They were married in weeks. Gregory arrived within the year. Bawling, strong, one hour old, plucked from the cradle: he kissed the infant’s fluffy skull and said, I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

“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.”

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.

“But why must it be written like this? And where does it say that Spanish Mary is a bastard?” “Lady Mary is out of the line of succession,” he says, “so the inference is clear. We don’t need to say more. You must forgive any coldness of expression. We try to write laws sparingly. And so that they are not personal.” “By God,” Gardiner says with reli

“Master Wriothesley has his eye on his advantage.” “I hope we all have that. Or why did God give us eyes?” “He thinks of making his fortune. We all know that money sticks to your hands.” Like the aphids to More’s roses. “No,” he sighs. “It passes through them, alas. You know, Stephen, how I love luxury. Show me a carpet, and I’ll walk on it.”

Anne yawns, a little catlike yawn. “You’re tired,” he says. “I shall go. By the way, why did you send for me?” “We like to know where you are.” “So why does your lord father not send for me, or your brother?” She looks up. It may be late, but not too late for Anne’s knowing smile. “They do not think you would come.”

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.”

But the trouble is, maps are always last year’s. England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into

“Now, Thomas, you will add to your letter some Venetian endearments, some covert phrases that will suggest, in the local dialect and the most delicate way possible, that I pay top rates.” And he will add that the people of England are welcoming to foreigners and that the climate of England is benign. That golden birds sing on golden branches, and a