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The Entity
Five Centuries of Secret Vatican Espionage
By Eric Frattini St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2004 Eric Frattini
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-4724-4
CHAPTER 1
BETWEEN THE REFORMATION AND A NEW ALLIANCE (1566–1570)
For many, as I have often told you and now tell you even in tears, conduct themselves as enemies of the cross of Christ.
— Philippians 3:18
There are various stories as to who actually founded the Holy Alliance, the Vatican's espionage arm. But it was surely Pope Pius V (1566–1572) who in 1566 organized the first papal espionage service with the goal of fighting Protestantism as represented by Elizabeth I of England.
Protected by the powerful cardinal Giovanni Pietro Caraffa (the future Pope Paul IV), Miguel Ghislieri had been summoned to Rome to take charge of a special mission. Ghislieri was instructed by His Eminence to create a sort of counterespionage service. Organized in the shape of a pyramid, it had the task of collecting information about anyone who might violate papal directives or Church dogma, so that they might then be judged by the Inquisition, or "Holy Office."
The young priest was fond of secret societies, and for him the Holy Office was one of the most powerful "secret societies" of its time. The work carried out by Ghislieri's agents in the regions of Como and Bergamo caught the attention of the powers-that-be in Rome. In less than a year, almost twelve hundred people ranging from peasants to nobles were judged by Inquisitorial courts. More than two hundred, after undergoing terrible tortures, were found guilty and executed.
The rope torture consisted of tying the presumed heretic's hands behind his or her back and then lifting the prisoner by a rope hanging from the ceiling. Once the prisoner was suspended in this way, the rope would be released for an instant so the body would fall by its own weight, and then the fall would be broken while the prisoner was still a few feet above the floor. The violent motion would dislocate the suspected heretic's extremities.
Another frequent tool was the water torture. The torturers would lay their victim in a wooden trough and stuff a soaked cloth in his or her throat while covering the nose to prevent breathing. When Inquisition doctors would halt the torment, many of the captives were already dead.
In 1551, under the papacy of Julian III (1550–1555), Miguel Ghislieri was promoted by Caraffa, for services rendered, to the position of commissary general of the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, as the chief official of the Roman Inquisition was known. As such, Ghislieri set about improving the Holy Office so it could better fulfill its objectives. In the first place, he reformed its governing council, and the pope named a group of cardinals to control it. In the case of important figures of Roman society being brought up for judgment, these cardinals served as both judges and papal counselors.
It was also Ghislieri who, early in 1552, established the seven classes of criminals who could be judged by the courts of the Holy Office: heretics; suspected heretics; those who protected heretics; magicians, witches, or sorcerers; blasphemers; those who resisted the authorities or agents of the Inquisition; and those who broke, disrespected, or violated the Holy Office's seals or emblems.
In that same year, Ghislieri began to assemble a true network of spies all over Rome. They operated everywhere, from the city's brothels to the kitchens of its noble palaces. The information of all sorts that they collected was delivered personally to Ghislieri in one of two ways: by word of mouth or by the so-called Informi Rosso (Red Report). The latter was a small piece of parchment rolled up inside a red ribbon bearing the emblem of the Holy Office. According to the laws in effect, breaking of this seal was punishable by instant execution. In these reports, Ghislieri's agents wrote down all the charges, often without a shred of proof, against Roman citizens thought to have violated Church precepts and so be susceptible to investigation by a tribunal of the Holy Office. The Informi Rosso was deposited in a small bronze mailbox dedicated to this purpose in the Roman headquarters of the Inquisition.
For years, the general of the Inquisition created one of the biggest and most effective spy networks and one of the best archives of personal data about the citizens of Rome. Nothing was said or done in the lanes or squares of the city without Ghislieri's knowledge. Nothing was said or done in the interior of the Vatican, either, without the general of the Inquisition knowing about it.
On May 23, 1555, after the brief papacy of Marcellus II, which lasted for less than a month, seventy-two-year-old Cardinal Giovanni Pietro Caraffa was elected pope without opposition from either the faction favoring the Holy Roman Empire or that favoring France. The Venetian ambassador, Giacomo Navagero, described the new pontiff this way: "Caraffa is a pope of violent and fiery temperament. He is too impetuous to manage the affairs of the Church and, of course, this aged pontiff does not tolerate anyone contradicting him."
Caraffa, now Pope Paul IV, came to fear the unprecedented power of Miguel Ghislieri, whom the Roman populace called "the shadow pope." In spite of everything, however, the pontiff bestowed the title of cardinal on him. From then on, Ghislieri the Inquisitor became ever more dangerous and powerful. Many members of the College of Cardinals did not want to let him chart the future of the Catholic Church from his post atop the feared Inquisition.
Ghislieri's agents did as they pleased, spreading terror through the streets of Rome. The cardinal's spies, known as "black monks," chose a victim and waited for him to go walking down some lonely street. At that moment he would be attacked, spirited into a closed carriage, and taken to one of the compounds of the Inquisition. A friar who was witness to the arrival of such captives described it this way, as published in Leonardo Gallois's Historia General de la Inquisición in 1869:
The victim was taken to the ground floor, just off an inner courtyard near the main entrance. There began his initiation, in a circular room where ten skeletons hung from the walls to announce that in this abode the guests were sometimes nailed there alive to calmly await their deaths. After such a holy warning, the victim came upon two more human skeletons in an adjoining gallery, not on their feet as if receiving visitors, but spread out like a mosaic or carpet. On the right side of the same gallery, a grease-stained oven could clearly be distinguished. It was the secret replacement for the bonfires in public plazas which had fallen into disuse in this corrupt century.... Few cells, properly speaking, could be found here on the first floor, but on the second floor, to the right, was the chamber of the Holy Tribunal flanked by two doors. Above one was a sign proclaiming stanza del primo padre compagno and above the other, stanza del secondo padre compagno. Thus were named the two inquisitors in charge of the double mission of helping the Suprema to uncover criminals and turn them definitively into convicts.
Cardinal Ghislieri's situation, however, changed completely when Pope Paul IV died suddenly on the night of August 18, 1559. As word of his death spread, sedition spread, too, through the Roman streets. Hunting down Ghislieri's agents became one of the main pastimes of the aroused masses. Many of those who had loyally served the Holy Inquisition were killed by the crowds and their bodies thrown into the sewers. The disorder did not end there. The Roman masses attacked the palace that housed the Tribunal of the Inquisition and toppled the statue of the late pope.
Cardinal Ghislieri and some of his men managed to preserve a large part of the secret archives, which accompanied them in eight carriages in their flight from Rome.
At last, normalcy returned when, on December 25, 1559, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo de' Medici, enemy of the late pope, became his successor under the name of Pius IV.
This pope was a man of firm character, a skilled diplomat determined to cleanse the Catholic Church of all traces of Paul IV. To this end, he surrounded himself with two loyal cardinals who were also his nephews, Mark Sittich von Hohenems and Carlo Borromeo. The first was a master swordsman, skilled in all the arts of war. The second was a master diplomat.
Borromeo had been Archbishop of Milan, papal legate in Bologna and Romagna, head of government in the papal states, and finally the pope's private secretary. As a first measure, the cardinals Carlo and Alfonso Caraffa were arrested and confined in the castle of Sant'Angelo. So were Giovanni Caraffa (the Duke of Paliano) and other gentlemen of the duke's court who were accused of the murder of his wife.
As his second measure, following the advice of Carlo Borromeo, Pope Pius IV decided to rehabilitate Cardinal Morone and Bishop Fiescherati, who had been accused of heresy by the Holy Office on Paul IV's orders. His third measure was to send Cardinal Ghislieri into exile and dissolve his network of black monks. His Eminence, who had taken refuge in an isolated monastery, thus returned to his duties in his former bishopric, which was well regarded when the College of Cardinals assembled once again after Pius IV's death on December 9, 1565. Curiously, after three weeks of deliberations, Pius IV's key advisor, Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, decided to support the candidacy of Ghislieri, which was backed by King Philip II of Spain. For years, Ghislieri had been collecting an annual subsidy of eight hundred ducats from the Spanish crown.
On January 7, 1566, Cardinal Ghislieri was elected pope. He adopted the name Pius V. The Spanish ambassador reported, "Pius V is the pope whom the times require." Philip II also approved of his ally's ascension to the Throne of St. Peter. His selection represented a victory for all the forces who wanted a pontiff who was austere and pious but simultaneously able to fight and act energetically against the Protestant Reformation. What was surely true was that Pius V would use his broad experience as head of the Inquisition to create an effective espionage service, implacable and operating with blind obedience to the orders of the pope.
The first function of the agents of the Holy Alliance — a name bestowed by the pope himself on his secret service in honor of the alliance between the Vatican and the Catholic queen Mary Stuart — was none other than that of obtaining information about possible political movements and intrigues directed from the court of London. The reports they assembled were sent to the powerful monarchs who supported Catholicism and papal power against the rising Protestant tide. The main responsibility of the papal spies was to lend their services to Mary Stuart (Mary Queen of Scots) with the aim of restoring Catholicism to Scotland, which had declared itself Presbyterian in 1560, and to fight against Protestantism in general. Pius V understood that his main enemy was the schismatic Church of England, represented by Queen Elizabeth I, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.
Henry VIII had broken with the Catholic Church in 1532, when he asked Pope Clement VII (November 19, 1523–September 25, 1534) for permission to divorce his queen, Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the "Catholic Monarchs" Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was also King Charles I of Spain, so as to marry his lover, Anne Boleyn. The pontiff studied the letter sent him by the English king, an old parchment measuring sixty by ninety centimeters and bearing the supporting signatures of seventy-five leading personalities of the realm. Seventy-five red silk ribbons hung from the document, with seventy-five wax seals.
In his petition, Henry VIII expressed the desire to marry his lover, and he requested the pope's permission to divorce his current queen, Catherine of Aragon. The petition was denied by Clement VII, which provoked Henry's rage and rejection of the Catholic Church. The King of England decided to marry Anne Boleyn. In spite of Rome's rejection, he ordered his marriage to Catherine annulled.
The definitive schism was provoked on January 15, 1535, under the papacy of Paul III, when, in order to give juridical legitimacy to his new ecclesiastic supremacy, Henry VIII summoned the clergy and the scholars of all the universities of his realm to publicly declare that the Roman pope had no divine right or other authority over England. The new church was to be a Catholic-Anglican institution under the authority of the crown.
The five-year reign of Mary Tudor, which came to an end with her death on November 17, 1558, was nothing if not intense. Wars, executions, internal rebellions, coups d'etat, and religious conflicts were the order of the day. The night Mary died, her sister, Elizabeth, was proclaimed Queen of England.
A great part of the English populace received the new queen's ascension with joy. In part, this reaction stemmed from their painful memories of the reign of her sister, popularly nicknamed Bloody Mary. At her ascension to the throne, Mary had decided to restore Catholicism whatever the cost — a policy supported by Pope Paul IV but opposed by the Spanish ambassador. A precondition of this policy was to cut off the heads of all those who had defended the Reformation.
Many of the Protestant bishops (castigated by Mary as "bad shepherds who have led their flocks to damnation") were the first to be burned at the stake for the crime of heresy. The former bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley (the same who had shortly before judged Mary Tudor a bastard and proclaimed Lady Jane Grey Queen of England in her place), was burned alive on October 16, 1555, in a public square in Oxford. Hugh Latimer, the ex–bishop of Worcester, accompanied him in the flames. Another execution ordered by the queen, to the surprise of both Rome and the English Parliament, was that of the ex–bishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who was condemned on March 21, 1556. Cranmer had pronounced the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon and consummated the definitive break with papal power in Rome.
On January 15, 1559, Elizabeth was crowned Queen of England, and on May 8, Parliament opened its new session at which she proposed new laws permitting the reestablishment of Protestantism throughout the kingdom and its possessions. Rome and its Catholic Church, led by Paul IV, an old man of eighty-three, lacked the strength to resist the renewed religious shift in England.
What the pontiff knew for sure was that the only way to at least maintain a Catholic enclave in Protestant England was to support the Queen of Scotland, Mary Stuart. Over the years that followed, she would become a puppet in conspiracies hatched by Paul IV and his successors along with the powerful and monastic King Philip II of Spain, the capricious King Charles IX of France, the insignificant and uncultured Ferdinand I of Austria, and Mary's own son, Prince James, who would eventually betray her and inherit her throne.
The circle began to close around Mary Stuart when the two men closest to her became spies for powers with important interests in Scotland. On July 29, 1565, she married the Catholic Henry Darnley. The new king-consort of Scotland was tall, strong, blond, and attractive to women, but unlearned and possessed of little culture. Furthermore, Darnley, though the new Scottish monarch and the bedmate of its queen, was himself a puppet in the hands of Sir Francis Walsingham, the head of Elizabeth's spy network, and in those of the Scottish nobles. Darnley was a coward above all.
A few months later, toward the end of 1565, Mary developed a friendship with a young dark-skinned Italian from the Piedmont region, David Rizzio. Rizzio came to Scotland as a member of the retinue of the visiting Marquis of Moreta, ambassador from Savoy. He was twenty-three years old and had round green eyes that caught the attention of a queen much attracted to men's appearances. Rizzio was skilled in music and poetry, in the lute and the making of verses. He was also a priest and one of the most active spies in the recently created Holy Alliance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Entity by Eric Frattini. Copyright © 2004 Eric Frattini. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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