Chapter 13

I’m so embarrassed. How could I have fallen for Wykes’s fabrication? For all my supposed knowledge of the universe, Jerome has exposed my utter foolishness. Surely Wykes hasn’t just shifted the date of Tartaglia’s death to fit with his own desire for a satisfying narrative? I have no choice but to dig for answers. Alan Wykes wrote a slew of books. Would anyone have kept his notes? I can’t help thinking of my own family; it seems a long shot that they would keep mine after I’m gone.

An internet search tells me many things. Wykes died in 1993 after a long career as an ‘author, journalist, raconteur and professional clubman’. He was ‘a prolific storyteller with a prodigious memory for historical detail’. But people did question his reliability. A book on the composer Lord Berners had people grasping for Wykes’s sources for certain anecdotes: it turns out he learned the stories at second or third hand and they remained uncorroborated. Similarly, his volume on Adolf Hitler contained the contention that the Führer’s anti-Semitism arose when he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute — an idea roundly demolished in previous studies. ‘Wykes’s witnesses were either mistaken or dishonest,’ one reviewer says. My suspicion is that the witnesses may not have existed.

I can find no mention of a surviving spouse or children. But there is the ‘clubman’ angle. For more than a quarter of a century, Wykes had been honorary secretary and chairman of the benevolent fund of the Savage Club, a London gentleman’s club whose former members included Sir Edward Elgar, Dylan Thomas, and JM Barrie. The internet is a goldmine here too: Mark Twain had once been a guest at the club; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle mentions the Savage Club in The Lost World, and the fascist Oswald Mosley turned up one evening (as a guest of Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter), but was immediately asked to leave. I email the club. And then, a couple of weeks later, my phone rings and I find myself speaking to Philip Voke, the man who inherited all of Wykes’s notes and manuscripts.

The two men had met in the 1970s, when Voke moved into the house next door to Wykes. The boxes of materials left to Voke after Wykes’s death are now in the possession of Reading Library. So, within a couple of weeks, I have lunched with Voke at the Savage Club and taken a train to Reading.

It is a short walk from Reading station to the Library’s reading room. Adrenaline is pumping through my body as I collect the box I have requested. I lay out my notebook and pencils — no pens are allowed in the reading room — and open the box.

In the movie of this book, there should be a quiet, apprehensive moment of tight focus on the box, with perhaps a single instrument sounding out the anticipation in a low tone. But there is no Eureka! moment to merit such drama. I do not unearth a pile of missing notes and sources, and find everything suddenly making sense. The problem is that the footnotes and references in Wykes’s handwritten version of his Doctor Cardano book are the same as in the typescript, which are the same as in the published version — with just one exception.

The note ‘2’ on page 174 of the published hardback is not in the manuscript or the typescript. This is the crucial fact. The published book, where the note does appear, has no corresponding reference. Had it been there, it would have referred to the passage where Wykes details Aldo and Tartaglia’s direct involvement in Jerome’s arrest:

On 13th October 1570, at Tartaglia’s instance, Cardano was arrested while in Bologna. ‘The boy Aldo, to whom I had promised the reward of the appointment of public torturer and executioner in that city, came to me in Rome with the intelligence that his father was in Bologna awaiting an interview with the syndics. I thought to myself, “Ah! This will be pleasant, to raise his hopes that at last the restrictions are to be lifted from him and then, an instant before the realisation of those hopes, to cast him into prison.” And so it was. I hastened to Bologna, and there he still sheltered, in the ruins of a hovel, awaiting an ascent to his former status. I instructed the guards to arrest him as he set out for his appointment.’ [2]

I can come to only one reluctant conclusion. It is all made up. At the last minute, perhaps, someone at the publishing house called Wykes and asked that he declare his source. They inserted the ‘[2]’ in anticipation of his supplying some reference. He never did. How could he? At this point, Tartaglia is long dead, his body lying in the crypt of Venice’s San Silvestro church.

Within the box are some pages of handwritten notes that look like an author’s snagging list. Some are struck through in red ink. On one page I read ‘Aldo — what happened to? Chiara ditto’ and ‘Aldo part of plot with T?’.

In the synopsis of chapters, written before embarking on the manuscript, the facts are laid out unembellished. Wykes has written to his publisher, Frederick Muller Ltd, that he aims to ‘produce a fully documented piece of research that would, I hope, be accepted as a serious contribution to historical literature’. There is nothing here about Jerome’s daughter Chiara, whom Wykes’s published book painted as a brazen nymphomaniac. In his narrative, she seduced her older brother and rendered herself infertile when she aborted Giovanni’s child. Wykes has Chiara’s husband complain to Jerome that she has ‘insatiable lusts’ and carries incurable syphilis that has withered away her charms: ‘she is like a dead twig and bears nothing but her pudendum’. Neither is there any mention of Aldo. Even Tartaglia doesn’t merit a mention in the synopsis. Somewhere along the path to publication, Alan Wykes succumbed to an ever-present temptation for writers. He crafted a story that was too good to be true.

‘He wasn’t the first.’

Jerome seems almost pleased. I am crestfallen to be found wanting in my research, and he is trying not to smile. Perhaps it fuels that insatiable desire for eternal fame: he clearly enjoys being the focus of books written hundreds of years after his death. And Jerome is right. The fabrications began even before his arrest.

In 1557, the year in which Nicolo Tartaglia died, an aspiring intellectual named Julius Caesar Scaliger published what has been called ‘the most savage book review in the bitter annals of literary invective’.

Exercitationes comprised a nine hundred page refutation of Jerome’s book On Subtlety. To be fair, Jerome’s work is a ridiculously wide-ranging book. Within its thousand pages he discusses the structure of the universe; lactating males (Jerome describes one Antonius Benzes, whom he met in Genoa: ‘thirty-four years old, pale, with a scanty beard and a fatty constitution, from whose breasts so much milk flowed that he could almost have suckled an infant’); attempts at powered flight (which contains a withering put down of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventive powers: ‘Da Vinci … tried it, and failed; he was an outstanding painter’); and a recipe for lip salve. On Subtlety meanders and stalls and jumps, but it does entertain. It’s not that bad.

It seems that Scaliger was just looking for someone — anyone — to take down. He was, after all, a man who raised himself up on the coattails of others. Aged twelve, he had been page to the Emperor Maximilian. By the time he left the Emperor’s service, aged twenty-nine, he had his eye on the position of Pope, no less. There is talk that he gave this ambition up when he could no longer bear the company of monks. He went back to soldiering (for the King of France).

Eventually, Scaliger married a girl of thirteen who bore him fifteen children. He was, according to one of his children, a ‘terrible’ man, more feared than loved. And his unpleasantness had not yet run its course.

Scaliger’s subsequent literary career was built on attacking the public’s favourite scholars. Once he had stuck his knife into the much-loved scholar Erasmus, Scaliger turned on Jerome. As the 1854 biography written by Henry Morley puts it (I won’t be referring to Wykes again), ‘It was a thick military book, full of hard fighting, with no quarter and no courtesy’ and riddled with ‘railing, jeering, and rude personal abuse’.

At first, Jerome didn’t dignify the attack with a reply. In fact, his silence was so deafening that some joker told Scaliger that his vitriol had put Jerome in the grave. Taking this wag at his word, Scaliger issued an apology to the public. Scaliger’s funereal oration assures Cardano’s fan base (somewhat self-servingly) that ‘the distress of mind occasioned to Jerome Cardano by my trifling castigations was not greater than my sorrow at his death’. This was everybody’s loss, he said: ‘the republic of letters is bereft now of a great and incomparable man’.

Scaliger goes on for pages and pages. And then, in what must have been a mortifying moment, Jerome published a polite and erudite reply to Scaliger’s criticisms without even mentioning his assailant by name.

‘That was a nice move,’ I say. ‘You didn’t even give him the satisfaction of a citation.’ With a grin, I swipe my hand away towards the door. ‘Scaliger, you are dismissed.’

Jerome looks puzzled again. ‘It wasn’t meant to be dismissive,’ he says. ‘Men of letters simply ought to act with dignity in their dealings with one another.’

Jerome’s dignity certainly did Scaliger no favours. Most contemporaries agreed Scaliger suffered a heavy defeat. An eighteenth-century literary scholar called Tiraboschi likened the dispute to a fight between a giant and a girl.

Jerome shrugs. ‘I have known girls who fight well,’ he says. ‘My mother, for example.’

It’s not that Jerome is impervious to assault. Later slurs on his character and talents hit him hard, especially when they took hold in Pavia. Though Milan had always caused Jerome grief, the people of Pavia had always been kind and respectful to Jerome — it was, to him, a place of refuge. But, after Giovanni’s execution, the mud of Milan still clung fast and there were mutterings among the Pavia scholars about whether Jerome’s position should be reconsidered.

The Milanese scholars had played a perfect hand. It is in 1562 that Jerome first learns that Scaliger had not been the only one who was out to get him. Some of the Milanese senators who condemned his son to death two years ago have been bragging about doing so in a deliberate attempt to drive Jerome mad with grief. Writing of this time, he claims to ‘not know whether I was most wretched or most hated’.

He is not destitute yet, though. He still has a house and a job, at least: he is a Professor at the University and, as a member of the Pavian College of Physicians, he can practise medicine to recoup some of the savings that are now gone. However, Jerome’s lifestyle is making his position even more precarious. His three young lodgers are inciting gossip. They are handsome boys, given to music and gambling — passions that Jerome shares and encourages. They are whispered about as an immoral household. The faculty at Pavia is starting to turn against him.

Jerome’s solution is to seek employment in Bologna. There, he approaches Carlo Borromeo, a family friend who has risen through the clerical ranks to become a cardinal — indeed a saint. Borromeo agrees to help, as does Cardinal Morone, another old friend. With an appointment in Bologna all but secured, Jerome offers his resignation to the University of Pavia. The Senate, interpreting the offer as a rash act by someone in an agitated state of mind, refuses to accept it.

The intrigues are not over. One morning, a courier arrives at his Pavian house with a letter. It purports to be from his daughter, Chiara, and her husband, ‘a most infamous and vile letter,’ Jerome calls it in his autobiography. In it, the couple claim to be ashamed of their relationship with Jerome and suggest that Pavia’s Senate and the College should sever all relations with him in reaction to the appalling acts he has committed. Then another condemning letter comes. This is from a colleague at Pavia named Fioravanti. As Jerome recalls, the tenor of it is that ‘he was ashamed of me for the sake of his country, the college, and the faculty; that the rumour was being circulated everywhere that I was using my boys for immoral purposes; and that not satisfied with one, I had added another to my household — a state of affairs absolutely unprecedented’.

Jerome dons his cloak and sweeps out of the house to confront Fioravanti. The confrontation works: Fioravanti breaks down and confesses that he wrote the letter purporting to be from Jerome’s daughter and son-in-law, and that he did so on behalf of the rector at the University of Pavia. He also says an accusation is coming, nonetheless. Immediately, Jerome works out what is going on. It is another academic tussle. A man called Delfino, a friend of the rector of Pavia University, has designs on Jerome’s position.

The accusation, when it comes, is — predictably — of impropriety with the boys under his roof. Jerome is pulled into slanging matches in the street, writing later of the ring of onlookers attracted by the war of words. The repercussions reach Bologna, where Jerome’s enemies side track an emissary from the university there and tell him that the old man is unworthy of a job. He is not even popular as a teacher, they say — he lectures to empty halls in Pavia. And so reports reach the Bolognese Senate that Jerome is ‘a professor without a class, but only benches; that he is a man of ill manners, and disliked by all; one full of folly. His behaviour is repulsive; and he knows but little of the art of medicine, expressing such sectarian opinions about it that he is rejected by all in his own city, and has no patients.’

On hearing the report, the Senate at Bologna halt the recruitment process. Fortunately for Jerome, Cardinal Borromeo knows the report is false, at least in part. Jerome, Borromeo tells the Senate, once cured his mother when all other physicians failed. Another member of the Senate confessed he had once been treated — and treated well — by Jerome and that he knows of other respected men who can say the same. The Senate quickly realises the reports are part of a conspiracy. They can’t help wondering if there is something behind it, though, and exercise caution: Jerome is offered a short-term position. He can work for the university for a year, during which he must prove himself. Only then can he begin negotiations over a better salary.

Humiliated by the offer, Jerome refuses the terms. But not without regret. His tenure at Pavia has ended; in the wake of the accusations, that refused resignation letter was suddenly accepted. He is running out of money and of ways to earn it. He becomes ever more reclusive and paranoid — not a bad thing, as it turns out. Thinking his enemies’ next move might be to present his writings in a dark, twisted light to the growing spectre of the Inquisition, he pre-empts them by sending all his published works to the Council at Rome. It is a move that might well have saved his life.

However, that good news is still some way down the line. Here in Pavia, things are about to get worse. Having resigned from the University of Pavia and turned down the offer from the University of Bologna, Jerome is desperate and destitute. When four Milanese senators write to him suggesting he is a good candidate for a professorship there now, he has no choice but to start the application procedure. And then he is forced to halt it. The Milan Senate’s representatives report that two of their physicians have told the university that they have witnessed Jerome perpetrating ‘grave crimes’. Out of respect, he will not be arrested, the Senate tells him. That is, not unless he strays within Milanese territory.

For three weeks, Jerome is an exile everywhere. A shadow hangs over him in Pavia, Milan, and Bologna. But he still has powerful friends, a number of whom work hard to refute the charges and ridicule his accusers. Suddenly, for reasons that Jerome will never discover, the charges are dropped. Bizarrely, the process has gained him a certain notoriety and Jerome finds himself a celebrity. ‘I grew in fame,’ Jerome later recalls. ‘The citizens, indeed almost the whole state, embraced me with peculiar love, admired my innocence, and pitied my misfortunes.’ Cardinals and councillors sought him out: ‘I never met with a success greater or more splendid.’

He even receives a new, unrestricted offer from Bologna. He accepts, deliberately turning his back on the Milanese. ‘I knew of nothing worse than to endure life surrounded by the cruel faces and hard voices of the men who had torn from me my sweetest son,’ he says.

Even the spirits are kind: he has a dream in which he is told to put an emerald in his mouth whenever he wants to forget the pain of Giovanni’s execution. Emeralds, he knows, are a means to call information from the future; perhaps his mind will be so busied with prophecy that the troubles of the past will fade from memory. From that morning until the end of his life, he is barely without that green gem tucked under his tongue. It is removed only for eating and talking.

ψ

Jerome will live in Bologna from 1562 until his arrest in 1570. This is where he takes on a student: Rudolf Silvestri, the skinny young man who will care for him in prison. He is also overjoyed to find that his former pupil, Lodovico Ferrari, is one of the university’s lecturers, teaching mathematics.

Within a year, Ferrari will be dead at his sister’s hand, but Jerome doesn’t know this, of course (where are the signs and omens when they could be useful?). And it is good that he doesn’t: these are happy times. The only taint is from the continued jealousy of academic colleagues furious at the ease with which he walked into the job.

In petty spite, the University of Bologna administrators timetable Jerome’s lectures for after the dinner hour — the graveyard slot, when students are unlikely to attend. The lecture hall is frequently (and deliberately) double booked so that he is always competing with other teachers for the space. Secret letters are sent to Jerome’s powerful friend Cardinal Morone, repeating the allegation that Jerome lectures to almost empty benches. For a while, Jerome also becomes embroiled in a very public row with a particularly prickly colleague: Fracantiano, the Professor of the Practice of Medicine. It is the age-old tale: Jerome is Professor of the Theory of Medicine, and a clash between Theory and Practice is almost inevitable. Indeed, Fracantiano so hates his rival that he cannot bear to be in Jerome’s presence, instructing his attendants to warn him if Jerome should ever come near. Students being students, it becomes their favourite sport to bring Jerome to wherever Fracantiano is teaching. On one occasion, they succeed in enticing Jerome into one of Fracantiano’s lectures and are rewarded with a wonderful sight. The Practice Professor is in such a rush to evade the Theory Professor’s presence that he trips over his long black gown and falls facedown on the floor.

Years pass without anything more significant happening.

And then comes the arrest.

ψ

Jerome is in a conciliatory mood tonight.

‘It is not hard to imagine how your man Wykes could have seen Aldo betraying me to my Inquisitors,’ he says. ‘Aldo has been nothing but trouble. It is a matter of public record that I had him arrested a few months ago. And that wasn’t the first time.’

Jerome had been paying off his son’s gambling debts, but that didn’t solve the problem. Tired of having his own money and possessions disappear, he threw Aldo out of the Bologna house. Even that wasn’t enough. Conspiring with one of his father’s assistants, Aldo performed an audacious burglary, sneaking into the house, smashing open an ironbound strongbox and carrying away cash, jewellery, amulets, and precious stones. Jerome reported the crime, and his suspicions about the perpetrators, to the authorities.

‘My assistant went to the gallows. Eight spells in a prison cell had done nothing for Aldo, so I had him banished.’ There is a wry smile on his face. ‘There are some perks to being a freeman of the city.’

‘And now the freeman is in prison.’

He sighs, a resigned look spreading across his features. ‘I imagine there are many people enjoying that irony.’