Anchor tag in htmlText not working

I have a flex Text field that previously I was declaring and initializing as pure flex mxml. The htmlText field had an anchor tag in it that worked just fine. However, now I’m declaring and initializing this Text field in an mx:script block, and the anchor tag no longer is recognized. Every other concievable tag work as before - <font, <u, and so on - but not <a. For example in the following:

  txt1.htmlText = "&lt;u&gt;&lt;a href='http://www.google.com'&gt;testing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/u&gt;";

the text is underlined but there is no link and the cursor doesn’t change.

More maddening arbitrary b.s. from flex/as3. Why do I keep torturing myself.