It was pity when this malady of gout attacked him, for he was not an old man." To the last of his days Louis XII.

was animated by earnest sympathy and active solicitude for his people.

It cost him a great deal to make with the King of England the treaties of August 7, 1514, to cede Tournai to the English, and to agree to the payment to them of a hundred thousand crowns a year for ten years.

He did it to restore peace to France, attacked on her own soil, and feeling her prosperity threatened.

For the same reason he negotiated with Pope Leo X., Emperor Maximilian, and Ferdinand the Catholic, and he had very nearly attained the same end by entering once more upon pacific relations with them, when death came and struck him down at the age of fifty-three.