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February 27 - March 30, 2025
The king has moved from his native ground: as if he has entered another realm where cause does not link to effect; nor does he care how he opens his heart.
He feels as if the Lutheran clock is still in his palm, the fidget of its workings disturbing his pulse. Its case was made by an artist; its machinery, by a gunsmith.
‘If you want power,’ he says, ‘get it like a man. It does not become your grey hairs, to play Pandar.’
‘Thomas, we both know what it is to serve this king. We know it is impossible. The question is, who can best endure impossibility? You have never lost his favour. I have lost it many times. And yet—’
‘I feel to my master the king as I do to Christ, hanging between two thieves.’
What can you do but, as Cicero says, live hopefully, die bravely?
At such times in your life, if ever you see such times—if fortune favours you, as fortune favours the brave—you lose for a moment a sense of the firm boundaries of yourself, and become light as air.
but these days men are friends at the gate and foes at the door.
‘That does not weigh. In it, out of it, we neither walk on the earth nor swim nor fly, we do not know which element we dwell in. Summer is coming, but the king rains and shines like April. Men change their religion as they change their coats. The council makes a resolution and next minute forgets it. We write letters and the words expunge. We are playing chess in the dark.’ ‘On a board made of jelly,’ he says. ‘With chessmen of butter.’
We servants of the king must get used to games we cannot win but fight to an exhausted draw, their rules unexplained. Our instructions are full of snares and traps, which mean as we gain we lose. We do not know how to proceed from minute to minute, yet somehow we do, and another night falls on us in Greenwich, at Hampton Court, at Whitehall.
To mend the matter, it is possible to be ingenious, without being dishonest.
Your man Machiavelli claims that fortune favours the young.’ ‘He isn’t my man.’ ‘No? Then who is?’
He is whimpering beneath his burden of knowledge, as all the king’s creatures do.
There are books which say, contemplate your final hour: live every day as if, that night, you go not to your bed but to your bier. The divines recommend this not just for the prisoner or invalid, but for the man in his pride and pomp, prosperity and health: for the merchant on the Rialto, for the governor in the senate.
Mirrors for Princes, which state the wise councillor must always prepare for his fall.
To hear Henry talk, you would think God ought to be grateful, for all Henry has done for him in England these last ten years: the way he’s set him up, got his big book translated, made him the common talk.
‘He is frightened of you, sir. You have outgrown him. You have gone beyond what any servant or subject should be.’
Wolsey was broken not for his failures, but for his successes; not for any error, but for grievances stored up, about how great he had become.
‘They say Truth is the daughter of time. I wish time bred like rabbits. We would arrive at a reckoning sooner.’
But the god of contraries made me say the opposite.
‘Any chancer has his chance with me.’
‘Is he? We always say so.’ But perhaps his caprices are designed to keep us working and keep us hoping. Anne Boleyn thought till her last moment that he would change his mind. She died incredulous.
Henry has ground and ground me in the mill of his desires, and now I am fined down to dust I am no more use to him, I am powder in the wind.
Princes hate those to whom they have incurred debts.
Men scorn to live under an obligation. They would rather be perjurers, and sell their friends.
The Duke of Urbino, Federigo di Montefeltro, was asked what it took to rule a state. ‘Essere umano,’ he said: to be human.
A year from now, if you sacrifice me, you will have neither honest coin nor honest minister.’
His Italian fever is killing him after all.
When a man does not know which path to take he scatters crumbs from the loaf he carries in his hand, but the birds swoop behind him and eat them.
Rats have eaten the laws of ancient times. They relish fish-glue and vellum; anything that was once alive, they will eat it, and then out of habit, they will eat what is dead; from the margins they chew their way in, to the secret history of England.
It is the glory of the men who have worked with Cromwell that instead of merely cursing the vermin they have patched, they have mended, they have stretched a point to replace a gnawed vowel; they have been ready to substitute a digested phrase with a clause that will help the Crown. But what has it availed? He has lived by the laws he has made and must be content to die by them.
But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard j...
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You may be a papist but you’re not a pauper.”’
You make an image for each memory and leave them in the churches you frequent, in the streets you walk, on the banks of the river you sail. You leave them in ditches, between the furrows of a field, and hanging from trees: crossbows and skillets, dragons and stars.
you cannot leave your memories alone in this world, for other men to own.
He would like Wolsey to come in so they could have a game of chess: though you should never play chess with a prelate, they always have a pawn in their sleeves.
We councillors think we are men of vision and learning, we gravely delineate our position, set forth our plans and argue our case far into the night. Then some little girl sweeps through and upsets the candle and sets fire to our sleeve; leaves us slapping ourselves like madmen, trying to save our skin.
‘Of course she is giddy. What else, at that age? You would not want her to think too much. History is against her.’
Fortune and the king have raised him high, but he should not trust to that, the ground beneath our feet is slippery.’
We are all dying, just at different speeds.’
‘Of course it does. It hits your pocket. If God knows his mind, what becomes of your chantries and your rosaries and your fees for a thousand years of Masses?’
Cremuello at your service, your shadow in a glass.
When he pictures Hell he can only think of a cold place, a wasteland, a wharf, a marsh, a landing stage; Walter distantly bawling, then the bawling coming nearer.
All your life you tramp the empty road with the wind at your back. You are hungry and your spirit is perturbed as you journey on into the gloom. But when you get to your destination the doorkeeper knows you. A torch goes before you as you cross the court. Inside there is a fire and a flask of wine, there is a candle and beside the candle your book. You pick it up and find your place is marked. You sit down by the fire, open it, and begin your story. You read on, into the night.
If a man should live as if every day is his last, he should also die as if there is a day to come, and another after that.
He has vanished; he is the slippery stones underfoot, he is the last faint ripple in the wake of himself. He feels for an opening, blinded, looking for a door: tracking the light along the wall.
