Young and Damned and Fair Quotes

“> *where Anne Boleyn had been executed.*
>

> …*The stones beneath the altar were prised up. Jane Boleyn and Catherine Howard were buried quickly next to the mouldering remains of Lady Salisbury, Thomas More, Jane’s husband, and another queen of England…. The few attendees walked out of the little church into the courtyard, where the scaffold still stood. The body of Catherine Howard was left to a vast silence. In all probability, she had not yet reached her twenty-first birthday.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“as ever, people tolerate in their friends what they deplore in their enemies,”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII

“Her story is, like so many lives, one which was predominantly shaped not by intention or design, but by the unquantifiable power of luck.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“Richard Rich, the middle-aged chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, a man unencumbered by any discernible principles”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“medieval Christian theology stressed the interconnectedness of the Bible as a divinely inspired mirror that constantly reflected itself in past and present.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“A more critical eye might dismiss the Henrician Church of England as a syncretic misfire led by an erratic megalomaniac caught somewhere between the liturgical certainties of his childhood and the storm-following-sunshine appeal of new and untested philosophies.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“The seven corporal deeds of mercy—to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick and the imprisoned, and bury the dead—were seen as useful guides on the efficacy of good deeds in absolving oneself of certain sins.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“In Catherine’s case, we can only infer from what happened next, since she left no record of her feelings at this time. All that can be said with confidence is that after her only Lent as queen, her behavior altered significantly. She became more prone to insecurity but paradoxically began to behave more recklessly in the privacy of her own apartments. She veered between uncertainty, which bred unhappiness, and a dangerous overconfidence.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“He missed Thomas Cromwell, charging his no doubt terrified councillors that “by false accusations, they made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“silence. He was impulsive, besotted, possessive, and loquacious.22 Even the Dowager’s coy affection for him did not blind her to the fact that this was the worst possible combination of traits, and her harvesting of all the incriminating evidence from a man she knew to possess the emotional equilibrium of a toddler”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“In the final decade of his life, the greatest attribute Henry prized in his wives was an obedience as total as he expected from his subjects.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“In the sixteenth century, it was a rare man who could unite the vanguard of the Protestant and Catholic reformations, but Henry VIII managed to be hated by both of them. The German Reformer Philip Melanchthon described him as “the English Nero” and prayed “May God destroy this monster!”;”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“from later in Catherine’s career that when it came to the appointments of ghosts from her life at Chesworth,”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“The noble mind-set in 1540 was still predominantly feudal.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“The habit of a disguised royal bridegroom spying on his fiancée was a trope borrowed from numerous romances, but one which actual princesses seemed to find both offensive and annoying.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“Courtiers, like servants and politicians, gossiped only a little less than they breathed,”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“Religion was omnipresent in Catherine’s world. It was not separated from the world, but rather it influenced everything in society, from the ecstatic to the banal,”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“No one wanted the poor to be miserable, but nearly everyone wanted them to be obedient.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“King had repudiated papal authority and embarked upon his own version of the Reformation in what rapidly became one of the least articulate government policies in British history. There was absolutely no clear strategy for where the Church of England should go once it was commanded from London rather than Rome.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“The line between sinners and the flock was not so clearly delineated, because even the worst members of society were still, in one way or the other, almost certainly believing Christians. All men were weak, all men would fail, all men would die, all men could be saved.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“living well, as Anne Boleyn had noted at her trial, also meant dying well.8 Christians were supposed to die bravely”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“society’s lively fascination with the next life. Death was the great moral battleground between one’s strengths and weaknesses; the supreme test came when the finite perished and the eternal began. To die well, in a spirit of resignation to the Will of God and without committing a sin against hope by despairing of what was to come next,”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“Like Thomas More before her, another political heavyweight in whose destruction Cromwell had been intimately involved, Anne Boleyn had embraced the sixteenth century’s veneration for the ars moriendi—the art of dying. The veil between life and death was made permeable by the teachings of Christianity.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“She was escorted out into the chilly morning air and led to a scaffold that stood on the same site where Anne Boleyn had been executed.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“Catherine then made a curious request which could not be refused - she wanted to see the block that she would die on… She explained to her gaolers that she wanted the opportunity to practise ‘by way of experiment’, and she did so, over and over again, laying her slender neck into the wooden curvature.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII

“Henry VIII’s court was a place riddled with espionage, where nothing was quite what it seemed and people listened behind the walls, peeped at keyholes, and whispered in alcoves. Its inhabitants exhibited a bizarre and unsettling mixture of bone-chilling fear alongside obsequious, and often genuine, loyalty.”
― Gareth Russell, Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII