er, he had given
her a certificate of matrimony, which she refused to surrender when
he put her away, so that the Duke, desiring afterwards to espouse
the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was obliged to present
a counterfeit certificate to his bride, who believed it the real
marriage contract, and destroyed it. When the Duchess discovered the
imposition, she would not rest till she had wrung the real document
from Camilla, under the threat of putting her son to death. The
miserable mother then retired to a convent, and died of a broken
heart, while Ferdinand bastardized his only legitimate son, a noble
boy, whom his mother had prettily called Jacinth. After this, a
kind of retribution, amid all his political successes, seems to have
pursued the guilty Duke. His second wife was too fat to bear children,
but not to bear malice; and she never ceased to distrust and reproach
the Duke, whom she could not believe in anything since the affair
of the counterfeit marriage contract. She was very religious, and
embittered Ferdinand's days with continued sermons and reproofs,
and made him order, in the merry Mantuan court, all the devotions
commanded by her confessor.

So Ferdinand died childless, and, it is said, in sore remorse, and was
succeeded in 1626 by his brother Vincenzo, another hope of the faith
and light of the Church. His brief reign lasted but one year, and
was ignoble as it was brief, and fitly ended the direct line of the
Gonzagas. Vincenzo, though an ecclesiastic, never studied anything,
and was disgracefully ignorant. Lacking the hereditary love of
letters, he had not the warlike boldness of his race; and resembled
his ancestors only in the love he bore to horses, hunting, and women.
He was enamored of the widow of one of his kinsmen, a woman no longer
young, but of still agreeable person, strong will, and quick wit,
and of a fascinating presence, which Vincenzo could not resist. The
excellent prince was wooing her, with a view to seduction, when he
received the nomination of cardinal from Pope Paul V. He pressed his
suit, but the lady would consent to nothing but marriage, and Vincenzo
bundled up the cardinal's purple and sent it back, with a very
careless and ill-mannered letter to the ireful Pope, who swore never
to make another Gonzaga cardinal. He then married the widow, but soon
wearied of her, and spent the rest of his days in vain attempts
to secure a divorce, in order to be restored to his ecclesia