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Updated: May 9, 2025
Meanwhile, King Ferrante's emissaries were doing their best to stir up the Duke of Orleans against his Sforza rivals, and had secretly offered his granddaughter Charlotte in marriage to the youthful Scottish monarch. But for the moment Lodovico's star was in the ascendant, and his influence reigned supreme at the French court.
We have seen how the childhood and early youth of Beatrice d'Este had been spent, first at her grandfather the King Ferrante's court at Naples, afterwards in her own home at Ferrara. Under the watchful eye of a wise and careful mother, she had been trained in all the learning and accomplishments of the day, but had been allowed little liberty or opportunity of revealing her strong individuality.
Whereupon the Pope drew a line from pole to pole, and granted to Spain the dominion over all lands discovered, or to be discovered, one hundred miles westward of Cape Verde and the Azores. And thus Ferrante's appeal to Spain against a Pope who showed himself so ready and complaisant a friend to Spain went unheeded by Ferdinand and Isabella.
He foresaw the injured dignity of the Spanish House of Naples, and Ferrante's wrath at the Pope's light treatment of him and apathy for his interests; and the cardinal knew that with Ferrante were allied the mighty houses of Colonna and Orsini. Thus, by his political divorcement from the Holy See, he flung in his lot with theirs, hoping for red war and the deposition of Alexander.
When I was summoned to take charge of Prince Ferrante's education I gave up my position in the household of Prince Bracciano not only because I believed that I could make myself more useful in training a future sovereign than the son of a private nobleman, but also," he added with a smile, "because I was curious to visit a state of which your Highness had so often spoken, and because I believed that my residence here might enable me to be of service to your Highness.
It is, of course, possible that Ferrante's queen may have repeated what passed between herself and the king; but that would surely have been in contravention of the wishes of her husband, who had, be it remembered, "dissembled his grief in public." And Ferrante does not impress one as the sort of husband whose wishes his wife would be bold enough to contravene.
A year later, when the danger was over and tranquillity had been completely restored, Leonora and her two little daughters set out for Naples, under the escort of Niccolo da Correggio, to be present at her father King Ferrante's second marriage with the young Princess Joan of Aragon, a sister of Ferdinand the Catholic.
So back to the Vatican went the Neapolitan envoys with definite proposals of an alliance to be cemented by a marriage between Giuffredo Borgia aged twelve and Ferrante's granddaughter Lucrezia of Aragon. The Pope, with his plans but half-matured as yet, temporized, was evasive, and continued to arm and to recruit.
The birth of Beatrice's son marks a new development in her husband's policy. Up to that time the Moro seems to have been content to govern in his nephew's name, and had rejected with horror King Ferrante's suggestion that he should depose Gian Galeazzo as incapable, and reign in his stead.
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