Cook, Faith
Caught in the Web: Life as a Christian in the Days of 'Bloody Queen Mary' (Cook)
Description
Hal had seen it coming. It was all a plot, a wicked plot. Lady Jane was being snared in a plot. Suddenly he found himself thinking of a spider’s web that he had seen up in the rafters when he had broken his leg. He remembered how the helpless fly was trapped in the fine silken threads. Was Lady Jane caught like that fly in a web woven by the cruelty of ambitious men and women?
Using a narrative form in which some of the characters are fictitious, Faith Cook brings to life for the modern reader a period of English history which was marked by great suffering for Christians who sought to remain faithful to the truths of the Bible.
The account is based first of all on the life of young Lady Jane Grey, nine-day Queen of England, who found herself caught up in a web of intrigue and political ambition, and then on the frightening cruelties which followed during the reign of Mary Tudor. With a network of spies and informers seeking to entrap them and betray them to the authorities, men and women from all walks of life, young and old alike, faced imprisonment, torture and death at the stake merely for owning and reading a Bible or for daring to question the Roman Catholic teaching on the mass.
Set against a background of actual historical events, the narrative introduces the reader to many authentic historical figures, often using their own recorded words. This vivid and often moving picture of life in the sixteenth century not only serves to commemorate the faith and endurance of Christians in those troubled times, but provides a challenge and encouragement to readers today.
Author
Faith Cook, daughter of Stanley and Norah Rowe, missionaries of the China Inland Mission (now OMF), was born in north-west China. After missionaries were evicted from the country in 1951, she returned to the UK and attended Clarendon School in North Wales before proceeding to teacher training college in Bromley, Kent. She married Paul Cook in 1961, and they served several evangelical churches in the Midlands and Yorkshire before his retirement. They have a daughter, four sons and ten grandchildren, and now live in Breaston, Derbyshire.