Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 1183

For by now the original cause of the quarrel, Philip's seizure of Gascony, was only one strand in the spider web of French interests that overlay all western Europe and that had been so well and closely spun that the lightest movement could set it trembling from one end to the other.

Even so, Edward's ambassadors can scarcely have foreseen that five years of unremitting work lay ahead of them before peace was finally made and that when it did come the countless embassies that left England for Rome during that period had very little to do with it.