Loyaute me lie – Loyalty Binds Me

Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.

I am fit to capture a unicorn, and I should not be so questioned…

This is what I feared would come; this is what I have dreaded. It is not very bright and honorable as you have always thought it; it is not like a ballad. It is a...

If a woman is interested in her own struggle into identity and power, then she will be interested in other women. The lives of these, and other women, show me what a woman can do...

She has a smile that grows slowly and then shines, like an angel’s smile.

The world hasn’t changed that much; men still rule.

If this is the will of God, it takes a strange and terrible shape. I did not know that the God of Battles was vile like this. I never knew that a saint could summon...

When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool,...

~My father says there are more than twenty thousand turned out for the king. It seems that most men think that we will win, that York will be captured and killed, though the king in...

Stars in the night,’ he said. ‘Something something something something, some delight

I shall make sure that it feels richly sinful,”- Edward IV to Elizabeth Woodville –

The most powerful men of the kingdom have dragged a duchess down and sent her out to be a marvel to the common people of London. They are so deeply afraid of her that they...

I can speak of our baby like this to no one else. Who but his father would linger over the exact width of his gummy little smile or the blueness of his eyes, or the...

A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days...

This is a woman whose belly is filled with pride. She has been eating nothing but her own ambition for nearly thirty years.

Men die in battle; women die in childbirth.

You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise…guided by your own virtue and highest ambition

To stop us reading forbidden books they will have to burn every manuscript. But to stop us thinking forbidden thoughts they will have to cut off our heads.

And now I want love. Lust is no good for me. I want love. His love.

This is George, my beloved George. D’you think I want to go to my grave knowing that at the moment of his trial he looked around and saw no one lift a finger for him?...

I was born to be your rival,’ she [Anne] said simply. ‘And you mine. We’re sisters, aren’t we?

The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to...

For a moment we glared at each other, stubborn as cats on the stable wall, full of mutual resentment and something darker, the old sense between sisters that there is only really room in the...

I am, at this moment, what I have always been to him: an object of beauty. He has never loved me as a woman.

And now I wnt love. Lust is no good for me. I want love. His love.

I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything but think about him. At night I dream of him, all day I wait to see him, and when I do see him my heart...

He is my brother,” I said. “I cannot desert him.””You can go to your own death,” William said. “Or you can survive this, bring up your children, and guard Anne’s little girl who will be...

Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love.

He had taken George, my beloved George, from me. And he had taken my other self: Anne.

I am so tired; all I want to do is sleep. I want to sleep all the day, from dawn until twilight that every evening comes a little earlier and a little more drearily. In...

I have seen statues that would look stodgy beside her, I have seen painted Madonnas whose features would be coarse beside her pale luminous loveliness.

I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own...

The truth is the last thing that matters,’ she said. ‘And you can believe one thing of the truth and me: I keep it well hidden, inside my heart.

We may be of the same family, but that is the very reason why we are not friends, for we are rivals for the throne. What quarrels are worse than family quarrels?

I realize that I can laugh, that it is possible to be happy, that laughter and hope can come back to me.

Katherine of Aragon was speaking out for the women of the country, for the good wives who should not be put aside just because their husbands had taken a fancy to another, for the women...

Do you really think that God in his heaven with all the angels, there from the beginning of time and looking towards the day of judgement day, really looks down on all the world and...

My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.

I prayed in silence that perhaps even now, the queen might have a son and might know joy like this, such a strange, unexpected joy- the happiness of caring for a child whose whole life...

My experience is that He rarely attends to the obvious.

Men command the world that they know . Everything that men know they make their own. Everything that they learn, they claim for themselves. They are like the alchemists who took for the laws that...

… all that that I learn just teaches me that I know nothing.

We stand hand-clasped, our faces quite blank, as if this were not a nightmare that tells me, as clearly as if it were written in letters of fire, what ending a girl may expect if...

Ah, Hannah, you have never longed to live as I long to live if you do not know that another day is the most precious thing.

Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as...

But the magic moment when he walks alone has not yet happened, and I was praying he would do it before I have to leave. Now he will take his first step without me. And...

I would know you anywhere for my true love. Whoever I was and whoever you were, I would know you at once for my true love.

I feel no peace, I feel nothing. I think I will feel nothing forever.

Once more, I am watching the most powerful men in the kingdom bring their power to bear on a woman who has done nothing worse than live to the beat of her own heart, see...