e king who
was a model of chivalry in his dealings with knight and noble showed
himself a brutal savage to the burgesses of Calais. Even the courtesy to
his Queen which throws its halo over the story of their deliverance went
hand in hand with a constant disloyalty to her. When once Philippa was dead
his profligacy threw all shame aside. He paraded a mistress as Queen of
Beauty through the streets of London, and set her in pomp over tournaments
as the Lady of the Sun. The nobles were quick to follow their lord's
example. "In those days," writes a chronicler of the time, "arose a rumour
and clamour among the people that wherever there was a tournament there
came a great concourse of ladies, of the most costly and beautiful but not
of the best in the kingdom, sometimes forty and fifty in number, as if they
were a part of the tournament, ladies clad in diverse and wonderful male
apparel, in parti-coloured tunics, with short caps and bands wound
cord-wise round their heads, and girdles bound with gold and silver, and
daggers in pouches across their body. And thus they rode on choice coursers
to the place of tourney; and so spent and wasted their goods and vexed
their bodies with scurrilous wantonness that the murmurs of the people
sounded everywhere. But they neither feared God nor blushed at the chaste
voice of the people."

[Sidenote: The Black Death]

The "chaste voice of the people" was soon to grow into the stern moral
protest of the Lollards, but for the moment all murmurs were hushed by the
king's success. The truce which followed the capture of Calais seemed a
mere rest in the career of victories which opened before Edward. England
was drunk with her glory and with the hope of plunder. The cloths of Caen
had been brought after the sack of that town to London. "There was no
woman," says Walsingham, "who had not got garments, furs, feather-beds, and
utensils from the spoils of Calais and other foreign cities." The court
revelled in gorgeous tournaments and luxury of dress; and the establishment
in 1346 of the Order of the Garter which found its home in the new castle
that Edward was raising at Windsor marked the highest reach of the spurious
"Chivalry" of the day. But it was at this moment of triumph that the whole
colour of Edward's reign suddenly changed. The most terrible plague the
world has ever witnessed advanced from the East, and after devastating
Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic swo