Loveday's History by Lucy Ellen Guernsey

I SHALL never forget that beginning. It was like the lightning flash, which always comes suddenly, albeit one may have seen the clouds gathering for hours, and even have heard distant growls and mutterings of thunder. Of such growls and mutterings there had indeed been a plenty when I was quite a little maid, living with my kinswoman, Lady Peckham, in Somersetshire. I remember well my lady's wrath and consternation at hearing that my Lord Cardinal had put down some thirty or more of the small religious houses, especially convents of nuns, and had confiscated their revenues to the endowment of his grand college foundation at Oxford. There was no talk of pensions and sustenance for old or young. The poor souls were turned adrift to shift as best they might. If my Lord Cardinal were alive to see the havoc that hath been made since, he might bethink himself (if he ever happened to hear it) of a certain pithy proverb about showing the cat the way to the cream. The cat hath lapped the cream pretty clean in these days.

I had a personal interest in that same measure of my Lord Cardinal, seeing I was myself destined for one of those very convents, a small, but reputable house of Gray Nuns, not far from Bridgewater. I was the daughter of a kinsman of my Lady Peckham's first husband, and being left an orphan of tender years and wholly without provision, my lady charitably took me into her protection and care, and gave me a home, intending to bring me up till such age as I should be fit to make a profession. But the convent was suppressed, as I have said, and so that cake was dough. The sisters-there were not more than eighteen or twenty in all-found places where they could. Some went to their friends, some to other houses of the same order. One went to live in the family of a master baker in Bridgewater, where she afterward married. I saw her not long since, a fine stately old dame, and a great blessing to her own family as well as to the poor of the town. One-Sister Benedict-came to stay with my lady till she could find suitable convoy to another house of Bernardines not far from London.