displays in her correspondence a spirit of tolerance towards the dissenters that seems at least three centuries in advance of her age; and she was not alone in this. The most beautiful women of the century-Giulia Conzaga, duchess of Traetto, Costanza d' Avalos, duchess of Amalfi, and Isabella Manriquez, sister of the cardinal of that name—were no less ardent followers of Juan Valdés. Isabella was obliged to flee across the Alps to escape prison or the scaffold; but the persecution of the other ladies began, happily, only after their death, as we shall presently see.

The centre of this religious movement had been transferred from Naples to Viterbo, where one of the leaders, Cardinal Pole, resided as papal delegate from 1541 to 1545, and where Vittoria herself lived in the monastery of Santa Caterina in 1543 and 1544. Reginald Pole, son of Richard and of Margaret of Salisbury, niece of the two kings Edward IV and Richard III, had been obliged to leave England in haste to escape from the wrath of Henry VIII, whose behavior toward Anne Boleyn he had dared to condemn. Paul III made him a cardinal in 1536, and this extraordinary distinction conferred on the young prelate made King Henry so furious that he not only sent to the scaffold Pole's brother and mother (the latter seventy-one years old), but promised a reward of fifty thousand scudi to any one who would take the cardinal's life. Whether these particulars are absolutely correct or not, there is no doubt that he was the victim of several dastardly attempts-thrice at the hands of Italian, twice of English emissaries. Each of the Italians was pardoned in his turn by Pole; the Englishmen, however, were branded with hot iron and sent to prison.

The basic principle of the reformers congregated at Viterbo, in Cardinal Pole's residence, was the well-known

doctrine of "justification by faith," a doctrine which had been advocated in the conference of Ratisbon by the Catholic delegate Contareno, as well as by the Protestant leader Melanchthon. Prominent among the sympathizers with Juan Valdés in the meetings at Viterbo were Cardinal Morone, Giulia Conzaga, Alvise Priuli, Pietro Carnesecchi, Vermigli, Occhino, and Vittoria; and it was only the high social standing of the majority of these personages that prevented the Inquisition from taking immediate steps to suppress the movement.

The history of the attempted reform in Italy cannot be impartially and exhaustively written until we shall be allowed to consult the original documents preserved in the archives of the Sant' Uffizio, above all those connected with the ghastly periods of Paul IV and Pius V. These archives, however, are practically inaccessible. We know that Paul III drew from them the minutes of the trial of Cardinal Pole, at the request of King Philip II, and Paul IV those of the trial of Carnesecchi, at the request of Catherine de' Medici; but these must be considered as exceptions to the rule, the strictest jealousy being exercised in guarding the secret of the trials and executions of dissenters from the opinions of the Curia.

There are fortunately other sources of information, with which the works of Amabile, Corvisieri, Berti, Gaidoz, Benrath, Gherardi, Fontana, Manzoni, and De Blasiis have made us familiar; such are the fourteen volumes of trials of the Sant' Uffizio (a. 1564-1659), now in the library of Trinity College, Dublin; the state archives of Bologna, Mantua, Ferrara, Venice, and Naples; the archives of the Governatore di Roma, and the diplomatic reports of the ambassadors of the Serenissima.

How, when, and by whom the splendid set of volumes at

Trinity College was abstracted from the Palazzo dell' Inquisizione is still a matter of conjecture. Madden in his work on "Galileo and the Inquisition," printed at Dublin in 1863, asserts that it was smuggled away by a French officer of General Oudinot's army, after the capture of Rome in 1849, and taken to Paris, where it was purchased by the Duke of Manchester. The duke is said to have sold it to an Irish Protestant clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Gibbings, for the sum of five hundred pounds. He in his turn disposed of it to

a Dr. Wall, through whose bequest it ended its peregrinations in Trinity College. Silvestro Gherardi, minister of public instruction at the time of the republican government of 1848-49, says that while the archives of the Inquisition were being removed, in April, 1849, from the

1 Il processo di Galileo, in Rivista Europea, 1870, fasc. i, p. 4.

Sant' Uffizio palace to that of Sant' Apollinare, thefts of documents were undoubtedly committed, but none of such magnitude as to involve the loss of sixty-four large and weighty volumes. The supposition that probably comes nearest the truth is that the theft was committed at the time of the first Napoleonic invasion.

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Next in importance to the Dublin volumes comes a “ summary of the processes of the Sant' Uffizio, instituted in the time of Paul III, Julius III, and Paul IV," compiled from the most secret original documents, for the use of Giulio Antonio Santorio, cardinal of Santaseverina and “consultor" to the Holy Inquisition. The cardinal's nephew and heir, Paolo Emilio, made a present of the "Compendium " to Father Antonio Caracciolo, a member of the order of the Teatins, the same order to which the terrible Paul IV had belonged before his election. It contains an alphabetical list of one hundred and twenty names of heretics, or persons alleged to be so, including many so illustrious and honorable and universally respected that it seems to have become a craze with the dreaded court to suspect even the noblest and holiest men of the period. The Sacred College, for instance, is represented in the persecution list by no less than thirteen members, Bembo, Badia, Contareno, Cortese, Di Fano, Fregoso, Pole, Simonetta, Sadoleto, Sacripante, Sfrondato, Madrucci, and Morone; the episcopate by eleven bishops and archbishops; the aristocracy by Ascanio Colonna, his sister Vittoria, the Duchess of Camerino, and Renata d'Este. We learn also from the "Compendium

1 The Trinity College set comprises fourteen volumes of religious trials in matters of faith; ten of bulls and briefs from the time of Boniface IX to that of Pius VI; and about forty concerning denunciations and trials in matters of witchcraft and crime in general.

2 Compendium processuum Sancti Officii Romae, qui fuerunt compilati sub Paulo III, Julio III, et Paulo IV.

the fact that the famous book "Beneficio di Cristo verso i Cristiani" (the simple possession of which has brought many victims to the scaffold) was not written by Paleario, as commonly asserted, but by a Benedictine monk of San

A bird's-eye view of the palace and prisons of the Inquisition, taken from the top of the dome of St. Peter's

Severino named Don Benedetto, a disciple of Flaminio, who himself revised the proofs of the Modena edition.'

A careful study of the "Compendium" (published by Corvisieri in vol. iii of the "Archivio della Società Romana di Storia Patria ") shows that the object its compiler had mostly in view was to lay before Cardinal Santorio the facts connected with the associates of Vittoria Colonna, because while the other heretics have only their names registered, with perhaps one or two references to the original minutes of the trial kept in the archives of Rome, every individual 1 Printed by Antonio Gadaldino, at the instigation of Cardinal Morone.