The king smiled at Anne. She dropped him a curtsy straight down, like a bucket in a well, head up, and a small challenging smile on her lips. The king was not taken, he liked easy women, he liked smil...
The common people only see weakness where there is greatness of spirit.
That’s how it is for women, I said, stung into honesty. It’s not what one would choose—I grant you that. But women are the very toys of fortune.
Tell my daughter Elizabeth -- no! Tell all my daughters, everywhere, in all the ages yet to come. Tell them how I died, and why. And tell them to remember this: the future is unwritten. Know your righ...
Sometimes God gives us a moment of destiny, and we have to hear the call and rise to it.
So he left her, because in his heart he feared that she was a woman with a divided nature—and he did not realize that all women are creatures of divided nature.
She's ice and ambition and she would see you on the gallows before surrendering her ambition. Anne has dazzled him, and dazzled the court, and dazzled even you.''Not me.' George said gently.'Uncle lik...
She smiled an empty bitter smile that did not reach her eyes, 'Do you think it can be worse than this? I cannot be charged with treason, I am the Queen of England, I am England. I cannot be divorced,...
She poured me a cup of coffee and I drank it standing by the back door, looking out of the back garden. I felt it scald my tongue but it did not warm me. It was heavy with sugar but it did not taste s...
One little boy, and he a bastard,' Anne said thoughtfully.'One little girl of six, one elderly Queen and a King in the prime of his life.' She looked up at the two of us, dragging her gaze away from h...
Makes no difference, he said, with his intuitive knowledge of my thoughts. No difference at all how your first marriage was. This is my marriage, and I want my wife in my bed. I laughed aloud and snug...
Life is a risk, who knows this better than me? Who knows more surely that babies die easily, that children fall ill from the least cause, that royal blood is fatally weak, that death walks behind my f...
Keep him coming forward but never let him think that you come forward yourself. He wants to feel that he is pursuing you, not that you are entrapping him. When he gives you the choice of coming forwar...
It’s still woman’s work whether it’s done in a great hall or in the kitchen, I said bitterly. I know it well enough. It’s earning no money for yourself and everything for your husband and master. It’s...
It is the old smile of gritty courage that all women show who have gone through hard nights and come out without betrayal.
If you mean Charles Stuart,' Frances's voice rang out clearly in the hall, 'then calling him he of whom you were speaking is hardly a brilliant disguise. And if is your idea of deep concealment then...
I would play ball with Catherine, and hide and seek: Not a very challenging game in an open meadow, but she was still at the age where she believed that if she shut her eyes and buried her head under...
I stop still with the shock and fell my head swim. Richard takes my hand. We stand for a moment, handclasped as if we are clinging to each other in this new and terrifying world. We don't notice the p...
I shall be dark and French and fashionable and difficult and you shall be sweet and open and English and fair. What a pair we shall be.
I remembered riding in the barge with Queen Katherine and how everyone had pulled off their hats as we went by and the women curtsied, and the children kissed their hands and waved. There had been a t...