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“... because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward imprisoned in the Tower for dedicating a book on the events of 1399 to her rebellious former favourite, the Earl of Essex. The queen found it seditious even to broach the topic of a past tyrannicide; Essex’s supporters planned to ...”

“... to be set alongside Henry’s own authority, and the initiatives he instigated. To dismiss the king as ‘a narcissist who saw exercising control as his birthright’ is to ignore the workings of his shrewd and ambitious mind. The king was no idiot, and he rarely ceded control to others. Guy and Fox suggest that Anne was ...”

“... to furniture fittings, plasterwork and murals. These arts flourished under both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, as wealthy householders sought to surround themselves with beautiful and edifying objects to guide charitable behaviour. Unlike paintings on panel, such decoration wasn’t intended for prolonged contemplation: that, after all, would encourage ...”

“... such as this cry out for psychological explanation, and an attempt to provide it has been made by Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, in The Young Richelieu. The attempt is bravely made, and it rests on solid archival research in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Archives, the British Library and other places. Yet, though the attempt to provide a psychological ...”

“... tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on.’ Two months earlier, Roe described a durbar held in Burhanpur by Jahangir’s son, Parvez, as being akin to ‘a great stage’, with Parvez seated like the ‘mock ...”

“... 20 July 1554 and married Mary Tudor five days later at Winchester Cathedral, where he was declared king ‘de jure uxoris’, though Parliament refused to let him be crowned, to his considerable annoyance. If Mary had borne him a son, there would have been a Habsburg dynasty in England. Unfortunately, her ghastly gynaecological difficulties, which may have ...”

“... other people who shared these views – as many did and do. Take the Duke and Duchess of Windsor: King George VI and Queen Elizabeth knew, Harris writes, that the Duke ‘was irresponsible, insensitive, feckless. He never paused to consider the implications of what he said and did. They put nothing past the mesmeric ...”

“... Yet all the time he knows she is ‘hurrying to join him’. Creating an imaginary fresco of King Candaules awaiting his wife on the nuptial couch, Anthony Powell observes that the expectant monarch has in him ‘something of all men’, his spouse absorbed in her own rituals ‘something of all women’. In the legend, Candaules dies for thinking his ...”

“... was made safe in Norfolk and Suffolk, if not so far in Europe. And then, at Norwich on 21 August, Elizabeth was for the first time publicly celebrated (by the poet Thomas Churchyard) as a Virgin Queen. The significance of this little piece of provincial theatre, a proposal not to marry, relates to the master-card in the 1578 strategy of appeasement: a royal ...”

“... the oath of succession. He was prepared to swear to the succession itself, which he believed that King and nobles were entitled to change, but was unwilling to swear to the preamble of the Act, since by doing so he would be denying Papal authority and implicitly rejecting the validity of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. From 1527 he had been the ...”

“... who wakes just in time, which the fiction and verse of Sidney and Spenser had used to urge Queen Elizabeth to mend her ways. What the editors of The Crisis of 1614 have enterprisingly done for that year could have been attempted for a number of other occasions in early modern English history. Whether or not we call them ‘crises’, moments of heightened ...”

“... block or the fire was lit under the prisoner bound to a stake. Volatility in this book is left to King Henry, tantrums and petty revenge to Anne Boleyn, sulks and tactlessness to Stephen Gardiner, fuming at upstart nobodies to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk. Cromwell, without title and for a long time without proper position, moved quietly ever forward. It ...”

“... the Anglo-American appetite for dirt. He had known for a while that an American biographer, Dean King, was on his case, and had told his friends to give King nothing. But Fenton’s and the BBC’s revelations forced King to show his hand in a piece for New York magazine, a speculative ...”

“... he knows it. Born in London in 1572, a year after a doomed international conspiracy to replace Elizabeth I with her papist cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Donne was, as Katherine Rundell puts it in her new biography, ‘not just Catholic … but super-Catholic’, the scion of a double line of renowned religious recusants. His father’s family estates were ...”

“... from the four walls. Historians and biographers have never offered identical portraits of the king. For A.F. Pollard, writing a hundred years ago, Henry was a Land of Hope and Glory monarch, who by some divine intuition foresaw his country’s destiny and laid its foundations. ‘It was the king, and the ...”