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 fashio