The Mirror and the Light

That is how it will be – not pain itself, but the constant apprehension of pain; the constant apprehension of fault, the knowledge that you are going to be punished for something you couldn’t help and didn’t even know was wrong; and the discord in Hell will be constant

We servants of the king must get used to games we cannot win but fight to an exhausted draw, their rules unexplained. Our instructions are full of snares and traps, which mean as we gain we lose. We do not know how to proceed from minute to minute, yet somehow we do, and another night falls on us in Greenwich, at Hampton Court, at Whitehall.

For you perhaps, if as I hope and wish you will live long after me, there will follow a better age. When the darkness is dispelled, our descendants will be able to walk back, into the pure radiance of the past.
PETRARCH: AFRICA IX

My agents would not steal your letters, only read them at your desk. I

Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.

Now we live in an age of coercion, where the king’s will is an instrument reshaped each morning, as if by a master-forger