Notwithstanding the execution of Boscoli and Capponi, another plot to assassinate the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici was discovered a few years later. A French courier was arrested in Florence, and although nothing of a treasonable nature was found upon him he was condemned to death. A police spy, dressed as a friar, was sent to hear his last confession, and learned that the wretched man had a letter, pieces of which were sewn in his cloak. The courier disappeared, and the letter went to the Cardinal. In the evening Jacopo Diaceto, already ill looked upon because he frequented the Rucellai gardens, where the Alamanni, Buondelmonti and others hostile to the Medicean rule met, was arrested. At the first turn of the rack he confessed everything, and answered every question. When at the point of death, Nardi tells us that the poor young fellow begged his confessor, in the hearing of the Black Brethren, to inform the judges that he had been driven by fearful torture to inculpate Tommaso Soderini, who was innocent. The poet Luigi Alamanni was at his villa near Figline, and a friend took horse and rode hard to warn him of his danger. He got away to Urbino, but his cousin and namesake, who was at Arezzo, was seized, brought to Florence and beheaded, together with Jacopo Diaceto, in the courtyard of the Bargello on 7th June, 1522. Zanobi Buondelmonti escaped, thanks to his wife’s presence of mind (see p. 59). During the siege of Florence in 1529, Vasari says, “On the feast of the Resurrection portraits of three citizens were uncovered on the façade of the palace of the Podestà; Alessandro di Gherardo Corsini, in mantle and hood; Taddeo di Francesco Guiducci, blind of one eye, in like dress; and Giorgio Ridolfi, hung by the leg; and the name of each was written below, with TRAITOR TO HIS COUNTRY added in capital letters.”[71] After the surrender of the city these were whitewashed over; only the portraits of the Duke of Athens, of his followers, and of Giovanni Bonaccorso, were left as a warning to all tyrants and traitors.