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Students recalling the social life of England should bear in mind the hours kept by our ancestors in the fourteenth and two following centuries. Under the Plantagenets noblemen used to sup at five P.M., and dine somewhere about the breakfast hour of Mayfair in a modern London season.
In Fulk first appeared that low type of superstition which startled even superstitious ages in the early Plantagenets. Robber as he was of Church lands, and contemptuous of ecclesiastical censures, the fear of the end of the world drove Fulk to the Holy Sepulchre.
She was willing to bear all the consequences, but then the Plantagenets were not in the habit of treating ladies as traitors.
The duchess, feigning a desire to convict him of imposture before the whole of her attendants, put several questions to him which she knew he could readily answer, affected astonishment at his replies, and, at last, no longer able to control her feelings, "threw herself on his neck, and embraced him as her nephew, the true image of Edward, the sole heir of the Plantagenets, and the legitimate successor to the English throne."
"A magnificent flight of steps led us from the foot of the ramparts up to the gate of the palace. We entered it, and were presently surrounded by a train of attendants in such sumptuous liveries, than I found myself all at once carried back into the fifteenth century, and might have fancied myself within the courtly halls of our Tudors and Plantagenets.
In my father's phrase, 'all the virtue had gone out of him. I declare when I have seen him riding among his troops, with his head bowed upon his breast and a face like a mute at a burying, casting an air of gloom and of despair all round him, I have felt that, even in case of success, such a man could never wear the crown of the Tudors and the Plantagenets, but that some stronger hand, were it that of one of his own generals, would wrest it from him.
If the Black Prince had lived, or if Richard II. had inherited the temper of the Plantagenets, the ecclesiastical system would have been spared the misfortune of a longer reprieve.
It lived in the royal nephew, through whose warlike skill he was overthrown, and who speedily arrived at the conclusion that most of the reforms of his uncle were founded upon the eternal principles of truth and justice. Hence that legislation which gained for Edward, the greatest of the Plantagenets, and the first truly English king since Harold, the title of the "English Justinian."
The Red and White Roses of the Plantagenets reappeared under the altered names of Whig and Tory; but it was proved that the decision of a leading soldier like the Duke of Marlborough would decide the army, and that it would govern the nation; fortunately the decision was a wise one, and was ratified by Parliament: thus FORCE governed LAW, and the decision of the ARMY influenced the SENATE. William III. succeeded, AS AN ELECTED MONARCH, under the Bill of Rights.
"The Achilles is certainly a model vessel in some respects, Sir Gervaise, though I flatter myself the Plantagenets have no great occasion to imitate her, in order to gain a character." "You imitate Morganic in order to know how to keep a ship in order! Poh! let Morganic come to school to you.
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