As for me, my mother now watched over me like any other lady of her nation.  She resorted far less to Queen Henrietta than formerly, and always took me with her whenever she went, putting an end now, in my twenty-fourth year, to the freedom I had enjoyed all my life.  She did not much like leaving me alone with Eustace, and if it had not been for going to church on Sunday, I should never have gone out with him. he was not strong enough now to go to prayers daily at Sir Richard Browne’s chapel, but he never failed that summer to take me thither on a Sunday, though he held that it would be dishonourable to let this be a way for any other meetings.

My mother had become devout, as the French say.  She wore only black, went much more to church, always leaving me in the charge of Madame Croquelebois, whom she borrowed from the d’Aubepines for the purpose, and she set all she could in train for the conversion of my brother and myself.  There was the Abbe Walter Montagu, Lord Mandeville’s brother, and one or two others, who had despaired of our Church and joined hers, and she was always inviting them and setting them to argue with us.  Indeed, she declared that one chief reason of her desiring this wedding for me was that it would bring me within the fold of the true Church.  They told us that our delusion, as they called our Church, was dead; that the Presbyterians and Fifth Monarchy men and all their rabble had stifled the last remnant of life that had been left in her; that the Episcopacy, even if we scouted the Nag’s Head fable, was perishing away, and that England was like Holland or the Palatinate.  But Eustace smiled gravely at them, and asked whether the Church had been dead when the Roman Emperors, or the heretic Arians, persecuted her, and said that he knew that, even if he never should see it, she would revive brighter and purer than ever—­as indeed it has been given to us to behold.  That dear brother, he was so unlike the Calvinists, and held so much in common with the French Church, that the priests always thought they were converting him; but he stood all the firmer for knowing what was truly Catholic.  Of course it was no wonder that as Walter Montagu, like all my Lord Mandeville’s sons, had been bred a Puritan, he should have been amazed to perceive that the Roman Catholics were not all that they had been painted, and should find rest in the truths that had been hidden from him; but with us it was quite otherwise, having ever known the best alike of ours and of theirs.  The same thing was going on at the Louvre.

Queen Henrietta was bent on converting her son, the Duke of Gloucester.  He was a dear good lad of twelve years old, who had just been permitted to join her.  I think the pleasantest times I had at all in those days were with him.  He clung to us because I had known and loved his sweet sister, the Lady Elisabeth, who had been his companion in his imprisonment, and though he seldom spoke of her it was easy to see that the living with her had left a strong mark on his whole character.