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Burchard's entries in his diary relating to the assault upon Alfonso of Aragon can no more escape the criticism of the thoughtful than can Capello's relation. His forty horsemen, for instance, need explaining.
That was all that was known to Capello at the time he wrote that letter, and you will observe already the discrepancy between his statement, penned upon hearsay, and Burchard's account which, considering the latter's position at the Vatican, must always be preferred. According to Burchard the wounds were three, and they were in the head, right arm, and knee.
One of the most important personages present, and one who contributed largely to the success or non-success of the feast, was Mr. Burchard's major-domo Maguire, the same who handed the napkin to Mr. Burchard when Mr. Sidney entered the drawing-room.
Yet not one of those many writers who have retailed that story from Burchard's Diarium as a truth incontestable as the Gospels, has paused to consider this so blinded are we when it is a case of accepting that which we desire to accept. The narrative, too, is oddly suspiciously circumstantial, even to the unimportant detail of the particular gate by which the peasants entered Rome.
Hill, afterward assistant secretary of state, mention being made of the Blaine campaign, an eminent justice of the Supreme Court said that Mr. Blaine always insisted to the end of his life that he had lost the Presidency on account of the Rev. Dr. Burchard's famous alliteration, "Rum, Romanism, and rebellion," and that the whole was really a Democratic trick.
1 Burchard's Diarium, March 6, 1504. Now if Asquino defamed the memory of Cardinal Michieli it seems to follow naturally that he had hated the cardinal; and, if we know that he hated him, we need not marvel that, out of that hatred, he poisoned him.
On the one side, in favor of the hypothesis of fever, we have Burchard's testimony, which does not, however, exactly agree with Giustiniani's, who reported apoplexy to the Venetian senate as the cause of death, and whose report, even at Venice, was rejected by Sanudo for the hypothesis of poison.
This is the only passage in Burchard's diary where Lucretia appears in an unfavorable light; nowhere else has he recorded anything discreditable to her. The accusations of the Neopolitans and of Guicciardini are not substantiated by anything in his diary. In fact we find corroboration nowhere unless we regard Matarazzo as an authority, which he certainly was not.
In the evening the reporters began rushing in and wanted my opinion of Doctor Burchard's statement that the main issue of the campaign was 'Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion. If I had heard him utter these words, I would have answered at once, and that would have been effective, but I am still in doubt as to what to say about it now.
Burchard's narrative is interrupted on the death of Innocent VIII, on July 12, and not resumed until December 2, when it is not retrospective. There is, it is true, the Diarium of Infessura. But that is of no more authority on such a matter than the narrative of Porzio or the letters of Valori.
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