ror for all territories on the left bank of the
Rhine. The occupation of Cambray, an Imperial fief, by the French king gave
a formal ground for calling the princes of this district to Edward's
standard. But already the great alliance showed signs of yielding. Edward,
uneasy at his connexion with an Emperor under the ban of the Church and
harassed by vehement remonstrances from the Pope, entered again into
negotiations with France in the winter of 1338; and Lewis, alarmed in his
turn, listened to fresh overtures from Benedict, who held out vague hopes
of reconciliation while he threatened a renewed excommunication if Lewis
persisted in invading France. The non-arrival of the English subsidy
decided the Emperor to take no personal part in the war, and the attitude
of Lewis told on the temper of Edward's German allies. Though all joined
him in the summer of 1339 on his formal summons of them as Vicar-General of
the Empire, and his army when it appeared before Cambray numbered forty
thousand men, their ardour cooled as the town held out. Philip approached
it from the south, and on Edward's announcing his resolve to cross the
river and attack him he was at once deserted by the two border princes who
had most to lose from a contest with France, the Counts of Hainault and
Namur. But the king was still full of hope. He pushed forward to the
country round St. Quentin between the head waters of the Somme and the Oise
with the purpose of forcing a decisive engagement. But he found Philip
strongly encamped, and declaring their supplies exhausted his allies at
once called for a retreat. It was in vain that Edward moved slowly for a
week along the French border. Philip's position was too strongly guarded by
marshes and entrenchments to be attacked, and at last the allies would stay
no longer. At the news that the French king had withdrawn to the south the
whole army in turn fell back upon Brussels.

[Sidenote: England and the Papacy]

The failure of the campaign dispelled the hopes which Edward had drawn from
his alliance with the Empire. With the exhaustion of his subsidies the
princes of the Low Countries became inactive. The Duke of Brabant became
cooler in his friendship. The Emperor himself, still looking to an
accommodation with the Pope and justly jealous of Edward's own intrigues at
Avignon, wavered and at last fell away. But though the alliance ended in
disappointment it had given a new impulse to the grudge against the Pap