Loyaute me lie – Loyalty Binds Me

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...

I have heard ballads of great battles, and poems about the beauty of a charge and the grace of a leader. But I did not know that war was nothing more than butchery, as savage...

I have seen sights and travelled in countries you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at...

Mother, before God,” I say, my voice shaking with tears, “I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping...

I wil not heat treason from my own daughterWhat will you do behead me for treason? We are not an amry at warWe are an army at war! This is your brother’s rightful throne that...

When they see us dance. When they see how you look at me. When they see how I smile at you.

Say yes,’ he whispers. ‘Marry me.’I hesitate. I open my eyes. ‘You will get my fortune,’ I remark. ‘When I marry you, everything I have becomes yours. Just as George has everything that belongs to...

When he told me that he would fight forever, I knew that he would have to be defeated.

He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.

Be a wife of whom he can make no complaint, Margaret. That is the best advice I can give to you. You will be his wife; that is to be his servant, his possession. He...

And then the sword came down like a flash of lightning, and then her head was off her body and the long rivalry between me and the other Boleyn girl was over.

I have given my word that only death will take me from you.

I felt his hardness and I suddenly understood-an older girl would have understood long before-that this was the currency of desire. He was my betrothed. he desired me. I desired him. All I had to...

Any woman who dares to make her own destiny will always put herself in danger.

The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son is a devil and should not.

I sit on the bed and kick off my shoes, and he kneels before me and takes the riding boots, holding one open for my bare foot. I hesitate; it is such an intimate gesture...

Like almost all girls I don’t know the date of my birth: my parents did not trouble to record the day and the time. I only know the year and the season, and I only...

Daniel, I did not knowwhat I wanted when I was agirl. And then I was a fool in every sense of the word. And now that I am a woman grown, I know that I...