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only things he cannot remember are the things he never knew.
Rafe looks uneasy. ‘She thinks that Anne was a protector of the gospel, and that cause is, as you know, near my wife’s heart.’
‘And besides, I think, with women, when something happens to one of them, all of them feel it. They are more pitiful than us, and it would be a harsh world if they were not.’
Her safety does not lie that way, with men who live on fantasies of the past.
ztill true today
‘With this king one needs a reversible garment. One never knows, is it dying or dancing?’
Do not talk about severed heads at a wedding.’
The younger brother, Tom Seymour—he doesn’t know what he speaks. He knows he never listens.
you can’t please a lady, she don’t get a child, or if she does, it’s some puny object that never lives to be christened.
Our possessions outlast us, surviving shocks that we cannot; we have to live up to them, as they will be our witnesses when we are gone.
For six or seven years, male children live with the women. Then without choice or discussion, one day they are plucked away, their hair cropped so their ears are always cold, and thrust into the sullen world where everyone finds fault and visits punishment, and until you are married there is no kindness unless you pay for it. It
Those who think a heart cannot break have led blessed and sheltered lives.
‘Ah, I see the Treason Act,’ Margaret says gaily. ‘I see its trip-wire. It is a crime to envisage the future. We are trapped in the hour we occupy.’
That’s the point of a promise, he thinks. It wouldn’t have any value, if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.
He is silent. Chapuys had said, you may renegotiate with the living, but you cannot vary your terms with the dead.
Obedience binds us together; all practise it, under God. It is the condition of our living as humans, in cities and dwelling houses, not in hides and holes in the fields. Even beasts defer to the lion: beasts show wisdom and policy thereby.
to make them commit a crime in retrospect.’
A prince cannot be impeded by temporal distinctions: past, present, future. Nor can he excuse the past, just for being over and done. He can’t say, ‘all water under the bridges’; the past is always trickling under the soil, a slow leak you can’t trace. Often, meaning is only revealed retrospectively. The will of God, for instance, is brought to light these days by more skilful translators. As for the future, the king’s desires move swiftly and the law must run to keep up.
The new clauses won’t necessarily stop royal persons doing stupid things. But they will create a formal process for dealing with them, when they do.
In Wyatt’s verse there is a tussle in every line. In the verse of Lord Thomas, there is no contest at all, just a smooth surrender to idiocy.
‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum.’
He thinks, she agrees with Chapuys: she believes Henry will never forgive me for it.
Vicegerent of the church, and knighted him, so he is Sir Thomas as well as Lord Cromwell.
Their part is to animate and quicken virtue in their prince. If Henry can think himself good, he will do good. But if you cast a shadow on his soul, comparing him to princes who are morally perfect and lucky as well, do not be surprised if he furnishes you with reason for complaint. Sometimes he reads a little in the book, to restore his faith in himself.
If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret: never let people see you.
But we yearn for our origins; we yearn for an innocent terrain.
‘Mark is very young and fearful. No creature in terror can make a good death. And he must be sensible of his sins at the last, and able to frame a prayer.’
Each stroke of the pen will translate into a stroke of the axe. Like the eel boy, they will understand that if Thomas Cromwell says, ‘You did it,’ you did it. No use arguing. It only prolongs the pain.
it is why we have courts of law, and judges, and juries … to protect us from the tyranny of one man’s opinion.’
‘My niece is a shame and a disgrace. She gave herself to the first man who asked her. She gave what was mine to give.’
Don’t look back, he had told the king: yet he too is guilty of retrospection as the light fades, in that hour in winter or summer before they bring in the candles, when earth and sky melt, when the fluttering heart of the bird on the bough calms and slows, and the night-walking animals stir and stretch and rouse, and the eyes of cats shine in the dark, when colour bleeds from sleeve and gown into the darkening air; when the page grows dim and letter forms elide and slip into other conformations, so that as the page is turned the old story slides from sight and a strange and slippery confluence
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‘You can say to the Germans … how to phrase it?… that though the articles are a statement of our English faith, they are not a complete statement.’
It is difficult to be at ease, he thinks, with men who believe that, since the misunderstanding in Eden, we have had neither reason nor will of our own.
citizens do not miss monks and their charity, if the city looks after them.
If war is a craft, the cardinal would say, peace is a consummate and blessed art.
There are now three kinds of people in the world. There are those who give Lord Cromwell his proper title. There are flatterers, who called him ‘my lord’ when he wasn’t. And there are begrudgers, who won’t call him ‘my lord’ now he is.
‘My lord,’ Riche says, his tone hushed, ‘the king is not in our way. He is our way.’ He says, ‘I shall go back
You can persuade the quick to think again, but you cannot remake your reputation with the dead.
watchman down. Now they go rattling through the streets, proclaiming the ballad of Worse-was-it-Never. There was a former age, it seems, when wives were chaste and pedlars honest, when roses bloomed at Christmas and every pot bubbled with fat self-renewing capons. If these times are not those times, who is to blame? Londoners, probably. Members of Parliament. Reforming bishops. People who use English to talk to God.
The web of treason is sticky in the palm, and leaves its bloody smear:
‘I do not think,’ Henry says, ‘that anyone could entertain a similar doubt in my case, and even if I were to dissemble’—he laughs—‘I doubt I would pass as a common fellow, unless I were to assume
‘It is because they wish to love them,’ Jane says. ‘They cannot always love the man, but they think they could love the child he
There are those who believe—and perhaps the king is one of them—that the health of the land depends on the health of its prince, and on his beauty besides. If you speak of an ordinary man you might say, ‘He cannot help his face.’ But a king must learn to help it. If he is ugly, so is the commonwealth. If the king is sick, so is his realm.
The cardinal bounces in the clouds, where the Faithful Departed giggle at our miscalculations. The dead are magnified in our eyes, while we to them appear as ants. They look down on us from the mists, like mystic beasts on spires, and they sail above us like flags.
As soon as you are king, nobody tells you the truth.’
If the dead can see us, be sure they do not like the world to change from what they knew. Nor do they like their power disrespected.
dogs. He hopes no one explains to Bellowe the death they thought he had died. Hearing such a tale, a man might lose his confidence in his fellow man.
There is a time to be silent. There is a time to talk for your life. He saw Henry’s need and he filled it, but you must never let a prince know he needs you;
You rise from table and it is as if you have been invited to a feast by a magician in a tale. You think you have been in the king’s chamber two hours but when you step outside, seven centuries have passed.
