The relations of trust which bravi occasionally maintained with foreign Courts, supply some curious illustrations of their position in Italian society.  One characteristic instance may be selected from documents in the Venetian Archives referring to Lodovico dall’Armi.[228] This man belonged to a noble family of Bologna; and there are reasons for supposing that his mother was sister to Cardinal Campeggi, famous in the annals of the English Reformation.  Outlawed from his native city for a homicide, Lodovico adopted the profession of arms and the management of secret diplomacy.  He first took refuge at the Court of France, where in 1541 he obtained such credit, especially with the Dauphin, that he was entrusted with a mission for raising revolt in Siena against the Spaniards.[229] His transactions in that city with Giulio Salvi, then aspiring to its lordship, and in Rome with the French ambassador, led to a conspiracy which only awaited the appearance of French troops upon the Tuscan frontier to break out into open rebellion.  The plot, however, transpired before it had been matured; and Lodovico took flight through the Florentine territory.  He was arrested at Montevarchi and confined in the fortress of Florence, where he made such revelations as rendered the extinction of the Sienese revolt an easy matter.  After this we do not hear of him until he reappears at Venice in the year 1545.  He was now accredited to the English ambassador with the title of Henry VIII.’s ‘Colonel,’ and enjoyed the consideration accorded to a powerful monarch’s privy agent.

[Footnote 228:  See Rawdon Brown’s Calendar of State Papers, vol. iv.]

[Footnote 229:  See Botta, Book IV., for the story of Lodovico’s intrigues at Siena.]

His pension amounted to fifty crowns a month, while he kept eight captains at his orders, each of whom received half that sum as pay.  These subordinates were people of some social standing.  We find among them a Trissino of Vicenza and a Bonifacio of Verona, the one entitled Marquis and the other Count.  What the object of Lodovico’s residence in Italy might be, did not appear.  Though he carried letters of recommendation from the English Court, he laid no claim to the rank of diplomatic envoy.  But it was tolerably well known that he employed himself in levying troops.  Whether these were meant to be used against France or in favor of Savoy, or whether, as the Court of Rome suggested, Henry had given orders for the murder of his cousin, Cardinal Pole, at Trento, remained an open question.  Lodovico might have dwelt in peace under the tolerant rule of the Venetians, had he not exposed himself to a collision with their police.  In the month of August he assaulted the captain of the night guard in a street brawl; and it was also proved against him that he had despatched two of his men to inflict a wound of infamy upon a gentleman at Treviso.  These offenses, coinciding with urgent remonstrances from the Papal Curia, gave