did not the less nourish their mistrustful presentiments; and one of Louis XII.’s most intelligent advisers, his finance-minister Florimond Robertet, was not slow to share them.  “The pope,” said he to them one day [July 1, 1509], “is behaving very ill towards us; he seeks on every occasion to sow enmity between the princes, especially between the emperor and the Most Christian king;” and, some weeks later, whilst speaking of the money-aids which the new King of England was sending, it was said, to Emperor Maximilian, he said to the Florentine, Nasi, “It would be a very serious business, if from all this were to result against us a universal league, in which the pope, England, and Spain should join.” [Negotiations Diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane, published by M. Abel Desjardins, in the Documents relatifs d l’Histoire de France, t. ii. pp. 331, 355, 367, 384, 389, 416.]

Next year (1510) the mistrust of the Florentine envoys was justified.  The Venetians sent a humble address to the pope, ceded to him the places they but lately possessed in the 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