[Sidenote:  Its Relation to the Papacy]

But the league had a more solid ground.  The Emperor, like Edward, had his strife with France.  His strife sprang from the new position of the Papacy.  The removal of the Popes to Avignon which followed on the quarrel of Boniface the Eighth with Philip le Bel and the subjection to the French court which resulted from it affected the whole state of European politics.  In the ever-recurring contest between the Papacy and the Empire France had of old been the lieutenant of the Roman See.  But with the settlement at Avignon the relation changed, and the Pope became the lieutenant of France.  Instead of the Papacy using the French kings in its war of ideas against the Empire the French kings used the Papacy as an instrument in their political rivalry with the Emperors.  But if the position of the Pope drew Lewis to the side of England, it had much to do with drawing Edward to the side of Lewis.  It was this that made the alliance, fruitless as it proved in a military sense, so memorable in its religious results.  Hitherto England had been mainly on the side of the Popes in their strife against the Emperors.  Now that the Pope had become a tool in the hands of a power which was to be its great enemy, the country was driven to close alliances with the Empire and to an evergrowing alienation from the Roman See.  In Scotch affairs the hostility of the Popes had been steady and vexatious ever since Edward the First’s time, and from the moment that this fresh struggle commenced they again showed their French partizanship.  When Lewis made a last appeal for peace, Philip of Valois made Benedict XII. lay down as a condition that the Emperor should form no alliance with an enemy of France.  The quarrel of both England and Germany with the Papacy at once grew ripe.  The German Diet met to declare that the Imperial power came from God alone, and that the choice of an Emperor needed no Papal confirmation, while Benedict replied by a formal excommunication of Lewis.  England on the other hand entered on a religious revolution when she stood hand in hand with an excommunicated power.  It was significant that though worship ceased in Flanders on the Pope’s interdict, the English priests who were brought over set the interdict at nought.

[Sidenote:  Failure of the Alliance]

The negotiation of this alliance occupied the whole of 1337; it ended in a promise of the Emperor on payment of 3000 gold florins to furnish two thousand men-at-arms.  In the opening of 1338 an attack of Philip on the Agenois forced Edward into open war.  His profuse expenditure however brought little fruit.  Though Edward crossed to Antwerp in the summer, the year was spent in negotiations with the princes of the Lower Rhine and in an interview with the Emperor at Coblentz, where Lewis appointed him Vicar-General of the Emperor for all territories on the left bank of the Rhine.  The occupation of Cambray, an Imperial fief, by the