Anne Askew

If only she had been quiet at any point until now, she might have avoided this fate, a fate worse than any she had seen befall any of the other well-born women sacrificed to the cruel whims of the Tudor regime.

Anne Askew, daughter of a high ranking member of King Henry VIII's court, had had a front row seat to the end of the first five of the king's marriages, which included two executions and one grizzly death from illness.

Anne had had every chance at a comfortable life.

So how did she end up not just condemned to death, but tortured on the rack in the Tower of London, stretched until her body was literally broken? It was because she spoke, and then she would not speak.

Because she had preached her Protestant beliefs, and then would not divulge the names that her torturers wanted.

She'd already been arrested and imprisoned before for heresy, and because Anne did not stop speaking out, she would pay for her crimes with her life.

But this torture, which was both unusual and illegal, was due to her silence, not her speech.

The king's men believed that she was part of a secret network of heretics that reached all the way to the palace.

Welcome to the Proper British History Podcast.

Today, we peel back the layers of Anne Askew's story from a gentry daughter turned Protestant voice to a woman who faced torture and was burned in Smithfield.

When we think of Protestant martyrdom in Tudor England, one name that keeps coming up is Anne Askew.

Born around fifteen twenty-one into a gentry family in Lincolnshire, she grew up as the younger daughter of Sir William Askew.

Her life would be cut short by the very religious reform movement she helped to nurture.

She famously wrote that she would die before the king or anyone could force her to deny Jesus, insisting on fidelity rather than flattery.

Her words capture a clarity of purpose that shocked many contemporaries and would later be used by Protestant writers as evidence of the early church's moral resolve.

Anne Askew's final act of faith was her execution by burning at Smithfield on the sixteenth of July, fifteen forty-six, making her one of only two women known to have been burnt for heresy in Tudor England.

Uh-huh.

um uh gosh i was originally going to say elizabeth barton but i feel like she was kind of a pawn whereas anne askew wasn't so i would pick anne because she had her convictions and stuck to them and

you know

elizabeth barton more so had to do what the men around her wanted her to do and then in the end they would have thrown her under the bus and

Which that would be absolutely

terrible too.

Anyway, Anne Askew, that's my answer.

Thanks for that.

that was impactful in carrying this belief forward and this commitment to the Word of God in the context of everyday life that, you know, we can't identify them, but if people knew that this person was doing this, it was inspirational for the community.

Okay, let me tell you about an English woman called Anne Askew.

So we don't know when she was born, sometime around 1520.

She came from Lincolnshire in the east of England.

In the reign of our Mary alone, Lord Burleigh believed that two hundred and ninety were burnt alive, of which a considerable number were women.

In Scotland, where Knox so manfully headed the struggle against popery, the martyrs were many, and Scottish men thrill with as deep feeling when they hear pronounced the names of George Wishart and Patrick Hamilton and Henry and Thomas Forrest and Norman Gourlay and their fellow martyrs, as that which moves the heart of every Protestant Englishman when he thinks of the cherished memories of Latimer and Ridley and Hooper and Philpot and Bradford and Rowland Taylor and Baynham and Bilney and Tyndale and Anne Askew and the rest of our noble army of martyrs.

Whence came the religion concerning whose doctrines there was so much contest in this sixteenth century? The contest was against corruption, but we cannot wonder that corruption should arise among the professors of Christianity.

Their corruptness does not prove the religion itself to be corrupt or untrue.

At Buckingham, Thomas Baynard and James Morton, the one for reading the Lord's Prayer in English and the other for reading Saint James' Epistles in English, were both condemned and burnt alive.

Now, there's one more that I wanted to read a little bit from, and this is another lady, Anne Askew.

And there's more to her life than, than...

Looks like there's a whole book that ought to be written about her.

Chamberlain at Colchester, the 14th of June, Thomas Osmond at Manningtree, and William Banford, alias Butler, at Harwich, the 15th of June, 1555, all dying full of the glorious hope of immortality.

Then reofficially, Lord Chancellor offered Anne Askew the king's pardon if she would recant, who made this answer, that she came not thither to deny her Lord and Master.

And thus the good Anne Askew, being compassed in with flames of fire, as a blessed sacrifice unto God, slept in the Lord, A.D. 1546, leaving behind her a singular example of Christian constancy for all men to follow.

Rev.

John Bradford and John Leaf, an apprentice.