Protestant martyr. Anne Askew was an English member of the Reformed Church who was persecuted as a heretic. She is the only woman on record to have been tortured in the Tower of London, before being burned at the stake. Born at Stallingborough into a notable family of Lincolnshire, she was forced by her father, Sir William Askew, to marry the Catholic Thomas Kyme, as a substitute for her sister who had died. Although the couple had two children, the marriage was not a happy one, largely due to her strong Protestant beliefs. When she returned from London, where she had gone to preach 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. Askew enlisted her friends at court for support, in particular Catherine Parr, but Parr could not save Askew from charges of heresy; in 1546 the young woman was imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured on the rack, in the hopes that she would implicate Parr. Askew did not break under the torture. As a result of this torture, she was too badly crippled to walk to the stake. During the ordeal, she wrote a first-person account of her ordeal and her beliefs, which was published as the Examinations by Protestant bishop John Bale, and later in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of 1563 which proclaims her as a Protestant martyr. Several ballads were written about her in the 17th century.
Protestant martyr. Anne Askew was an English member of the Reformed Church who was persecuted as a heretic. She is the only woman on record to have been tortured in the Tower of London, before being burned at the stake. Born at Stallingborough into a notable family of Lincolnshire, she was forced by her father, Sir William Askew, to marry the Catholic Thomas Kyme, as a substitute for her sister who had died. Although the couple had two children, the marriage was not a happy one, largely due to her strong Protestant beliefs. When she returned from London, where she had gone to preach 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. Askew enlisted her friends at court for support, in particular Catherine Parr, but Parr could not save Askew from charges of heresy; in 1546 the young woman was imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured on the rack, in the hopes that she would implicate Parr. Askew did not break under the torture. As a result of this torture, she was too badly crippled to walk to the stake. During the ordeal, she wrote a first-person account of her ordeal and her beliefs, which was published as the Examinations by Protestant bishop John Bale, and later in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of 1563 which proclaims her as a Protestant martyr. Several ballads were written about her in the 17th century.
