Mary’s nearly 300 executions might soon have been forgotten if it had not been for writer John Foxe. Driven partly by religious zeal and partly by what can only be described as humanitarian indignation, Foxe set out to celebrate the martyrs of English Protestantism, and in the process, to pillory the previous regime as a clique of murderous hispanophile gangsters. It is hard to overemphasize the impact his Acts and Monuments had the twenty years following its 1563 publication. By the second edition