H F M Prescott

Estate

H F M Prescott
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Biography

HFM Prescott, Hilda Frances Margaret Prescott, was an English historian, novelist, and academic. She is remembered for THE MAN ON A DONKEY, a chronicle-style novel about the Pilgrimage of Grace during Henry VIII’s reign, along with a number of other historical novels, a biography of Mary Tudor (awarded the James Tait Black Prize) and the thriller, DEAD & NOT BURIED, which was adapted for TV in the 1950s.

Publications

Fiction

Publication Details Notes
THE MAN ON A DONKEY 2019 Head of Zeus

A forgotten literary masterpiece, The Man on a Donkey is less about the great figures who shape historical change and more about what it’s like to live through it.

This is a sweeping, immersive historical novel that invites the reader to inhabit Tudor history as it unfolds: Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon; Robert Aske’s rebels fighting the Dissolution of the Monasteries; the machinations of Cardinal Wolsey and Anne Boleyn.

It is, quite simply, one of the finest historical novels ever written.

Non-fiction

Publication Details Notes
MARY TUDOR: THE SPANISH TUDOR 2003 Weidenfeld and Nicolson
A highly-readable popular biography of ‘Bloody Mary’ – winner of the James Tait Black Prize.
Mary I is notorious for her persecution of Protestants and has been vilified by generations of partisan historians. H.F.M. Prescott brings a more humane and measured perspective to the life of this tormented woman. First published in 1940 under the title SPANISH TUDOR, Prescott’s biography won the James Tait Black prize the following year. An extensively revised and updated edition was published in 1953 under the title MARY TUDOR. Prescott sums up her subject’s life as follows: ‘Perhaps no other reign in English history has seen such a great endeavour made, and so utterly defeated. All that Mary did was undone, all she intended utterly unfulfilled…mistaken often, almost always misguided in her public office, with much blindness, some rancour, some jealousy, some stupid cruelty to answer for, she had yet trodden, lifelong and manfully, the way that other sinners know.’
H F M Prescott
H F M Prescott
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