Our authorities, barren of interest for the domestic life of Duke Francesco Maria,[*47] are altogether a blank as regards his children, and we know nothing of the Prince beyond the fact of his sharing his mother's virtual arrest at Venice in 1527. His early tastes seemed to have turned upon horses: in 1529, he ordered from Rome a set of housings for his charger, with minute instructions accompanying the pattern; ten years later, the Grand Duke Cosimo I. regretted his inability to find for him such horses as he had desired; and he appears to have paid 70 golden scudi for one from Naples. In 1843, I was shown, at Pesaro, the wooden model of a beautiful little Arab, which had long been preserved in the Giordani family, covered with the skin of his favourite charger, a fragment of which remained. We have seen Guidobaldo complimented by Clement VII. in 1529, and in that year he had a condotta from Venice, for seventy-five men-at-arms, and a hundred and fifty light horse, with 1000 ducats of pay for himself, 100 for each man-at-arms, and 50 for each horseman. In 1532, his father, on departing from Lombardy, left him regent of the duchy. The circumstances of his marriage, on the 12th of October, 1534, to Giulia Varana, then but eleven years of age, and her questionable succession to her paternal state of Camerino, have been fully detailed in our preceding chapter.[48] From 1534 till his father's death, in 1538, he seems to have exercised the rights of sovereignty, with the title of Duke of Camerino, unchallenged by the Pontiff, who had recalled his censures. But no sooner was Paul III. relieved from the influential opposition of Francesco Maria, than his designs upon that principality were firmly carried out. [Footnote *47: For certain details of Court life, cf. VERNARECCI, _Di alcune rappresentazioni Drammatiche nella Corte di Urbino_ in _Arch. St. per le Marche e per l'Umbria_, vol. III., p. 181 _et seq._, and ROSSI, _Appunti per la Storia della Musica alla Corte di Francesco Maria I. e di Guidobaldo della Rovere_ in _Rassegna Emiliana_ (Modena, 1888), vol. I., fasc. 8; also VANZOLINI, _Musica e Danza alla Corte di Urbino_, in _Le Marche_ (1904), An. iv., fasc. vi., p. 325 _et seq._] [Footnote 48: In the Harleian MSS. No. 282, f. 63, is a letter from Henry VIII. of 28th November, in his 30th year [1538], to Sir Thomas Wyatt, his ambassador to the Emperor, proposing a marriage of the Princess Mary either to the young Duke of Cleves and Juliers, or to "the present Duke of Urbyne," and desiring him to sound "whether he wold be gladd to have us to wyve with any of them." Guidobaldo had been already wedded for four years!] [Illustration: GUIDOBALDO II., DUKE OF URBINO _From a picture in the Albani Palace in Rome_]