Women Born In The 1950s

"Anne says, “I am Jezebel. You, Thomas Cromwell, are the priests of Baal.” Her eyes are alight. “As I am a woman, I am the means by which sin enters this world. I am the devil’s gateway, the cursed ingress. I am the means by which Satan attacks the man, whom he was not bold enough to attack, except through me. Well, that is their view of the situation. My view is that there are too many priests with scant learning and smaller occupation. And I wish the Pope and the Emperor and all Spaniards were in the sea and drowned.”"

"The cardinal used to say, the English will forgive a king anything, until he tries to tax them."

"But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires."

"One tradesman the same as the next? Not in the real world. Any man with a steady hand and a cleaver can call himself a butcher: but without the smith, where does he get that cleaver? Without the man who works in metal, where are your hammers, your scythes, your sickles, scissors and planes? Your arms and armor, your arrowheads, your pikes and your guns? Where are your ships at sea and their anchors? Where are your grappling hooks, your nails, latches, hinges, pokers and tongs? Where are your spits, kettles, trivets, your harness rings, buckles and bits? Where are your knives?"

"“She is selling herself by the inch. The gentlemen all say you are advising her. She wants a present in cash for every advance above her knee.” “Not like you, Mary. One push backward and, good girl, here’s your fourpence.” “Well. You know. If kings are doing the pushing.” She laughs. “Anne has very long legs. By the time he comes to her secret part he will be bankrupt. The French wars will be cheap, in comparison.”"

"Lent saps the spirits, as of course it is designed to do."

"The ladies of Italy, seemingly carefree, wore constructions of iron beneath their silks. It took infinite patience, not just in negotiation, to get them out of their clothes."

"What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold."

"And I suppose the cardinal might send him a present for his trouble. Some money, I mean. Our aunt Mercy says that the pope does nothing except on cash terms."

"Rumors of the cardinal’s popularity don’t make him glad, they make him afraid. The king has given Wolsey a pardon. But if he was offended once, he can be offended again. If they could think up forty-four charges, then—if fantasy is unconstrained by truth—they can think up forty-four more."

"Wherever he goes he is cheered by the people. “The people?” Norfolk says. They’d cheer a Barbary ape. Who cares what they cheer? Hang ’em all.” “But then who will you tax?” he says, and Norfolk looks at him fearfully, unsure if he’s made a joke."

"Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest."

"“He told me that you had a loathing of those in the religious life. That was why he found you diligent in his work.” “That was not the reason.” He looks up. “May I speak?” “Oh, for God’s sake,” Henry cries. “I wish someone would.” He is startled. Then he understands. Henry wants a conversation, on any topic. One that’s nothing to do with love, or hunting, or war. Now that Wolsey’s gone, there’s not much scope for it; unless you want to talk to a priest of some stripe. And if you send for a priest, what does it come back to? To love; to Anne; to what you want and can’t have. “If you ask me about the monks, I speak from experience, not prejudice, and though I have no doubt that some foundations are well governed, my experience has been of waste and corruption. May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organize a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery? I have seen monks who live like great lords, on the offerings of poor people who would rather buy a blessing than buy bread, and that is not Christian conduct. Nor do I take the monasteries to be the repositories of learning some believe they are. Was Grocyn a monk, or Colet, or Linacre, or any of our great scholars? They were university men. The monks take in children and use them as servants, they don’t even teach the dog Latin. I don’t grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness—their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don’t like, and written one that is favorable to Rome.”"

"He stands by a window. A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure: that something almost extinct, some small gesture toward the future, is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before."

"A part of the art of ruling, I suppose, is to know when to shut your ears."

"It will be the usual tense gathering, everyone cross and hungry: for even a rich Italian with an ingenious kitchen cannot find a hundred ways with smoked eel or salt cod. The merchants in Lent miss their mutton and malmsey, their nightly grunt in a featherbed with wife or mistress; from now to Good Friday their knives will be out for some cutthroat intelligence, some mean commercial advantage."

"Norfolk approaches him. He stands far too close. His eyes are bloodshot. Every sinew is jumping. He says, “Substitute nothing, you misbegotten—” The duke stabs a forefinger into his shoulder. “You…person,” he says; and again, “you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.”"

"He says, “No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They’re not affordable things. No prince ever says, ‘This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.’ You enter into one and it uses up all the money you’ve got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.”"

"The king turns, he looks at him, astonished. “You are not of Thomas More’s opinion, are you?” He waits. He cannot imagine what the king is going to say. “La chasse. He thinks it barbaric.” “Oh, I see. No, Your Majesty, I favor any sport that’s cheaper than battle.”"

"Katherine finds him too intimate with his co-legate; anyone who has spent much time with Wolsey, she thinks, no longer knows what honesty is."

"“But I need a new husband. To stop them calling me names. Can the cardinal get husbands?” “The cardinal can do anything. What kind of husband would you like?” She considers. “One who will take care of my children. One who can stand up to my family. One who doesn’t die.”"

"More pats his arm. “Have you no plans to marry again, Thomas? No? Perhaps wise. My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?”"

"There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented or new things that pretend to be old."

"It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation."

"News comes from France of the cardinal’s triumphs, parades, public Masses and extempore Latin orations. It seems that, once disembarked, he has stood on every high altar in Picardy and granted the worshippers remission of their sins. That’s a few thousand Frenchman free to start all over again."

"Unreliable, is the word that comes to mind. If all the old stories are to be believed, and some people, let us remember, do believe them, then our king is one part bastard archer, one part hidden serpent, one part Welsh, and all of him in debt to the Italian banks…"

"We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later."

"Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don’t do that. They’re too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money."

"It’s not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you’ve already commissioned your tomb."

"The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it’s so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for “Back off, our prince is fucking this man’s daughter.” He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on."

"Beneath every history, another history."

"“His reliquary!” George is upset, astonished. “To part with it like this! It is a piece of the true Cross!” “We’ll get him another. I know a man in Pisa makes them ten for five florins and a round dozen for cash up front. And you get a certificate with St. Peter’s thumbprint, to say they’re genuine.”"

"“The multitude,” Cavendish says, “is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down—for the novelty of the thing.”"

"For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?"

"He never sees More—a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod—without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, “Purgatory.” Show me where it says “relics, monks, nuns.” Show me where it says “Pope.”"

"“So now, tell me how was Yorkshire.’” “Filthy.” He sits down. ‘Weather. People. Manners. Morals.”"

"He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream."

"Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that."

"Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you."

"I used to think that the interesting issue was whether we should have a monarchy or not. But now I think that question is rather like, should we have pandas or not? Our current royal family doesn't have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren't they interesting? Aren't they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it's still a cage."

"It may be that the whole phenomenon of monarchy is irrational, but that doesn't mean that when we look at it we should behave like spectators at Bedlam. Cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty. It can easily become fatal. We don't cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago. History makes fools of us, makes puppets of us, often enough. But it doesn't have to repeat itself."

"The guard make a wall, but Christophe’s arm snakes between them as if to touch him. One of the men raises his armoured fist. He hears a crack. He sees the boy’s face twist in shock and pain. Holding out his arm like a broken wing, his voice hoarse, his body convulsing, he speaks his curse: “Henry King of England! I, Christophe Cremuel, curse you. The Holy Ghost curses you. Your own mother curses you. I hope a leper spits on you. I hope your whore has the pox. I hope you go to sea in a boat with a hole in it. I hope the waters of your heart rise up and spout down your nose. May you fall under a cart. May rot rise up from your heels to your head, going slowly, so you take seven years to die. May God squash you. May Hell gape.”"

"When he pictures Hell he can only think of a cold place, a wasteland, a wharf, a marsh, a landing stage; Walter distantly bawling, then the bawling coming nearer. That is how it will be—not pain itself, but the constant apprehension of pain; the constant apprehension of fault, the knowledge that you are going to be punished for something you couldn’t help and didn’t even know was wrong; and the discord in Hell will be constant, repeating for ever and ever, a violent argument being carried on in the next room."

"He had thought, if ever I need to disappear, Venice is where I will come."

"He, Thomas, had paid for Masses for his soul. “Do you think it does any good?” he had said to the priest. “Don’t despair of him,” the fellow said. “He was rough but he wasn’t all bad.” “No,” he said, “I don’t mean, will prayers do Walter any good. I mean, do they do good for any dead person? God is watching us all our lives. Surely, if you live as long as Walter, God has formed a view. Unless he always knows.” “That sounds like heresy to me,” the priest said. “Of course it does. It hits your pocket. If God knows his mind, what becomes of your chantries and your rosaries and your fees for a thousand years of Masses?”"

"We are all dying, just at different speeds."

"He would like Wolsey to come in so they could have a game of chess: though you should never play chess with a prelate, they always have a pawn in their sleeves."

"“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 the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own."

"Treason can be construed from any scrap of paper, if the will is there. A syllable will do it. The power is in the hands of the reader, not the writer."