Imprimatur

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  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.

  The hypothesis that Innocent financed William's undertaking, Danckel­mann argues, naturally depends upon one premise: that the Pope knew of the Prince of Orange's imminent landing in England, as Roloff claimed to have proved. Once he had taken the English throne, William would have found it easy to honour his debts to the Pope, to whom he would sooner or later have repaid them all, with interest, as to any other moneylender.

  Instead, Danckelmann swears, the Pope did not know. He was owed nothing by William, nor did he expect the forthcoming invasion of England. This is proved, according to Danckelmann, by the letters exchanged shortly before William's landing, between the Secretary of State, Cardinal Alderano Cybo, the Nuncio to Vienna, Cardinal Francesco Bonvisi, and the Nuncio to London, Ferdinando D'Adda. According to these missives, the Pope was most alarmed by the Prince of Orange's military manoeuvres, nor was there any hint of a secret understanding between William and the Holy See. The Pope, therefore, did not know.

  Even if it were to be admitted that Innocent had channelled money to William, Danckelmann continued, the money would certainly have had to pass through the Papal Nunciature in London. But payments from Rome to the London Nunciature, scrupulously checked by the German scholar, showed no trace of financing for William. The documents examined, Danck­elmann complacently concludes, "completely clarify the question". Roloff's thesis is demolished and, with it, any claim that dares affirm that the Pope lent money to the House of Orange: Q.E.D.

  Danckelmann's rashness is quite astonishing. With a little research, however, a number of interesting facts come to light: the Barons von

  Danckelmann had been closely linked with the House of Orange since the time of William III. They had been raised to the nobility by the Prince Elector Frederick of Brandenburg, the uncle of William III. They came, moreover, from the county of Lingen, which was part of the estates of the House of Orange. Danckelmann, however, omits to inform his readers of these personal connections (cf. Kürschners deutscher Gelehrter Kalender, Berlin 1926, II, p. 374; C.J.M. Denina, La Prusse litterairesous Frederic II, Berlin 1791, I, ad vocem A. Rossler, Biografisches Worterbuch zur deutschen Geschichte, Munich 1973-1975, advocem).

  In 1956, the beatification of Pope Innocent XI at long last took place, aided and abetted—in the view of some—by the Cold War: the Turks had become a metaphor for the Soviet empire, while the Pope of the day cast himself as carrying the flame of his heroic predecessor three centuries previ­ously. Pope Innocent XI had saved the West from the Turkish tide; Pope Pius XII would protect it from the horrors of communism.

  For too long, the truth was made to wait out in the cold. Once the of­ficial version had crystallised, historians went to unprecedented lengths to stick only to what had already been said. Perhaps perturbed by too many questions both too old and too new, they cast only an indifferent glance over the mystery that forever links William III of Orange, the Prince who re-established the Anglican religion in England, and the greatest Pope of the seventeenth century.

  Meanwhile, papers, essays and theses abounded on depilation in the Middle Ages, the daily life of deaf mutes under the Ancien Regime and the world-view of millers in Lower Galicia. No one, however, took the trouble to tackle that great historical question mark and, sharing the dust of the archives in which they lay, honestly to peruse the papers of the Odescalchi and Beaucastel.

  The mercenary Pope

  The fact remains: no one has ever attempted to tell the truth about Innocent XI. In the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele in Rome, there is a curi­ous opuscule written in 1742 and entitled De suppositions militaribus stipendis Benedicti Odescalchi, by Count Giuseppe Delia Torre Rezzonico. Rezzonico's purpose is to dispel a widespread rumour following the death of Innocent XI, namely that the Blessed had, in the years of his youth, fought as a mer­cenary in Holland under the Spanish flag, suffering, among other things, a serious wound to his right arm. Rezzonico claims that Benedetto Odescalchi had been a soldier as a very young man, but only in the communal militia of Como, not as a mercenary.

  It is perhaps unfortunate that the author was a relative of that Rezzonico who, from Venice, acted as a proxy for the Odescalchi; it is also a pity that the Rezzonico family should have had ties of kinship with the family of Innocent XI. It would doubtless have been preferable if a historian more detached from the events of which he speaks had set out to disprove the military past of the Blessed. However, a number of facts make one regret the absence of a closer examination. According to Pierre Bayle, the young Benedetto Odescalchi was wounded in the right arm when fighting as a mer­cenary in Spain. Curiously, as confirmed by official medical sources, the Pope suffered from great pain in that very member until his death.

  Quite apart from the merits or demerits of the above, it is surprising that this obscure aspect of the life of Pope Innocent should have been neglected for decades. From within Rezzonico's volume, there fell out a card from the library, showing the name of the last person to consult it: the card was signed "Baron v. Danckelmann, 16 April 1925". Since then, no one had turned those pages.

  True and false

  Atto Melani says wisely, when instructing the young apprentice: what false papers proclaim is not always false. Even the forged letters of d'Estrees pub­lished by Dalrymple fall into that bizarre class of document. It is no acci­dent that another letter, this time authentic, published by Gerin, from the Cardinal d'Estrees to Louis XIV dated 16th November, 1688, confirms the contacts between Count Casoni and William of Orange:

  Cardinal Cybo [...] has learned that, through the good offices of a cleric who came last year from Holland bearing letters from certain missionaries in that country, who had been given to hope that the States-General would accord freedom of conscience to the Catho­lics, he [Casoni] had come to a kind of understanding with a man depending upon the Prince of Orange and who held out hope for that freedom: that the said man upheld the missionary in the convic­tion that the Prince of Orange had great respect for the Pope and would do many things for him; that in recent times these relations had grown firmer and that the Prince of Orange had certainly given it to be understood that he had only good intentions.

  The circumstance referred to by d'Estrees is credible, if only because the source of the information, Cardinal Cybo, was a spy in the pay of Louis XIV (Orcibal, op. at., p. 73, note 337). On 9th December, the French sovereign sent this irate reply to d'Estrees:

  If he wanted to restore good relations with me, the Pope would re­move Casoni for good, together with the criminal correspondence which he has carried on with the Prince of Orange.

&nbs
p; The memoirs of Madame de Maintenon, which speak of loans by Inno­cent XI to William of Orange, are apocryphal, yet may they too not tell the truth?

  The revolution of 1688

  All this is not limited to a mere academic discussion. In order to appreciate the scope of the Glorious Revolution, and therefore of Innocent XI's action, we shall again give the floor to Roloff:

  The revolution in which William of Orange overthrew the Catholic James in 1688 marked the transition from one period to another no less than the other great European revolution, the French one of 1789. For England, the accession of the Prince of Orange meant not only the definitive establishment of the evangelical faith, but also the stabilisa­tion of the rule of Parliament and the opening of the way which was to lead to the reign of the House of Hanover, which has continued to this day. The victory of Parliament over James II made possible the creation of both the parties which have divided government between themselves throughout English history [i.e. Tories and Whigs]. Power passed durably into the hands of the aristocracy of birth and of money, who represented mercantile interests in general.