Anne Askew

Life and Ministry

Anne Askew was born in 1521 to a Lincolnshire gentry family at Stallingborough and married off at fifteen to Thomas Kyme, a Catholic landowner who had been engaged to her elder sister before that sister died. She bore Kyme two children and read her way through the English New Testament, which had been legally placed in every parish church only six years before her marriage. Her conversion to Reformed convictions in her early twenties produced an irresolvable rift with her husband, who eventually expelled her from his house. She moved to London, sought a divorce on biblical grounds (which was refused), and joined the circle of Reformed gentlewomen around Queen Catherine Parr. Her First Examination, written by her own hand in prison, is one of the earliest surviving prose autobiographies by an English woman.

Circumstances of Death

Anne was arrested twice. Her first examination in 1545 ended with her release; her second in 1546 was meant to gather evidence against the Reformed women of the queen's chamber. Henry VIII's chancellor, Lord Wriothesley, and the solicitor general, Richard Rich, took her to the rack at the Tower of London — the only documented case of an English noblewoman being racked — and turned the wheel themselves when the lieutenant of the Tower refused. Anne refused to name a single woman of the queen's circle. She was racked until her shoulders, hips, knees, and elbows were all dislocated, and she had to be carried to her execution in a chair. On July 16, 1546, she was tied upright to the stake at Smithfield in London, her broken body unable to stand, and burned in company with three Protestant men. She was twenty-five years old.

Legacy

Anne's First Examination and Latter Examination — smuggled out of England and printed by John Bale at Wesel in 1546–47 — became one of the most widely read Reformation texts in English. John Foxe gave her seven full pages in the Acts and Monuments. Her refusal under torture to name the queen's circle is credited with sparing Catherine Parr from arrest in the final months of Henry VIII's reign. Henry himself died six months after Anne's burning, and the Reformed party briefly took the council under the boy-king Edward VI. She remains the most prominent female martyr of the English Reformation and one of the only women in any era recorded as having been racked.