he Romagna, and conjured him to relieve
them from the excommunication he had pronounced against them. Julius
II., after some little waiting, accorded the favor demanded of him.
Louis XII. committed the mistake of embroiling himself with the Swiss by
refusing to add twenty thousand livres to the pay of sixty thousand he
was giving them already, and by styling them "wretched mountain-
shepherds, who presumed to impose upon him a tax he was not disposed to
submit to." The pope conferred the investiture of the kingdom of Naples
upon Ferdinand the Catholic, who at first promised only his neutrality,
but could not fail to be drawn in still farther when war was rekindled in
Italy. In all these negotiations with the Venetians, the Swiss, the
Kings of Spain and England, and the Emperor Maximilian, Julius II. took a
bold initiative. Maximilian alone remained for some time at peace with
the King of France.

In October, 1511, a league was formally concluded between the pope, the
Venetians, the Swiss, and King Ferdinand against Louis XII. A place was
reserved in it for the King of England, Henry VIII., who, on ascending
the throne, had sent word to the King of France that "he desired to abide
in the same friendship that the king his father had kept up," but who, at
the bottom of his heart, burned to resume on the Continent an active and
a prominent part. The coalition thus formed was called the League of
Holy Union. "I," said Louis XII., "am the Saracen against whom this
league is directed."

He had just lost, a few months previously, the intimate and faithful
adviser and friend of his whole life: Cardinal George d'Amboise, seized
at Milan with a fit of the gout, during which Louis tended him with the
assiduity and care of an affectionate brother, died at Lyons on the 25th
of May, 1510, at fifty years of age. He was one not of the greatest, but
of the most honest ministers who ever enjoyed a powerful monarch's
constant favor, and employed it we will not say with complete
disinterestedness, but with a predominant anxiety for the public weal.
In the matter of external policy the influence of Cardinal d'Amboise, was
neither skilfully nor salutarily exercised: he, like his master, indulged
in those views of distant, incoherent, and improvident conquests which
caused the reign of Louis XII. to be wasted in ceaseless wars, with which
the cardinal's desire of becoming pope was not altogether unconnected,
and which, after having re