He had said to More, prophecy didn’t make her rich. He makes a memorandum to himself: “Dame Elizabeth Barton to have money to fee the hangman.” She h… - Hilary Mantel

And I suppose the cardinal might send him a present for his trouble. Some money, I mean. Our aunt Mercy says that the pope does nothing except on cash terms.

The all-consuming passion of Wolsey for Wolsey was hot enough to scorch all England.

Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.