Henry was a boy, little more than a child, but the circumstances of his life had been such as early to teach him the necessity of self-interest. His father's last counsels, given at a supreme moment, may have weighed with him, for his well-known answer, "I will be torn to pieces ere they make me a king while my brothers live," prove him to have been, at that time, an unusually precocious child. Be this as it may, he showed an unexpected reluctance to follow his mother's advice and an unaccountable dislike of the Abbé Montagu, whom she appointed to be his governor. Perhaps he remembered his father's distrust of that fascinating person; certainly he knew that by following his teaching he would offend irrevocably the brother on whom, in case of a restoration to their native land, his future must depend. Henrietta herself was not blind to this aspect of the case, and she tried to propitiate her eldest son, to whom she had given a promise that she would not tamper with his brother's religion. "Henry has too many acquaintances among the idle little boys of Paris," she wrote to Charles, who was away from the city, "so I am sending him to Pontoise with the Abbé Montagu, where he will have more quiet to mind his book." To Pontoise accordingly Henry went, where Montagu attempted in vain to win his confidence. After a while the boy was allowed to return to Paris, but he showed himself so obstinately indocile that at night-time he and his page (a lad who had been in the service of the Earl of Manchester, and who doubtless enjoyed thwarting the renegade Abbé), "like Penelope's web ... unspun" (as well as they two little young things, some few years above thirty between them) whatever had passed in public.[396] The poor little Prince owned, indeed, that he was called upon to deal with matters above his years. His relatives at the French Court assured him that his first duty was to his mother now that his father was dead. His Anglican friends told him that a sovereign came before a mother, and that his obedience was due to his eldest brother. That brother, moreover, took this view strongly and wrote to him, saying in brief and pithy terms that, should he become a Catholic, he would never see him again. It is not surprising that between all these conflicting opinions Henry's young head was a little confused. He was further perplexed when to other arguments in his mother's favour was added the curious one that his conversion would make amends to her for the breach of her marriage contract, by which she should have had control of her children up to the age of twelve.