However, as he preferred active to professorial
work, he began at this time to practice at the bar, where he soon ranked
as an able advocate and eloquent speaker. This reputation, together
with his character for gravity and insight, determined the Signoria to
send him on an embassy to the Court of Ferdinand of Aragon in 1512. Thus
Guicciardini entered on the real work of his life as a diplomatist and
statesman. We may also conclude with safety that it was at the court of
that crowned hypocrite and traitor to all loyalty of soul that he
learned his first lessons in political cynicism. The court of Spain
under Ferdinand the Catholic was a perfect school of perfidy, where even
an Italian might discern deeper reaches of human depravity and formulate
for his own guidance a philosophy of despair. It was whispered by his
enemies that here, upon the threshold of his public life, Guicciardini
sold his honor by accepting a bribe from Ferdinand.[1] Certain it is
that avarice was one of his besetting sins, and that from this time
forward he preferred expediency to justice, and believed in the policy
of supporting force by clever dissimulation.[2] Returning to Florence,
Guicciardini was, in 1515, deputed to meet Leo X. on the part of the
Republic at Cortona. Leo, who had the faculty of discerning able men and
making use of them, took him into favor, and three years later appointed
him Governor of Reggio and Modena. In 1521 Parma was added to his rule.
Clement VII. made him Viceroy of Romagna in 1523, and in 1526 elevated
him to the rank of Lieutenant-General of the Papal army. In consequence
of this high commission, Guicciardini shared in the humiliation
attaching to all the officers of the League who, with the Duke of Urbino
at their head suffered Rome to be sacked and the Pope to be imprisoned
in 1527. The blame of this contemptible display of cowardice or private
spite cannot, however, be ascribed to him: for he attended the armies of
the League not as general, but as counselor and chief reporter. It was
his business not to control the movements of the army so much as to act
as referee in the Pope's interest, and to keep the Vatican informed of
what was stirring in the camp. In 1531 Guicciardini was advanced to the
governorship of Bologna, the most important of all the Papal
lord-lieutenancies. This post he resigned in 1534 on the election of
Paul III., preferring to follow the fortunes of the Medicean princes at
Florence. In this