Teaser Tuesday #192

Ed ecco di nuovo la rubrica settimanale Teaser Tuesday, creata dal blog Should Be Reading, che si divide in poche, semplici fasi:
1_ prendi il libro che stai leggendo
2_ apri una pagina a caso
3_ scrivi un breve brano (stando attenti a non spoilerare)
4_ scrivi titolo e autore

Elizabeth was a discreet, persuasive lobbyst in her own account. London's key politicians and merchants cultivated her assiduously; so too did foreign diplomats. They did not because she was 'powerless', but quite the opposite. Beneath the emollience was steeliness, glimpsed in the brisk letters she wrote intervening in legal affairs, and in petioning her husband for favours on behalf of her servants. When Pope Alexander VI requested that his representative in England be given to the vacant bishopric of Worcester, Henry wrote back apologetically, explaining that his queen had already bagged the post for her confessor. Elizabeth could, it seemed, put her foot down. During the preparations for Arthur and Catherine's wedding, the Spanish ambassador de Puebla handed over letters in duplicate to the queen from Catherine of Aragon and from her parents. Henry wanted copies of each to 'carry continually about him'. Elizabeth refused. One set, she said, was for Prince Arthur, and she 'did not like to part with hers'; the resulting marital tiff was played out in front of Lady Margaret and the watching de Puebla.
Elizabeth combined a strong sense of family loyalty - including a love for her siblings which was, according to Henr VII's chronicler Bernard André, 'ferme incredibilis', truly extraordinary - with a strong awareness of the new political dispensation that she represented.
 - Winter King, Thomas Penn