Through hill-land and through moor-land, past Moyns and Great
Yeldham, past Halstead and Chappel and the walls of Colchester,
turning now this way and now that until it comes to Mersea Island
and the sea, the little river flows to-day even as it sped along
one pleasant summer morning sixteen hundred and forty years ago,
when a little British princess, only fairly in her teens,
reclined in comfortable contentment in her gilded barge and
floated down the river from her father's palace at Colchester to
the strand at Wivanloe.
For this little girl of fourteen, Helena, the princess, was a
king's daughter, and, according to all accounts, a very bright
and charming girl besides--which all princesses have not been.
Her father was Coel, second prince of Britain and king of that
part of ancient England, which includes the present shires of
Essex and of Suffolk, about the river Colne.
Not a very large kingdom this, but even as small as it was, King
Coel did not hold it in undisputed sway. For he was one of the
tributary princes of Britain, in the days when Roman arms, and
Roman law, and Roman dress, and Roman manners, had place and
power throughout England, from the Isle of Wight, to the Northern
highlands, behind whose forest-crowned hills those savage natives
known as the Picts--"the tattooed folk"--held possession of
ancient Scotland, and defied the eagles of Rome.
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