After four months in Rome, suddenly, and with no leave-taking, the Duke of Gandia fled to Spain. The prospect of a scarlet hat had become too real, too terrifying. Of course there is not the slightest danger that a man may be made cardinal against his expressed desire. The cardinalate is not an infectious disease like the plague, or scarlet fever; nor is it a sacrament, like baptism, which leaves an ineradicable mark upon the soul. It conceivably is possible that only brutal rudeness and incivility will suffice for its avoidance:—but they will suffice. And it can always be renounced, rare though renunciations be. The Duke of Gandia was a very gracious lord, in full possession of all his faculties, utterly uninfluenced; and, no doubt, he wished to avoid an occasion when his conscience would direct him to be ungracious or uncivil to the benevolence of the Holiness of the Pope. In his flight, he first went to the castle of Loyola, where his General had been born, to thank Heaven for the nativity of that marvellous man: then, onward again, a few miles to the little town of Oñata in Guipuscoa, where there was a house of the Company of Jesus. The Lord Paul P.P. III died in Rome this year 1550: and was succeeded by the Lord Julius P.P. III. The Duke of Gandia received a Brief from Caesar Carlos V, dated the twelfth of February 1551, giving permission, to divest himself of rank and to renounce the world, with very much regret at losing the allegiance of his most brilliant subject, and solely because Caesar felt that to refuse would be opposition to the Divine Will. He made the formal act of renunciation before a notary at Oñate; bestowing his duchy, his principalities, and his counties on his heir, the Marquess Don Carlos of Lombay; distributing his estates and wealth among his children. He laid aside his sword, which, according to the fashion of the courtiers of Caesar Carlos V, he rode cock-horse, (so to speak,) as it hung between his legs. He had his hair cut short, and the tonsure shaved on his head. He changed his ducal robes for the shabby ill-fitting black habit of a Jesuit. On Whit Saturday he was ordained priest; and the Duke of Gandia disappeared in Padre Francisco de Borja. In his after life, he never would allow of any allusion to his former style, except when he chanced to hear of the refusal by the Company of Jesus to admit a would-be but unsuitable novice, when he would say, “Now I thank God from the bottom of my heart for having made me a duke; for assuredly there was nothing else about me which could have induced the superiors to accept me”: an opinion which shews that Padre Francisco’s extremely poor opinion of himself betrayed him into exaggeration—a little human touch which brings him nearer to human understanding.