Wolf Hall

Conversation is in various tongues and Rafe Sadler translates adroitly, smoothly, his head turning from side to side: high topics and low, statecraft and gossip, Zwingli’s theology, Cranmer’s wife. About the latter, it has not been possible to suppress the talk at the Steelyard and in the city; Vaughan says, “Can Henry know and not know?” “That is

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: a

Halloween: the world’s edge seeps and bleeds. This is the time when the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and jailers, listen in to the living, who are praying for the dead.

No need to ask if the cardinal has any particular princess in mind. He has not one but two or three. He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities. While he is doing his best to keep the king married to Queen Katherine and her Spanish-Imperial family, by begging Henry to forget his scruples, he will a

Look now, my lord, holy simplicity was well enough in its day, but its day is over. We’re at war. Just because the Emperor’s soldiers aren’t running down the street, don’t deceive yourself—this is a war and you are in the enemy camp.” The bishop is silent. He sways a little on his stool. Sniffs. “I see why Wolsey retained you. You are a ruffian and

“Majesty, we were talking of Castiglione’s book. You have found time to read it?” “Indeed. He extols sprezzatura. The art of doing everything gracefully and well, without the appearance of effort. A quality princes should cultivate, too.”

Petrarch writes, “between one dip of the pen and the next, the time passes: and I hurry, I drive myself, and I speed toward death. We are always dying—I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they are all dying.”

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

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 situati