He had never introduced into the school any academiste
feminine:
He had departed at the summons of his father, having taken
proper leave of M. and Mme. de Poix."[271]
However, something of an education had to be provided for Royalist boys
at the time of the Civil War, when Oxford was demoralized. Parents
wandering homeless on the Continent were glad enough of the academies.
Even the Stuarts tried them, though the Duke of Gloucester had to be
weaned from the company of some young French gallants, "who, being
educated in the same academy, were more familiar with him than was
thought convenient."[272] It was a choice between academies or such an
education as Edmund Verney endured in a dull provincial city as the sole
pupil of an exiled Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge. But the
effects of being reared in France, and too early thrown into the
dissolute Courts of Europe, were evident at the Restoration, when
Charles the Second and his friends returned to startle England with
their "exceeding wildness." What else could be the effect of a youth
spent as the Earl of Chesterfield records:[273] at thirteen years old a
courtier at St Germaine: at fourteen, rid of any governor or tutor: at
sixteen, at the academy of M. de Veau, he "chanced to have a quarrel
with M. Morvay, since Captaine of the French King's Guards, who I hurt
and disarmed in a duel." Thereupon he left the academy and took up his
abode at the Court of Turin.
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