If, having experienced the grace of your former devotion, I rightly interpret the craft of holy condescension, I think that, at your command, my lords and fellow-servants the priests have come to console me. This, behold, I would speak under divine testimony: out of reverence for the service I owe, I have not presumed to render it to my most exalted lord. For it derogates from your virtue if anyone should offer some word of consolation, in writing or by speech, concerning the mishap that has befallen. Nor, moreover, does the casting off of grief befit a mind that is not merely royal but philosophical. Your love, it is true, has provoked the tears of all. But if your safety is granted to a longing age, it is a small thing that, being father of all, you have lost one pledge.
The grove is temporal, where one so innocent has died, whose death no one thought possible. Let each judge as he feels: nothing can ever befall in your times which I would not always reckon to have been of profit. Hence I presume nothing here to be by chance, nothing harsh. A hidden dispensation has rather ordained this anguish than inflicted it. You once wept with ineffable piety the funerals of your brothers; the public weeping was followed by the affliction of all, and by the hidden gaze of the Divinity the instruments of mourning were being prepared unto joy. The felicity of the kingdom was diminishing the number of royal persons, and this alone was being kept for the world, which sufficed for the empire. There was laid up whatever had been prosperous for the catholic truth.
And we did not know that it was then only being broken, which thereafter would not know how to be bent. Or what shall we say of a brother's lot? He himself, whom your nature caused to be called little, served your interests without any malice, when he served you while unaware of the peril of the nation, when the turmoil of the region was disposing a future peace. Believe one who has tried it: whatever harmed here, here brought profit; whatever we then wept over, now we love. To those who could not foresee these things it may perhaps seem harsh that a maiden near to the marriage-chamber was snatched away with tedium pressing upon her: yet she was sought as a queen, and died undefiled. Although in truth I would say she left a greater cause for her mourning, had she closed her last day after recent vows.
For there perhaps might have been found the place where, after the knot of envy, a rival's malice might have fixed the tooth of insult upon me. But now, in truth, what mind is so barbarous as not to pity a virginity and felicity received in a father's and a royal bosom? She neither changed her dwelling nor underwent exile: where she could not long be a mistress, nor was she briefly a stranger. Wherefore, since the whole world awaits your gladness as it awaits the serenity of heaven, restore yourselves to the joys of the peoples: for the commonwealth never falls into the ruin of orphanhood, so long as, with you sustaining her, Mother Church has not felt bereavement.