Anne and Religion Askew

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1:35Dana Schwartz:Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Menke. Listener discretion advised. Her silence at the end of her life was bitterly ironic. If only she had been quiet at any point until now, she might have avoided this fate, a fate worse than any she had seen befall any of the other well-born women sacrificed to the cruel whims of the Tudor regime. Anne Askew, daughter of a high-ranking member of King Henry VIII's court, had had a front-row seat to the end of the first five of the king's marriages, which included two executions and one grisly death from illness.

2:26Anne had had every chance at a comfortable life, So how did she end up not just condemned to death, but tortured on the rack in the Tower of London, stretched until her body was literally broken? It was because she spoke, and then she would not speak, because she had preached her Protestant beliefs, and then would not divulge the names that her torturers wanted. She'd already been arrested and imprisoned before for heresy, and because Anne did not stop speaking out, she would pay for her crimes with her life. But this torture, which was both unusual and illegal, was due to her silence, not her speech.

3:17The king's men believed that she was part of a secret network of heretics that reached all the way to the palace. If they were right or wrong, Anne never said. But she wasn't entirely done speaking. Even as she drifted in and out of consciousness on the rack in the tower, she had secretly stashed away hundreds of words, a memoir of sorts, recounting her experiences to be published after her death. Anne believed in the power of the written word above all else. For her, Scripture and the Holy Bible were sacred beyond sermons, cathedrals, relics, or anything else the Church could offer. So while her body was destroyed and her deeds may not have moved the wheels of history, it's maybe what she would have wanted, that her writings remained, for us to read and discuss.

4:22like we're doing right now. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. In January 1521, the German priest and academic Martin Luther was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Martin Luther is best known for his 95 Theses, a document outlining a theological debate about how, To very much oversimplify the matter, the church should handle repentance for sins, though it touched on other controversial matters. When the Pope excommunicated Luther, Pope Leo X made a growing schism in the church official. Luther's followers wouldn't take on the name Protestant for some years, but that's essentially who they were.

5:17Meanwhile, England in 1521 was, let's say, the before picture of how most people imagine the Tudor era. King Henry VIII was married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, his late brother's widow. That year, the monarch published a treatise titled The Defense of the Seven Sacraments. Impressed by his act of steadfast Catholicness, Pope Leo X awarded Henry the title Defender of the Faith. Also in 1521, a member of Henry's court, William Askew, was named the High Sheriff of Lincolnshire, and his wife, Elizabeth Rotsley, gave birth to the couple's fourth child, a daughter named Anne. The family lived in comfort in the English countryside, where Anne received as good an education as any girl of the area might hope.

6:19But while Anne was growing up, as the kids would say, the saxophones were getting louder. Elizabeth had a fifth child before passing away, and William remarried and had two more sons. Meanwhile, back at court, King Henry was desperate to ditch Catherine of Aragon and Mary Anne Boleyn. And when Pope Clement VII wouldn't grant an annulment, Henry broke with Rome and declared himself head of the Church of England. I'm fast-forwarding through a lot of English history, but I hope you get the general idea. Was Henry defecting to Martin Luther's side? It's not that simple. Henry was on Henry's side. The infrastructure of the Catholic Church remained in England.

7:11It just now had the king as its new head figure, a king who had been raised in the Catholic Church. The intricacies of this situation can and have filled many a textbook, but the headline is, The English Reformation just began, and religious affiliations functioned almost like political parties, their powers waxing and waning depending who was closest to the crown. Spoiler alert, Henry's second marriage was a bigger disaster than his first, and Anne Boleyn was tried and ultimately executed for trumped-up charges of adultery, incest, and treason. At the trial of her alleged co-conspirators, the jury included Anne Eskew's father, William, who was equally authoritarian when it came to doling out fates for his children at home.

8:14Anne's older sister, Martha, had been arranged to marry Thomas Keim, the son of a local farmer, and evidently a dowry had already been settled and paid when Martha sadly died. But William didn't want to just lose the cash he'd already paid, So the same year that Anne Boleyn lost her head, he swapped out one of his daughters for another and sent 15-year-old Anne Askew to marry Thomas Keim in her sister's place. Anne Askew and Thomas had two children, but otherwise very little is known about Anne's life during her marriage to Thomas, who was a staunch Catholic. It appears that it was an unhappy union, and there are some connections we might reasonably draw between Eskew's childhood and her conversion to Protestantism.

9:14From the time that Anne was born until the time that she was married, she watched her father replace her own late mother with a stepmother. She watched the King of England replace his first wife via a divorce and his second via a beheading. She was close enough to the court that she probably heard all about Henry's mistresses in between. She also watched King Henry replace the Pope with himself. And she saw that when her own sister died, her father made her take her place in her marriage. What lesson could she possibly take away from all of this? Anne Askew understood that proximity to power was no guarantee of safety.

10:02Even a queen or a pope could find their fortune reversed overnight. As for money, King Henry had seized the monasteries for their riches, and estates were granted based on royal favor. Might it all have seemed a bit... Fickle? The highly decorated cathedrals, the self-important clergy, the pomp and circumstance of Catholic mass. Anne saw right through it, right through all of them, these men in charge. And she went looking for her own answers, looking, of course, in the Bible. This was an inherently Protestant approach. In the Catholic tradition, the Bible was, first of all, only written in Latin, which was fine because it was meant to be only read by priests.

10:58They could then interpret Scripture for everyone else. And if you had a question about your faith, you would ask your priest or your bishop, who was the head of the church, the way the man was the head of the family. There's a reason you call him Father. But the Protestant perspective encouraged closer individual relationships to the good book itself, not mediated through the priests. As the movement grew in popularity, the Bible became available in English, and literate women like Anne Askew were reading it as teenagers. By the time she came of age, she could quote passages by heart, and was known to sit studying her Bible in church, ignoring the clergy who attempted to speak with her.

11:50It wasn't that she didn't want a community, it was that she rejected the strict Catholic, or pseudo-Catholic, hierarchy. By 1544, she was preaching to anyone who would listen. That did not include her husband, who quickly threw her out of the house. The end of the marriage was just fine by Anne Askew. She went right back to her maiden name, moved to London, and demanded a divorce. And she kept on preaching. She was smart. She could explain her beliefs plainly and back them up with Bible verses. She was high-born and she was a woman, which meant she could connect to the wives of powerful men. Today, maybe she would be a podcaster.

12:41But at the time, it made her a threat.

12:45Dana Schwartz:So a quick word about the terms that I've been using. I've been referring to things in people as Protestant and Catholic or sort of Catholic, because those are generally the two main types of Christians as we understand them today. And those designations right now in history aren't wrong, but they aren't the most specific. The truth is, King Henry threw his political power behind different groups at different points throughout an eschew's life, including those who could generally fall under the umbrella of Protestantism, even if he himself generally subscribed to mostly Catholic religious beliefs.

13:28Historians refer to Henry's court's doctrine by different names, traditionalism, Anglicanism. As for Anne Askew, she was a Calvinist who linked up with a few notable Anabaptists and may have partied with a Lutheran or two. And when we get into what all this means on a practical level, as in what they literally disagreed about besides what language to read the Bible in, it becomes even harder to keep all of the terms straight. The religious beliefs that would make someone a heretic at this time might seem bafflingly specific to a modern secular listener. And frankly, they're not totally pertinent to the overall story, But just as an example of what Anne is preaching against, perhaps the biggest point of contention during the debates she would engage in was transubstantiation during the Eucharist.

14:29That is, when the priest gives out wafers and wine during Mass, do they literally turn into the blood and body of Jesus Christ. The wine either is or is not the blood of Christ, literally, and if you answer wrong, you will be put to death or else severely punished to cleanse your soul of this wound that would otherwise condemn you to hell, which is also a literal place. I am not mocking people who fall on either side of this debate, though I do think killing about it is a bit of an overreaction. Heresy is about religion, absolutely, but it is also about control. When Anne was speaking out against transubstantiation, saying, hey, maybe the blood and body of Christ wasn't meant exactly literally, she was a powerful, outspoken woman pissing the crown off.

15:27And she became, and I mean this literally, figuratively, religiously, and as a meme, A Bitch Eating Crackers. Anne Askew was arrested in March of 1545, and for the better part of two weeks, she was interrogated by primarily Edmund Bonner, the Bishop of England. Much of the public, whatever their religious affiliations, did not like living under draconian laws, and Bonner was known to be a cruel, harsh punisher of heretics, driven less by ideological passion and more by a fervent adherent to the rule of law. Later, under Queen Mary I, he would earn the nickname Bloody Bonner for the ferocity with which he went after Protestants.

16:23But if you can believe it, he was very nearly fair in his treatment of Anne. At least, that's how Anne would later write about it in her book, Examinations. According to her transcripts, the two engaged in a tete-a-tete worthy of the Frost-Nixon treatment, verbally sparring and jousting with wits and even flashes of sarcasm on her end. Because this was not really an interrogation aimed at getting to the truth of what Anne believed. Sure, Bonner said he wanted to, quote, uncover her soul's wound so he could fix her and she could get into heaven, But really, he had a few possible outcomes in mind.

17:09He could get Anne to admit to some act of heresy and then punish her for it. He could force Anne to recant her Protestant faith and use her reconversion for propaganda. Or he could stump her on Bible questions, showing everyone that she was stupid and maybe they would stop listening to her preach. Anne, on the other hand, had one very tricky goal for their hours of conversation. Answer all of his questions in a way that wasn't not Protestant, but also wasn't so Protestant that she'd be convicted of heresy and executed. Of course, she didn't want to die. She was devout, sure, but she was also in her early 20s.

17:57She had a lot of living left to do, ideally. To accomplish her goal, Anne used every rhetorical trick she could think of, and demonstrated just how clever and dangerous a well-read woman could be. Bonner would ask her about one Bible passage, and instead of answering, she'd respond by quoting another. He'd accuse her of some heretical act. She would undermine the premise of the accusation. If he had a complicated question, she'd half answer part of it. Sometimes she spoke in riddles. Once or twice, she even corrected him on his knowledge of scripture. When she really couldn't think of a way out of his questions, she pulled the old standby, smile and shrug.

18:47If you've ever played that game on long car rides where you see how long you can hold a conversation, only answering questions with questions? Their conversation is a little like that, and it's surely to Anne's advantage that Bonner grew more and more frustrated as the days went on. She, however, kept a cool head, and she should be commended as much for her bravery when faced with such an intimidating debate opponent as for her intellect. After twelve days of back and forth, Anne's cousin had arranged bail, and Anne signed a declaration of faith that was more than nothing but less than a recantion.

19:33Both she and Bonner knew she didn't mean it, and for some reason it wasn't even used for any propaganda purposes until much later. Why did Bonner let her go on bail? The man who so hated heretics and had just seen firsthand how effective and persuasive a speaker he had on his hands?

19:56Dana Schwartz:Why didn't he put a stop to her right then and there? Maybe he still thought so little of women that he assumed one arrest would send her straight back into the arms of her estranged husband. Or maybe he was just sick of dealing with her. The most likely explanation, though, is that he didn't want to make a martyr of her. Anne Askew was a well-connected woman who would make a sympathetic figure for the Protestant cause, and she might be more useful to them dead than alive. If Anne had left London, stopped preaching, or even laid low at this point, she may have lived to see the religion she cherished become the faith of the land.

20:43But Anne had a calling, and it would not wait. She had only been out of custody for three months when she was arraigned once again for speaking against the sacrament of the altar, another term for the blood and body in the wine and the bread. though when a credible witness failed to appear, Anne and her fellows were released. For the next year, she seemed to have made connections with Protestants in high places, or people in high places with Protestant sympathies, like Catherine Parr, the sixth and final wife of Henry VIII. At this point, King Henry was sick, and everyone around him knew it. Quietly, in hushed tones and only behind closed doors, the powerful and influential men around the king were preparing for an England after his death.

21:42They were getting their ducks in a row in order to push for their own agendas. The king's young successor, his son, the future Edward VI, had been raised in the Protestant faith, but he was not yet of age, and he would rule by regency council. Catherine Parr also had growing influence at court, and apparent Protestant sympathies. It would still be possible for the traditionalists to hang on to power and keep some form of Catherine doctrine intact when Henry VIII died, but only if they moved very swiftly and decisively, only if they knew whose voices they had to silence before they grew too loud.

22:30In 1546, Anne Askew was arrested again. London juries had become increasingly unwilling to enforce religious policies they saw as arbitrary and unnecessary. So Anne was brought directly to the King's Privy Council. After some cursory questions about her faith, they got down to the heart of the matter. These men believed that Anne was a member of, or knew the members of, a secret, powerful network of Protestant women at court. They wanted names. Names of the wives of powerful men. Names of sympathizers hidden in plain sight. Names of her highest-ranking allies. Oh, and please, won't someone accuse the Queen of something treasonous already?

23:23We really would like to get rid of her. But Anne either didn't know or would not say. She didn't utter a word. Not when they convicted her of heresy or sentenced her to death. Not when they took her to the Tower of London or threatened her with torture. When the threat was not enough, they laid her open on the rack. The infamous stretching device that tears a person apart from the inside, limb by limb. Trigger warning? disconnecting ligaments and removing hip bones and shoulders from their sockets. It was excruciating, but Anne held up under physical torture as well as she had held up under interrogation.

24:11She gave nothing away. At one point, Anne lost consciousness and they took her off the machine, allowing her to recover, though a true recovery wasn't possible. She could right, but any movement was unbearably painful. They didn't torture her again. It did no good, and besides, it was illegal. As a high-born woman already condemned to die, this practice should have been unthinkable, and the public was aghast when the news leaked. Anne is one of only two known women who were ever tortured at the Tower of London. This second examination was a far cry from the feisty back-and-forth she had had with Bishop Bonner.

25:00In July 1546, at age 25, Anne Askew was taken to Smithfield Market in London to be burned at the stake, a public spectacle to show all in attendance what became of a heretic. Anne had to be carried in a chair to the pyre. Her body was too broken for her to walk. There is some debate over whether she was given a final opportunity to recant and save herself. If she was, she did not. If the crowd wanted to declare victory in this case, it was a hollow one. They never got anything they wanted out of Anne. Not a meaningful recantion, not a single name, not even a cry for mercy. All they really proved is that people burn when you light them on fire.

25:53And they handed the Protestants a very sympathetic martyr, a woman who died for the cause, like Jesus, with the traditionalists playing the part of the persecuting Romans. But remember, Anne wasn't a woman of symbols or of punishment. She didn't believe wine became blood, so she wouldn't have thought herself a second Christ at the moment of her death. She was loyal to the written word of the Bible, And in her final moment, I think we can imagine her mind was on those holy pages, and on the pages that were, at that very moment, being smuggled into Germany. For Anne may have met her death, but for her ideas, this was not her end.

26:47As Anne was being carried to the pyre, her writings, her recollections and reflections about religion, her imprisonment, and her remarkable life were being smuggled into Germany. That year, they were published by the scholar John Bale as The First Examination of the Worthy Servant of God, Mestress Anne Askew. The next year, he published the second volume, The Latter Examination of the Worthy Servant of God, Mestress Anne Askew. Bale was, to put it mildly, an aggressive editor. He also had his own propagandistic agenda when it came to Anne's image, which is probably why he fashioned Askew into a mild-mannered and saintly feminine figure rather than an intellectual and a preacher with a mind and backbone of her own.

27:42There is much debate about what writing is from Bale and what writing is from Anne, and for that matter, what writing from Anne is what actually happened and what Anne was editorializing or embellishing. But what comes through the examinations, however you read them, is a woman ahead of her time, with wit and deep personal conviction, driven not by an egotistical sense that her story needed to be told, but by a desire to explain herself. When I look back at the many figures we've covered on this show, and the many gaps in the historical records, all the brains I wish I could pick, I can only imagine how valuable it would be if any of them had left behind even a fraction of the autobiography that Anne Askew did.

28:38Of course, some of them did, but when it comes to non-royals in the Tudor era, it's incredibly welcome to have a first-hand account. The true tragedy of Anne's death is that if she had made it just a little bit longer, she would have barely been considered a heretic. Within a year of her execution, the Lord Chancellor who oversaw her torture would lose his position, King Henry VIII would die, and Protestant reforms would sweep the nation. Then again, it's possible to think maybe Anne's death was the price of the movement's eventual progress and success. That's the story of Anne Askew, but stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear Anne's most famous and possibly apocryphal piece of writing.

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