But beneath all this glitter of chivalry lay the subtle, busy diplomatist.  None of our kings was so restless a negotiator.  From the first hour of Edward’s rule the threads of his diplomacy ran over Europe in almost inextricable confusion.  And to all who dealt with him he was equally false and tricky.  Emperor was played off against Pope and Pope against Emperor, the friendship of the Flemish towns was adroitly used to put a pressure on their counts, the national wrath against the exactions of the Roman See was employed to bridle the French sympathies of the court of Avignon, and when the statutes which it produced had served their purpose they were set aside for a bargain in which King and Pope shared the plunder of the Church between them.  His temper was as false in his dealings with his people as in his dealings with the European powers.  Edward aired to country and parliament his English patriotism.  “Above all other lands and realms,” he made his chancellor say, “the King had most tenderly at heart his land of England, a land more full of delight and honour and profit to him than any other.”  His manners were popular; he donned on occasion the livery of a city gild; he dined with a London merchant.  His perpetual parliaments, his appeals to them and to the country at large for counsel and aid, seemed to promise a ruler who was absolutely one at heart with the people he ruled.  But when once Edward passed from sheer carelessness and gratification at the new source of wealth which the Parliament opened to a sense of what its power really was becoming, he showed himself as jealous of freedom as any king that had gone before him.  He sold his assent to its demands for heavy subsidies, and when he had pocketed the money coolly declared the statutes he had sanctioned null and void.  The constitutional progress which was made during his reign was due to his absorption in showy schemes of foreign ambition, to his preference for war and diplomatic intrigue over the sober business of civil administration.  The same shallowness of temper, the same showiness and falsehood, ran through his personal character.  The 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