as a trusty bravo.  Neither in the message, therefore, nor in the messenger was there much to rouse suspicion.  The time, indeed, was oddly chosen, and Marcello had never made a similar appeal on any previous occasion.  Yet his necessities might surely have obliged him to demand some more than ordinary favour from a brother.  Francesco immediately made himself ready to set out, armed only with his sword and attended by a single servant.  It was in vain that his wife and his mother reminded him of the dangers of the night, the loneliness of Monte Cavallo, its ruinous palaces and robber-haunted caves.  He was resolved to undertake the adventure, and went forth, never to return.  As he ascended the hill, he fell to earth, shot with three harquebuses.  His body was afterwards found on Monte Cavallo, stabbed through and through, without a trace that could identify the murderers.  Only, in the course of subsequent investigations, Il Mancino (on the 24th of February 1582) made the following statements:—­That Vittoria’s mother, assisted by the waiting woman, had planned the trap; that Marchionne of Gubbio and Paolo Barca of Bracciano, two of the Duke’s men, had despatched the victim.  Marcello himself, it seems, had come from Bracciano to conduct the whole affair.  Suspicion fell immediately upon Vittoria and her kindred, together with the Duke of Bracciano; nor was this diminished when the Accoramboni, fearing the pursuit of justice, took refuge in a villa of the Duke’s at Magnanapoli a few days after the murder.

A cardinal’s nephew, even in those troublous times, was not killed without some noise being made about the matter.  Accordingly Pope Gregory XIII. began to take measures for discovering the authors of the crime.  Strange to say, however, the Cardinal Montalto, notwithstanding the great love he was known to bear his nephew, begged that the investigation might be dropped.  The coolness with which he first received the news of Francesco Peretti’s death, the dissimulation with which he met the Pope’s expression of sympathy in a full consistory, his reserve in greeting friends on ceremonial visits of condolence, and, more than all, the self-restraint he showed in the presence of the Duke of Bracciano, impressed the society of Rome with the belief that he was of a singularly moderate and patient temper.  It was thought that the man who could so tamely submit to his nephew’s murder, and suspend the arm of justice when already raised for vengeance, must prove a mild and indulgent ruler.  When, therefore, in the fifth year after this event, Montalto was elected Pope, men ascribed his elevation in no small measure to his conduct at the present crisis.  Some, indeed, attributed his extraordinary moderation and self-control to the right cause. ’Veramente costui e un gran frate!’ was Gregory’s remark at the close of the consistory when Montalto begged him to let the matter of Peretti’s murder rest. ’Of a truth, that fellow is a consummate hypocrite!’