More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The only things he cannot remember are the things he never knew.
Perhaps the darkness falls away from her in flecks and sparks of light, the roofs and gables like shadows in water; and when she studies the net there is no net, only the spaces between.
Besides, even if we are sorry for a thing, we cannot be forgiven if we fully mean to do it again.’
‘No. I am not sad. I am not allowed to be. I am too useful to be sad.’
‘Be careful,’ Wyatt says. ‘You are on the brink of explaining yourself.’
‘Surely not,’ Riche says. ‘I never heard of ghosts that walk in June.’
He had once said to Cranmer, the dreams of kings are not the dreams of other men. They are susceptible to visions, in which the figures of their ancestors come to speak to them of war, vengeance, law and power. Dead kings visit them; they say, ‘Do you know us, Henry? We know you.’ There are places in the realm where battles have been fought, places where, the wind in a certain direction, the moon waning, the night obscure, you can hear the thunder of hooves and the creak of harness and the screams of the slain; and if you creep close—if you were thin air, suppose you were a spirit who could
...more
I don’t have a history, only a past.
You climb so fast, my lord, the kingdom has not ladders enough.’ ‘Ladders? I have wings.’
In obedience, there is strength and tranquillity.
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.
We give poets latitude—
Look up at the world, instead of down at your prayer book. Try smiling. You’ll be surprised how much better you feel.
But now there are rumours of plague and sweating sickness. It is not wise to allow crowds in the street, or pack bodies into indoor spaces.
Such advice could breed consequences.
she wants to draw him where he will not go, into the thickets of the past.
He thinks, when fire breaks out you run to the rescue with a bucket. But it’s not the smoke and flames that kill you, it’s the bricks and timbers that fly out when the chimney blows up.
‘You see, Dick, it is why we have courts of law, and judges, and juries … to protect us from the tyranny of one man’s opinion.’
You look back into your past and say, is this story mine; this land?
Moderation in all things, nothing to excess (those two are the same, wisdom can be repetitious). Know yourself. Know your opportunity. Look ahead. Don’t try for the impossible. And Bias of Priene: pleistoi anthropoi kakoi, most men are bad.
I made each one a bridegroom: I married them to crimes they had barely imagined, and walked them to their wedding breakfast with the headsman.
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.
It is a prince’s part to provide not only for noble families but for obscure ones, and not only for scholars and magistrates but for the untutored and the poor, for the whole commonwealth of his people—both for their corporeal welfare, and their spiritual good.’ He adds, benign, ‘The duty is laid on me, and the world shall see me discharge it.’
The world is wide and he is in it somewhere.
As he grew up, he grew into caution: to a degree.
‘With the king’s army. I cannot be more exact, we are all like planets driven out of our
He has mastered silence,
‘“Life is short and art is long, the opportunity sudden and fleeting: experiment dangerous, judgement difficult.”
The room is empty, except for those who do not count.
In the pause he consults his heart: it registers nothing, except the trace of the pen that, in the Book of Life, lightly inks a fate. It is the fate of a woman he knew in another country. And she not young, either.
She kept a list of his sins, in the pocket of her apron: took it out and checked it from time to time.
The world is burning under her hand. She lives in intense striving, her earnest little face creased with concentration:
‘I am in awe of myself,’ he says. ‘I never know what I will do next.’
They will see with their own eyes that nowhere in the scripture does it mention penances and popes and purgatory and cloisters and beads and blessed candles, or ceremonies and relics—’ ‘Not even priests,’ she says. Not even priests. Though we do not stress that point to Henry.
Englishmen of every shire are wedded to what their nurses told them. They do not like to think too hard, or disturb the plan of the world that exists inside their heads, and they will not accept change unless it puts them in better ease.
‘don’t ask questions unless you know what to do with the answers.’
At dawn, and twilight, when the light is an oyster shell, and again at midnight, bodies change their shape and size,
‘Saving your Majesty, I believe if you go back far enough we were all lawyers. At Lynn or some other place.’
But he is tired of trying to wake up different.
Only remember she is not a goddess but human, a woman who scours pots and peels roots and brings the cattle in: surprised by the angel, she is weighed down by her gravid state, and exhausted by the journey before her, the nights with no certain shelter.
He whispers to the air, ‘Shall I read it aloud, my lord cardinal?’ For who knows if ghosts can read? The cardinal is quiet: not a chuckle. The air is empty: not a stir.
He grants latitude to his ministers—yet he sets a hedge of expectation around them, invisible but painful as blackthorn. You know when you have brushed against it.
He is too stupid to be killed.’ Henry says, ‘You’ll have to learn to be stupid too, won’t you, Crumb?’
The mirror and the light of other kings.’
The dead queens blink at him, from behind their broken mirrors.
In his day, castles repaired themselves, and all beggars were Christ in disguise.
He wants to beg her, don’t be angry. Angry people fill my life.
She would die and leave me. Or I would die and leave her. It’s not worth it. Nobody’s worth it.
Dead men are at work. Their cause is not lost. They labour on, screened from us by smoke.
I believe, but I do not believe enough.
