Then the question of motives must be taken into consideration; and it must be seen at once that the reasons Ferdinando had for wishing Bianca removed were of the very strongest nature. For the last ten years and more, she had been a constant thorn in his side, the ever recurring difficulty in all his schemes for aggrandising the family, the wreck of all his strivings for the support of the decorum and respectability of the Medicean name, and the ground of discord and hatred between him and his brother. She had made the Grand Duke the laughing–stock of Italy, and odious as well as contemptible to his own subjects. Her blood–stained practising had succeeded in foisting one base–born plebeian of alien blood into the family. She was continually attempting still worse frauds to wrong him of his birthright; and though by the exertion of extreme vigilance her schemes had been hitherto foiled, what possible security, short of her death, could be had against the success of future attempts of the same sort. A De Medici, and a sixteenth century Cardinal may well have persuaded himself that he was justified under the circumstances, in adopting the only possible means of providing against such treason, pregnant with such results. But his brother? Can it be shown that Ferdinando had sufficient motive to wish his brother's death, as to favour the probability that he was his murderer? It can only be said, that there was old hate between them, constantly stimulated and embittered by fresh provocations of the most galling sort on the part of the elder brother; hate, made more dangerous by the necessity for carefully suppressing all manifestation of it for long years of self–restraining dissimulation; that from the manner in which Francesco had received the proposals of a second marriage after the death of his first wife, there was very little room to hope that Bianca's death would be followed by any marriage, which might put the prospects of the family on a satisfactory footing; that to have taken off Bianca and left her husband alive would have been an exceedingly dangerous step, for _then_ the inquiries, the suspicions, the post–mortem examinations, and the investigations, would, of course, have been of a very different sort, and, under the circumstances, very difficult to deal with; that, finally, last, though far from least, Ferdinando was a De Medici. [Sidenote: HER BURIAL.] That shrewd and sagacious old man, Pope Sixtus V., saw at once,[223] on hearing of what had happened, that suspicion of the double murder would fall on the Cardinal; and it may perhaps be said, without much chance of inaccuracy, that the balance of opinion among those most qualified to judge, has, in modern times, inclined in that direction.