ng all who tried to offer resistance. The
people of Ferrara, however, were loyal to their beloved duke and
duchess. After a few days of anxious suspense, Ercole returned, and soon
quelled the tumult and restored order in the city. That evening he
appeared on the balcony of the Castello, and publicly embraced his wife
and children amid the shouts and applause of the whole city. The next
day the whole ducal family went in solemn procession to the Cathedral,
and there gave public thanks for their marvellous deliverance. A
terrible list of cruel reprisals followed upon this rebellion, and
Niccolo d'Este himself, with two hundred of his partisans, were put to
death after the bloody fashion of the times.

A year later, when the danger was over and tranquillity had been
completely restored, Leonora and her two little daughters set out for
Naples, under the escort of Niccolo da Correggio, to be present at her
father King Ferrante's second marriage with the young Princess Joan of
Aragon, a sister of Ferdinand the Catholic. The duchess and her children
travelled by land to Pisa, where galleys were waiting to conduct them to
Naples, and reached her father's court on the 1st of June, 1477. Here
Leonora spent the next four months, and in September, gave birth to a
second son, who was named Ferrante, after his royal grandfather. But
soon news reached Naples that war had broken out in Northern Italy, and
that Duke Ercole had been chosen Captain-general of the Florentine
armies. In his absence the presence of the duchess was absolutely
necessary at Ferrara, and early in November Leonora left Naples and
hastened home to take up the reins of government and administer the
state in her lord's stead. She took her elder daughter Isabella with
her, but left her new-born son at Naples, together with his little
sister Beatrice, from whom the old King Ferrante refused to part. This
bright-eyed child, who had won her grandfather's affections at this
early age, remained at Naples for the next eight years, and grew up in
the royal palace on the terraced steps of that enchanted shore, where
even then Sannazzaro was dreaming of Arcadia, and where Lorenzo de'
Medici loved to talk over books and poetry with his learned friend the
Duchess Ippolita. Beatrice was too young to realize the rare degree of
culture which had made Alfonso's and Ferrante's court the favourite
abode of the Greek and Latin scholars of the age, too innocent to be
aware of the dark