“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.”

“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 who walked the hard road between kitchen, bedroom, church and childbirth. For the women who deserved more than their husband's whim.”

“But young hearts mend easily, and hearts that own half of England have something better to do than to beat faster for love.”

“They say that at the mountain pass he looked back at his kingdom, his beautiful kingdom, and wept, and his mother told him to weep like a woman for what he could not hold as a man.”

“We might, either of us, be Queen of England and yet we'll always be nothing to our family.”

“Plainly, she is quite besotted by him,... a girl, a young girl, and she is falling in love for the first time in her life. ...little Kitty Howard at a loss, stumbling in her speech, blushing like a rose, thinking of someone else and not herself is to see a girl become a woman.”

“If He were not God, then one would think it very badly planned.”