cked courage to carry it
out until a member of the Medici family, furious at the presence of the
base-born Medici in the palace, and a professed hater of her base-born
uncle Clement VII and all his ways--Clarice Strozzi, nee Clarice de'
Medici, granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent--came herself to this
house and drove the usurpers from it with her extremely capable tongue.

To explain clearly the position of the Florentine Republic at this
time would be too deeply to delve into history, but it may briefly be
said that by means of humiliating surrenders and much crafty diplomacy,
Clement VII was able to bring about in 1529 peace between the Emperor
Charles V and Francis I of France, by which Charles was left master
of Italy, while his partner and ally in these transactions, Clement,
expected for his own share certain benefits in which the humiliation
of Florence and the exaltation of Alessandro came first. Florence,
having taken sides with Francis, found herself in any case very badly
left, with the result that at the end of 1529 Charles V's army, with
the papal forces to assist, laid siege to her. The siege lasted for
ten months, in which the city was most ably defended by Ferrucci,
that gallant soldier whose portrait by Piero di Cosimo is in our
National Gallery--No. 895--and then came a decisive battle in which
the Emperor and Pope were conquerors, a thousand brave Florentines
were put to death and others were imprisoned.

Alessandro de' Medici arrived at the Medici palace in 1531, and
in 1532 the glorious Florentine Republic of so many years' growth,
for the establishment of which so much good blood had been spilt, was
declared to be at an end. Alessandro being proclaimed Duke, his first
act was to order the demolition of the great bell of the Signoria which
had so often called the citizens to arms or meetings of independence.

Meanwhile Ippolito, the natural son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and
therefore the rightful heir, after having been sent on various missions
by Clement VII, to keep him out of the way, settled at Bologna and took
to poetry. He was a kindly, melancholy man with a deep sense of human
injustice; and in 1535, when, after Clement VII's very welcome demise,
the Florentine exiles who either had been banished from Florence by
Alessandro or had left of their own volition rather than live in the
city under such a contemptible ruler, sent an embassy to the Emperor
Charles V to help them against th