Four Princes Quotes

“At Lavenham in Suffolk, ten thousand men planned to converge in active protest; it was said that they failed only because the clappers had been removed from the church bells that were to signal the start of the uprising.”
― John Julius Norwich, Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe

“Renard was obliged to report ruefully to his master that the laws of England were so unsatisfactory that it was impossible to have people executed unless they had previously been proved guilty.”
― John Julius Norwich, Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe

“consumption that had accounted for his father, his elder brother and his bastard son, and which was soon to carry off his legitimate son, King Edward VI.”
― John Julius Norwich, Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe

“Tridentine Creed and the Tridentine Mass (from Tridentum, the Latin name for Trent), which remained in use for the next four centuries;”
― John Julius Norwich, Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe

“Francis asked his sister Margaret, Duchess of Alençon, to do the honours in her place, but she flatly refused to meet ‘the King of England’s whore’.”
― John Julius Norwich, Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe

“It was the last time in history that a pope was to crown an emperor; on that day the seven-hundred-year-old tradition, which had begun in ad 800, when Pope Leo III had laid the imperial crown on the head of Charlemagne, was brought to an end.”
― John Julius Norwich, Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe

“la plus belle des savants, la plus savante des belles”
― John Julius Norwich, Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe