Anne Askew
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Anne Askew (1521 - 16 July 1546) was an English member of the Reformed Church who was persecuted as a heretic. She is the only woman on record to have been tortured in the Tower of London, before being burned at the stake.
Born at Stallingborough into a notable family of Lincolnshire, she was forced by her father, Sir William Askew, to marry the Catholic Thomas Kyme when she was just 15, as a substitute for her sister who had died. Anne rebelled against her husband by refusing to adopt his surname. Although the couple had two children, the marriage did not go well, not least because of her strong Protestant beliefs (He was a Catholic). When she returned from London, where she had gone to preach against the doctrine of transubstantiation, her husband turned her out of the house. She then went again to London to ask for a divorce, justifying it from scripture (1 Corinthians, 7.15), on the grounds that her husband was not a believer.
Eventually Anne left her husband and went to London where she gave sermons and distributed Protestant books. These books had been banned and so she was arrested. Her husband was sent for and ordered to take her home to Lincolnshire. Anne soon escaped and it was not long before she was back preaching in London.
Anne was arrested again. This time, Sir Anthony Kingston, the Constable of the Tower of London, was ordered to torture Anne in an attempt to force her to name other Protestants. Anne was put on the rack. Kingston was so impressed with the way Anne behaved that he refused to carry on torturing her, and Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor had to take over.
Askew enlisted her friends at court for support, in particular Catherine Parr, but Parr could not save Askew from charges of heresy; in 1546 the young woman was imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured on the rack, in the hopes that she would implicate Parr. Askew did not break under the months of torture, although, as a result, she was too badly crippled to walk to the stake.
During the ordeal, she wrote a first-person account of her ordeal and her beliefs, which was published as the Examinations by Protestant bishop John Bale, and later in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of 1563 which proclaims her as a Protestant martyr. Several ballads were written about her in the 17th century.
References
- Elaine V. Beilin, ed., The Examinations of Anne Askew (Oxford, 1996) ISBN 0195108493
- "[Prisoners Tortured in the Tower of London]". Accessed 29 June 2005.
External links
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