New Tales - v. 2 Author:Amelia Alderson Opie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A TALE OF TRIALS; TOLD TO MY CHILDREN. " I Was born in the year 1642 : and I need not tell those whom I address that I am of an ancient family; nor that... more », as the child of a younger brother, and the eldest of several children, my prospects of fortune were for many years of my life inferior to the advantages of my birth. " It is equally needless for me to inform them that I saw the light just as the discontents in England were ripening into a civil war. " But it may be necessary for me to explain even to those who know my father's political opinions, and how devotedly attached he always was to what are now called Whig principles; why,on the expected execution of his sovereign in the year 1649, (seven years after my birth,) he left England in disgust, and joined his elder brother, a determined loyalist, on the pleasant banks of the Durance. '' It was because my father, though he fully admitted the right of the parliament to depose the king, could not approve the vote for his execution, and not from the influence of personal attachment counteracting the power of principle, but from a deep-rooted opinion which he entertained that allowances should always be made for a being born to sovereign sway, and consequently to the extraordinary temptations and disadvantages inseparable from the situation. He therefore thought that the indulgence due to those errors, the result of a rank in life to which the culprit did not call himself, should have led the unhappy monarch's judges to have changed his sentence from death into banishment, " These sentiments were, unconsciously to himself, encouraged in my father by the quiet, unfelt, but sure influence of my beloved mother; who—being a Provencale by the maternal side, a catholic, and the younger daughter of a Scotch baron, had ...« less