Lorenzo Cardinal Campeggio
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Lorenzo Cardinal Campeggio (1471 or 1472 - 1539) was an Italian cardinal and politician.
Campeggio was born in Milan, the eldest of the five sons. In 1500 he took his doctorate in canon and civil law at Bologna and married Francesca Guastavillani with whom he had five children. When she died in 1509 Campeggio began an ecclesiastical career under Pope Julius II's patronage.
He was quickly appointed to two diplomatic missions, both against the Council of Pisa, first to the emperor Maximilian I, who gave him the bishopric of Feltre in 1512 (held until 1520), and then in 1512–13 to the duke of Milan. In 1513 he returned to Germany seeking a league against the Turks. Pope Leo X made him a Cardinal on 1 July 1517, and Maximilian made him cardinal–protector of the Holy Roman Empire. On 3 March 1518 he was sent to England as part of Leo's peace policy. This gave Thomas Wolsey the chance to gain a legation for himself by using permission for Campeggio to enter England as leverage, and then to outmanoeuvre the new legate once he arrived, taking over the process of peace-making which led to the Treaty of London in 1519.
Campeggio was formally appointed cardinal–protector of England on 22 January 1523. He was not involved in much English business, except for the referring of episcopal provisions in consistory. The election of Pope Adrian VI in 1522 cemented his position in the Roman Curia.
Campeggio wrote his De depravato statu ecclesiae for Adrian, which proposed many radical reforms of papal bureaucracy. On 2 December 1524 he received the bishopric of Salisbury, which he had been promised in 1518. The election of Pope Clement VII in 1523 further exalted Campeggi's power. He was also a member of Johann Goritz's humanist sodality. Clement made him bishop of Bologna on 2 December 1523 (held until 1525) and then on 9 January 1524 legate to the Diet of Nuremberg.
During the sack of Rome in 1527, Campeggio lost everything. Clement, who fled to Orvieto, left him behind as papal legate in the city, just as the political situation England required his attention. Wolsey and Henry VIII expected his support for their suggestion that a papal co-legate should decide on Henry's divorce from Katherine of Aragon in co-operation with Wolsey. Campeggio had, however, already given a legal opinion to the pope which supported the validity of the marriage.
Nevertheless he was named legate on 8 June 1528, after a joint commission to him with Wolsey had been agreed on 13 April. Clement intended to use Campeggio to hide his own reluctance to deal with the issue, under political pressure from Charles. Campeggio arrived in London on 8 October 1528 and was subjected to the first of many sessions with Wolsey and Henry, the first English king to sue before a papal judge in person.
Campeggio found himself in an almost impossible position, since emperor Charles V, Katherine of Aragon's nephew, was determined to prevent the divorce. The deciding point in law for Campeggio was Julius's dispensation for Henry and Katherine's marriage in the full form recently discovered in Spain. In Katherine's possession from early in 1528, she showed it to Campeggio in October, and he took it to invalidate his commission, since the latter failed to cover the Spanish document. He tried to make the case disappear on 23 July 1529 by proroguing it until October, but this act had been forestalled by the pope's advocation of the matter to Rome a week earlier. On his way back to Rome, Campeggio met Charles and Clement in Bologna, where the pope made over to Campeggi the castle of Dozza and the emperor took the family under his protection. Charles later (2 September 1530) gave Campeggio the Spanish bishopric of Huesca and Jaca, which he held until 17 June 1534 when he became bishop of Candia (Crete) (until 1536); in 1532, moreover, when making Campeggi's son Gianbattista bishop of Majorca, the emperor reserved the administration of the see to the young man's father. Campeggi was legate to the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, where he pursued intense negotiations with Philip Melanchthon.
By 20 May 1531 Henry had dismissed Campeggio. In August 1533 he lost the revenues of Salisbury, and on 21 March 1534 was deprived by act of parliament. Campeggio was a member of the commission which excommunicated Henry in 1535. He remained protector of Germany until his death, at the same time devoting much energy to insuring the future of his family; he left two sons, two brothers, and one nephew as bishops. He was named legate to the general council called first for Mantua and then for Vicenza, only the first session of which, in May 1538, he attended. He died on 25 July 1539, aged sixty-seven, and was buried in Santa Maria in Trastevere; in 1571 at least some of his bones were transferred to the church of Santi Marta e Bernardino that he had built in Bologna.
[edit] References
- E. V. Cardinal, Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, legate to the courts of Henry VIII and Charles V (1935)
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
