And if in the seventeenth century communications between one part of the world and another had been as rare and as difficult as in the ninth; if men had been then as ignorant, as simple, and greedy of the marvellous; if the press, which is to such error what a terrier is to a rat, had not been in existence, the historians of Europe might have chronicled a second she–pontiff, the "Pope Olympia," as having ascended the papal throne in the year 1644. For assuredly no John, Benedict, nor Boniface of the worst and darkest age of the Church ever lived more scandalously under petticoat government, or gave greater occasion to the assertion, that a woman was the real Pope in his stead, than did Giovanni Batista Pamfili, who was elected in that year.
Pope Olympia was born in 1594, at Viterbo. A daughter of the noble and ancient, but poor, family of the Maidalchini, she was, as the daughters of impoverished nobles generally were, destined for the Church from her infancy, and educated in a convent. But as this branch of the ecclesiastical profession could lead to nothing, at the best, more exalted than the station of a lady Abbess, Donna Olympia, who felt herself to have a soul above bead–counting, intimated, with a firmness and decision all her own, her intention of marrying. And an alliance was accordingly formed for her with a provincial gentleman, as noble and as poor as herself. As Giovanni Batista Pamfili, afterwards Pope by the name of Innocent X., was past eighty when he died in 1655, and must accordingly have been born in or before the year 1575; and as his brother, Donna Olympia's husband, must have been an elder brother, it follows that this poor noble, whom the ambitious and shrewd lady chose to wed, rather than accept the nullity of a cloister life, was more than nineteen years her senior. Nor does it appear that he had any requisite, either of station, function, or talent, which might have seemed capable of affording assistance to Olympia's views of rising in the world.
But the noble Roman maiden, who had already, we are told, given a specimen of her talent for governing, by exerting sway over her companions in the convent seminary, had looked out on the Roman world with a shrewd and observant eye, and knew well what she was about. What had the poor country noble to render him worthy of Olympia's hand and adapted to her views? He had a brother. Men who marry don't rise in the ecclesiastical states. And you can't marry a Cardinal, nor even a Bishop. Yet to hook yourself more or less indissolubly on to something of this sort, is the only possible means by which "excelsior" aspirations can be gratified in the world of Rome.