Whether the Lord Julius P.P. II had made, or had not made, promises before His election, He was now _de iure_ and _de facto_ Ruler of the World, and absolutely despotic. He arrested Duke Cesare in Rome; and imprisoned him as a rebel in the Borgia Tower. The utter and vacuous helplessness of the Duke is in striking contrast to the masterful energy of all his previous life. Some enormous mental shock might produce such degeneration; the hideous treachery of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere as related by Varillas, for example. Duke Cesare behaved, in his misfortune, like a son staggered, struck breathless and speechless by a revelation of a father’s iniquity. A Bull of Deprivation despoiled him of all fiefs and dignities held from the Holy See, and confiscated all his personal property. He literally was stripped naked. In 1504, he escaped from Rome to Ostia in disguise, and thence to Naples. Here he might have found a pied à terre; and, with the splendour of his past achievements, have won an opportunity of recovering his lost estates by war: but the Lord Julius P.P. II, conscious of the danger to His peace that such an aggrieved and notable personality would be, had intrigued with the Catholic King; and, on Duke Cesare’s arrival in the Regno, he was re-arrested, and shipped to a new prison in the castle of Medina del Campo in Spain. * * * * * The marriage of Madonna Lucrezia Borgia with Don Alfonso d’Este was a most happy one. The sweet young bride had made herself beloved by all Ferrara, from her husband’s father Duke Ercole to the meanest of his subjects, by her beauty, her goodness, and her wonderfully able versatility, three indispensable qualities in the wife of the heir to the throne. Attired in “a mulberry satin gown embroidered with gold fish-bones each two fingers broad,” with the lace-flounce worth thirty thousand ducats (say £60,000) which, according to Giovanni Lucido, was in her wedding-chest, she would amuse herself in the ducal palace by witnessing performances of the _Casina_ or the _Miles Gloriosus_, comedies of Plautus. Sometimes, (as Sanuto, the Venetian Orator at Ferrara, informed his government,) she would remain all day in her apartments, writing letters, and having her head washed: or she would sit for hours and listen to the violin-music of her adept young husband. On the Maundy Thursday of the first year of her marriage, she publicly washed the feet of one hundred and sixty poor men. Her observance of religious duties was as notable as the spirit of genuine piety which pervades her many letters still extant.