BLOODY JACK Chapter Eight

I can name the year the British Empire was truly achieved. It was 1825, while England was still paying off the debts incurred from the America War of 1812 and the Napoleonic Wars. In the face of such a dramatic loss of income, the British government invested in their own future, creating the public/private corporations that built and operated the London Docks – in the shadow of the Tower of London, in Wapping, St. Katherine's Docks, and further east, across Nightingale Lane, the London Docks, and on the Isle of Dogs, the Albert and the East India Docks. The initial cost of the smaller St. Katherine's Docks alone was over £1,000,000. But the return was an economic engine that supercharged the industrial revolution, and insured a British empire, and private British fortunes for the next one hundred years.

In 1827- 28, 1,250 houses and tenements covering 24 acres in Wapping were bought and torn down. In their place was built an artificial harbor with 4 miles of quays which could load or unload 26 ships at once, directly into or from 6 story warehouses. The unloading time was cut from 3 days to just 12 hours. And by the late 1880's the Blackwell railroad sped the dispersal of cargoes to and from every town in England, Wales and Scotland. The St. Katherine's docks specialized in the import and export of 19^th Century luxury items - wine, wool, ivory, rubber, china, sugar, marble, spices, perfume, hops, indigo, coal and tea. And the Albert and East India docks were even bigger, covering 800 acres.

But as is usual in capitalism, profits proved addictive. By 1887, even while the warehouse space leased by private companies bulged with cargoes and their profits soared, the St. Katherine Dock corporation itself was almost bankrupt, maintenance and staff levels were cut, and salaries for the 1,700 day laborers remained stagnant. What happened next was predictable. Shortly before 9:00 p.m. on the chilly rainy Thursday, 30 August, 1888, a fire broke out in the huge South Quay warehouse of the East India docks - 6 floors high, 150 yards long by 75 yards wide - with cotton stored on the upper floors, kegs of gin and brandy below.

The rainstorm did nothing to slow the flames because they were inside the building. Alarms called in 12 steam powered water pumps and over 70 firemen, but they could only contain the flames to that single structure. A verbose reporter described the conflagration as, “lurid flames of gigantic volume, rising high against a canopy of fantastic clouds and throwing the tapering masts into clear relief until they and their rigging looked like fairy cobwebs, illuminated by a strange, unearthly light. The effect was grand...” Not until midnight did the flames begin to die down.

And just as the South Quay fire finally seemed to be dying, another fire broke out at the Ratcliff Dry dock, where the 843 ton, 191 foot long Steam Ship Cornavia was under construction. The ship was saved, but the flames quickly spread to the 2 story Gowland warehouse filled with 800 tons of coal. By 2:00 a.m. this conflagration was being fought by 14 pumps, two firefighting boats and over 100 firemen. In classic British understatement, the “Chemical Trade Journal” predicted, “The loss will be enormous.”

It seems strange that on such a rainy night, two such serious fires should break out in the London docks, one right after the other but so separated in space. Perhaps they were ignited by lightning strikes. Or sparked by fires lit to keep workers warm. Or perhaps they were an act of sabotage, by competitors, or by owners seeking insurance settlements to save their fortunes. Or perhaps they were desperate angry acts by workers, paid little better than starvation wages. But whatever the cause, a large crowd had gathered at the gates to the docks to enjoy the free show. And those masses attracted street hawkers selling food and gin and beer, and prostitutes selling their wares, and pickpockets making their fortunes.

Among the crowd enjoying the light show was Emily “Nelly” Holland, described as “an elderly woman with a naturally pale face.” She was, in fact, only about 50 years old. After 2:00  that morning of Friday, 31 August, 1888,  40 year old Emily – aka Jane Oram - was returning to the room she shared with four other women in a private doss, the Wilmont Lodging House, at 18 Thrall Street (above) . It was a street so crowded with rundown slum rooming houses it was sometimes called “doss street”. There, said a contemporary writer, “...robberies and scenes of violence are of common occurrence... Thieves, loose women, and bad characters abound... (a place even) a constable will avoid...unless accompanied by a brother officer.” But it was refuge of reasonable safety to Emily Holland - a roof, a shared kitchen and a shared bed.

As Emily came up Whitechapel Road, passing the "White Chapel" of St. Mary's, and crossing Osborn Street (above), she saw a woman she had first met in the Lambeth Workhouse. 

Of the perhaps 6,000 prostitutes – young and old, full and part time – in all of London, there were only 150 infirmary beds set aside for women in poverty suffering from venereal diseases. Lambeth was the borough located just across the Thames from the City of London, and the pious Christian Victorian citizens of The City did not want to encourage sin by treating the disease ravaged bodies of these “fallen women”. The majority of women in Lambert were not there to be treated for VD. But it was one of the few sources of treatment for the common infection. And it was in the Lambeth Workhouse where Emily Holland first met the woman she knew as Polly Nichols, and Polly Nichols had been transferred to Lambert three separate times.

The two alcoholics were friendly, and for three weeks Polly even shared a bed with Emily at the Wilmont Lodging House. Emily liked Polly, and considered her "a very clean woman who always seemed to keep to herself",  the perfect friend for another alcoholic.  But a week ago Polly had abruptly left, moving to the White House doss at 56 Flower and Dean Street (above), where men and women were permitted to share beds for the night - meaning a woman without the full 4 pence for a bed could exchange the use of her body for a few moments, for a place to sleep for the entire night. Emily never explained Polly's sudden decent another step down the social ladder. But seeing the diminutive Polly this damp chilly morning, “very much the worse for drink, falling against a wall” Emily clearly felt sympathy.

Polly was leaning against the wall of a grocery store just down from the corner,  on Osborne street,

and she greeted Emily cheerfully. She explained she had just been tossed out of the White House doss because she did have the half price - 2 pence - required to share a man's bed. Emily urged Polly to come spend the night with her at Thrall Street, but Polly refused, insisting she had already earned her doss three times that evening. But she had either spent it on gin, or the gangs which infested Whitechapel had stolen the money from her.  She would earn it again, she insisted, easily. And Emily could have had no doubt that she could. Then their conversation came to an abrupt halt while the bell of St. Mary's Matfellon Church on the south side of Whitechapel Road tolled the 2 o'clock half hour.

There was something about Polly Nichols (above) which inspired many people to want to to protect her. She was small - just 5 foot tall - and pretty in life, even after delivering 5 children, and a decades long addiction to alcohol which had reduced her to sleeping on the pavement of Trafalgar Square for months at a time. A childhood fall had left her with a scar across her forehead, but through it all she retained a cheerful and positive personality, sneering at the obstacles she thew up for herself. But like all alcoholics, Polly seemed to be harboring a secret, that she could share with no one, that she daily sacrificed to keep and protect. In truth there was no secret. Alcoholism is an addiction, not a romantic moral failing, not something tragedy inspired. It is a physical condition like diabetes, or asthma. And offering to protect Polly, merely drove her to run away faster.

Once St. Mary's bell stopped, Polly was anxious to be on her way, despite their having talked with Emily for only six or seven minutes. In a line she used to smooth her exits, she assured Emily that her new bonnet would attract a customer. And as she staggered off up Whitechapel Road, she told Emily, "It won't be long before I'm back."

Polly Nichols was wrong. She would be dead on her back in Buck's Row within an hour, her throat cut twice and then disemboweled and left abandoned like a bit of trash, to be discovered first by two self absorbed lorry drivers, and then by a 33 year old Metropolitan Police Constable from County Cork, assigned to the Bethel Green “J” Division – PC 97J, John Neil, who would luckily be spared the worst of the horrors of his discovery.

- 30 -

THE FIRST DAY Chapter Seven

I think some of the 300 troopers saw the danger. But momentum carried them up the narrow road and into the blind curve, past the 2 story farmhouse of Mr. Dallas Furr on the left, past the low stone wall on the right where some of the killers crouched, to the top of the rise and into the killing zone. In the time it takes to draw a breath 2,000 Virginians rose and fired a single murderous volley, from front and rear, punctuated by a point blank cannon blast of grapeshot. In the words of the First Massachusetts regimental history, “In a moment the road was full of dead and dying horses and men, piled up in an inextricable mass....All who were not killed were captured,” says the history, “except a very few...in the rear of the squadron.” Those few survived. But they never forgot the bloody ambush at Aldie, Virginia.

Just after midnight of Wednesday, 17 June, 1863, “Fighting Joe” Hooker passed on some of the heat he had been getting from Washington to his cavalry corps commander, Brigadier General Alfred Pleasonton (above). Hooker's orders were brutal. “The Commanding General relies upon you...to give him information of where the enemy is...Drive in (their) pickets, if necessary and get us information. It is better that we should lose men than to be without knowledge of the enemy.” 

Fired with this new urgency, at 3:00 a.m. Pleasanton dispatched 30 year old, 6 foot 1 inch Brigadier General David McMurtrie Gregg (above) to take his 2^nd cavalry division and occupy the “quaint and picturesque” village of Aldie.

The Federal stupidity at Winchester allowed Robert E. Lee to gamble. He ordered Longstreet's First Corps not to follow Ewell's safer road through the Chester Gap and into the Shenandoah Valley, but to take the quicker route, east of the Blue Ridge, and be quick about it. It was a blazing hot Tuesday, 16 June, 1863, when the First Crops' of the Army of Northern Virginia,  21,000 men,  set out on a 12 hour quick-step march. Choking on their own dust clouds, over 500 rebels dropped from heat exhaustion. But by dark the First Corps had covered almost 30 miles, and the advance had reached the town of Upton, Virginia, almost at the mouth of Ashby's Gap. And with that forced march a village 40 miles away, on the east side of the Loudoun Valley, became, briefly, a place men would die to posses.

At just about 10:00 on the hot, humid morning of 17 June, Major General J.E.B. Stuart (above) and his staff rode into the village of Middleburg, in the center of the Loudoun Valley. 

Closely following were 5 Virginia cavalry regiments, commanded by Col. Thomas Munford (above) and supported by Captain James Breathed's battery of 5, 3 inch rifled horse artillery. 

Stuart was under orders to blind the Yankees to Longstreet's march. So about noon, after allowing the troopers and horses 2 hours to cool down and water, Stuart dispatched the Virginians 5 miles further eastward to plug the Aldie gap in the rolling Bull Run Mountains.

 Munford held the 1^st and 3^rd Virginia regiments about a mile west of the pass as his reserve, and to collect forage for the brigade's horses. The 2^nd and 4^th regiments took the Carter's Bridge cutoff – now the Cobbs House Road - to reach the Snickersville Turnpike north of Aldie (above). 

 The 5^th Virginia regiment continued through the pass alongside the Small River and arrived in the little village of 145 souls about 2:30 that afternoon, just as the Federal Cavalry Brigade of Colonel Judson Kilpatrick appeared through the heat shimmers.

Killpatrick (above) had 1,200 troopers under his command – first in line was the 2^nd New York, followed by the 6^th Ohio, the 1^st Massachusetts and then the 4^th New York volunteer cavalry. An hour behind was the Second Brigade, commanded by the Division commander's cousin, Colonel “Long John” Irvin Greeg, leading the 1^st Maine and 4^th Pennsylvania volunteer regiments. A collision was not only inevitable, it was just what Colonel Judson “Kil-cavalry” was looking for.

The New York boys chased the rebels out of Aldie. Then rebel Colonel Thomas Rosser brought his Virginians in force and chased the Yankees back down the pike. 

In response the 6^th Ohio went into formation, and together the 2 Federal regiments drove the 5^th Virginia back beyond the road junction with the Snickersville Pike, thus opening up both roads for a Federal advance. Killpatrick had his 2 leading regiments dismount to defend the Ashby Pike, and sent the Massachusetts and 4^th New York boys up the Snickersville pike, to outflank the Virginians.

The Massachusetts troopers skirmished with the 2^nd and 4^th Virginian until about 3:30, slowly driving the rebels back to their main line of defense, the hilltop stone fences and house of the Furr family farm. Colonel Munford, who personally organized the defenses on the hilltop, said, “I doubt if there was a stronger position in fifty miles of Aldie than the one I had.” South of the Furr house, across the fields, Companies E and G of the 1^st Massachusetts formed in column of fours and charged straight up the turnpike, with the 4^th New York attacking across the fields. As the temperature topped 94 degrees Fahrenheit, those on the road quickly outpaced the New Yorkers crossing the fields.

When rebel Sargent George Brooke and his fellow Virginians stood and fired,  he was so close he could see the dust fly off the blue jackets of the Massachusetts boys, as rounds from nearly 2,000 carbines and revolvers penetrated. It was impossible to miss. 

On the other side, Corporal John Weston wrote his sister, “We were flanked on the right and left...firing into us a perfect hail of bullets. Let me turn my head which way I would, it was horses and men falling..."

"The road was narrow...all blocked up with wounded horses with their legs broken, kicking and floundering among men and horses dead and dying. If a wounded man fell among them there was not much chance for him. I can't see for my life how any of our squadron got out..” Few did. The slaughter was memorable even to men in their third year of war.

 

Piled high at the blind curve were the bodies of 24 officers and men, 42 wounded and another 88 unable to escape before being taken prisoner. On the Rebel side, Colonel Munford would later write, “I have never seen as many Yankees killed in the same space of ground...on any battlefield in Virginia that I have been over.” A Federal doctor was more succinct, calling the fight at Aldie, “by far the most bloody cavalry battle of the war.” Another rebel officer noted, “I had never known the enemy’s cavalry to fight so stubbornly or act so recklessly, nor have I ever known them to pay so dearly for it.”

The lead elements of Colonel Gregg's 2^nd Battalion, the First Maine cavalry, arrived to stabilize the Federal line, and by evening the Confederate troopers were forced to withdraw from the Aldie pass and fall back toward Middleburg, where they discovered an understrength Yankee Rhode Island regiment had captured the town in a rush, almost taking Stuart and his entire staff prisoners. Then the Islanders had grimly held on until relieved by the General Gregg's division, after dark.

The opposing cavalry spent Thursday, 18 June, pushing each other into and out of Middleburg. But by the end of the day, General Pleasanton's gathering cavalry corps had pushed westward, closer to the masking Blue Ridge. Pleasanton still didn't know what Stuart's troopers were fighting so hard to protect. And the only way he could find out was to keep pushing up the Ashby's Gap Pike until he could break through. But that made Stuart's job relatively easy – keep throwing fresh units in front of Pleasanton, to slow him down and cost him men. As night fell, a thunderstorm crashed over the Loudoun Valley, and rained into the morning of Friday, turning the unimproved roads and fields into quagmires.

Behind the cavalry screen, the unimpeded rebel march north continued. On Friday, 20 June, A.P. Hill's corps began crossing the Potomac River further downstream from Williamsport, where General “Baldy” Ewell's men were still striping the Maryland countryside of food and horses.

But the aggression of Pleasanton's horsemen had convinced Lee to hold some infantry back in the Shenandoah Valley, blocking Ashby's Gap and, 14 miles to the north, Snickersville Gap, through the Blue Ridge. And the units Lee picked to slow down and provide the blocking force were the 21,000 men commanded by his “Old War Horse”, Lieutenant General James Longstreet.

There were good reasons for the choice. Lee trusted Longstreet (above) to use his men wisely, avoiding a bigger fight than was absolutely necessary. And, after the forced march of 16 June, Longstreet's men could use a day or two of rest. But there might be other less laudable reasons for Lee to make “Old Pete” last in line for the invasion. Just a month ago Longstreet had urged the Confederate government to dismember Lee's Army of Northern Virginia,. That would also free Longstreet from Lee''s authority. And he had forced Lee to negotiate to win the argument.  It also seems likely to me that Lee had begun to worry that “Pete” Longstreet might be too cautious once over the Potomac. The "Grey Knight" had no doubt that Longstreet would follow orders, but all orders are subject to interpretation. And subsequent events would seem to prove Lee right to worry. So the First Corps was held back to guard the passes through the Blue Ridge. Longstreet, the most experienced corps commander in Lee's army was thus last in, with the Division of Brigadier General George Picket as their tail-end-Charley

While the Massachusetts cavalry were bleeding that Wednesday, 17 June, Major General Joseph Hooker (above), commander of the Army of the Potomac, had worked himself into a new panic. He telegraphed his boss, General Halleck, “All my cavalry are out, and I have deemed it prudent to suspend any farther advance of the infantry until I have information that the enemy are in force in the Shenandoah Valley. I have just received dispatches from Pleasonton...He ran against...(rebel cavalry) near Aldie, and...it is further reported that there is no infantry on this side of the Blue Ridge...All my cavalry are out. Has it ever suggested itself to you that this cavalry raid may be a cover to Lee's re-enforcing Bragg or moving troops to the West?”

It was a most desperate fantasy - that Lee could slip away and vex and embarrass some other union general rather than General Hooker.  General-in-Chief Henry Halleck (above) deflated that balloon with a telegram on Thursday, 18 June, “Officers and citizens...are asking me why does not General Hooker tell (us) where Lee's army is; he is nearest to it... I only hope for positive information from your front.” 

 Halleck's missive crossed with Hooker's (above) latest fevered paranoia - “I would request that signal officers be established at Crampton's Pass and South Mountain (in Maryland).” He had returned to his obsession with those isolated and under strength commands outside his control. By noon on Friday, 19 June, Hooker was again demanding that he be given authority over the few infantry and cavalry at Harpers Ferry and in the Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania “I have asked...for information as to the location, character, and number of their commands. Please direct it to be furnished....Are orders for these commands to be given by me where I deem it necessary?”

During all of this fevered mental activity The Army of the Potomac – the 85,000 effectives that Hooker was actually responsible for - had been slowly shuffling north. The 12^th crops under Major General Slocum was at Leesburg, Virginia, the 11^th under General Howard was just south of there, the 5^th Corps under General Meade was at Aldie, the First Crops under General Reynolds was camped around Herndon Station, the 3^rd Corps under General Birney was at Gum Spring, the 2^nd Corps under General Hancock was at Centerville, and the 6^th crops commanded by Major General Sedgwick was at Germantown, Virginia. So both armies were on the move. But Hooker remained convinced that the Army of Northern Virginia had not yet crossed over the Potomac in force

And then, on the afternoon of Saturday, 19 June, General Hooker (above) asked his boss, “ Do you give credit to the reported movements of the enemy as stated in the Chronicle, of this morning?” Halleck forced himself to wait an hour before he responded. “I do not know to what particular statement in the Chronicle you refer. There are several which are contradictory. It now looks very much as if Lee had been trying to draw your right across the Potomac, so as to attack your left. But...it is impossible to judge until we know where Lee's army is. No large body has appeared either in Maryland or Western Virginia.”

Lee had stolen a week's march on Hooker. On Saturday, 19 June, he already had 1/3^rd of his infantry across the Potomac, with another third about to cross. And Hooker remained confused and bewildered. It was not until late on Sunday, 20 June,  that things clarified for Hooker, and it was the sacrifices of the cavalry which finally pierced the fog at Hookers headquarters. At 5:30 that evening he notified Washington, “Infantry soldiers captured report...that Longstreet's rear passed through the Blue Ridge yesterday. I have directed a bridge to be laid at Edwards Ferry to-night.” Hooker was finally following Lee north of the Potomac River.

- 30 -

EASTER SERVICE Part One

I believe the bloody Easter Sunday murder in a crowded Tuscany church was set in motion twenty-five years earlier, in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman empire. The loss of Byzantine middle men tripled the price Christians had to pay for a volcanic rock called alunite, used in tanning animal skins and fixing dyes into cloth. The resulting inflation threatened to blow up the entire European economy. So the Catholic church was over joyed when eight years later, a huge source of alunite was discovered in the Tolfa Mountains, just 50 miles north of Rome. Pope Pius II quickly annexed the mountainous region into his own Papal States, and immediately leased the mineral rights to the people who could pay him the most, the Vatican bankers, the House of Medici.

It was Cosimo de Medici who firmly established the family fortune by courting members of the 51 guilds who held the public political power in the Republic of Florence; The Guild of Wool, the Guild of Silk, The Guild of Doctors and Apothecaries, the Guild of Ferrirers and Skinners, Masters of Stone and Wood, etc. But behind the scenes Cosimo actually controlled the city by following a simple motto: “Envy is a plant you must not water.” As his biggest fan Niccolo Macchiavelli noted, “Never did he exceed the modest behavior of a citizen.” What others in Florence spent on personal luxury, guards and body armor, Cosimo de Medici spent on charity and bribes and gifts of public art by Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli. He depended on the loyalty and the self interest of the guilds and masses to support and protect his family's massive fortune.

But when Cosimo's grandson, Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, became head of the family in 1469, the empire seemed in decline. In five short years Lorenzo's father Piero the Gouty, had emptied the family coffers of the modern equivalent of $460 million. True, along with his younger brother Giuliano, Lorenzo still guided a sprawling financial empire, with bank branches in Rome, Florence, Pisa, London, Bourges and Constantinople. But Lorenzo was only twenty years old and not that interested in banking, He had already acquired the look of a man who smelled something unpleasant.

In 1471 a bank in the Medici client town of Volterra, about twenty miles south west of Florence, refused to invest in improvements for the Medici alunite mines. So in June of 1472 an army of Medici mercenaries laid siege to Volterra, murdering, raping and looting the town for three days. They were stopped before any permanent damage was done, and once the smoke had cleared, Lorenzo publicly apologized and paid “blood money” to the survivors. But behind the scenes the offending bank now reversed itself and invested in the Medici mines. And that was what mattered in Florence. Except people in a lot of towns aligned with Florence noticed.

A more difficult problem developed in Rome when 57 year old Francesco della Rovere was elected Pope, also in 1471. The ambitious man adopted the name of Sixtus IV, and quickly began promoting his family members to positions of money and power. He made six of his nephew's Cardinals, and in 1472, married one of them, Giovanni della Rovere, to the lovely and wealthy Giovanna da Montefeltro, of Urbano. Her dowry was the fortress town of Imola, about forty miles northeast of Florence, and Sixtus decided to match it with a title and local office for his nephew, asking his banker, Lorenzo de Medici, to loan him 40,000 Florintine ducats to go along with the title.

Except Lorenzo was not so foolish as to willingly help the Pope extend his power into Florence's backyard. It was like asking him to pay for his own execution. After getting promises of support from the 32 other banking families in Florence, Lorenzo turned the Pope down. Then, unexpectedly - at least to Lorenzo - one of those bankers pulled a double cross; Jacopo Pazzi.

In Italian the word “pazzi” means madman, and it was said the family patriarch earned that title in 1099 by being one of the first soldiers over the walls in the capture of Jerusalem in the first Crusade. True or not we do know this 11th century lunatic brought back to Florence a stone from the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre. For this feat of fidelity the family received their new surname and a title, and the right to provide the spark used to reignite the cities' flame every Easter Sunday. Some of the luster went out of the honor in the 12th century when laws blocked nobility from holding elective office, and the Pazzi were forced to renounce their title. They kept their land and money, and never stopped trying to get the title back. Which made it all the more insulting when Cosimo de Medici pushed through taxes on the wealthiest citizens of the Republic to help feed and clothe  the poor. In response, the Pazzi took a self imposed exile from their city. Like all who see themselves as entitled, the Pazzi were offended when titles came with obligations.

The aging Jacopo Pazzi, head of the family bank in the winter of 1472, was still sharp enough to seize an opportunity by the throat. He had finally returned to Florence after the death of Piero, but his hatred of the Medici had not abated. . So he had no compunction about betraying his promise to Lorenzo. And even though it went against his penny pinching nature, and it almost bankrupted his bank, he now granted Pope Sixtus the 40,000 ducats denied him by the House of Medici. The grateful Sixtus transferred all the Papal Curia accounts from the Medici to the Pazzi bank, reinvigorating Jacopo's fortune. Sixtus also granted the Pazzi a monopoly for refining the alunite clawed out of the Medici mines, cutting even further into Medici profits.

Lorenzo responded by supporting anyone willing to resist the Pope. When Sixtus sent an army under another of his nephew Cardinals, Giuliano della Rovere, to force a Medici ally, Niccolo Vitelli, out of his stronghold in the village of Citta di Cadello, about 40 miles south east of Florence, Lorenzo began to assemble mercenaries to lift Guiliano's siege. The nephew was not a soldier, and Sixtus was forced to order Guiliano's army to return to Rome, for the time being.

And then there was the matter of religious appointments Sixtus chose a favorite, Francesco Salviati,, as the new Archbishop of Florence. But Lorenzo was not willing to have Papal spy in his own city, and signed an allegiance with Venice and Milan, making it clear Salviati's appointment would mean open war. Sixtus was again forced to back down. As a consolation prize, he named Salviati the Archbishop of Pisa, 40 miles west of Florence. But Pisa was also a Medici ally, and Lorenzo ordered the city gates locked against Salviati, preventing him from presiding over his new parish for almost a year. After contemplating these insults, and a dozen others real and imagined, Sixtus decided he needed to remove the Medici entirely. There is no record Sixtus ever actually ordered Lorenzo's or Giuliano's de Medici's muder. In fact he was on the record as saying he supported a plot - “as long as no one is killed.” But no one in Italy could have believed the Medici would be stopped, short of their deaths.

The conspiracy now passed to the younger, more active hands of Jacopo's nephew  the priest Francesco Pazzi, and Jacopo's sons Andea and Poero Pazzi., and the young handsome Guflielmo Pazzi, who was also married to Bianca de' Medici, yet another peace offer the Pazzi had betrayed. Francesco's first plan was for the Pope to invite both of the Medici brothers to the Holy City for reconciliation talks. In Rome, isolated from friends and allies, both brothers would be murdered. At the same time in a coup d'etat, Pazzi conspirators back in Florence would seize the city hall, the Plaza del Vecioo, and execute any of the remaining Medici family who were still a threat. The plan failed because Lorenzo made the trip, but the younger intended victim, Giuliano Medici, excused himself because of illness.

But at the winter meetings in Rome, the 17 year old Raphael Riario (above), another of Sixtus' nephews, had engaged Lorenzo in a discussion about their shared passion for the arts. Although made a Cardinal the year before, Raphael was not yet ordained as a priest, and was tightly controlled by his mother Catherine, who rarely let him out of her sight. But this day, Raphael managed a private conversation with Lorenzo, and confided he had heard of the art collection the Medici kept hidden in their a villa in Fiesole, just outside of Florence. Raphael would be in Florence in the spring, to deliver the Easter Mass in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore (Church of Saint Mary of the Flowers). Could he impose on Lorenzo to show him the paintings? Charmed by the young man's innocence, and seeking to smooth things over with the boy's uncle, Lorenzo offered to not only to welcome Raphael into his home, but to throw him a banquet. In gratitude the boy spontaneously invited both Medici brothers to attend the Easter Mass as his personal guests.

And thus the focus of the conspiracy shifted back to Florence, the Medici home court. And in the end, that would make all the difference.

- 30 -