Dan Jones Quotes

A typical plague victim developed large, tumorlike buboes on the skin; they started the size of almonds and grew to the size of eggs. They were painful to the touch and brought on hideous deformities when they grew large. A bubo under the arm would force the arm to lurch uncontrollably out to the side; sited on the neck, it would force the head into a permanently cocked position. The buboes were frequently accompanied by dark blotches, known as God's tokens, an unmistakable sign that the sufferer had been touched by the angel of death. Accompanying these violent deformities, the victim often developed a hacking cough that brought up blood and developed into incessant vomiting. He gave off a disgusting stench, which seemed to leak from every part of his body - his saliva, breath, sweat, and excrement stank overpoweringly - and eventually he began to lose his mind, wandering around screaming and collapsing in pain.

As with many tragedies, our story opens in a moment of triumph.

eagle chicks left in the same nest would soon come to vicious fighting.

Extravagance was a political necessity.

Rebels depend on willful gullibility.

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Believing that Edward's men were at a safe distance in Worcester, Simon's men were unprepared for attack. They did not realize that Edward and Gloucester had spies among them, including a female transvestite called Margoth.

He was munificent and liberal to outsiders, but a plunderer of his people, trusting strangers rather than his subjects. . . . [H]e was eventually deserted by his own men and in the end, little mourned.

The king's "only interest in government was a pious but simpleminded desire for reproachment

Here was a king who saw his subjects as peers and allies around whom he had growing up rather than semi-alien entities to be suspected and persecuted.

Perhaps most surprising of all, the deposed and imprisoned King Henry was not murdered. This had been the fate of the two Plantagenet kings who had lost their crowns before him: Edward II died while in custody at Berkeley Castle in 1327, while Richard II was killed at Pontefract in 1400, the year following his deposition. Ironically, Henry's survival was perhaps a mark of his uniquely pitiful and ineffectual approach to kingship - for it was much harder to justify killing a man who had done nothing evil or tyrannical, but had earned his fate thanks to his dewy-eyed simplicity. Permitting Henry to remain alive was a bold decision that Edward IV would come to regret. But in 1465 it must have struck the king as a brave and magnanimous act.

Had Henry III been richer, less beset by other problems and a more competent military strategist, securing Sicily for his second son might have resembled the masterful pan-European geopoliticking in which his grandfather Henry II might have specialised. Unfortunately, he was none of those things. He was a naive fantasist with a penchant for schemes.