She
wanted her churches, and her theatres, her cock-pits and taverns, and
bear-gardens and maypoles back again. She wanted to be ruled by the law,
and not by the sword; and she longed with a romantic longing for that young
wanderer who had fled from her shores in a fishing-boat, with his life in
his hand, to return in a glad procession of great ships dancing over summer
seas, eating, drinking, gaming, in a coat worth scarce thirty shillings,
and with empty pockets for his loyal subjects to make haste and fill.
Angela had the convent parlour all to herself this fair spring morning. She
was the favourite pupil of the nuns, had taken no vows, pledged herself to
no noviciate, ever mindful of her promise to her father. She had lived as
happily and as merrily in that abode of piety as she could have lived in
the finest palace in Europe. There were other maidens, daughters of the
French and Flemish nobility, who were taught and reared within those sombre
precincts, and with them she had played and worked and laboured at such
studies as became a young lady of quality. Like that fair daughter of
affliction, Henrietta of England, she had gained in education by the
troubles which had made her girlhood a time of seclusion.
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