The Grand Duchess Giovanna gave birth, on 19th May, the following year, to a son—­a sickly child to be sure, but the undoubted heir of his father.  Ferdinando’s hopes were shattered, but he had not done with Bianca Buonaventuri.  Within nine months, on 9th February, Giovanna died, somewhat suddenly, and the Cardinal failed not to intimate that Bianca was the cause thereof, and to name poison as her means!  The truth is, that the Grand Duchess one day getting out of her sedan-chair, slipped upon the polished marble floor, and, being again near her confinement, a miscarriage resulted, from which she never recovered.

Within two months of the burial of sour-tempered, unlovable Giovanna, the Grand Duke married Bianca, Pietro Buonaventuri’s widow, privately in the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio.

One immediate result of this marriage was the quasi-legitimisation of the child Antonio—­a vigorous youngster and certain to outlive frail little Filippo.

Reconciliation with Venice, public marriage, and Coronation were in due order celebrated, and Bianca Cappello, “the true and undoubted daughter of Venice,” was enthroned in the Duomo, as the true and lawful Grand Duchess of Tuscany!  Cardinal Ferdinando watched all these ceremonials from afar—­the only one of his family who declined to honour the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess with his presence during the festivities.

Represented by an inferior official of his household, he remained in Rome, closely shut up in his palace, a spectacle to the world at large of ungovernable prejudice and foiled ambition.  His cogitations, however, were very grateful, for he was working out in his intriguing brain a ready method for ridding himself, not alone of the two children, bars to his pretensions, but of the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess also!  Ferdinando was determined to succeed Francesco as Sovereign of Tuscany, come what might!

Never was a man more changed than the Grand Duke Francesco when he placed the new Grand Duchess beside him on his throne.  Twelve years of gloom and disappointment gave way before the advent of the “Sun of Venice.”

The best, happiest, and most popular years of his reign exactly synchronise with the period of Bianca’s ascendency.  No strife of parties, no pestilence, no foreign war, black-marked those years.  Arts and crafts revived with the increase of population and of confidence, and men began to agree that there was something after all to be said—­and to be said heartily—­for Macchiavelli’s “Prince,” and his idea of a “Il Governo d’un solo.”

In this glorious eventide of the Renaissance were reproduced some of the magnificence of its heyday, under Lucrezia and Lorenzo de’ Medici.

In the early days of Francesco’s infatuation for Bianca he had given forth an impassioned madrigal, which once more he sang to her as his good angel-guardian:—­

“Around my frail and battered barque
There is always serenely swimming,
And wakefully watching me,
Lest I perish, a beautiful and powerful Dolphin. 
Warn’d and shielded from every buffet
Of the deadly wave, I feel secure. 
Fierce winds no longer cause me fear. 
I seek succour no more from oars and sails
Safely accompanied by my loving Guardian!”