Anne Askew (née Anne Ayscough, married name Anne Kyme) (1520/1521 — 16 July 1546) was an English poet and Protestant who was persecuted as a heretic. She is the only woman on record to have been tortured in the Tower of London before being burnt at the stake.
Born at Stallingborough into a gentry family of Lincolnshire, she was forced by her father, Sir William Askew (1490—1541), to marry Thomas Kyme when she was fifteen, as a substitute for her sister Martha who had recently died. Anne rebelled against her husband by refusing to adopt his surname. Anne had at least one child, William Askew. The Dictionary of National Biography says no more than that she left her children to go "gospelling". Her marriage did not go well, not least because of her strong Protestant beliefs. When she returned from London, where she had gone to teach against the doctrine of transubstantiation, her husband turned her out of the house. She then went again to London to ask for a divorce, justifying it from scripture (1 Corinthians, 7.15), on the grounds that her husband was not a believer.
Eventually, Askew left her husband and went to London where she gave sermons and distributed Protestant books. These books had been banned and so she was arrested. Her husband was sent for and ordered to take her home to Lincolnshire. Askew soon escaped and it was not long before she was back preaching in London.
In the last year of Henry VIII's reign, Askew was caught up in a court struggle between religious traditionalists and evangelicals. Stephen Gardiner was telling the king that diplomacy - the prospect of an alliance with the Catholic Emperor Charles V - required a halt to religious reform. The traditionalist party pursued tactics tried out three years previously, with the arrests of minor evangelicals in the hope that they would implicate those who were more highly placed. In this case measures were taken that were, according to McCulloch, "legally bizarre and clearly desperate", in the context of the king's failing health. The persons rounded up were in many cases strongly linked to Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, who spent most of the period absent from court in Kent: Askew's brother Edward Ayscough was one of his servants, and Nicholas Shaxton who was brought in to put pressure on Askew to recant was acting as a curate for Cranmer at Hadleigh. Others in Cranmer's circle who were arrested were Rowland Taylor and Richard Turner.
The traditionalist party included Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich who racked Askew in the Tower, Edmund Bonner and Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk. The intention of her interrogators may have been to implicate the Queen, Catherine Parr, through the latter's ladies-in-waiting and close friends, who were suspected of having also harboured Protestant beliefs. These ladies included the Queen's sister, Anne Parr, Katherine Willoughby, Anne Stanhope, and Anne Calthorpe. Other targets were Lady Denny and Lady Hertford, wives of evangelicals at court.
Askew was arrested again. She was examined in June 1546 by Martin Bowes, Lord Mayor of London. Sir Anthony Kingston, the Constable of the Tower of London, was ordered to torture Askew in an attempt to force her to name others.
According to Askew's own account, and also that of gaolers within the Tower, she was tortured only once. She was taken from her cell, at about ten o'clock in the morning, to the lower room of the White Tower. She was shown the rack and asked if she would name those who believed as she did. Askew declined to name anyone at all, so she was asked to remove all her clothing except her shift. Askew then climbed onto the rack and her wrists and ankles were fastened. Again, she was asked for names, but she would say nothing. The wheel of the rack was turned, pulling Askew along the device and lifting her so that she was held taut about 5 inches above its bed and slowly stretched. In her own account written from prison, Askew said that she fainted with the pain, and was lowered and revived. This procedure was repeated twice. Kingston refused to carry on torturing her, left the Tower, and sought a meeting with the King at his earliest convenience to explain his position and also to seek his pardon, which the king granted.
Wriothesley and Rich set to work themselves. Askew's cries could be heard in the garden next to the White Tower where the Lieutenant's wife and daughter were walking. Askew gave no names, and her ordeal ended when the Lieutenant ordered her to be returned to her cell.
She was burnt at Smithfield, London aged 25, on 16 July 1546, with John Lascelles and two other Protestants. Anne Askew was carried to execution in a chair as she could not walk. She was dragged from the chair to the stake which had a small seat attached to it, which she sat astride. The executioner hung a bag of gunpowder around her neck as a humane act in order to speed her death along, and it exploded nearly immediately. Those who saw her execution were impressed by her bravery, and reported that she did not scream until the flames reached her chest.
She wrote a first-person account of her ordeal and her beliefs, which was published as the Examinations by John Bale, and later in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of 1563 which proclaims her as a Protestant martyr. The story of Askew's martyrdom was thus written into the Protestant hagiography, but as McCulloch comments, under a version of her unmarried name (which he attributes to some embarrassment over her desertion of her husband Kyme). As he notes, the Catholic propagandist Robert Parsons picked up on this aspect of the story.
Several ballads were written about her in the 17th century. As Thomas Fuller described it, "she went to heaven in a chariot of fire." There was a resurgence of interest in her story during Victorian times, and the Bleets company produced an Anne Askew doll complete with rack and stake. One is on show at the Leeds Toy Museum.
