Hilary Mantel

Dame Hilary Mary Mantel DBE FRSL (/mænˈtɛl/ man-TEL; born Thompson; 6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022) was a British writer whose work includes historical fiction, personal memoirs and short stories.

• 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.
  • "Royal Bodies", London Review of Books, 35:4 (21 February 2013).

• Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
  • As cited in Linda Newbery, Yvonne Coppard Writing Children's Fiction: A Writers' and Artists' Companion, A&C Black (22 August 2013), p. 55

• 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.
  • "Hilary Mantel: why I became a historical novelist", The Guardian (3 June 2017).

All page numbers from the American trade paperback edition published by Picador in 2010, ISBN 978-0-312-42998-0, 20th printing

Won the 2009 Booker Prize and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Italics and ellipses as in the book. Bold face added for emphasis.

• He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.
  • Part 1, Section 1, “Across the Narrow Sea. 1500” (p. 15)

• “So now, tell me how was Yorkshire.’”
  “Filthy.” He sits down. ‘Weather. People. Manners. Morals.”
  • Part 1, Section 2, “Paternity. 1527” (p. 18)

• 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.”
  • Part 1, Section 3, “At Austin Friars. 1527” (p. 36)

• For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?
  • Part 1, Section 3 (p. 40)

• “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.”
  • Part 2, Section 1, “Visitation. 1529” (p. 49)

• “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.”
  • Part 2, Section 1 (p. 53)

• Beneath every history, another history.
  • Part 2, Section 2, “An Occult History of Britain. 1521-1529” (p. 61)

• 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.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 70)

• It’s not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you’ve already commissioned your tomb.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 79)

• 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.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 80)

• We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 80)

• 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…
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 91)

• 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.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 98)

• It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 99)

• There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented or new things that pretend to be old.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 109)

• 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?”
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 113)

• “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.”
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 127)

• 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.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (pp. 132-133)

• 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.”
  • Part 3, Section 1, “Three-Card Trick. Winter 1529-Spring 1530” (p. 167)

• 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.”
  • Part 3, Section 1 (p. 168)

• 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.”
  • Part 3, Section 1 (p. 173)

• 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.
  • Part 3, Section 1 (p. 174)

• A part of the art of ruling, I suppose, is to know when to shut your ears.
  • Part 3, Section 1 (p. 179)

• 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.
  • Part 3, Section 2, “Entirely Beloved Cromwell. Spring-December 1530” (p. 189)

• “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.”
  • Part 3, Section 2 (pp. 202-203)

• Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.
  • Part 3, Section 2 (p. 211)

• 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.
  • Part 3, Section 2 (p. 220)

• 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.
  • Part 3, Section 2 (p. 220)

• 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.
  • Part 3, Section 2 (p. 238)

• What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold.
  • Part 3, Section 2 (p. 240)

• 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.
  • Part 4, Section 1, “Arrange Your Face. 1531” (p. 265)

• Lent saps the spirits, as of course it is designed to do.
  • Part 4, Section 1 (p. 282)

• “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.”
  • Part 4, Section 1 (p. 292)

• 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?
  • Part 4, Section 1 (p. 306)

• 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.
  • Part 4, Section 2, “Alas, What Shall I Do for Love? Spring 1532” (p. 331)

• The cardinal used to say, the English will forgive a king anything, until he tries to tax them.
  • Part 4, Section 2 (p. 332)

• 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.”
  • Part 4, Section 2 (p. 334)

• Why do I feel I have heard this story before? She has a flock of monks and priests about her, who directed the people’s eyes heavenward while picking their pockets.
  • Part 4, Section 2 (pp. 353-354)

• Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn’t matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It’s the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say.
  • Part 4, Section 2 (p. 361)

• Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it.
  • Part 4, Section 2 (p. 376)

• The king laughs. “Why would I trust a man with my business, if he could not manage his own?”
  • Part 4, Section 2 (p. 377)

• “Oh, you are not disappointing,” Henry says. “But the moment you are, I will let you know.”
  • Part 4, Section 2 (p. 377)

• I don’t suppose she would be a bad wife, for somebody who was prepared to keep her chained to the wall.
  • Part 5, Section 1, “Anna Regina. 1533” (p. 400)

• “You see,” she says slowly, “I was always desired. But now I am valued. And that is a different thing, I find.”
  • Part 5, Section 1 (p. 400)

• “He is a good boy, Gregory. Not the most forward, but I can understand that. We’ll make him useful yet.”
  “You don’t intend him for the church?” Cranmer asks.
  “I said,” growls Rowland, “we’ll make him useful.”
  • Part 5, Section 1 (p. 401)

• When have I, when have I ever forced anyone to do anything, he starts to say: but Richard cuts in, “No, you don’t, I agree, it’s just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it’s quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.”
  • Part 5, Section 1 (p. 406)

• All our lives and fortunes depend now on that lady, and as well as being mutable she is mortal, and the whole history of the king’s marriage tells us a child in the womb is not an heir in the cradle.
  • Part 5, Section 1 (p. 407)

• “Tell me, why do you think I do this?” The king sounds curious. “Out of lust? Is that what you think?”
  Kill a cardinal? Divide your country? Split the church? “It seems extravagant,” Chapuys murmurs.
  • Part 5, Section 1 (p. 410)

• In his student days he was known for a sharp slanderous tongue, for irreverence to his seniors, for drinking and gaming for high stakes. But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?
  • Part 5, Section 2, “Devil’s Spit. Autumn and Winter 1533” (p. 451)

• Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.
  • Part 5, Section 2 (p. 467)

• A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old.
  • Part 6, Section 1, “Supremacy. 1534” (p. 525)

• The all-consuming passion of Wolsey for Wolsey was hot enough to scorch all England.
  • Part 6, Section 1 (p. 531)

• When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them. If your law exacts a penalty, you must be able to enforce it—on the rich as well as the poor, the people on the Scottish borders and the Welsh marches, the men of Cornwall as well as the men of Sussex and Kent.
  • Part 6, Section 1 (p. 533)

• He had said to More, prophecy didn’t make her rich. He makes a memorandum to himself: “Dame Elizabeth Barton to have money to fee the hangman.” She has five days to live. The last person she will see as she climbs the ladder is her executioner, holding out his paw. If she cannot pay her way at the last, she may suffer longer than she needs. She had imagined how long it takes to burn, but not how long it takes to choke at the end of a rope. In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck.
  • Part 6, Section 1 (p. 535)

• Seven years she schemed to be queen, and God protect us from answered prayers.
  • Part 6, Section 2, “The Map of Christendom. 1534-1535” (p. 554)

• “I have never understood where the line is drawn, between sacrifice and self-slaughter.”
  “Christ drew it.”
  “You don’t see anything wrong with the comparison?”
  • Part 6, Section 2 (p. 580)

• Henry stirs into life. “Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the whole of the history of this realm.” He drops his voice. “Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your presence? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it.”
  • Part 6, Section 2 (p. 585)

• He says, this silence of More’s, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More’s dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.
  • Part 6, Section 3, “To Wolf Hall. July 1535” (p. 597)

All page numbers from the American trade paperback edition published by Henry Holt in 2022, ISBN 978-1-250-80672-7, 3rd printing

Won the 2012 Booker Prize and the 2012 Costa Book Award for Novel

Italics as in the book. Bold face added for emphasis.

• It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
  • Part 1, Section 2, “Crows. Autumn 1535” (p. 34)

• All the same: in the village alehouses up and down England, they are blaming the king and Anne Boleyn for the weather: the concubine, the great whore. If the king would take back his lawful wife Katherine, the rain would stop. And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends?
  • Part 1, Section 2 (p. 36)

• Once they were young men of esprit, young men of élan. A quarter of a century has passed and they are grey or balding, flabby or punchy, gone in the fetlock or missing some fingers, but still as arrogant as satraps and with the mental refinement of a gatepost.
  • Part 1, Section 2 (p. 38)

• He, Cromwell, says to his visitors, just tell them this, and tell them loud: to each monk, one bed: to each bed, one monk. Is that so hard for them? The world-weary tell him, these sins are sure to happen, if you shut up men without recourse to women they will prey on the younger and weaker novices, they are men and it is only a man’s nature. But are they supposed to rise above nature? What’s the point of all the prayer and fasting, if it leaves them insufficient when the devil comes to tempt them?
  • Part 1, Section 2 (p. 45)

• He thinks, if I had my way I would free them all to lead a different life. They claim they’re living the vita apostolica; but you didn’t find the apostles feeling each other’s bollocks. Those who want to go, let them go. Those monks who are ordained priest can be given benefices, do useful work in the parishes. Those under twenty-four, men and women both, can be sent back into the world. They are too young to bind themselves for life with vows.
  • Part 1, Section 2 (p. 45)

• You have the right of it, Gregory. All our labours, our sophistry, all our learning both acquired or pretended; the stratagems of state, the lawyers’ decrees, the churchmen’s curses, and the grave resolutions of judges, sacred and secular: all and each can be defeated by a woman’s body, can they not? God should have made their bellies transparent, and saved us the hope and fear. But perhaps what grows in there has to grow in the dark.
  • Part 1, Section 2 (p. 62)

• “It wouldn’t be St Apollonia’s teeth?”
  “Guess again.”
  “Is it teeth from the comb of Mary Magdalene?”
  Rice relents. “St Edmund’s nail parings.”
  “Ah. Tip them in with the rest. The man must have had five hundred fingers.”
  In the year 1257, an elephant died in the Tower menagerie and was buried in a pit near the chapel. But the following year he was dug up and his remains sent to Westminster Abbey. Now, what did they want at Westminster Abbey, with the remains of an elephant? If not to carve a ton of relics out of him, and make his animal bones into the bones of saints?
  • Part 1, Section 2 (pp. 68-69)

• According to the custodians of holy relics, part of the power of these artefacts is that they are able to multiply. Bone, wood and stone have, like animals, the ability to breed, yet keep their intact nature; the offspring are in no wise inferior to the originals. So the crown of thorns blossoms. The cross of Christ puts out buds; it flourishes, like a living tree. Christ’s seamless coat weaves copies of itself. Nails give birth to nails.
  John ap Rice says, “Reason cannot win against these people. You try to open their eyes. But ranged against you are statues of the virgin that weep tears of blood.”
  • Part 1, Section 2 (p. 69)

• Riding beneath dark trees at the close of that first day’s travel, they sing; it lifts the tired heart, and dispels spirits lurking in the verges; never underestimate the superstition of the average Englishman.
  • Part 1, Section 2 (p. 79)

• They have made no great speed, but it is futile to wear out horses on a task that is important, but not urgent; Katherine will live or die at her own pace. Besides, it is good for him to get out to the country. Squeezed in London’s alleys, edging horse or mule under her jetties and gables, the mean canvas of her sky pierced by broken roofs, one forgets what England is: how broad the fields, how wide the sky, how squalid and ignorant the populace.
  • Part 1, Section 2 (p. 80)

• We could have put up at a monastery, one of his guard had complained; but no girls in a monastery, I suppose. He had turned in the saddle: “You really think that?” Knowing laughter from the men.
  • Part 1, Section 2 (p. 81)

• He doesn’t believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there’s no harm in hedging your bets.
  • Part 1, Section 2 (p. 83)

• When he sleeps he dreams of the fruit of the Garden of Eden, outstretched in Eve’s plump hand. He wakes momentarily: if the fruit is ripe, when did those boughs blossom? In what possible month, in what possible spring? Schoolmen will have addressed the question. A dozen furrowed generations. Tonsured heads bent. Chilblained fingers fumbling scrolls. It’s the sort of silly question monks are made for.
  • Part 1, Section 2 (p. 92)

• You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you.
  • Part 1, Section 3, “Angels. Christmas 1535 – New Year 1536” (pp. 135-136)

• Thank you for your gallant reminder, Master Sadler, without your advice I might have thought myself sixteen. Ah, do you see, I am an Englishwoman now! I know how to say the opposite of what I mean.
  • Part 1, Section 3 (p. 139)

• “Well,” he says, “if you’re dead, Peterborough is as good a place as any.”
  • Part 1, Section 3 (p. 150)

• “Jane,” he says, “if the time comes when you wish to disburden your conscience, do not go to a priest, come to me. The priest will give you a penance, but I will give you a reward.”
  • Part 2, Section 1, “The Black Book. January-April 1536 (p. 159)

• What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.
  • Part 2, Section 1 (p. 159)

• A term in Parliament is an exercise in frustration, it is a lesson in patience: whichever way you like to look at it. They commune of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudges, riches, poverty, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, oppression, treason, murder and the edification and continuance of the commonwealth; then do as their predecessors have done – that is, as well as they might – and leave off where they began.
  • Part 2, Section 1 (p. 178)

• In March, Parliament knocks back his new poor law. It was too much for the Commons to digest, that rich men might have some duty to the poor; but if you get fat, as gentlemen of England do, on the wool trade, you have some responsibility to the men turned off the land, the labourers without labour, the sowers without a field. England needs roads, forts, harbours, bridges. Men need work. It’s a shame to see them begging their bread, when honest labour could keep the realm secure. Can we not put them together, the hands and the task?
  But Parliament cannot see how it is the state’s job to create work. Are not these matters in God’s hands, and is not poverty and dereliction part of his eternal order? To everything there is a season: a time to starve and a time to thieve. If rain falls for six months solid and rots the grain in the fields, there must be providence in it; for God knows his trade. It is an outrage to the rich and enterprising, to suggest that they should pay an income tax, only to put bread in the mouths of the workshy. And if Secretary Cromwell argues that famine provokes criminality: well, are there not hangmen enough?
  • Part 2, Section 1 (p. 204)

• Of his cousin Anne he says, “You like to know where you are with a woman. Is she a harlot, or a lady? Anne wants you to treat her like the Virgin Mary, but she also wants you to put your cash on the table, do the business and get out.”
  • Part 2, Section 1 (p. 206)

• Sir Francis is intermittently pious, as conspicuous sinners tend to be.
  • Part 2, Section 1 (p. 206)

• He sensed in Jane’s tone the peculiar cruelty of women. They fight with the poor weapons God has bestowed – spite, guile, skill in deceit – and it is likely that in conversations between themselves they trespass in places where a man would never trust his footing.
  • Part 2, Section 2, “Master of Phantoms. April-May 1536” (p. 296)

• She knows adultery is a sin and treason a crime, but to be on the losing side is a greater fault than these.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 302)

• He asks Jane, “Would you do anything you can, to ruin Anne Boleyn?” His tone implies no reproach; he’s just interested.
  Jane considers: but only for a moment. “No one need contrive at her ruin. No one is guilty of it. She ruined herself. You cannot do what Anne Boleyn did, and live to be old.”
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 307)

• The church does not offer much comfort to the married man, though Paul says we should love our wives. It is hard, Majesty, not to think marriage is sinful inherently, since the celibates have spent many centuries saying that they are better than we are. But they are not better. Repetition of false teachings does not make them true.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 314)

• You have always regarded women as disposable, my lord, and you cannot complain if in the end they think the same of you.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 333)

• Rafe asks him, could the king’s freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed?
  Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (pp. 348-349)

• When Gregory says, “Are they guilty?” he means, “Did they do it?” But when he says, “Are they guilty?” he means, “Did the court find them so?” The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 367)

• Whoever else is surprised, they are not surprised in Rome about the turn events have taken. In Rome, of course, it would be unremarkable: adultery, incest, one merely shrugs. When he was at the Vatican, in Cardinal Bainbridge’s day, he quickly saw that no one in the papal court grasped what was happening, ever; and least of all the Pope. Intrigue feeds on itself; conspiracies have neither mother nor father, and yet they thrive: the only thing to know is that no one knows anything.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 368)

• In any well-ordered country, Suffolk said yesterday, the trial of a noblewoman would be conducted in seemly privacy; he had rolled his eyes and said, but my lord, this is England.
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 371)

• Richard hugs him; says, “If she had reigned longer she would have given us to the dogs to eat.”
  “If we had let her reign longer, we would have deserved it.”
  • Part 2, Section 2 (p. 388)

• The word “however” is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
  • Part 2, Section 3, “Spoils. Summer 1536” (p. 404; closing words)