The celebrated historian Francesco Guicciardini, nephew to Niccolò, was born in 1482. At twenty-three he was already so able a lawyer that the Signoria appointed him to read the Institutes in public; he then began to practise at the bar and his reputation for eloquence, acumen and gravity, obtained him the post of ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic of Aragon, from whom his enemies say he accepted a bribe. “Certain it is,” writes Symonds, “that avarice was one of his besetting sins, and that from this time forward he preferred expediency to justice, and believed in the policy of supporting force by clever dissimulation.” In 1513 Leo X. came to Florence, and discerning the ability of Francesco Guicciardini appointed him Governor of Reggio and Modena, to which Parma was added in 1521. Two years later Clement VII. made him Viceroy of the Romagna, and in 1527 Lieutenant-General of the Papal army with supreme authority. This, Passerini declares, was the chief cause of the sack of Rome and the imprisonment of the Pope, the Duke of Urbino disdaining to take orders from a mere lawyer. In the same year he fruitlessly strove to uphold the Medicean cause in Florence, only incurring the hatred of his fellow-citizens and the bitter reproaches of the Pope, who accused him of want of energy. Retiring to his villa near Arcetri he began his famous History, but alarmed at the aspect of things in Florence, he fled to Rome in 1529 and was declared a rebel. Three years later he returned as one of the twelve magistrates who “reformed” the city according to the commands of Clement VII. and the Emperor, “when,” as Varchi tells us, “Messer Francesco Guicciardini was more cruel and more ferocious than the others” [in punishing and proscribing the anti-Palleschi citizens]. He was elected to the Senate of the Eighty, and undertook to defend the cause of the Duke Alessandro de’ Medici before Charles V. at Naples, “which he did with such ardour,” writes Bernardo Segni, “confuting the accusations one by one with such contempt ... that the exiles styled him Messer Cerrettieri.”[42] He won the cause and Alessandro returned to Florence as absolute ruler. After the murder of the Duke, Guicciardini thought that the young Cosimo would be easily led, and supported his candidature to the throne with all his might. But for once the astute lawyer had misjudged his man. Cosimo I. made him understand that his advice was not wanted and that he intended to be sole master in Florence, and Pitti writes: “when the Duke Cosimo dismissed him together with certain of his colleagues his rage was great.... Astonished and deeply hurt he retired to his villa of Sta. Margarita at Arcetri where, carried away by anger, he re-wrote much of his History to prove that he did not belong to the sect of the Palleschi; and where he could, he attempted to show that he was but an instrument of the Republic.”[43] He spent the last year of his life in