Here be Dragons

Poor Wales. So far from Heaven, so close to England.

Eleanor would have been indifferent to the immorality of her adultery, but would never have forgiven the stupidity of it.

The Welsh were a god-cursed, stiff-necked, and utterly vexatious people, John said bitterly, but they did have an inexplicable ability to rise phoenixlike from the ashes of defeat, to soar upwards on wings too scorched for flight.

Oh, John is clever enough. But what do brains avail a man if he does lack for backbone?

Whilst stupidity may indeed be a sin, it is also possible to be too clever. I sometimes fear, John, that you are too clever by half.

Indeed. But I was not thinking of his immortal soul, Matilda. I was thinking that history is chronicled by monks.

If disliking Richard be grounds for accusing a man of conspiracy, I daresay you could implicate half of Christendom in this so-called plot. Richard endears himself easiest to those who've yet to meet him.

If that’s how you’d rather remember it. But I did not mean that as a reproach. I do not, in truth, think less of you for having the common sense to abandon a ship once waves began to break over the bow. Nor, after sixteen years shut away from the sun, am I likely to find tears to spare for Henry Plantagenet.

War is the least productive of men’s pastimes, and the most indulgent.

Poor Wales, so far from Heaven, so close to England!

The day that he accused a reigning King of murder was the day he signed his own death warrant, and he knew it.

I’ve never been so hungry that I was willing to lick honey off thorns.

There are secret sins and found-out sins, and it is foolish to worry about the first until it becomes the second.

I would look dreadful in black.

Richard forced him from his sickbed, broke his power, his pride. But you, John, you broke his heart. I truly wonder which be the greater sin.

In a contest of wills between John and his mother, he did not think John would prevail, indeed he hoped he would not. But he did not care to be a witness to their confrontation; he suspected Eleanor's methods would be neither maternal nor merciful.

Otherwise, I’d like nothing better than…conversing with you. You’re such a deep, penetrating conversationalist, after all,

Memory is merciful, Joanna, more so than man. It fades past pain, yet holds bright the colors in recalled joy.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.