CHAPTER IV
1546 Anne Askew—Her trial and execution—Katherine Parr’s danger—Plot against her—Her escape.
As the months of 1546 went by the measures taken by the King and his advisers to enforce unanimity of practice and opinion in matters of religion did not become less drastic. A great burning of books disapproved by Henry took place during the autumn, preceded in July by the condemnation and execution of a victim whose fate attracted an unusual amount of attention, the effect at Court being enhanced by the fact that the heroine of the story was personally known to the Queen and her ladies. It was indeed reported that one of the King’s special causes of displeasure was that she had been the means of imbuing his nieces—among whom was Lady Dorset, Jane Grey’s mother—as well as his wife, with heretical doctrines.
Added to the species of glamour commonly surrounding a spiritual leader, more particularly in times of persecution, Anne Askew was beautiful and young—not more than twenty-five at the time of her death—and the thought of her racked frame, her undaunted courage, and her final agony at the stake, may well have haunted with the horror of a night-mare those who had been her disciples, and who looked on from a distance, and with sympathy they dared not display.
There were other circumstances increasing the interest with which the melancholy drama was watched. Well born and educated, Anne had been the wife of a Lincolnshire gentleman of the name of Kyme. Their life together had been of short duration. In a period of bitter party feeling and recrimination, it is difficult to ascertain with certainty the truth on any given point; and whilst a hostile chronicler asserts that Anne left her husband in order “to gad up and down a-gospelling and gossipping where she might and ought not, but especially in London and near the Court,”[28] another authority explains that Kyme had turned her out of his house upon her conversion to Protestant doctrines. Whatever might have been the origin of her mode of life, it is certain that she resumed her maiden name, and proceeded to “execute the office of an apostle.”[29]
Her success in her new profession made her unfortunately conspicuous, and in 1545 she was committed to Newgate, “for that she was very obstinate and heady in reasoning on matters of religion.” The charge, it must be confessed, is corroborated by her demeanour under examination, when the qualities of meekness and humility were markedly absent, and her replies to the interrogatories addressed to her were rather calculated to irritate than to prove conciliatory. On this first occasion, for example, asked to interpret certain passages in the Scriptures, she declined to comply with the request on the score that she would not cast pearls among swine—acorns were good enough; and, urged by Bonner to open her wound, she again refused. Her conscience was clear, she said; to lay a plaster on a whole skin might seem much folly, and the similitude of a wound appeared to her unsavoury.[30]
For the time she escaped; but in the course of the following year her case was again brought forward, and on this occasion she found no mercy. Her examinations, mostly reported by herself, show her as alike keen-witted and sharp-tongued, rarely at a loss for an answer, and profoundly convinced of the justice of her cause. If she was not without the genuine enjoyment of the born controversialist in the opportunity of argument and discussion, she possessed, underlying the self-assertion and confidence natural in a woman holding the position of a religious leader, a fund of indomitable heroism. For she must have been fully conscious of her danger. It is possible that, had she not been brought into prominence by her association with those in high places, she might again have escaped; but, apart from the grudge owed her for her influence over the King’s own kin, her attitude was almost such as to court her fate. Refusing “to sing a new song of the Lord in a strange land,” she replied to the Bishop of Winchester, when he complained that she spoke in parables, that it was best for him that she should do so. Had she shown him the open truth, he would not accept it.
“Then the Bishop said he would speak with me familiarly. I said, ‘So did Judas when he unfriendlily betrayed Christ....’ In conclusion,” she ended, in her account of the interview, “we could not agree.”
Spirited as was her bearing, and thrilling as the prisoner plainly was with all the excitement of a battle of words, it was not strange that the strain should tell upon her.