Duke Alfonso’s brothers, Don Ferdinando d’Este and the Bastard Giulio, engaged in a conspiracy to assassinate him. News of the plot reached Cardinal Ippolito in Rome. He promptly warned Duke Alfonso of his danger. Finding themselves discovered, the conspirators fled. Don Ferdinando was caught: but the Bastard Giulio, good at escapes, took refuge in sanctuary with his brother-in-law the Marquess of Mantua, who replied to Duke Alfonso’s demand for extradition that, if evidence of guilt were shewn, the criminal should be delivered up to justice. Evidence was shewn, in the shape of the full confession of Don Ferdinando; and the Bastard Giulio passed into his sovereign brother’s hands. Brought to the common block in the square of Ferrara, the two detected traitors were allowed to suffer all the pangs of the approach of death: but, at the last moment, Duke Alfonso in his mercy granted a reprieve, commuting their penance to life-imprisonment. * * * * * Early in 1507, died Duke Cesare de Valentinois (detto Borgia), by a mean inglorious death for one who had been in life so mighty a man. While commanding a small squadron on behalf of the King of Navarre, he was killed in a petty skirmish by the castle of Viana. His corpse was quietly interred in the cathedral of Pampeluna, which, by a curious coincidence, had been the first piece of ecclesiastical preferment conferred on him by the Lord Alexander P.P. VI. So ended a phenomenal personality in which superb and tawny beauty of physique, prodigious force of character, fierce all-conquering energy, swift unerring almost-feline agility of action, and transcendent splendour of achievement, were blasted and nullified and marred, humanly speaking, by one single delicacy of respectful conscientious self-sacrifice and supreme confidence in clerical honour. His beautiful elegy by Ercole Strozzi, “Ille diu, qui dum caelestibus auris Visitur, implet onus laudis, caelumque meretur” is too well-known to be quoted at length. He left three children, (α) Madame Eloise de Valentinois; who married, first, the Sieur Louis de la Tremouille, second, the Sieur Philippe de Bourbon, Comte de Busset, whose direct descendants flourish in France at the present day: (β) Don Girolamo de Valentinois; who, by marriage with Madonna Isabella Carpi patrician of Ferrara, had issue Madonna Lucrezia de Valentinois married, in 1562, to Don Bartolomeo Oroboni patrician of Ferrara, who died in 1565.