Julius III

Julius III, created pope the seventh of February 1550, was called John Maria del Monte. He was of low extraction and a true soldier of ecclesiastical fortune; he rose up step by step till he came to be president of the council of Trent; he was a very voluptuous man, and passionately loved a young boy very ugly and of very mean birth. When he was made pope he gave him his cardinal’s cap, and made a pleasant answer when the unworthiness of the person was represented to him. Some said it was his son, others .denied it, and told how cardinal del Monte having found this lad playing tricks with a monkey in the streets, took him into his service because there was nobody but he that durst play with that creature. This was the foundation of a kindness which afterwards grew a disorderly passion, although this lad had nothing in him but what was loathsome, only he had gotten a habit of buffoonery. Thomas Erastus relates this fact, and these are his words:—“He has a boy a black, filthy, insolent brute; silly, ignorant,

and quite a fool, except that he can play the buffoon a little; upon the whole he is a monster both in body and mind. Who he is and whence he sprung, no one knows; some think him his son, and those who deny it ingeniously come off by saying he found him in the streets, and brought him up from a child, because of his playing with an ape which no one else dared to do: the cardinal (or bishop then) was so pleased they say with the sight, that he took him for his own. He is the fondest imaginable of this boy, as indeed he exceeds all others in pederasty.” Thuanus says a thing which confirms part of this; as first, that this boy was called the monkey, even when he had obtained the cardinal’s cap. In the second place, that he had his name because of his employment with the cardinal his master, which was to look after a monkey. “Soluti ad omnem licentiam animi homo they are the words of this great historian, which give a very ill character of pope Julius III.—“Being addicted to every kind of pleasure, he was no sooner created pope than he discovered to everyone his disposition; for it being an ancient custom that the new pope gives his hat to whom he pleases, he gave it to a certain youth whose name was Innocentius, and who, because he had the care of a monkey in the family, retained the name of Simia, giving him his name and marks of honour.” Erastus, whom I have already cited, gives us a more particular account. This boy was left at Bologna, so that Julius III who would not bring him to Rome before he had made him a cardinal, and who wanted a little time to make that promotion relished, was very uneasy at his absence, and endeavoured to find a remedy for it. He was never gay and pleasant but when he heard of his Innocent, and enquired after him of all those who could give an account of him. He ordered him to come near Rome that he might have an opportunity to go and see him; and having sent for him once secretly into the city, he expected him at the windows with all the impatience of a man to whom his mistress has promised a night. He was heard to say that the chief reason why he rejoiced for being pope was, because it gave him an opportunity of being a benefactor to Innocent; and that he thought himself less indebted to the cardinals for making him pope, than for having consented to the promotion of Innocent to a cardinal’s hat. He appointed him his principal minister and intercessor for all those that would obtain favours of him. Some satires were published at Rome, in which it was said that this favourite as ugly as he was, was a new Ganymede. The pope made no mystery of it; but sometimes told the cardinals some stories of this boy’s lascivious tricks. “Romæ fama, erat, et libellus quoque prescriptum fuit, à Jove Ganymedum foveri, licet deformem: sed nec ipse Pontifex hoc ad reliquos Cardinales dissimulare, et per jocum fertur aliquando commemorare, quam sit lascivus adolescens et importunus.” Sleidanus, Histor. lïb. xxi, fol. m. 609, versa. ¹³⁶ The discourses of Julius had but little gravity in them, as appears from the reflection he one day made upon the answer of two cardinals. They found him in the court of his palace in a very indecent posture; for by reason of the heat he had put off his clothes and was walking in his drawers. He obliged them to do the like, and afterwards asked them what the people would say of them should they go and shew themselves in that figure in the field of Flora and the streets of Rome? “They would take us,” answered they, “for idle rogues, and would throw stones at us;” “Therefore,” replied he, “it is to our clothes we are obliged for not being thought idle rogues: how much then are we indebted to our clothes?”

The want of gravity was not the greatest fault of Julius: his discourse proceeded sometimes to profaneness and blasphemy, as when he excused his passion by instancing the anger that God expressed against Adam for an apple. During the

conclave in which he was elected, some of his letters were intercepted, which made it conjectured that this future pope would be a lewd man, for those letters were stuffed with the most extravagant obscenities. It is thought his money frustrated the election of cardinal Pole which had been concluded on, and the publication whereof was only deferred because they were afraid it would be an ill omen to notify it in the night. The medal which he ordered to be struck after the death of Edward king of England, had for its motto a sentence of the holy scripture, the application whereof proved false in a little time. They expressed an extraordinary joy at Rome for the death of king Edward, because the princess Mary who succeeded him, restored England to the obedience of the pope; but the reasons of that joy ceased in a little time. Queen Elizabeth re-established the reformation, and rendered that island one of the most flourishing kingdoms in Christendom; so that the prediction of the medal was a mere chimera.—“Julius arrived to such a pitch of madness, that he ordered a medal to be struck to perpetuate the memory of the king; on one side of which was a figure with three horns, and on the reverse this inscription: Heidegger. Hist. Papatus, pag. 238. ¹³⁷ ‘ The people and kingdom which will not serve thee, shall perish foolishly arrogating to himself what Isaiah said of Christ. But the joy lasted not long.” This pope died the twentieth of February, 1755, being about sixty-eight years of age. He pretended to be sick, and the better to deceive the world he reduced himself to a course of physic, which brought upon him a real disease of which he died. It is said that there was so great an intimacy betwixt him and cardinal Crescentio, that they had mistresses in common, and that they maintained the children they had by them at a common charge, for want of knowing who was the true father. Each of them also paid his quota for the maintenance of these women. Cardinal Pallavicino extenuates as much as he can the faults of this pope, but he does not confute what father Paul says of them. He owns that Julius loved to divert himself, but he adds that he equally loved application to business; he grants that he died being little esteemed and loved, but he pretends that his too free and familiar way of acting was the cause of it; because not getting the public veneration, he made it believed that he was not a good pope. He adds that this judgment was unjust, and that if the faults of Julius III were more conspicuous than his good qualities, they were not perhaps of so much consequence as his virtues. As to the promotion of the young lad, he is contented to say that it dishonoured the first days of his papacy. He acknowledges that the birth of this boy was so obscure that it was still unknown; but he pretends the affection cardinal del Monte had for him was founded upon this, that he looked upon him as the son of his judgment; the meaning whereof is this: whilst the cardinal was legate at Piacenza, he was pleased with the pretty carriage of a little boy who often came near his table; he took this for a sign of wit, and resolved to raise this young plant at his own charge, and seeing the boy improving, he loved him more and more. He applauded himself for his happy conjecture, he looked upon him as the son of his judgment, a sort of creature which we set a greater value upon than upon a child of our body. He would have his brother to adopt him, and when he was pope he raised hint to the dignity of a cardinal, the thirtieth day of May, 1550. He had made him stay till then in a village a day's journey from Rome. He gave him an income of twelve thousand crowns; but did not then entrust him with the administration of affairs. This new cardinal was scarcely seventeen years of age; he showed himself wholly unworthy of this honour, and it was necessary under the following pontificate to punish him for his debaucheries. This is all that Palavicino observes: he has cautiously forborne to criticise on father Paul, whom he does not accuse of malicious slanders, but is contented to say that he is mistaken as to the time of the adoption, and as to the place where this young man first began to make himself acceptable. The court of France offered to this pope’s nephew a princess of the blood; but this alliance was refused. The pope answered that marriages between persons of so different a rank could not be happy; and as he acknowledged the royal house of France to be the noblest in the world, he acknowledged his own to be the meanest upon earth. However he did not give the true reason of this refusal; for that which induced him to refuse so glorious an alliance, was, the desire of marrying his nephew to the great duke’s daughter, which was more useful to him for the execution of what he was projecting in favour of his family. Observe, that one of the daughters of Cosmo duke of Florence, was betrothed to Fabian del Monte, who was Baudouin’s son, and not yet marriageable. See Thuanus, book xiii. Palavicino, in the place above cited, observes, that' Fabian was Baudouin’s bastard. It must be confessed that this anecdote places the houses of Valois and Medicis in a very exalted point of view. Ed. ¹³⁸—Art. Julius III.