statue of Pasquino in Rome on the day when Cardinal Odescalchi was elevated to the pontificate:
Invenerunt hominem in telonio sedentem.
In other words: they have chosen a Pope seated at the usurer's table.
This was no piece of gossip disseminated for purposes of propaganda. Bayle, a great pre-Enlightenment intellectual, could not be accused of vulgar pro-French partisan motives. He was, moreover, quite close to the facts about which he was writing (his dictionary was published in 1697).
No historian, however, attempted to clarify the facts, to follow the tracks left by the clandestine pamphlets and Bayle. The truth about the Odescalchi was thus kept to a handful of pamphlets and the dusty dictionary of a Dutch philosopher who repudiated his own writings (Bayle converted from Calvinism to Catholicism and back, and ended up by rejecting all credos).
Hagiography, meanwhile, triumphed without firing a shot, and Innocent XI passed into history. The facts seemed incontrovertible: in 1683, Vienna was liberated thanks to the man who had mobilised the Catholic princes and sent subsidies from the Apostolic-Chamber to Austria and Poland. Innocent XI was a heroic and ascetic pope who had put an end to nepotism, restored order to the Church's finances, forbidden women to appear in public in short sleeves, put an end to the insanity of the Carnivals and closed the theatres of Rome, those places of perdition.
After his death, a deluge of letters arrived from all over Europe; every reigning house asked for him to be beatified. The process of beatification began as early as 1714, thanks to the solicitude of the Pope's nephew Livio. Witnesses still living were heard, documents acquired, and biographical events reconstructed, going back to the Pope's infancy.
Almost at once, however, a number of obstacles arose, which slowed down the progress of the investigation. Perhaps mention was made of the old French pamphlets and of Bayle's Dictionary: malicious scribblings, hearsay, unproven and perhaps impossible to prove, and yet, even in the case of a chaste, virtuous and heroic life like that of Benedetto Odescalchi, such things must needs be taken into consideration. Opposition on the part of France is also suspected, where the elevation of an old and bitter enemy was not viewed kindly. The process of beatification, already weighed down by innumerable and highly creditable procedural documents, ground to a halt: from a rushing torrent, it had turned into a muddy and sluggish trickle, disappearing into the sands.
Decades passed. There was no more talk of Innocent XI until 1771, when the British historian John Dalrymple published his
Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland.
And perhaps one can catch here glimpses of what had slowed down the investigation. In order to understand Dalrymple's thesis, one must, however, take a step back in time and widen one's view to cover the European political panorama on the eve of William of Orange's landing in England.
In the last months of 1688, a new and exceedingly grave outbreak of political tension had occurred in Germany. For months, the nomination of the new Archbishop of Cologne had been awaited. France wanted at all costs that this office should go to Cardinal Furstenburg. If the manoeuvre had succeeded, Louis XIV would have won a precious bridgehead towards central Europe, gaining military and strategic predominance; and that, the other princes could not tolerate. Innocent XI himself had refused his—legally indispensable—consent to Furstenburg's nomination. During these same weeks, all Europe was watching anxiously the military manoeuvres of William of Orange's troops. What was William preparing? Was he on the point of intervening against the French to resolve by force of arms the question of the Archdiocese of Cologne, thus sparking off a tremendous conflict throughout Europe? Or was he—as some suspected—on the point of invading England?
Here, then, is Dalrymple's thesis: William of Orange succeeded in persuading the Pope that he intended to use his troops against the French. Innocent XI who, as usual, could not wait to obstruct the plans of Louis XIV fell into the trap and lent William the money necessary to maintain his army. The Prince of Orange crossed the Channel instead and won England over for ever to the Protestant religion.
Thus, heresy was said to have triumphed thanks to Church finances. Even if he had been deceived, the Pope had nevertheless armed a Protestant prince against a Catholic one.
This hypothesis had already been circulated in anonymous pamphlets at the time of Innocent XI and Louis XIV On this occasion, however, Dalrymple produced decisive proofs: two long and detailed letters from Cardinal d'Estrees, Ambassador Extraordinary of Louis XIV to Rome, addressed to the French Sovereign and to Louvois, the Sun King's Minister for War.
According to the two missives, the closest collaborators of Innocent XI were already informed well in advance of William of Orange's real intentions: the conquest of England. At the end of 1687—a year before the invasion of England by the Protestant prince—the Vatican Secretary of State Lorenzo Casoni was alleged already to be in contact with a Dutch burgomaster, sent secretly by William of Orange. Among Casoni's servants, there was, however, a traitor; thanks to the latter, Casoni's missives to the Emperor Leopold I were intercepted. From these letters, it was learned that the Pope had placed large sums of money at the disposal of the Prince of Orange and of the Emperor Leopold I, so that they could fight the French in the conflict which was on the point of breaking out over the question of the Archbishop of Cologne. From Casoni's letters to the Emperor, William's real intentions also emerged clearly: not to provoke a conflict in central Europe against the French, but the invasion of England, of which the ministers of Innocent XI would thus have been perfectly aware.
D'Estrees' letter struck a mortal blow against the process of beatification. Even if Innocent XI had been in the dark about William's real plans, namely the annihilation of Catholicism in England, it emerged absolutely clearly that he had financed him for warlike purposes and, moreover, against the Most Christian King.
A whole series of historians took up the letters produced by Dalrym- ple, thus demolishing the reputation of Benedetto Odescalchi. Besides this, doubts had also arisen on strictly doctrinal matters, and these further complicated the progress of the beatification, which seemed thus to have been irremediably compromised.
A period of time proportionate to the gravity of these circumstances had to pass before someone found the courage and lucidity necessary to reopen the question. Only in 1876 did a masterly article by the historian Charles Gerin cause history to take a 180-degree turn. In the
Revue des questions historiques,
Gerin demonstrates rigorously and with a wealth of arguments that the letters from d'Estrees published by Dalrymple were gross forgeries, once again attributable in all probability to French propaganda. Inexactitudes, errors, improbabilities, and above all a series of blatant anachronisms voided them of all credibility.
As though that were not enough, Gerin demonstrated that the originals of the letters, which, according to Dalrymple, were supposed to be in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, were nowhere to be found. Dalrymple himself, Gerin observed, had candidly confessed that he had never seen the originals and had relied on a copy sent to him by an acquaintance. The repercussions of Gerin's article, although limited to historians' circles, were considerable. Dozens of authors (including the celebrated Leopold von Ranke, doyen of the historians of the papacy) had drawn blithely upon Dalrymple's
Memoirs
without taking the trouble to verify his sources.
The conclusion was unavoidable. With blind symmetry, once the letters had been proved false, all the facts to which they referred became false and all that went in the opposite direction was taken to be true. Where accusations are based upon false documentation, the accused immediately becomes innocent.
The by now time-worn question of the relations between Innocent XI and William of Orange, which seemed to have been resolved forever by Gerin, was unexpectedly resurrected by the German historian Gustav Roloff at the beginning of the First World War. In an article published in 1914 in the
Preussischer Jahrbiicher,
Roloff brought to light new documents concerning Innocent and the Prince of Orange. From a report by a Brandenburg diplomat, Johann von Gortz, it was discovered that in July 1688, a few months before William's landing on the English coast, Louis XIV had secretly requested Emperor Leopold I of Austria (Catholic, but a traditional ally of the Dutch) not to intervene if France invaded Holland. Leopold, however, already knew that the Prince of Orange intended to invade England, and he therefore found himself faced with a dramatic dilemma: whether to support Catholic France (detested, however, throughout Europe), or heretical Holland.
According to Gortz's report, the Emperor's doubts were dispelled by Innocent XI. The Pope is alleged to have communicated to Leopold that he should absolutely not endorse Louis XIV's actions and designs, since the latter "derived, not from a just passion for the Catholic Religion, but from the intention to throw all Europe into the sea, and consequently, England too".
Leopold, after ridding himself of the burden of religious doubt, did not hesitate to enter into further pacts of support for and alliance with William, thus favouring the invasion of England by a Dutch heretic. The advice from Innocent XI which made for this resolve followed soon after William's coup, the imminence of which he should have known from his representative in London, the Nuncio D'Adda. Of course, Roloff adds, no letter from Innocent XI has been found, in which he communicated his opinion to Leopold; but it may readily be assumed that the latter will have taken the form of a rapid and discreet oral communication through the Papal Nuncio in Vienna.
Roloff himself was not, however, at all satisfied with his own explanation. Something else must have been involved, said the German historian. "If Innocent had been a Renaissance Pope, his behaviour could easily have been explained by political opposition to France. However, that motivation was no longer adequate in the period following the great wars of religion." The Pope's actions were, indeed
must
have been determined by some other factor, of which the oppressive presence could still only be sensed.
The matter was not resolved. In 1926, another German historian, Eber- hard von Danckelmann, went onto the counter-attack with the declared intention of winning the decisive battle against all talk of an alliance of interests between the Protestant William III of Orange and the Pope. In an article which appeared in the periodical
Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken,
Danckelmann directly attacks Roloff's thesis. Not only was Innocent XI not informed of the Prince of Orange's expedition, says Danckelmann, citing a number of letters from the Vatican's diplomatic representatives, but he followed with anguish the unfolding of the situation in England.
Then we came to the heart of the matter. Revealing his hand almost nonchalantly, Danckelmann adds that it had in the past been rumoured that the Prince of Orange owed the Pope large sums of money; debts in consequence of which William is alleged to have considered renouncing his Principality of Orange in favour of Innocent. These sums, Danckelmann points out, are alleged to have been lent specifically for the purpose of the English expedition.
In five lines, Danckelmann drops his bombshell. It is true that Saint- Simon in his
Memoires
adopted the same poisonous hypothesis (which Voltaire was to dismiss as improbable). No serious and well-documented modern historian, however, had ever taken seriously the scandalous idea that the Blessed Innocent XI might have lent money to the Prince of Orange to overthrow the Catholic religion in England.
Roloff himself had done no more than conclude that the Pope knew in advance of the Prince of Orange's intention to invade England, and had done nothing to prevent him. But he made no claim that William had been financed by Innocent XI. Danckelmann had, however, decided to give a name—even while confuting it—to that unknown factor which, according to Roloff's intuition, must have guided the Pope's manoeuvrings and caused him secretly to support William: money.