When the people of Calais saw that all hope of a rescue had slipped from them, they held a council, resigned themselves to offer submission to the King of England rather than die of hunger, and begged their governor, John de Vienne, to enter into negotiations for that purpose with the besiegers. Walter de Manny, instructed by Edward to reply to these overtures, said to John de Vienne, “The king’s intent is, that ye put yourselves at his free will to ransom or put to death such as it shall please him; the people of Calais have caused him so great displeasure, cost him so much money, and lost him so many men, that it is not astonishing if that weighs heavily upon him.” “Sir Walter,” answered John de Vienne, “it would be too hard a matter for us if we were to consent to what you say. There are within here but a small number of us knights and squires who have loyally served our lord the King of France even as you would serve yours in like case; but we would suffer greater evils than ever men have had to endure rather than consent that the meanest ‘prentice-boy or varlet of the town should have other evil than the greatest of us. We pray you be pleased to return to the King of England, and pray him to have pity upon us; and you will do us courtesy.” “By my faith,” answered Walter de Manny, “I will do it willingly, Sir John; and I would that, by God’s help, the king might be pleased to listen unto me.” And the brave English knight reported to the king the prayer of the French knights in Calais, saying, “My lord, Sir John de Vienne told me that they were in very sore extremity and famine, but that, rather than surrender all to your will, to live or die as it might please you, they would sell themselves so dearly as never did men-at-arms.” “I will not do otherwise than I have said,” answered the king. “My lord,” replied Walter, “you will perchance be wrong, for you will give us a bad example; if you should be pleased to send us to defend any of your fortresses, we should of a surety not go willingly if you have these people put to death, for thus would they do to us in like case.” These words caused Edward to reflect; and the greater part of the English barons came to the aid of Walter de Manny. “Sirs,” said the king, “I would not be all alone against you all. Go, Walter, to them of Calais, and say to the governor that the greatest grace they can find in my sight is that six of the most notable burghers come forth from their town, bare-headed, bare-footed, with ropes round their necks, and with the keys of the town and castle in their hands. With them I will do according to my will, and the rest I will receive to mercy.” “My lord,” said Walter, “I will do it willingly.” He returned to Calais, where John de Vienne was awaiting him, and reported the king’s decision. The governor immediately left the ramparts, went to the market-place, and had the bell rung to assemble the people. At sound of the bell men and women came hurrying up hungering for news, as was natural for people so hard-pressed by famine that they could not hold out any longer. John de Vienne then repeated to them what he had just been told, adding that there was no other way, and that they would have to make short answer. On this they all fell a-weeping and crying out so bitterly that no heart in the world, however hard, could have seen and heard them without pity. Even John de Vienne shed tears. Then rose up to his feet the richest burgher of the town, Eustace de St. Pierre, who, at the former council, had been for capitulation. “Sir,” said he, “it would be great pity to leave this people to die, by famine or otherwise, when any remedy can be found against it; and he who should keep them from such a mishap would find great favor in the eyes of our Lord. I have great hope to find favor in the eyes of our Lord if I die to save this people; I would fain be the first herein, and I will willingly place myself in my shirt and bare-headed and with a rope round my neck, at the mercy of the King of England.” At this speech, men and women cast themselves at the feet of Eustace de St. Pierre, weeping piteously. Another right-honorable burgher, who had great possessions and two beautiful damsels for daughters, rose up and said that he would act comrade to Eustace de St. Pierre: his name was John d’Aire. Then, for the third, James de Vissant, a rich man in personalty and realty; then his brother Peter de Vissant; and then the fifth and sixth, of whom none has told the names. On the 5th of August, 1347, these six burghers, thus apparelled, with cords round their necks and each with a bunch of the keys of the city and of the castle, were conducted outside the gates by John de Vienne, who rode a small hackney, for he was in such ill plight that he could not go a-foot. He gave them up to Sir Walter, who was awaiting him, and said to him, “As captain of Calais I deliver to you, with the consent of the poor people of the town, these six burghers, who are, I swear to you, the most honorable and notable in person, in fortune, and in ancestry, in the town of Calais. I pray you be pleased to pray the King of England that these good folks be not put to death.” “I know not,” answered De Manny, “what my lord the king may mean to do with them; but I promise you that I will do mine ability.” When Sir Walter brought in the six burghers in this condition, King Edward was in his chamber with a great company of earls, barons, and knights. As soon as he heard that the folks of Calais were there as he had ordered, he went out and stood in the open space before his hostel and all those lords with him; and even Queen Philippa of England, who was with child, followed the king her lord. He gazed most cruelly on those six poor men, for he had his heart possessed with so much rage that at first he could not speak. When he spoke, he commanded them to be straightway beheaded, All the barons and knights who were there prayed him to show them mercy. “Gentle sir,” said Walter de Manny, “restrain your wrath; you have renown for gentleness and nobleness; be pleased to do nought whereby it may be diminished; if you have not pity on yonder folk, all others will say that it was great cruelty on your part to put to death these six honorable burghers, who of their own free will have put themselves at your mercy to save the others.” The king gnashed his teeth, saying, “Sir Walter, hold your peace; let them fetch hither my headsman; the people of Calais have been the death of so many of my men that it is but meet that yon fellows die also.” Then, with great humility, the noble queen, who was very nigh her delivery, threw herself on her knees at the feet of the king, saying, “Ah gentle sir, if, as you know, I have asked nothing of you from the time that I crossed the sea in great peril, I pray you humbly that as a special boon, for the sake of Holy Mary’s Son and for the love of me, you will please to have mercy on these six men.”
The king did not speak at once, and fixed his eyes on the good dame his wife, who was weeping piteously on her knees. She softened his stern heart, for he would have been loath to vex her in the state in which she was; and he said to her, “Ha! dame, I had much rather you had been elsewhere than here; but you pray me such prayers that I dare not refuse you, and though it irks me much to do so, there! I give them up to you; do with them as you will.” “Thanks, hearty thanks, my lord,” said the good queen. Then she rose up and raised up the six burghers, had the ropes taken off their necks, and took them with her to her chamber, where she had fresh clothes and dinner brought to them. Afterwards she gave them six nobles apiece, and had them led out of the host in all safety.
Edward was choleric and stern in his choler, but judicious and politic. He had sense enough to comprehend the impressions exhibited around him and to take them into account. He had yielded to the free-spoken representations of Walter de Manny and to the soft entreaties of his royal wife. When he was master of Calais he did not suffer himself to be under any illusion as to the sentiments of the population he had conquered, and, without excluding the French from the town, he took great care to mingle with them an English population. He had allowed a free passage to the poor Calaisians driven out by famine; he now fetched from London thirty-six burghers of position and three hundred others of inferior condition, with their wives and children, and he granted to the town thus depeopled and repeopled all such municipal and commercial privileges as were likely to attract new inhabitants thither. But, at the same time, he felt what renown and importance a devotion like that of the six burghers of Calais could not fail to confer upon such men, and not only did he trouble himself to get them back to their own hearths, but on the 8th of October, 1347, two months after the surrender of Calais, he gave Eustace de St. Pierre a considerable pension “on account of the good services he was to render in the town by maintaining good order there,” and he re-instated him, him and his heirs, in possession of the properties that had belonged to him. Eustace, more concerned for the interests of his own town than for those of France, and being more of a Calaisian burgher than a national patriot, showed no hesitation, for all that appears, in accepting this new fashion of serving his native city, for which he had shown himself so ready to die. He lived four years as a subject of the King of England. At his death, which happened in 1351, his heirs declared themselves faithful subjects of the King of France, and Edward confiscated away from them the possessions he had restored to their predecessor. Eustace de St. Pierre’s cousin and comrade in devotion to their native town, John d’Aire, would not enter Calais again; his property was confiscated, and his house, the finest, it is said, in the town, was given by King Edward to Queen Philippa, who showed no more hesitation in accepting it than Eustace in serving his new king. Long-lived delicacy of sentiment and conduct was rarer in those rough and rude times than heroic bursts of courage and devotion.
Philip of Valois tried to afford some consolation and supply some remedy for the misfortune of the Calaisians banished from their town. He secured to them exemption from certain imposts, no matter whither they removed, and the possession of all property and inheritances that might fall to them, and he promised to confer upon them all vacant offices which it might suit them to fill. But it was not in his gift to repair. even superficially and in appearance, the evils he had not known how to prevent or combat to any purpose. The outset of his reign had been brilliant and prosperous; but his victory at Cassel over the Flemings brought more cry than wool. He had vanity enough to flaunt it rather than wit enough to turn it to account. He was a prince of courts, and tournaments, and trips, and galas, whether regal or plebeian; he was volatile, imprudent, haughty, and yet frivolous, brave without ability, and despotic without anything to show for it. The battle of Crecy and the loss of Calais were reverses from which he never even made a serious attempt to recover; he hastily concluded with Edward a truce, twice renewed, which served only to consolidate the victor’s successes. A calamity of European extent came as an addition to the distresses of France. From 1347 to 1349 a frightful disease, brought from Egypt and Syria through the ports of Italy, and called the black plague or the plague of Florence, ravaged Western Europe, especially Provence and Languedoc, where it carried off, they say, two thirds of the inhabitants. Machiavelli and Boccaccio have described with all the force of their genius the material and moral effects of this terrible plague. The court of France suffered particularly from it, and the famous object of Petrarch’s tender sonnets, Laura de Noves, married to Hugh de Sade, fell a victim to it at Avignon. When the epidemic had well nigh disappeared, the survivors, men and women, princes and subjects, returned passionately to their pleasures and their galas; to mortality, says a contemporary chronicler, succeeded a rage for marriage; and Philip of Valois himself, now fifty-eight years of age, took for his second wife Blanche of Navarre, who was only eighteen. She was a sister of that young King of Navarre, Charles II., who was soon to get the name of Charles the Bad, and to become so dangerous an enemy for Philip’s successors. Seven months after his marriage, and on the 22d of August, 1350, Philip died at Nogent-le-Roi in the Haute-Marne, strictly enjoining his son John to maintain with vigor his well-ascertained right to the crown he wore, and leaving his people bowed down beneath a weight “of extortions so heavy that the like had never been seen in the kingdom of France.”
Only one happy event distinguished the close of this reign. As early as 1343 Philip had treated, on a monetary basis, with Humbert II., Count and Dauphin of Vienness, for the cession of that beautiful province to the crown of France after the death of the then possessor. Humbert, an adventurous and fantastic prince, plunged, in 1346, into a crusade against the Turks, from which he returned in the following year without having obtained any success. Tired of seeking adventures as well as of reigning, he, on the 16th of July, 1349, before a solemn assembly held at Lyons, abdicated his principality in favor of Prince Charles of France, grandson of Philip of Valois, and afterwards Charles V. The new dauphin took the oath, between the hands of the Bishop of Grenoble, to maintain the liberties, franchises, and privileges of the Dauphiny; and the ex-dauphin, after having taken holy orders and passed successively through the Archbishopric of Rheims and the Bishopric of Paris, both of which he found equally unpalatable, went to die at Clermont in Auvergne, in a convent belonging to the order of Dominicans, whose habit he had donned.
In the same year, on the 18th of April, 1349, Philip of Valois bought of Jayme of Arragon, the last king of Majorca, for one hundred and twenty thousand golden crowns, the lordship and town of Montpellier, thus trying to repair to some extent, for the kingdom of France, the losses he had caused it.
