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.