More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 22 - October 20, 2024
But then, she must have heard Henry described, by those whose pleasure it is to rip up her dreams.
But of course, he thinks, it is usual for a son to fear his father, it is the way the world is made. ‘I tried to be a tender father to you. I never once struck you.’
Now down to dust with them go all the Glastonbury relics, two saints called Benignus and two kings called Edmund, a queen called Bathilde, Athelstan the half-king, Brigid and Crisanta and the broken head of Bede. Farewell, Guthlac and Gertrude, Hilda and Hubertus, two abbots called Seifridus and a Pope called Urbanus. Adieu, Odilia, Aiden and Alphege, Wenta, Walburga, and Cesarius the martyr: sink from man’s sight, with your muddles and your mistranscriptions, with the shaking of your flaky fingerbones and the compound jumble of your skulls. Let us bury them once and for all, the skeletons of
...more
It is not written that great men shall be happy men. It is nowhere recorded that the rewards of public office include a quiet mind.
Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones, set the torn leaves of Duns Scotus sailing about the quadrangles, and place the gospels in every church. You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through, inscribed on the rocks and carried on floodwater, surfacing from deep cold wells. It’s not just the saints and martyrs who claim the country, it’s those who came before them: the dwarves dug into ditches, the sprites who sing in the breeze, the demons bricked into culverts and buried under bridges; the bones
...more
‘And put it to some use, I warrant,’ Bastings says admiringly. ‘Sir, a thing you should know. That little lass of the duke’s, I hear she is spoiled. There is one in the old duchess’s household boasts he has had his fingers in her cunt. He says he has felt it in the dark and he would know it among a hundred.’
He follows the king. What can you do but, as Cicero says, live hopefully, die bravely?
It is a transcript—a copy, let’s be blunt—of a letter from Ambassador Marillac to François. ‘Marillac says the king is about to arrest Cranmer. He is to go to the Tower, with Barnes.’ Call-Me has put a man in the ambassador’s train. ‘Well done for this,’ he says. The paper feels hot.
If I were a prince and I had Cromwell, I would think myself Heaven’s elect.’
The boy frowns. ‘Forgive me, but your lordship is talking as if your fortunes were reversed. As if you had suffered a blow of fate, instead of great promotion and honour.’
But Rafe says, ‘He has conceived a grudge, sir. Because you do not love him as you love Thomas Wyatt.’
It is the cardinal over again, he thinks. 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.
‘Will you find my Hebrew grammar? Nicolas Clendardus of Leuven. I have it at Stepney. I have wanted to study it. I lacked leisure.’ Clendardus advises, grasp the basic rules before you advance to detail. They say with his help you can learn the rudiments in three months. I might not live that long, he thinks, but I can make a start.
‘You must understand, Rafe, Cranmer and I agreed long ago, that if one of us looked set to go down, the other would save himself.’
Cranmer does what is in him. It is all any man can do.
Rafe says, ‘Do not yield. Do not resign yourself, I beg you. You know the king is impulsive…’ ‘Is he? We always say so.’
She died incredulous.
breaching the king’s confidence by talking about his futile nights with the queen. ‘But everybody knew,’ he had said, baffled. ‘And he gave his permission for me to talk to you, and to people in Anna’s household.’ ‘He doesn’t recall that now,’ Fitzwilliam said. ‘He thinks you have made him a laughing stock.’
He thinks, I have never limited my desires. Just as I have never slacked my labours, so I have never said, ‘Enough, I am now rewarded.’
He thinks, ten years I have had my soul flattened and pressed till it’s not the thickness of paper. 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.
When he was an infant, his sister Kat used to tell him the bells made the time. When the hour strikes, and the music shivers in the air, you have the best of it; and what’s left is like a sucked plumstone on the side of a plate.
Charles and François will scramble your brains like a basin of eggs.
A year from now, if you sacrifice me, you will have neither honest coin nor honest minister.’
It is not as if he has endured any pains—which are spared him, at the king’s direction, even though he is not nobly born.’
Charles seemed dumbfounded, dispatches say. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Cremuel? Are you sure? In the Tower? And by the king’s command?’
His Italian fever is killing him after all.
Between the first reading of the bill and its second, between the second and the third, he is a dying man. When the bill passes, then by law he is dead.
You will be required to take an oath.’ ‘Why would I refuse?’ he says. ‘I would also take an oath I am a true servant and that my faith is the catholic and universal faith, not varying from that professed by the king. It were strange if my word should hold good in the one matter, but not the other.’
When Henry dies and goes to judgement, he must answer for me, as for all his servants: he must account for what he did to Cromwell.
All over England there are standing stones, petrified forms of men who hoped to rule: Stick stock stone, As King of England I be known. For their presumption they are condemned to stand for a thousand years, two thousand, in wind and rain; around them are smaller stones, the forms of the wretches who were their knights. Count them and—by a peculiar enchantment—you never get the same number twice. The destruction goes beyond counting. It goes beyond what the pen can record.
‘The French swear they will carry their princess to the altar, if need be. She is only twelve years old, so she cannot weigh heavy.’
‘You shouldn’t believe in ghosts,’ he says uncertainly. ‘I don’t,’ Martin says. ‘But who are they to care, if I believe in them or not?
‘But then the king said, “You know, he has never forgiven me for Wolsey, and I have long wondered, to what extremity will sorrow lead him? Even when my son Richmond lay dying, he was pestering the physicians with his enquiries. Bishop Gardiner says, the cardinal himself might forgive, but the cardinal’s man never will.”
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.
Perhaps some people will say I have died for the gospel, as More died for the Pope. But most will not think me a martyr for anything, except the great cause of getting on in life.
What do you do with a dog, when the season ends? You hang it.’
When More reminded him about the penny he’d paid, he opened his eyes wide: ‘I thought that was one time only?’ With a sigh and a half-smile, Master More disbursed.
It was Daedalus who invented the wings and made the first flight, he more circumspect than his son: scraping above the labyrinth, bobbing over walls, skimming the ocean so low his feet were wet. But then as he rose on the breeze, peasants gaped upwards, supposing they were seeing gods or giant moths; and as he gained height there must have been an instant when the artificer knew, in his pulse and his bones, This is going to work. And that instant was worth the rest of his life.
So I am to die with a monster, he thinks. Or a man who has made monstrous enemies, who have great imaginative powers to shape the condemned to their desires.
Though every man dreads to know the hour of his death, the Christian dreads more a sudden end, such as his father met: mors improvisa with no time to repent.
Walter shouting down at him and he shouting back, je voudrais mourir autrement—not here, not now, and not like this.
He has not made much progress with Hebrew, in part because he has been occupied with the king’s business; there was never a prisoner more hard-pressed, or who called for so much ink.
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.
They give him coins, which he will pass to the executioner, payment for his services.
‘There is a Plymouth man, William Hawkins, has fitted a ship for Brazil. He is taking lead and copper, woollen cloth, combs and knives and nineteen dozen nightcaps. I would have liked to know how that works out.’
I am as I am and so will I be But how that I am, none knoweth truly Be it evil, be it well, be I bound, be I free,
