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“Sir Reginald believes in hierarchies and authority. As mayor, he thinks the aldermen’s job is to make decisions and then enforce them. When your father was mayor he said that aldermen should rule the town by serving it.” Ned said impatiently: “That sounds like two ways of looking at the same thing.” “It’s not, though,” said his mother. “It’s two different worlds.”
“But I know there is another kind of happiness, the mad ecstasy of adoring someone and being adored in return.” “Yes!” Margery was so glad that Susannah understood. “That particular joy is not given to all of us,” she said solemnly. “But it should be!” Margery could not bear the thought that a person might be denied love.
She took religion very seriously, but she had always been disobedient. How could that be? For Rollo, the essence of religion was submission to authority. That was the trouble with Protestants: they thought they had the right to make up their own minds.
Rollo was driven mad by the idea that people—ignorant, uneducated, stupid ordinary people—had the right to make up their own minds about religion. If such a naïve idea ever gained currency, civilization would collapse. People had to be told what to do.
Spain was the richest country in the world but also the most conservative: there were laws against gaudy clothing. The rich dressed in black while the poor wore washed-out browns. It was ironic, Barney thought, how similar extreme Catholics were to extreme Protestants.
This was how women such as Caterina exercised power, she realized with admiration. They moved cleverly but invisibly, working behind the scenes, managing events while the men imagined they had total control.
“When a man is certain that he knows God’s will, and is resolved to do it regardless of the cost, he is the most dangerous person in the world.”
Might there come a time when people of different faiths did not kill one another?
The simple idea that people should be allowed to worship as they wished caused more suffering than the ten plagues of Egypt.
In the eyes of the church, the Bible was the most dangerous of all banned books—especially translated into French or English, with marginal notes explaining how certain passages proved the correctness of Protestant teaching. Priests said that ordinary people were unable to rightly interpret God’s word, and needed guidance. Protestants said the Bible opened men’s eyes to the errors of the priesthood. Both sides saw reading the Bible as the central
Changing your beliefs with every change of monarch was called “policy,” and people who did it were “politicians.”
Her well-being was more important to me than my own. I have learned, during the course of a long life, that that is the meaning of love.
