So universal was the scandal caused by the bestial vices of the Popes and the Italian cardinals that the Catholic Parliament of England refused to allow Pope Innocent IV. to come to the British Court. Why? Because, as the House of Commons roundly declared, "the Papal Court spreads such an abominable odor that it should not be permitted in England." (This was the Catholic Parliament of the Catholic King, Henry III., 13th century.) Let me quote the brutally frank _words of a Pope_-- "Whoever," writes Pius II., "has not felt the fire of love is either a stone or a beast. Who is it, at the age of thirty, that has not committed a crime for the sake of love? Many women have I courted and loved: and as soon as I had possessed them, I was filled with loathing for them." (The Infallible Pius II. lived in the 15th century.) Inasmuch as the courtesans raised one boy of eighteen, and another of twelve, to the "throne of Saint Peter," you can imagine what sort of lives they led in that gilded brothel, the Pope's palace. (Pope John XII. was 18 years of age. Pope Benedict IX. was a lad of 12 years. Both were monsters of lust.) This being the general picture of the Popes, _after_ they quit taking wives, we are not surprised to learn that their mistresses and their bastards were as well known, and as socially respectable, as those of the kings and emperors, who married because it was a duty, and Lotharioed because they found pleasure in it. The illegitimate children of the Vicars of Christ were as undenied and undeniable as were those of Henry of Navarre, Augustus of Saxony, Louis XIV. of France, and Charles II., of England. Don John of Austria, was not more proudly the "woods colt" of Charles V. of Germany, than was Cæsar Borgia the son of His Holiness, Alexander VI. The Duke of Berwick was not better known as the bastard of James II. and Arabella Churchill, than were two of the reigning belles of Rome, not many years ago, recognized as the winsome daughters in the flesh of His Holiness, Pope Pius IX. To complete the picture, history tells us that Pope John XII., who was made God-on-earth at the age of eighteen, met his death by the hand of an outraged husband, at the age of twenty-five. The furious husband broke into the Pope's bed-room, in the Lateran palace, and slew the adulterer in the arms of the faithless wife. Even Platina mentions this horrible fact, in his Lives of the Popes, written at the request of Pope Sixtus IV., and published in the year 1479. Platina was a devout Catholic and was Superintendent of the Vatican Library, Rome, Italy.