A few months after her return, Giustiniana witnessed at first hand a turning point in the drift of the Venetian Republic toward an increasingly authoritarian government in the hands of the Council of Ten. Her friend Angelo Querini, a decent, civic-minded young senator who had been (with Andrea) among Lodoli’s most ardent followers, was charged with conspiring against the Republic and thrown into jail. Querini was hardly a revolutionary: his ambition was to give back to the Maggior Consiglio some of the authority that had been usurped by the Council of Ten. His arrest came as a stern warning to the reformers of his circle, and it helps to explain the more prudent approach Andrea would adopt in his political career.
In her letters from Padua, Giustiniana had told Andrea she intended to live as quietly as possible while she stayed in Venice. But as Murray’s disobliging remarks remind us, it was not long before she was causing a certain commotion in town. Thomas Robinson, the twenty-two-year-old son of Lord Grantham who had been so surprised by Lady Montagu’s loose tongue, was quite taken with Giustiniana when he met her in the fall of 1760—to the point that he apparently wanted to marry her. From the very beginning, however, the fact that he was a Protestant and Giustiniana a Catholic was seen as an insurmountable obstacle. The young Englishman was soon out of the picture: in early spring he left Venice—the last stop on his Italian tour—and made his way back to London.
Shortly after Robinson’s departure, however, Giustiniana startled everyone by accepting the hand of Count Philip Orsini-Rosenberg, the imperial ambassador of Austria to the Venetian Republic. It was a remarkable coup; certainly that is how everyone around her perceived it. The count, a seventy-year-old widower, came from a very aristocratic Austrian family that claimed to descend from the Roman clan of the Ursini. He was ending his long diplomatic career with a luxurious posting, housed in the magnificent embassy on the Grand Canal.
His wife, Maria von Kaunitz, had died in 1755, a year after their arrival in Venice. After a brief period of mourning, the count had given himself over to a fairly dissolute life and was to be found gambling with his friends at the Ridotto when he was not chasing young actresses at the theater or visiting his favorite courtesans. Giustiniana’s reappearance on the scene changed all that. The count must have known her from the old days—he had probably met her at Consul Smith’s early on, when her love affair with Andrea had been the talk of the town. But now he saw her in a new light: She was a mature young lady of twenty-four, with experience quite beyond her age. Her lively spirit enchanted him, and those “womanish” features she had complained so much about undoubtedly did as well. He fell in love with her, as other older men had before him.
Giustiniana must have been a little stunned to receive a proposal from a man of such exalted station. Of course, she had said that marriage “was not for her,” that she prized her independence more than the security provided by a husband. But she had expressed those thoughts when she was still trying to make room in her life for Andrea, groping for an unconventional solution to an unconventional situation. Now her long affair was over, and she was doing her best to put it behind her. She needed to be practical, and she might well have concluded that her quest for independence required a detour through a few years of married life.
Ambassador Murray, so quick to dismiss the Wynnes when they had returned to Venice, deemed the news of such importance as to warrant a diplomatic notice to William Pitt himself. “The conversation of the town is taken up about a marriage which is shortly expected between Count Rosenberg and the eldest Miss Wynne,”3 he wrote to the Great Commoner, treating the information as a matter of official significance, as indeed it was: Giustiniana, after all, was marrying an important minister of a Great Power with which Britain was still at war.
Andrea, still entangled in his complicated affair with M., must have appreciated the logic behind Giustiniana’s snap decision: after all, he had always encouraged her to marry an old man and the cher frère in him surely saw the practical benefits of her situation. But it is hard to imagine that the news did not set off a certain amount of inner turmoil in the old lover.
The count and Giustiniana were married on November 4, 1761. The ceremony probably took place at the embassy. There was no fanfare, not even a public notice: it was a rushed, hushed affair in the presence of a priest, a few intimate friends, and her family (one imagines Mrs. Anna smiling, happy at last). Still, everyone in town knew about it. Lady Montagu was no longer on hand to deliver a pointed remark on the event, having finally returned home to England upon her husband’s death, but her Venetian friend Chiara Michiel made sure she was kept informed: “Monsieur de Rosenberg married Giustiniana without declaring her either wife or ambassadress. . . . Such a marriage is well below his rank . . . but is worthy of his heart.” 4 Lady Montagu replied rather philosophically, “Your words are subtle and just and noble, and I understand all that.”5
Giustiniana, now Countess Rosenberg, settled into the elegant palazzo the Austrian government had leased from the Loredan family. As long as her husband was alive, she was guaranteed a very comfortable life. After his death, she would not inherit his possessions, which were already destined to her stepson, but the count set up a small trust that would give her an income of 2,000 Austrian florins a year for as long as she kept his name. That would be enough for her to live decorously, though not in luxury.
Her social rank, however, remained ambiguous. She was Countess Rosenberg in the eyes of her husband, but she was not—as Chiara Michiel had been quick to underline—the “ambassadress.” Nor had the marriage put an end to all the talk about her questionable titles of nobility. The snobbery and condescension were depressing and terribly familiar to Giustiniana.
The Court in Vienna, not officially informed of the marriage, expressed deep misgivings. Prime Minister Anthon von Kaunitz, a cousin of Rosenberg’s deceased first wife, involved himself personally in the matter and begged the ambassador to tell him exactly how things stood. Here is the count’s reply—an extraordinary “confession,” at once poignant and pathetic, by an old libertine in love with a much younger woman:
Sir, the trust and very special esteem I have always had for your Excellency make me seize with joy the opportunity I am o fered to open my heart to you and make the disclosure you ask of me. It is true that I have married Miss Giustiniana Wynne in secret,22 and the marriage will remain such as long as I shall be ambassador. But it is not true that she is the daughter of an English merchant. Chevalier Wynne, who died a Catholic some ten years ago in Venice, was a gentleman and belonged to one of the oldest houses of Wales. He was traveling in Italy when he married the daughter of Count Gazzini. After his death Lord Holderness was appointed governor of the family—just fifteen days ago the two Wynne [brothers], who are still minors, received written orders to return to England, where the eldest has an income of 6,000 pounds sterling from his estate. I say all this so Your Excellency may see that the family is very noble and I hold indisputable proof.6
The count added that if this were still deemed insufficient, the Austrian Court should consider the following information as final proof of Giustiniana’s aristocratic lineage: “Andrea Memmo, a Venetian nobleman belonging to one of the oldest families, was ready to marry her with the full consent of his entire family, but Mme Wynne did not grant her consent because he was a very disturbed young man. Similarly, Lord Grantham’s son wished to marry her last year, but the young lady refused him as he was a Protestant.”
The count “implored” the prime minister to grant his “protection” to Giustiniana, but Kaunitz was not impressed by the clarifications he received—he probably had less biased information to rely on than the one his old ambassador provided him. He left Count and Countess Orsini-Rosenberg hanging.
It cannot have been an easy period for Giustiniana, no matter how used she had become to this type of social ostracism. Was her disappointment lessened by the joys of marriage? It is difficult to imagine Giustiniana falling deeply in love with the count, but she might well ha
ve felt a growing affection and respect for this distinguished old man who was willing to put himself on the line for love of her. Despite the difference in age, people certainly assumed that the marriage was consummated and the relationship was physical, not only because of Rosenberg’s reputation as a sexually active septuagenarian but because his young wife quickly became pregnant. “One hears the beautiful Giustiniana will soon give a new fruit to the world,” 7 Lady Montagu chuckled from London, eager to stay abreast of things in Venice. If it is true she became pregnant after marrying Count Rosenberg, then she must have lost the child—presumably to Vienna’s great relief.
As the new Countess Rosenberg, Giustiniana was isolated on all sides. Not only was she not accepted by her husband’s government, she was also cut off from Venetian society, for if Vienna did not recognize her as the wife of the Austrian ambassador, the Venetian authorities certainly did. As a foreign dignitary she was not allowed to come into direct contact with local patricians. The law was a residue of a past age. Yet it had lived on, much to the distress and irritation of the ambassadorial corps, and was being enforced with even greater severity than usual since the beginning of the war. If she and Andrea communicated at all at this point, it had to be in secret, as so often in the past.
In early 1763, however, they did see each other publicly at the house of a mutual friend, and the inquisitors deemed the episode “very serious in all its circumstances.”8 Andrea had just been elected to the position of savio di terraferma, with administrative duties on the mainland territory. One of his first and most delicate assignments was the resolution of a dispute with the Austrian government over the postal system. Giustiniana suggested she might be able to help, using her husband’s connections, and they discussed the issue in front of other guests that evening. She then sent him a note on the matter. He was imprudent enough to reply.
Andrea realized his mistake, or perhaps he was tipped off that a government informer was about to denounce him for having communicated with the wife of a foreign ambassador. In any event, he went directly to the Tribunal of the Inquisitors and confessed his crime. The Tribunal stated that his action deserved “the sternest and most solemn punishment” but spared him in the end on account of his “spontaneous confession.” There was a final warning, however: “In the future you will refrain from any contact whatsoever with the wife of [the] ambassador and with the family of that wife as well . . . and you are prohibited from going near her at public functions and celebrations. . . . You are hereby also informed that an attentive eye will always be watching you.”9
The reprimand was so severe—and so reminiscent of his “fateful banishment” a decade earlier—that one has to wonder whether Andrea and Giustiniana were again seeing each other on the quiet and the information had reached the inquisitors. Alternatively, it is possible that the count himself tipped off the authorities preemptively, to make sure that Andrea would stay away from his young wife. Whatever the case, Andrea must have taken the rebuke seriously. His career was on track by then—he was moving ahead under the aegis of Andrea Tron, the powerful procuratore di San Marco who had been the Wynnes’ neighbor back in the summer of 1756—and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to tarnish his reputation by breaking a law of the Republic, no matter how obsolete he may have considered it.
So after all that had passed between them, this is how matters stood between Andrea and Giustiniana in 1763, the year the war ended with the treaties of Paris and Hubertusburg and peace finally returned to Europe.
In 1764 the Austrian Court recalled its ambassador to Venice and sent him into retirement. Count Rosenberg had made no headway in his painful dealings with his government over his new spouse. He and Giustiniana left Palazzo Loredan and moved to Klagenfurt in the Austrian province of Carinthia, where the Orsini-Rosenbergs had their family seat. Despite his declining health, the count continued to press Prime Minister Kaunitz to grant protection to his wife. Once they were back in Austria, the possibility that they would not be received at Court in Vienna loomed as the worst possible nightmare. Giustiniana decided to take matters into her own hands. She enlisted the help of Lord Stormont, the British ambassador to Vienna, who asked the secretary of state, Lord Sandwich, to sign a declaration reaffirming that the Wynnes were indeed from a “very noble and very ancient Family.”10
The statement was signed and sealed within a matter of days. Surely the irony was not lost on Giustiniana that the British, so maddeningly rigid when she had wanted to be presented to Court in London, were now so ready to help. Nonetheless, the Austrian government remained unimpressed. That summer Giustiniana wrote directly to Kaunitz:
Sir, it is with the greatest pain that I have learned of the deadly grief my husband has had to suffer on my account. I thought that such an authentic and honorable statement by the King of England23 about my family as the one you received would have sufficed as proof of its antiquity. . . . I have no fear that once Her Majesty the Empress is informed of the truth she will not want to take away from me what I have been given by God, who wished me born a lady in a great nation and in a very old family. Your Highness, you know the ways of the world so well—could you not explain to Her Majesty the righteousness of my cause and the fatal consequences that might otherwise occur? Sir, your sense of justice is too well known for me to think that you might refuse your powerful help to a Lady who implores it.11
The letter was sent at the end of July 1764 and was signed “Your humble and very obedient servant Countess de Rosenberg née Wynne.” Kaunitz, well aware that her husband was not well, was clearly buying time. His tactic was soon rewarded. Count Rosenberg died the following winter, and the vexing issue of their presentation to the Court disappeared.
Her husband now dead, Giustiniana was free to leave Austria. But where should she go? There was no compelling reason for her to rush back to Venice. She had no house to return to. She was not particularly eager to live with her mother and her sisters again, and her brothers were studying in England. So she remained in Klagenfurt, staying on for another five years. Little is known about her Austrian period. It seems she overcame the initial hostility of the local nobility and managed to establish cordial relations with the Rosenberg family. Her character would have led her to make the best of her stay and to gather as many interesting people around her as she could. Still, she must have remained an outsider in the eyes of the provincial Klagenfurt society: it is hard to imagine Giustiniana turning into a German-speaking Austrian countess. In the end, one suspects she stayed in Austria in no small part because she wanted to set her financial affairs in order and ensure for herself an income from her former husband’s estate that would give her the independence and the security she needed before she went back to Italy.
She returned to Venice around 1770. She was still only in her early thirties, and after six quiet years in Austria she was eager to lead a more engaging existence. However, she found that life in Venice had deteriorated greatly. Society had become stale. Cultural life was dead. Corruption was rife. Prostitution and gambling were out of control. These were all symptoms of a much deeper crisis. The Venetian ruling class seemed incapable of providing a sense of direction, of lifting its eyes beyond the lagoon that surrounded it. To Giustiniana, who had spent so much time abroad, the Republic must have appeared very old and tired—a wrinkled grande dame gazing out over the backwaters of Europe.
She took a house near Piazza San Marco and tried to build herself a new life as the widowed Countess Rosenberg. She called on old friends, and now that she was no longer the wife of the Austrian ambassador she was free to see Andrea again. She gathered a small salon around her and did what she could to interest herself in the life of the city. But her heart was not in it; the city no longer felt like home. Again one hears the echo of that earlier cry: “Venice is not for me!” She escaped when she could, often traveling to Paris and London. Each trip meant a tiring journey across Europe, but it gave her the oxygen she lacked in the stagnant atmosphere of the lagoon.
To extricate herself from this downward spiral, she decided to spend more time in Padua, where life was not as decadent and had a gentler rhythm. Although it was a provincial town, it was strangely more cosmopolitan than Venice. Perhaps it had to do with the old university, which was going through one of its better moments, or maybe it was due to the proximity of the countryside and the pleasant life that revolved around some of the elegant villas nearby. The environment was certainly more stimulating for Giustiniana. She rented an apartment in a palazzo by the Duomo. With the help of loyal friends and her own determination, she gradually pulled herself together—and out of debt.
She retained the house in Venice and followed closely what went on in the city, even though it was increasingly with the eye of an observer one step removed from the action. Her connections abroad and her knowledge of languages made her the ideal chaperon for foreign travelers, especially the English. The writer William Beckford, who became a close friend, describes how happy he was to have been recommended to “the fascinating” Giustiniana.12
A Venetian Affair Page 31
