England proved a safe and agreeable asylum for the accomplished cardinal, and when he was finally recalled he must have returned to Rome with some misgivings. He found the Curia, as well as the city, living under that spell of terror which the Borgias, father and son, had woven about them. Strange stories, horrible suspicions, and mysterious crimes were the order of the day; and the cardinal, returning from his bishopric of Bath and Wells and the frankness and simplicity of the English court, must have found the change little to his liking. Very probably it was to secure the Pope’s friendship that he engaged the services of Bramante and began to build a magnificent palace on the Pope’s new thoroughfare. But while Alexander VI loved splendor, he also coveted money. The new palace was slow in building, and before it was completed, the Pope could see that all the gold which the cardinal had collected in England had not gone into the papal coffers. In short, he comprehended the fact that his Cardinal Adriano Corneto was a very rich man; and in the summer of 1503 he sent him a message that His Holiness and the Duke of Valentino (Cesare Borgia) would honor him by taking supper with him on the night of August 12. It is easy to understand the consternation with which the message was received, the look of frozen horror on the cardinal’s face as he already saw himself dying in sudden convulsions or fading slowly away with a fatal and mysterious malady. No time was to be lost, and a large share of the cardinal’s English gold bought over the Pope’s majordomo to his side. Possibly some of the deadly work had already begun before the bargain was struck. Possibly the majordomo thought it best to appear to have obeyed the Pope’s orders, even at the risk of a little torture to the cardinal, for although Cardinal Corneto survived that fatal supper, it was said that the skin fell from him in strips. The Pope died within ten days, the monstrous appearance of the corpse terrifying all who beheld it. Only Cesare Borgia’s almost superhuman vitality saved him from a like fate. Years after, when he had been shut out forever from Rome, Cesare told his friend and admirer Machiavelli that the results of this supper in the gardens of the cardinal’s palace had frustrated all his plans. Cesare had fully determined that his father’s successor should not humiliate and despoil him as his father had despoiled and humiliated the nephews of his predecessor, Pope Sixtus IV. He had made every arrangement to make himself master of Rome as soon as his father should die. He had, so he told the author of “Il Principe,” foreseen and provided for every possible difficulty. The one thing he had not been able to foresee was that he himself should be too ill to leave his bed.