Anne Askew was arrested in March, 1545, and brought before Christopher Dare at Sadlers’ Hall, Cheapside, on the charge of denying transubstantiation, the eighteenth article of the statute. She was afterwards examined by the Lord Mayor, by the Bishop of London’s chaplain, by Bishop Bonner, by Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, none of whom could shake her convictions or induce her to retract, and she was accordingly burnt at the stake. Anne Askew was of good social position, the daughter of a knight, Sir William Askew, and a maid of honour to Queen Catherine Parr.
It was not only a rapt enthusiasm and ecstatic fervour which sustained women in the hour of martyrdom. There is plenty of evidence of that comprehending courage which could anticipate and prepare for death with the same calmness as for any ordinary event of life. The dying speeches of the women who suffered from the merciless brutality of Judge Jeffreys are very remarkable. That of the aged Lady Alicia de Lisle, who was barbarously executed in 1685, after the battle of Sedgmoor, for sheltering fugitives, is one of the most notable—
“Gentlemen, Friends, and Neighbours, it may be expected that I should say something at my death, and in order thereunto I shall acquaint you that my birth and education were both near this place, and that my parents instructed me in the fear of God, and I now die of the Reformed Protestant Religion; believing that if ever popery should return into this nation, it would be a very great and severe judgment.... The crime that was laid to my charge was for entertaining a Nonconformist Minister and others in my house; the said minister being sworn to have been in the late Duke of Monmouth’s Army.
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“I have no excuse but surprise and fear, which I believe my Jury must make use of to excuse their verdict to the world. I have been also told that the Court did use to be of counsel for the prisoner; but instead of advice, I had evidence against me from thence; which, though it were only by hearing, might possibly affect my Jury; my defence being such as might be expected from a weak woman; but, such as it was, I did not hear it repeated again to the Jury, which, as I have been informed, is usual in such cases. However, I forgive all the world, and therein all those that have done me wrong.”
Another victim, Mrs. Gaunt of Wapping, who was burnt in the same year for a somewhat similar offence, wrote the day before her martyrdom—
“Not knowing whether I should be suffered or able because of weaknesses that are upon me through my hard and close imprisonment, to speak at the place of execution; I writ these few lines to signifie that I am well reconciled to the way of my God towards me, though it be in ways I looked not for, and by terrible things, yet in righteousness.”
She goes on to write a long speech expressive of her religious faith and her entire lack of regret for anything that she had done in succouring the poor, “... I did but relieve an unworthy poor distressed family, and lo, I must die for it.”
She puts a postscript: “Such as it is you have it from her who hath done as she could, and is sorry she can do no better.”
The Quakers went through their period of martyrdom in the seventeenth century. In the midst of a heterogeneous state of religious parties, the Quaker movement stands out with great distinctness as the only religious movement in which women were recognized as leaders and teachers. The Quakers began to preach in London about the year 1654, five years after George Fox’s imprisonment. Both in England and in America, whither numbers emigrated, they endured violent persecution. The first Quakers who went to Boston were two women who sailed in 1656. They were imprisoned and maltreated, were deprived of food and light, had their books seized and burnt, and all sorts of indignities practised upon them. The reign of Charles II. was an exceedingly troublous time for Quakers in England, though they had been promised immunity from molestation in their meetings, both by General Monk and by Charles when he came to the throne. In the first year of the preaching in London two women, who undertook to distribute a pamphlet written by George Fox and called “The Kingdom of Heaven,” were arrested and sent to Bridewell prison.
As their numbers increased, so did their troubles. Quakers have never been noted for active proselytizing, but their well-ordered lives made a greater impression than exhortation and argument.
“Thus continuing to live in fear and a reverential awe, they improved in true godliness; insomuch that by their pious lives they preached as well as others with words. After this manner the number of their society increased: but then grievous sufferings ensued; for the priests could not endure to see that their hearers left them; the furious mob was spurred on, and among the magistrates there were many who, being of a fierce temper, used all their strength to root out the professors of the light (as they were called at first), and to suppress and stifle their doctrine; but all proved in vain, as appears abundantly from their history; although there were hardly any prisons in England where some of these people were not shut up; besides the spoil of goods and cruel whippings that befell some of them. Yet all this they bore with a more than ordinary courage without making resistance, how great soever their number was; and notwithstanding many of them had been valiant soldiers, who often had slain their enemies in the field without regarding danger.”