Adam was snoring vigorously, Luke with dignity and serenity, the servants like a full orchestra...

The years from 1400 to 1485, which intervened between the deaths of Richard II and Richard III, were filled with the color and cruelties of civil war, with stories of deep villainy and vile conspiracy and with some slight imprints of the genius of an emerging imagination.

Public memory is short and public taste sups avidly on sentiment.

In spite of poor government and the strife it produced, England was merrie.

Invention, after lying fallow for centuries, was to bloom again with the suddenness which can turn a desert into a riot of lupine overnight.

The counts of Anjou and their lovely, but wicked wives gained such an unsavory reputation over the centuries that the people of England were appalled when they found that one of them was to be King of England. This was young Henry, the grandson of Henry I and of the Count of Anjou, and there was much angry muttering and shaking of heads.

After several years of struggle to bring the country to subjection, during which Henry had to keep armies in the field at ruinous cost, his rosy dreams of affluence changed to despair. He was close to the brink of bankruptcy when he gave in finally and allowed the terms which the moderates had advised in the beginning.

Historians have never made the mistake of underestimating Henry VII, not even those who like him little.

Murders can be committed successfully sometimes, but the disposal of the body is always a difficult matter.

He divided the inhabitants of the world into two groups, into those who had loved and those who had not.