The wise prince is not always the most popular prince;
The lawyers’ saying ‘Le mort saisit le vif’? The dead grip the living. The prince dies but his power passes at the moment of his death, there is no lapse, no interregnum
News, he formulates his denial, for whom it may concern: His Grace the cardinal wholly rejects any imputation that he has sent an evil spirit to wait upon the Duke of Norfolk. He deprecates the sugges...
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 wh...
His greatest ambition for England is this: the prince and his commonwealth should be in accord. He doesn’t want the kingdom to be run like Walter’s house in Putney, with fighting all the time and the...
He takes as his text and example the unfortunate Ahab, seventh king of Israel, who lived in a palace of ivory. Under the influence of the wicked Jezebel he built a pagan temple and gave the priests of...
Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?
You would save them. If you could.No. There are periods in revolution when to live is a crime, and people must know how to yield their heads if they are demanded. Perhaps mine will be. If that time co...
You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
With France as she is, poor and unarmed, war means defeat. Defeat means either a military dictator who will salvage what he can and set up a new tyranny, or it means a total collapse and the return of...
Why did you let her take the head off London Bridge?Cromwell:You know me, Stephen. The fluid of benevolence flows through my veins and sometimes overspills.
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; conspirac...
We make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy—at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable. The Theory of Ambitio...
Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes.
Truth isn’t pretty, I thought, and the pursuit of it doesn’t make pretty people. Truth isn’t elegant; that’s just mathematicians’ sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only f...
Thomas More still has some credit with the king. And he has written him a letter, saying, he manages to smile, that I am Wycliffe, Luther and Zwingli rolled together and tied up in string—one reformer...
Thomas Cromwell is now about fifty years old. He has a labourer's body, stocky, useful, running to fat. He has black hair, greying now, and because of his impermeable skin, which seems designed to res...
These are good days for him: every day a fight he can win. Still serving your Hebrew God, I see, remarks Sir Thomas More. I mean, your idol Usury. But when More, a scholar revered through Europe, wake...
There was a man called Chaumette, scruffy and sharp-featured. He hated the aristocrats and he also hated prostitutes, and the two things used to get quite confused in his mind.
There is only one penalty for high treason: for a man, to be hanged, cut down alive and eviscerated, or for a woman, to be burned. The king may vary the sentence to decapitation; only poisoners are bo...