"“I hear you will bring in a law,” Kingston says. “It seems harsh, to make them commit a crime in retrospect.” They try to explain it to the constable. A prince cannot be impeded by temporal distinctions: past, present, future. Nor can he excuse the past, just for being over and done. He can’t say, ‘all water under the bridges;’ the past is always trickling under the soil, a slow leak you can’t trace. Often, meaning is only revealed retrospectively. The will of God, for instance, is brought to light these days by more skilful translators. As for the future, the king’s desires move swiftly and the law must run to keep up. Bear in mind his Majesty’s remarkable foresight, at the trial of the late queen. He knew the sentence before the verdict was in. “True,” Kingston says. “The executioner was already on the sea."
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Part 1, Section 3 (p. 158)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hilary_Mantel
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Hilary Mantel
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