Blood Mary's Martyrs; The Story of England's Terror

New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2001. First Carroll & Graf edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. ix, [1], 246 pages. List of Illustrations. Illustrations. Notes and Sources. Bibliography. Index. Pencil erasure residue on fep. Jasper Ridley (25 May 1920 - 1 July 2004) was a British writer, known for historical biographies. He received the 1970 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography Lord Palmerston. Born in West Hoathly, Sussex, he was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. He trained and practiced as a barrister, before starting to write. During World War II, he was a conscientious objector and was, by his own account, violently abused while in a detention camp. He served on St Pancras Borough Council from 1945 to 1949, and stood, unsuccessfully, as Labour Party candidate for Winchester in 1955 general election. Derived from a Kirkus review: England during the 16th century was not a good place for anyone with strong convictions. The Reformation began there in 1533 when Parliament decreed that Henry VIII and his successors were to be considered supreme head of the Church in England-thereby guaranteeing that all religious disputes were to be treated as affairs of state and judged according to the sovereign's pleasure. Henry VIII suppressed the monasteries but made very few changes in the daily practice of religion. The boy-king Edward VI was a fierce Protestant, Mary I a devout Catholic, and Elizabeth I a pragmatist. With each new coronation, the entire populace had to re-conform itself to a new religious dispensation, and those who refused were considered traitors to the crown and dealt with accordingly. Mary's reign sent some 300 Protestants to the stake in just five years. Ridley gives a good narrative account of many of these victims, who came from every class of English society.