"Without your help, my lords--without your help, so please you
both," she cried. "Why, Dudley," she exclaimed, in mock surprise,
as she threw a look over her shoulder at the prostrate boy, "are
you there? Beshrew me, though, you do look like one, of goodman
Roger's Dorking cocks in the poultry yonder, so red and ruffled
of feather do you seem. There, see now, I do repent me of my
discourtesy. You, Sir Robert, shall squire me to the hall, and
Lord Seymour must even content himself with playing the gallant
to good Mistress Ashley"; and, leaning on the arm of the now
pacified Dudley, the self-willed girl tripped lightly up the
entrance-steps.
Self-willed and thoughtless--even rude and hoydenish--we may
think her in these days of gentler manners and more guarded
speech. But those were less refined and cultured times than these
in which we live; and the rough, uncurbed nature of "Kinge Henrye
the viii. of Most Famous Memorye," as the old chronicles term the
"bluff King Hal," reappeared to a noticeable extent in the person
of his second child, the daughter of ill-fated Anne Boleyn --"my
ladye's grace" the Princess Elizabeth of England.
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