appealed to Prince Charles, which was distasteful to the officers of the Commonwealth, who were not disposed to have any dealings with the Cavalier party, and at last in June, some eight months after the abduction, the lady was sent back to England in a man-of-war, and her captors were surrendered to the English authorities and indicted for felony, the supposed marriage being set aside. CHAPTER V. EVERY-DAY LIFE IN THE STUART PERIOD. Puritan influence--Neglect of women’s education--The boarding-out system for girls--Sir Matthew Hale on the education of girls--Manners and customs--Diversions of great ladies--Rules for behaviour--John Evelyn on manners--Effects of the Civil War--Simplicity of home life--Lady Anne Halkett--Position of wives--A contemporary writer on husbands. The Civil War had raised up two parties in England, divided as much upon ethics as upon politics. With the extremists on either side, women fared badly. They were between two camps, both equally noxious in their way--the libertines and the ascetics. “Under the Commonwealth society assumed a new and stern aspect. Women were in disgrace; it was everywhere declared from the pulpit that woman caused man’s expulsion from Paradise, and ought to be shunned by Christians as one of the greatest temptations of Satan. ‘Man,’ said they, ‘is conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity; it was his complacency to women that caused his first debasement; let man not therefore glory in his shame; let him not worship the fountain of his corruption.’ Learning and accomplishments were alike discouraged, and women confined to a knowledge of cooking, family medicines, and the unintelligible theological discussions of the day.” If Cromwell’s “Saints,” with their deadly hatred of Roman Catholicism, had been told that their views coincided with certain portions of the early teaching of the abhorred Church, they would have vehemently repelled the accusation. But the Puritans, in their revolt against beauty and pleasure, in their cramped conception and distorted views of the position of women, were only following the lead of the Fathers and the monks of the fourth century, who made of Christianity a revolting and immoral form of asceticism. A kind of moral dislocation was going on, forming a canker in social life. With the excesses of the court on the one hand and the austerities of the Puritans on the other, there was a constant interaction going on, each party goading the other into greater extremes. The deterioration of moral tone on the one side, and the perversion of thought on the other, affected the national life injuriously, and retarded the intellectual progress of women.