81 Quotes by Alison Weir

Life was good, and already she understood that to be aware of happiness when you were actually feeling it, and not just in retrospect, was to be happy indeed.

As their forces broke, the Yorkist cavalrymen raced to the horse park behind their own lines and mounted their steeds to give chase. As they thundered past, the King and Warwick, flushed with victory, yelled, ‘Spare the commons! Kill the lords!’ Their words went unheeded.

Men, however, were encouraged to sow their wild oats, but a woman who did so became a social outcast and ruined her chances of making a good marriage.

Katherine of Aragon was a staunch but misguided woman of principle; Anne Boleyn an ambitious adventuress with a penchant for vengeance; Jane Seymour a strong-minded matriarch in the making; Anne of Cleves a good-humoured woman who jumped at the chance of independence; Katherine Howard an empty-headed wanton; and Katherine Parr a godly matron who was nevertheless all too human when it came to a handsome rogue.

Only during courtship might a woman briefly gain the upper hand, as both Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour did, but woe betide her if she did not quickly learn to conform once the wedding-ring was on her finger. The.

Since mediaeval times, the King had been seen as two bodies in one: a mortal entity and “the King’s person,” representing unending royal authority; monarchs therefore referred to themselves in the plural form as “we.

Who does not tremble when he considers how to deal with his wife?’ asked Henry VIII in his treatise A Defence of the Seven Sacraments; ‘for not only is he bound to love her, but so to live with her that he may return her to God pure and without stain, when God who gave shall demand His own again.’ Marriage.

His handsome face is suffused with rage. He stands before me shaking, then to my disgust, bursts into noisy tears; “I shall tell my mother of you!” he sobs and crashes out of the chamber.

It did not do to give your heart to a man so entirely, she thought. Men did not value what they came by easily. Once you loved, you laid yourself open to pain.