January 28th, after taking leave of the Pope with many expressions of friendship, Charles departed. At the place appointed for Caesar to join him the youthful cardinal presented himself with six magnificent chargers, and they rode forth, Caesar on the King’s left. Two days later news was brought the Pope that the Cardinal of Valencia, disguised as a stable-boy, had fled from the King’s camp at Velletri. When Caesar joined the King he had nineteen large chests, which were supposed to contain his personal effects; two of the trunks were brought back to Rome; the remaining seventeen were opened by the King’s order after the flight of his hostage, and were found to contain nothing--“at least, so I was informed,” adds Burchard, “but I do not believe this.” On his return to Rome Caesar spent the first night at the house of Antonio Flores, Auditor of the Ruota--perhaps to give the paternal anger time to cool. The following day the Pope sent his secretary, the Bishop of Nepi and Sutri, to the King to disclaim all responsibility for Caesar’s disregard of the agreement. February 1st the city of Rome sent three envoys, Hieronymus Portius, the Pope’s intimate, Coronato Planca, senior Consistorial Auditor, and Jacopo Sinibaldi, Master of the Seals, to the King to recommend the city to his care and to beg him not to be angry on account of the cardinal’s flight. At the time it was generally believed in Rome that his Holiness had connived at Caesar’s conduct, but his right to give his son to Charles as a hostage was also questioned. Caesar was then only nineteen, and his flight was clear proof of his powers of dissimulation and of his determination. Charles finally concluded to ignore the matter, and in the course of a few days the young cardinal again appeared about the Vatican. About the time that Caesar took his unceremonious departure the Spanish ambassadors arrived in Charles’s camp to renew the protests of the House of Aragon, which was determined to assert its own rights to the Neapolitan throne, and while at Velletri Don Antonio de Fonseca had threatened Charles with war. These protests, which were the beginning of the famous League of the Conservation, furnish a more reasonable explanation of Caesar’s flight from the French camp than does the theory of an earlier agreement between himself and his father. The day the League was proclaimed in Rome--April 1st--a mob of Spaniards attacked a body of Swiss troops belonging to the French army, and Burchard intimates that Caesar inspired the assault in revenge for outrages committed by the mercenaries. The Pope, to avoid the charge of complicity in Caesar’s escape, sent him to Spoleto, where the promising ecclesiastic awaited developments. Twenty days after Caesar left the French camp Charles VIII. entered Naples as conqueror.