who served in this nefarious transaction, Bianca contrived to assassinate two, but not before one of the victims to her dread of exposure made full confession at the point of death.  The third escaped.  Another woman who had superintended the affair was shot between Florence and Bologna in the valleys of the Apennines.  Yet after the manifestation of Bianca’s imposture, the Duke continued to recognize Antonio as belonging to the Medicean family; and his successor was obliged to compel this young man to assume the Cross of Malta, in order to exclude his posterity from the line of princes.[215]

[Footnote 215:  See Mutinelli, Storia Arcana, vol. ii. pp.54-56, for Antonio’s reception into the Order.]

The legend of Francesco’s and Bianca’s mysterious death is well known.  The Duchess had engaged in fresh intrigues for palming off a spurious child upon her husband.  These roused the suspicions of his brother Cardinal Ferdinando de’Medici, heir presumptive to the crown.  An angry correspondence followed, ending in a reconciliation between the three princes.  They met in the autumn of 1587 at the villa of Poggio a Cajano.  Then the world was startled by the announcement that the Grand Duke had died of fever after a few days’ illness, and that Bianca had almost immediately afterwards followed him to the grave.  Ferdinand, on succeeding to the throne, refused her the interment suited to her rank, defaced her arms on public edifices, and for her name and titles in official documents substituted the words, ‘la pessima Bianca.’  What passed at Poggio a Cajano is not known.  It was commonly believed in Italy that Bianca, meaning to poison the Cardinal at supper, had been frustrated in her designs by a blunder which made her husband the victim of this plot, and that she ended her own life in despair or fell a victim to the Cardinal’s vengeance.  This story is rejected both by Botta and Galluzzi; but Litta has given it a partial credence.[216] Two of Cosimo’s sons died previously, in the year 1562, under circumstances which gave rise to similar malignant rumors.  Don Garzia and the Cardinal Giovanni were hunting together in the Pisan marshes, when the latter expired after a short illness, and the former in a few days met with a like fate.  Report ran that Don Garzia had stabbed his brother, and that Cosimo, in a fit of rage, ran him through the body with his own sword.  In this case, although Litta attaches weight to the legend, the balance of evidence is strongly in favor of both brothers having been carried off by a pernicious fever contracted simultaneously during their hunting expedition.[217] Each instance serves however, to show in what an atmosphere of guilt the Medicean princes were enveloped.  No one believed that they could die except by fraternal or paternal hands.  And the authentic crimes of the family certainly justified this popular belief.  I have already alluded to the murders of Ippolito, Alessandro, and Lorenzino.  I have told how the Court of Florence sanctioned the assassination of Bianca’s daughter by her husband at Bologna.[218] I must now proceed to relate the tragic tales of the princesses of the house.