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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.

Seven years she schemed to be queen, and God protect us from answered prayers.

The all-consuming passion of Wolsey for Wolsey was hot enough to scorch all England.

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.

“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.”

And that was it, he thought. It was all a series of rooms one never found one's way out of. You had to be content with that, or die, or go completely crazy.

"They don't worry too much if they get the wrong man," Ernest said. "They reckon whoever they get is probably guilty of something. Or would have been eventually. And if he didn't do anything, he probably wanted to."

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

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.”

Everyone loses everything in the end.

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

"Over and over our plans foundered on human nature. On the mediocrity of human nature that betrays its better self, its best ideals, that is unworthy of itself everywhere.

"Shocking, the mediocrity of everything - is it not?"