Word: prescott
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...Kingdoms. Biographer Prescott's aim is to show how and why a princess of "patient, untiring affection" grew into a soured, suspicious queen who was incapable of compromise in the matter of religious heresy. So the real story of Mary has to begin with the canceling of the marriage of her mother, Katherine of Aragon, and Henry VIII...
...Confession of me, the Lady Mary" (as this surrender was entitled) was destined "to mark Mary for life." She had been "false to her mother and her mother's Church." writes Biographer Prescott. "In every crisis . . . afterwards she remembered it, and . . . made her decision . . . regardless of wisdom, deaf to argument . . . not daring to compromise because once in her life she had known what was right, and had not done...
...Mary's-and England's-tragedy, concludes Biographer Prescott, that no such simple graciousness was workable. The England she had imagined in her semi-exile in no way resembled the England she came to rule. What Mary called the "new" religion was already "old" to many Englishmen. The Protestant party was not, as she imagined, composed of a few erring men who had "been misled, or frightened into the new ways." It was a powerful, well-rooted faction made up partly of ardently religious men, partly of landlords who dreaded that Mary would give back to the Church...
...Deathbed Succession. What Mary faced was a state of "open war." Who, exactly, led and organized "the policy of persecution" with which Mary retaliated. "we do not know," writes Author Prescott. But the burning of heretics, "a principle taken for granted" in Tudor England, now began on a scale never known before or since. "Women at their marketing, men at their daily trade, the cobbler at his bench, the ploughman trudging the furrow-all learned to know the awful smell of burning human flesh, the flesh of a neighbor, of a man or woman as familiar as the parish pump...
...Author Prescott tells her story not as a Catholic apologist (she is an Anglican), but rather as a woman writing understandingly of the troubles of another. In her hands, Mary's story is both terrible and unforgettable...