How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.
H. Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009), 378
This I don't think is historically accurate. The banking houses of the early modern era a) went bust a lot and b) got themselves noble titles as quickly as they could. But it's foretelling where the world is going, even if it hasn't quite got there yet.
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