OF PAPAL CONCLAVES.
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his life. Of these, one, Cardinal Petrucci, was strangled in the Castle of St. Angelo on the 6th June 1517; while Cardinals Saoli and Soderini were indeed degraded, and declared stripped of both active and passive voice in a Conclave—that is, of the power of either voting or being elected; but this sentence was cancelled before the Pope's demise tested its validity. Under Leo's successor Cardinal Soderini again stood convicted of conspiracy, and was imprisoned in the Castle of St. Angelo; but on the last day of the Pope's obsequies he was let out by the Sacred College, and gave his vote in Conclave for Clement VII., by whom then he was restored to all the honours of his rank.[1] But the ruling case on this head
- ↑ The case of Cardinal Soderini is doubly important, because Adrian VI. tried to enforce his authority for proclaiming exclusion, and the attempt, though made with the exceptional solemnity of a Pope speaking from his deathbed, was disallowed by the Cardinals. The last official act of Pope Adrian was that, almost at the hour of his death, he gave a Bull motu proprio, ordering that the Cardinal of Volterra (Soderini) should on no condition be released from prison. The College of Cardinals, however, which had not shown much respect for his lawful orders whilst he was alive, entirely disregarded his commands, which were of very doubtful legality, when he was dead. The prison of the Cardinal of Volterra was opened, and it was he
