Anne Askew

9 Anne Askew

LIKE as the armèd knight Appointed to the field, With this world will I fight, And faith shall be my shield.

More enemies now I have Than hairs upon

my head. Many women writers were attacked Let them not me deprave for their views – Mary Wroth was But fight thou savaged by half the nobility of in my stead London, Delarivier Manley was arrested The Ballad which for scandalum magnatum, Olympe de Anne Askew made Gouges was sent to the guillotine. But and sang when she probably no other female writer apart was in Newgate from Anne Askew (1520 – 1546) has ever been thrown out of the house and sued for divorce by her husband, imprisoned in both Newgate prison and the Tower of London, tortured on the rack, twice and written about it both times, then burnt at the stake for her views.

52

Now considered a protestant martyr, Anne was the daughter of Sir William Askew, or Ayscough, the High Sheriff of Lincolnshire. She was educated from an early age and soon became very attached to and knowledgeable about the Bible. She knew her Scriptures well and as a young woman could discuss and debate – apparently on equal terms – details of doctrine with the clergy; according to her own later writings she could defeat any male cleric in liturgical argument from an early age. When she was still very young, Anne was forced into an arranged marriage with a man called Thomas Kyme. The marriage had originally been arranged with Anne’s elder sister but she died before the wedding and ‘to save the money,’ Anne was forced to marry him instead. In his introduction to her writings, the Protestant reformer John Bale described the marriage as ‘ungodly, unlawful and coacted’ [coerced]. Bale says however that Anne despatched her wifely duties and had two children. However, ‘In process of time by oft reading of the sacred Bible’ she converted to Protestantism; Kyme unfortunately was a Catholic.

Anne’s transgressive behaviour started early. In 1546 Kyme appeared in court with her as his wife, but she refused to acknowledge him as her husband. The court detained Anne because ‘she was obstinate and heady in reasoning of matters of religion, wherein she showed herself

53

to be of naughty opinion.’ According to the court records, ‘seeing no persuasion of good reason could take place, she was sent to Newgate, to remain there to answer to the law.’ Anne continued to be transgressive, reading the Bible openly in Lincoln Cathedral, which had recently become illegal: in 1543, The Act for the Advancement of True Religion had restricted the reading of the Bible to clerics, noblemen, the gentry and rich merchants. Women other than gentlewomen, as well as servants, apprentices and ordinary people were forbidden to read it at all. Women of the gentry and the nobility were allowed to read it, but only in private. (William Tyndale’s English language new Testament was first made available in England in 1526 and, with Miles Coverdale’s additions, the first complete English language Bible was first available from 1535 though it was considered heretical and copies were burnt; Tyndale himself was burnt at the stake.)

Around this time, probably at the instigation of local Catholic priests, Kyme ejected his wife from the house and attempted to divorce her; it is not known for sure whether the

54

divorce ever went through but it is interesting that, unlike most women writers, Anne published under her father’s name rather than her husband’s.

Unfortunately for her, Askew had become associated with the underground Protestant circle around Katherine Parr, then the Queen of England and Henry VIII’s last wife – she was the one who survived him, despite all the odds. Askew was detained and tortured by Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, Sir Richard Rich and Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, who were looking for evidence to justify a warrant against the Queen for heresy and the names of any co-conspirators. Torturing a gentlewoman was illegal but that made no difference. Anne was detained under the 1539 Act of Six Articles which took the Catholic view that in the communion ‘the natural body and blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ’ is literally and physically present in the bread and wine and that ‘after the consecration there remaineth no substance of bread or wine, nor any other substance, but the substance of Christ, God and man.’ Anyone who dissented from this, as Anne did very strongly, was a heretic and would ‘suffer judgment, execution, pain, and pains of death by way of burning, without any abjuration, clergy, or sanctuary to be therefore permitted.’

55

Askew describes her torture on the rack in the starkest and clearest of terms. ‘Then they did put me on the rack, because I confessed no ladies nor gentlewomen to be of my opinion, and thereon they kept me a long time. And because I lay still and did not cry, my lord Chancellor and master Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands, till I was nigh dead.’ But still Anne did not give her torturers any names. On 16 July Askew was brought to the stake in Smithfield, still so weak from the torture that she had to be carried in a chair. John Foxe republished her works and related her death in his Book of Martyrs, 1563.

56 And thus the good Anne Askew, with these blessed martyrs, being troubled so many manner of ways, and having passed through so many torments, having now ended the long course of her agonies, being compassed in with flames of fire, as a blessed sacrifice unto God, she slept in the Lord A.D. 1546, leaving behind her a singular example of Christian constancy for all men to follow.

Shortly after her death, and before the appearance of Foxe’s work, John Bale published Askew’s writings, with his own heavy editorialising, in two books titled The First Examination of Anne Askew, 1546 and The Latter Examination of Anne Askew, 1547. In these works Anne writes autobiographically, in the first person, describing her examination and torture in simple, unemotional terms. According to her own words, she gives the inquisitors at least as good as she gets. The ostensible heart of the matter

57

is transubstantiation: whether – as the Catholics insist – the bread and wine of the communion literally become Jesus’ flesh and blood. Askew continues to deny this, jousting with her examiner, quoting Scripture back at him.

‘Then you drive me,’ saith he, ‘to lay to your charge your own report, which is this: you did. say, ‘He that doth receive the sacrament by the hands of an ill priest, or a sinner, receiveth the devil, and not God.’ To that I answered, ‘I never spake such words: but, as I said before, both to the quest and to my lord mayor, so say I now again, that the wickedness of the priest should not hurt me, but in spirit and faith I received no less than the body and blood of Christ.’ Then said the bishop unto me, ‘What saying is this, in spirit? I will not take you at that advantage.’ Then I answered, ‘My Lord, without faith and spirit I cannot receive him worthily.

Then he laid unto me, that I should say, that the sacrament remaining in the pix [the box that holds the host], was but bread. I answered that I never said so; but indeed the quest [court] asked me such a question, whereunto I would not answer, (I said,) till such a time as they had assoiled [absolved] me this question of mine, Wherefore Stephen was stoned to death? They said they knew not. Then said I again, no more would I tell them what it was.

Then said my Lord unto me, that I had alleged a certain text of the Scripture. I answered that I alleged none other but St. Paul’s own saying to the Athenians, in the seventeenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, that ‘God dwelleth not in temples made with hands.’ Then asked he me, what my faith and belief was in that matter? I answered him, ‘I believe as the Scripture doth teach me.’

58

In Newgate prison, having been sentenced to burn at the stake, Askew was offered pardon at the very last minute if she would recant her heresy. She wouldn’t. She wrote this instead.

But this is the heresy which they report me to hold: that after the priest hath spoken the words of consecration, there remaineth bread still. They both say, and also teach it for a necessary article of faith, that after those words be once spoken, there remaineth no bread, but even the self-same body that hung upon the cross on Good Friday, both flesh, blood, and bone. To this belief of theirs say I, nay. For then were our common creed false, which saith, that he sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, and from thence shall come to judge the quick and the dead. Lo, this is the heresy that I hold, and for it must suffer the death.

And so she did. Anne Askew was really not the Angel of the House.

59