18
June 1546 A.D. Anne
Askew Condemned to Death
Graves,
Dan. “Anne Askew Condemned to Death.”
Christianity.com. Apr 2007. http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1501-1600/anne-askew-condemned-to-fire-11629973.html. Accessed
3 May 2014.
Anne Askew looked around the
room. She did not find a single sympathetic eye. There was no jury that she
could hope to sway, no friendly witnesses. Did her heart quail? "Pray,
pray, pray," she had urged friends. Now, although she had already been
racked so cruelly that she could no longer walk, her accusers had a further
penalty in store for her. On this day, June 18, 1546,
they pronounced her sentence. She was to be taken to Smithfield and burned.
Anne's crime was to deny the
doctrine of transubstantiation. She believed (as most Protestants do), that the
Lord's Supper is not literally the body and blood of Christ, but rather a
sacred symbol of it. "But as touching the holy and blessed supper of the
Lord, I believe it to be a most necessary remembrance of his glorious
sufferings and death. Moreover, I believe as much therein as my eternal and
only Redeemer, Jesus Christ, would [that] I should believe. Finally, I believe
all those scriptures to be true [which] he has confirmed with his precious
blood." For this she had been arrested, interrogated, released and now
jailed again.
When she was first brought
before the Lord Mayor of London, he asked her, "You foolish woman, do you
say that the priests cannot make the body of Christ?"
Always ready with a tart answer
(as her own account shows) Anne replied, "I say so, my Lord; for I have
read that God made man; but that man can make God, I never read, nor, I suppose,
ever shall read." She persisted in this view despite torture, answering
many of her opponent's arguments with quotations from scripture, which she knew
well.
She also refused to name her
accomplices. These included Katherine Parr, the sixth wife of King Henry VIII,
a tenderhearted and tactful woman. Katherine got Anne off the first time, but
Anne's persistence in her beliefs led to her rearrest and finally spelled death
for her. (Katherine was fortunate enough to outlive Henry.)
Anne's life had been a hard one.
Her father forced her to marry Thomas Kyme, to whom her dead sister had
originally been promised. The marriage was unhapppy, in part because of
religious disagreements. Kyme eventually threw his wife out of the home,
although he acknowledged that she was the most devout woman he had ever known.
Anne tried to get a divorce on the ground that they were "unequally
yoked." She found a divorce as hard to obtain as the king had, but she did
not have his clout to engineer national events to get her way.
In July that same year, Anne was
carried to the stake in a chair. At her execution, so many spectators massed at
the scene that the crowd had to be pushed back to make room for the fire. She
refused a last minute pardon which required her to recant. Gunpowder was poured
over her body and she perished in the flame. Because of her heroic stand and
refusal to "snitch" on like-minded believers, she became a symbol of
womanly valor and won wide support for the Protestant cause. John Foxe included
her death in his book of martyrs. Some Baptist histories claim her among their
forerunners.
Bibliography:
1. Bainton, Roland H. Women of the Reformation in France and England. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1973.
2. Bale, John. Select works of John Bale ... Containing the examinations of Lord
Cobham, William Thorpe, and Anne Askewe, and The image of both churches.
Edited for the Parker society, by the Rev. Henry Christmas ... Cambridge
[England]: Printed at the University press, 1849.
4. Foxe, John. Book of Martyrs. Various editions.
5. Various encyclopedia and internet articles and Baptist histories.
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