THE PROTESTANT A Tale of THE REIGN OF QUEEN MARY BY MRS. BRAY NEW AND REVISED EDITION LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL LIMITED THE PROTESTANT. CHAPTER I. NEAR the city of Canterbury, during the reign of Mary the First, queen of England, there stood a retired village, which we shall introduce to our readers by the name of Wellminster. It was situated in one of those richly wooded valleys for which the county of Kent is so distinguished, guarded by gently sloping hills, and watered by the river Stour. A church, erected in the early ages of Christianity, and said to have owed its foundation to Ethelbert, king of Kent, displayed the massive structure and the round-headed arch of the Saxon era. This church was dedicated to St. John the Baptist, as a spring of the purest water, that rose near the spot, was held by tradition to have been the font of baptism to many of the first converts who embraced the Gospel in our island. A few humble tenements, and a handsome stone-built house of the time of Henry the Seventh that stood within a pretty garden, formed the village. The whole was remarkable for nothing so much as the beauty of its situation; where woods and water, together with the fresh verdure of the fields, combined to form a scene of that happy and cultivated character peculiar to England. Such was Wellminster. But Time, that subdues empires as well as towns, whose touch withers alike the bloom of human beauty and the pride of human art-Time has long since passed over it with a destroying hand, and the church, the village, are no more. So complete has been the ruin, that vainly would the traveller now seek to find even the smallest vestige of their former existence. B |