Word: breakspeare
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...only Englishman to sit on the Throne of St. Peter was born Nicholas Breakspear in humble circumstances. As Adrian IV (1154-59), he adroitly played off the grasping Byzantines, the ambitious Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and the obstreperous Romans. The sole Portuguese Pope had a brief pontificate: John XXI (1276-77) was killed when the ceiling of the papal palace in Viterbo collapsed...
...artist, his principal frustration is the failure to secure a "vocation" in the Church of Rome, to which he converted "overnight" at the age of 26. Not even a lowly "clerk" let alone a prelate, this blustery paranoid and repressed homosexual aspires to be the first English Pontiff since Breakspear in the twelfth century...
Long before Chaucer began to build the English language, long before Buonarroti sketched his plans for St. Peter's, a British islander named Nicholas Breakspear became priest, then Abbot, then Cardinal, then Legate, then Pope, assuming the grand Roman Imperial name of Adrian (Hadrian) IV. And never before or since has an islander been Pope...
...that Breakspear quit the monastery of which he was Abbot in a pleasant Province, and proceeded, as Cardinal-Legate, to the rough untutored northlands of Denmark, Norway and Sweden...
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