The Lady of Monza

Virginia Maria de Leyva was a descendant of Charles V.'s general, Antonio de Leyva, who through many years administered the Duchy of Milan, and died loaded with wealth and honors.[188]

For his military service he was rewarded with the principality of Ascoli, the federal lordship of the town of Monza, and the life-tenure of the city of Pavia. Virginia's father was named Martino, and upon his death her cousin succeeded to the titles of the house. She, for family reasons, entered the convent of S. Margherita at Monza, about the year 1595. Here she occupied a place of considerable importance, being the daughter of the Lord of Monza, of princely blood, wealthy, and allied to the great houses of the Milanese. S. Margherita was a convent of the Umiliate, dedicated to the education of noble girls, in which, therefore, considerable laxity of discipline prevailed.[189]

Sister Virginia dwelt at ease within its walls, holding a kind of little court, and exercising an undefined authority in petty affairs which was conceded to her rank. Among her favorite companions at the time of the events I am about to narrate, were numbered the Sisters Ottavia Ricci, Benedetta Homata, Candida Brancolina, and Silvia Casata; she was waited on by a converse sister, Caterina da Meda. Adjoining the convent stood the house and garden of a certain Gianpaolo Osio, who plays the principal part in Virginia's tragedy. He must have been a young man of distinguished appearance; for when Virginia first set eyes upon him from a window overlooking his grounds, she exclaimed: 'Is it possible that one could ever gaze on anything more beautiful?' He attracted her notice as early as the year 1599 or 1600, under circumstances not very favorable to the plan he had in view. His hands were red with the blood of Virginia's bailiff, Giuseppe Molteno, whom he had murdered for some cause unknown to us. During their first interview (Virginia leaning from the window of her friend Candida's cell, and Osio standing on his garden-plot beneath), the young man courteously excused himself for this act of violence, adding that he would serve her even more devotedly than the dead Molteno, and begging to be allowed to write her a letter. When the letter came, it was couched in terms expressive of a lawless passion. Virginia's noble blood rebelled against the insult, and she sent an answer back, rebuffing her audacious suitor. The go-betweens in the correspondence which ensued were the two nuns, Ottavia and Benedetta, and a certain Giuseppe Pesen, who served as letter-carrier. Osio did not allow himself to be discouraged by a first refusal, but took the hazardous step of opening his mind to the confessor of the convent, Paolo Arrigone, a priest of San Maurizio in Milan. Arrigone at once lent himself to the intrigue, and taught Osio what kind of letters he should write Virginia. They were to be courteous, respectful, blending pious rhetoric with mystical suggestions of romantic pas sion. It seems that the confessor composed these documents himself, and advised his fair penitent that there was no sin in perusing them. From correspondence, Osio next passed to interviews. By the aid of Arrigone he gained access to the parlor of the convent, where he conversed with Virginia through the bars. In their earlier meetings the lover did not venture beyond compliments and modest protestations of devotion. But as time went on, he advanced to kisses and caresses, and once he made Virginia take a little jewel into her mouth. This was a white loadstone, blessed by Arrigone, and intended to operate like a love-charm. The girl, in fact, began to feel the influence of her seducer. In the final confession which she made, she relates how she fought against temptation. 'Some diabolical force compelled me to go to the window overlooking his garden; and one day when Sister Ottavia told me that Osio was standing there, I fainted from the effort to restrain myself. This happened several times. At one moment I flew into a rage, and prayed to God to help me; at another I felt lifted from the ground, and forced to go and gaze on him. Sometimes when the fit was on me, I tore my hair; I even thought of killing myself.' Virginia was surrounded by persons who had an interest in helping Osio. Not only the confessor, who was a man of infamous character, but her friends among the nuns, themselves accustomed to intrigue of a like nature, led her down the path to ruin. False keys were made, and one or other of the faithless sisters introduced the young man into the convent at night. When Virginia resisted, and enlarged upon the sacrilege of breaking cloister, Arrigone supplied her with a printed book of casuistry, in which it was written that though it might be sinful for a nun to leave her convent, there was no sin in a man entering it. At last she fell; and for seven years she lived in close intimacy with her lover, passing the nights with him, either in his own house or in one of the cells of S. Margherita. On one occasion, when he had to fly from justice, the girls concealed him in their rooms for fifteen days. The first fruit of this amour was a stillborn child; after giving birth to which, Virginia sold all the silver she possessed, and sent a votive tablet to Our Lady of Loreto, on which she had portrayed a nun and baby, kneeling and weeping. 'Twice again I sent the same memorial to our Lady, imploring the grace of liberation from this passion. But the sorceries with which I was surrounded, prevailed. In my bed were found the bones of the dead, hooks of iron, and many other things, of which the nuns were well informed. Nay, I would fain have given up my life to save my soul; and so great were my afflictions, that in despair I went to throw myself into the well, but was restrained by the image of the Virgin at the bottom of the garden, for which I had a special devotion.' In course of time she gave birth to a little girl, named Francesca, who frequented the convent, and whom Osio legitimated as his child.

It was impossible that a connection of long standing, known to several accomplices, and corroborated by the presence of the child Francesca, should remain hidden from the world. People began to speak about the fact in Monza. A druggist, named Reinaro Soncini, gossiped somewhat too openly. Osio had him shot one night by a servant in his pay.

And now the lovers were engaged in a career of crime, which brought them finally to justice. Virginia's waiting-woman Caterina fell into disgrace with her mistress, and was shut up in a kind of prison by her orders. The girl declared that she would bring the whole bad affair before the superior authorities, and would do so immediately, seeing that Monsignor Barca, the Visitor of S. Margherita, was about to make one of his official tours of inspection.

This threat cost Caterina her life. About midnight, while a thunder-storm was raging, Virginia, accompanied by her usual associates, Ottavia, Benedetta, Silvia, and Candida, entered the room where the girl was confined. They were followed by Osio, holding in his hand a heavy instrument of wood and iron, called piede di bicocca, which he had snatched up in the convent outhouse. He found Caterina lying face downward on the bed, and smashed her skull with a single blow. The body was conveyed by him and the nuns into the fowl-house of the sisters, whence he removed it on the following night by the aid of Benedetta into his own dwelling. From evidence which afterwards transpired, Osio decapitated the corpse, concealed the body in a sort of cellar, and flung the head into an empty well at Velate.

The disappearance of Caterina just before the visitation of Monsignor Barca, roused suspicion; and, though a murder was not immediately apprehended, the guilty associates felt that the cord of fate was being drawn around them. In the autumn of 1607 the tempest broke upon their heads. Virginia was removed from Monza to the convent called Del Bocchetto at Milan; and on November 27 the depositions of the abbess, prioress, and other members of S. Margherita were taken regarding Osio's intrigues, the assassination of Soncini, and the disappearance of Caterina.

Among the nuns who had abetted Osio, the two most criminally implicated were Ottavia and Benedetta. Their evidence, if closely scrutinized, must reveal each secret of the past. It was much to Osio's interest, therefore, that they should not fall into the hands of justice; nor had he any difficulty in persuading them to rely on his assistance for contriving their escape to some convent in the Bergamasque territory. We may wonder, by the way, what sort of discipline was then maintained in nunneries, if two so guilty sisters counted upon safe entrance into an asylum, provided only they could leave the diocese of Milan for another.[190] On the night of Thursday, November 30, 1607, Osio came to the wall of the convent garden, and began to break a hole in it, through which Ottavia and Benedetta crept. The three then prowled along the city wall of Monza, till they found a breach wide enough for exit. Afterwards they took a path beside the river Lambro, and stopped for awhile at the church of the Madonna delle Grazie. Here the sisters prayed for assistance from our Lady in their journey, and recited the Salve Regina seven times. Then they resumed their walk along the Lambro, and at a certain point Ottavia fell into the river. In her dying depositions she accused Osio of having pushed her in; and there seems little doubt that he did so; for while she was struggling in the water, he disengaged his harquebuss from his mantle and struck her several blows upon the head and hands.

She pretended to be dead, and was carried down the stream to a place where she contrived to crawl to land. Some peasants came by, whose assistance she implored. But they, observing that she was a nun of S. Margherita by her dress, refused to house her for the rest of the night. They gave her a staff to lean on, and after a painful journey she regained the church of the Grazie at early dawn. Ottavia's wounds upon the head, face, and right hand, inflicted by the stock of Osio's gun, were so serious that after making a clean breast to her judges, she died of them upon December 26, 1607.

When Osio had pushed Ottavia into the Lambro, and had tried to smash her brains out with his harquebuss, he resumed his midnight journey with Sister Benedetta. They reached an uninhabited house in the country about five or six miles distant from Monza. Here Osio shut Benedetta up in an empty room with a stone bench running along the wall. She remained there all Friday, visited once by her dreaded companion, who brought her bread, cheese, and wine. She abstained from touching any of this food, in fear of poison. About nine in the evening he returned, and bade her prepare to march. They set out again, together, in the dark; and after walking about three miles they came to a well, down which Osio threw her. The well was deep, and had no water in it. Benedetta injured her left side in the fall; and when she had reached the bottom, her would-be murderer flung a big stone on her which broke her right leg. She contrived to protect her head by gathering stones around it, and lay without moaning or moving, in the fear that Osio would attempt fresh violence unless he thought her dead. From the middle of Friday night, until Sunday morning, she remained thus, exploring with her eyes the surface of her dungeon. It was dry and strewn with bones. In one corner lay a round black object which bore the aspect of a human skull. As it eventually turned out, this was the head of Caterina, whom Benedetta herself had helped to murder, and which Osio had thrown there. On Sunday, during Mass, the men of the village of Velate were in church, when they heard a voice from outside calling out, 'Help, help! I am at the bottom of this well!' The well, as it happened, was distant some dozen paces from the church door, and Benedetta had timed her call for assistance at a lucky moment. The villagers ran to the spot, and drew her out by means of a man who went down with a rope. She was then taken to the house of a gentleman, Signor Alberico degli Alberici, who, when no one else was charitable enough to receive her, opened his doors to the exhausted victim of that murderous outrage. It may be remarked that the same surgeon who had been employed to report on Ottavia's wounds, now appeared to examine Benedetta. His name was Ambrogio Vimercati. Benedetta was taken to the convent of S. Orsola, where her friend Ottavia lay dying; and after making a full confession, she eventually recovered her health, and suffered life-long incarceration in her old convent.

Osio was still at large. On December 20, he addressed a long letter to the Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, in which he vainly attempted to defend himself, and throw the blame on his associates. It is a loathsome document, blending fulsome protestations and fawning phrases, with brutal denouncements of his victims, and treacherous insinuations. One passage deserves notice. 'Who was it,' he says, 'who suggested my correspondence with Virginia? The priest Paolo Arrigone, that ruin of the monastery! The Canon Pisnato, who is now confessor to the nuns of Meda; in his house you will find what will never be discovered in mine, presents from nuns, incitements to amours, and other such things. The priest Giacomo Bertola, confessor of the nuns of S. Margherita; who was his devotee? Sacha!—and he stayed there all the day through. These men, being priests, are not prosecuted; they are protected by their cloth, forsooth! It is only of poor Osio that folk talk. Only he is persecuted, only he is a malefactor, only he is the traitor!' Arrigone, as a matter of fact, was tried, and condemned to two years' labor at the galleys, after the expiration of which term he was not to return to Monza or its territory. This seems a slight sentence; for the judges found him guilty, not only of promoting Osio's intrigue with Virginia, by conducting the correspondence, and watching the door during their interviews in the parlor, but also of pursuing the Signora himself with infamous proposals.

In his absence Osio was condemned to death on the gibbet. His goods were confiscated to the State. His house in Monza was destroyed, and a pillar of infamy recording his crimes, was erected on its site. A proclamation of outlawry was issued on April 5, 1608, under the seal of Don Pietro de Acevedo, Count of Fuentes, and governor of the State of Milan, which offered 'to any person not himself an outlaw, or to any commune, that shall consign Gianpaolo Osio to the hands of justice, the reward of a thousand scudi from the royal ducal treasury, together with the right to free four bandits condemned for similar or less offenses; and in case of his being delivered dead, even though he shall be slain in foreign parts, then the half of the aforesaid sum of money, and the freedom of two bandits as above. And if the person who shall consign him alive be himself an outlaw for similar or less offenses, he shall receive, beside the freedom of himself and two other bandits, the half of the aforesaid sum of money; and in the case of his consignment after death, the freedom of himself and of two other bandits as aforesaid.' I have recited this Bando, because it is a good instance of the procedure in use under like conditions. Justice preferred to obtain the culprit alive, and desired to receive him at honest hands. But there was an expectation of getting hold of him through less reputable agents. Therefore they offered free pardon to a bandit and a couple of accomplices, who might undertake the capture or the murder of the proscribed outlaw in concert, and in the event of his being produced alive, a sum of money down. Osio, apparently, spent some years in exile, changing place, and name, and dress, living as he could from hand to mouth, until the rumor spread abroad that he was dead. He then returned to his country, and begged for sanctuary from an old friend. That friend betrayed him, had his throat cut in a cellar, and exposed his head upon the public market place.

Virginia was sentenced to perpetual incarceration in the convent of S. Valeria at Milan. She was to be 'inclosed within a little dungeon, the door of which shall be walled up with stones and mortar, so that the said Virginia Maria shall abide there for the term of her natural life, immured both day and night, never to issue thence, but shall receive food and other necessaries through a small hole in the wall of the said chamber, and light and air through an aperture or other opening.' This sentence was carried into effect. But at the expiration of many years, her behavior justified some mitigation of the penalty. She was set at large, and allowed to occupy a more wholesome apartment, where the charity of Cardinal Borromeo supplied her with comforts befitting her station, and the reputation she acquired for sanctity. Her own family cherished implacable sentiments of resentment against the woman who had brought disgrace upon them. Ripamonte, the historian of Milan, says that in his own time she was still alive: 'a bent old woman, tall of stature, dried and fleshless, but venerable in her aspect, whom no one could believe to have been once a charming and immodest beauty.' Her associates in guilt, the nuns of S. Margherita, were consigned to punishments resembling hers. Sisters Benedetta, Silvia and Candida suffered the same close incarceration.