Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain Quotes

“It was always too late to retract, to try and retrieve what one had done.”
― Margaret Irwin, Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain

“There was some reason to call Pole heartless. His blood ran thinly in an effete body; no human emotion was urgent in him, neither love of family nor of country, and certainly not of women. But now he was forced to remember that his mother was also a woman, and to realize that her fate had lain at his door.”
― Margaret Irwin, Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain

“Yes, it's true that Cranmer had the courage of a scholar. And Mary a warm heart. And Pole integrity. All good people by nature. Yet look at the Devil's brew they've broiled between them. No one can be everything.”
― Margaret Irwin, Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain

“Philip would not be afraid to die. But to live; to take over the mastery of more than half the world; to make swift decisions in the heat of action; to break the power of his arrogant nobles and then seem to make friends with them, while always distrusting them; to trust no one, depend on no one, to listen to advice and take none of it - yes, Philip was afraid to live.”
― Margaret Irwin, Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain

“August. I walk many times into the pleasant fields of the Holy Scriptures, where I pluck up the goodly herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, chew them by musing, and lay them up at length in the high seat of memory by gathering them together, that so having tasted their sweetness I may the less perceive the bitterness of this miserable life.”
― Margaret Irwin, Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain

“The State must come before the individual soul. Yet Christ had shown that the individual soul mattered above all else. So how could one be a Christian and a statesman - let alone an Emperor? One could not, that was the answer.”
― Margaret Irwin, Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain