1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [51]
"Indeed he is," said Urban, "and mildly embarrassing it is, too. However, handing over cardinals to secular princes for judgment is a precedent I do not wish to set. For now, at least, they do no more than bluster. Reasonably politely, as these things go. However, Father-General, you were suggesting that Borja might have turned Brutus?"
"I speculate only, Your Holiness. The most likely course of events remains that Borja seeks to disrupt the business of the See of Rome. Your Holiness will recall that Spain was most displeased that you stated that you were to take no further part in secular disputes in the Germanies. Since Olivares is sufficiently simpleminded to reason that he who is not with his king is against him, disruption of anything you might do in support of Protestant arms in those wars will be an obvious maneuver for him."
"But you still think there is a risk to Our person?"
"Inevitably. Your Holiness would not be the first pope to be arrested or even assassinated."
Barberini coughed politely. "If I might suggest that there is no need to plan against one eventuality exclusively? Your Holiness has guards, after all."
"Indeed," said Urban, beaming at Barberini as at a bright schoolboy who had mastered a basic point. "Not all assassination plots are as feeble-witted as Camillo's."
"Indeed not," Barberini agreed. Camillo had tried to kill the pope with sympathetic magic, sticking pins into a doll. He had been tried and found guilty and thoroughly laughed at.
"There is more, however," Vitelleschi said. "The Committee of Correspondence has become active in Rome. Quevedo is using them."
Barberini had heard about that, and could not suppress a chuckle. "So that was Quevedo?" Barberini was, technically, an Inquisition cardinal these days, and so received reports. "That young revolutionary whom Your Holiness ordered me to marry off to his inamorata was most incensed about the false broadsides that have begun to circulate in Rome. He had to be escorted out of San Mateo, I understand. He demanded an investigation and the perpetrators be punished. It, ah, was what brought those broadsides to the Holy Office's attention in the first place. There is some confusion as a result."
"Ha." Vitelleschi laughed for the second time in that meeting. Barberini began to wonder if the old Jesuit was not becoming addled in his old age: the man appeared to be in danger of developing a sense of humor. "Indeed it was Quevedo," he went on. "The printer he went to is one of our informants."
"And the substance of the printing?" Urban asked.
"A pastiche of revolutionary propaganda, anticlerical and rabble-rousing. Of a piece with the mobs he has been organizing, to whom his agents have claimed to represent the Committee," Vitelleschi answered.
"Even if it was the Committee," Urban said, "I doubt We have anything to fear from that direction. I have met most of them, and they seem quite ineffectual."
Barberini could see where it was going, however. "I would predict, Your Holiness, that within a few days Borja's tame preachers will be viewing all this with alarm from Rome's pulpits. It would not be the first time that more nefarious elements have used the Committees of Correspondence as a cat's-paw."
"My assessment also," said Vitelleschi. "However, almost certainly a pure distraction."
"How so?" Barberini asked. It had certainly seemed to him, and to his staff, that an accusation that the pontiff was not in control of Rome would be a serious stick with which to beat on His Holiness. Whatever could be turned to reducing the esteem in which the pope was held would be of use to Borja, if he truly wanted to cripple the papacy for a time, or even pending a new incumbent.
"While attention is elsewhere, more useful measures will be taken. It might also be of use in securing