Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/470

450 rigidly defined, and Calais being the sensitive point of difference between the two countries, there had been quarrels among the opposition gangs of labourers. Trenches which had been cut by one party were filled in by the other; Lord Maltravers, the English deputy, was fired on by an ambuscade; and although officially the Governments affected to regret the unruliness of their subjects, neither would yield anything of their supposed rights. Lord William Howard was sent to Paris to ascertain, if possible, the real feeling towards England, and at the same time to learn how matters stood between Francis and the Emperor. The Earl of Hertford went to Calais to arrange the disputes with a French commissioner, and with directions to hint that if treaties were systematically broken, 'if the French would omit to accomplish that whereunto they were bound, and sought daily to claim that whereunto they had no title, they might drive the King of England to seek and claim his right in some other things, and might hear that which should percase redound to their disadvantage.' The 'some other things' referred to an old debt which had arrived at dimensions not easy to deal with. A series of money transactions, dating back into the fifteenth century, and complicated further by the war of 1513, by the redemption money which Francis had engaged to pay for the restoration of Tournay, and other intricacies, had been adjusted and simplified in