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We hanged him in front of Kingsbridge Cathedral. It is the usual place for executions. After all, if you can’t kill a man in front of God’s face you probably shouldn’t kill him at all.
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.
The worst kind of religious.
In my short life I had never seen anything so dreadful. I did not know how men could do such things, and I did not understand why God would let them. My mother said something that I have remembered all the subsequent years: “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.”
The simple idea that people should be allowed to worship as they wished caused more suffering than the ten plagues of Egypt.
The Guise family would lose all their influence in a moment. Power was terrifyingly fragile.
“Any event may be good or evil, depending on point of view. Consider this. A group of armed toughs enter a city, kill the men, rape the women, and make off with all the valuables. They are wicked criminals—unless the city is in Assyria and the victims are Muslims, in which case the armed men are not criminals but Crusaders and heroes.”
“What is the point of a law if it’s not enforced?” “The point is to keep everyone reasonably content. Protestants are happy because the mass is illegal. Catholics are happy because they can go to mass anyway. And the queen is happy because people are going about their business and not killing one another over religion.
Roger’s welfare was more important than Ned’s: that was what it meant to be a parent.
