Quotes from Alison Weir

Henry had arranged for her to go to 'Jericho', a house he leased from St Lawrence's Priory at Blackmore in Essex; it was a house with a poor reputation, where the King maintained a private suite.

Henry VIII owned more than eight hundred carpets

Adam of Eynsham, the biographer of St. Hugh of Lincoln, testifies to the King holding truly devout men in high regard, and Walter Map tells of him tactfully averting his eyes and making no comment when a monk's habit blew up and exposed his bare buttocks.

Never underestimate the power of calculated bullying and veiled threats! It's my conviction that, when it comes to politics, a tender conscience can be an inconvenience.

In this world, you must be one thing or the other; you cannot pick and choose each tenet of your faith.

remembering what a struggle it had been to provide for them all on an income of only £50.00 per annum.

7. CCR; Robert of Reading; Murimuth; Dugdale, Monasticon; Annales

We always hear about the scandals of the few, but what of the goodness of the majority?

But it's always easier for those who go to new places than it is for those who are left behind

Lady Wingfield had confided to a friend that the Queen was a loose woman.

All he had wanted, for most of his long reign, was a son to succeed him. For that he had married six times. Would he be proud to see her now, seated in this chair of estate he had once occupied? She hoped so. She

Maundy Thursday

but he frequently drank too much, and when he was inebriated would indiscriminately "let out his secret thoughts and quarrel with bystanders for feeble causes."47

I devour books the way gluttons gobble their food.

God did not say, You will not be troubled, you will not be belabored, you will not be afflicted; but He said, You will not be overcome.

Shrovetide.

things had once stood between them. That had gone for ever, she knew, and in its place there was a terrible sense of loss that sometimes threatened to overwhelm

was the one who was left behind who did most of the missing.

Swearing, drunkenness, "haunting bad houses," fighting, and drawing graffiti—hugh penises were a favourite—on the palace walls were all punishable by warnings

The King ruled in consultation with his chief nobles, who fromed the nucleus of what was in effect a military aristocracy, whose power was centered on the castles they used to subdue and dominate the land.

this pestiferous person'.

Henry IV could count himself fortunate in having the support of his Beaufort half-brothers, whose descendants would remain loyal to the House of Lancaster for the next sixty years.

If you could forget that they were two heretics, and that Lord Robert had very likely murdered his wife, they were perfect for each other.

the memory of having to abase herself and denigrate her sex, for she was certain that women's minds were just as capable as men's. But to say so would be a worse heresy than Luther's!