A twenty-five-year-old Tudor gentlewoman was racked by the Lord Chancellor of England himself. She named no one. Then she wrote everything down.
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.
Anne Askew needs to be remembered.
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On the morning of July 16, 1546, four heretics were brought to Smithfield to be burned. Three walked. The fourth was carried in a chair. 
She had been born around 1521 into the gentry of Lincolnshire. Her father, Sir William Ayscough, had once attended Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. She had been educated.
She had read the English Bible. At fifteen, after her elder sister Martha died before the marriage could take place, she was substituted into the contract her father had made with Thomas Kyme — a Catholic landowner who had not bargained for an evangelical wife.
The marriage failed on confessional grounds. Kyme drove her from his household. Askew invoked the apostle Paul, sued for divorce, and traveled to London to preach from memorized Scripture.
She refused to call herself Kyme.
In London she became known as a gospeller — a lay preacher who could quote whole books of the Bible from memory and meant to be heard. She drew crowds. She had family in useful places. Her brother Edward served in the household of Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Her brother Francis had been a cupbearer to the king. The Askews were not nobodies. Part of what made her dangerous was that she was somebody.
The England she walked into was a country at war with itself over the bread on the altar. Henry VIII had broken from Rome but had not broken from the Mass. The Act of Six Articles, passed in 1539, made denial of transubstantiation a capital crime. To say that the consecrated bread remained bread was, in law, to choose the stake.
The court was split. Cranmer and the Seymours wanted reform. Wriothesley, Rich, and Gardiner wanted Rome without the pope. The two factions watched each other across the dying king and waited.
Queen Catherine Parr held religious study sessions in her chambers. Her ladies read evangelical books. The conservative faction saw their opening. If they could prove the queen kept Protestant company, they could break her, and through her break the reformers’ position in the council.
They needed a witness.
Anne Askew preached on the streets of London. She was the witness they wanted.
She was arrested in March 1545, examined for two weeks, and released on bond. She was arrested again in the spring of 1546. Bishop Stephen Gardiner of Winchester gathered the evidence. The Guildhall court tried her on June 18, 1546, and condemned her to burn. The condemnation was supposed to close the case. It did not. The Council still wanted names.
They took her to the Tower.
The questioning began in two phases, and the second phase is the one that matters. The first phase was doctrinal. What do you believe about the sacrament? About confession? About the king’s book? She answered with Scripture. She asked them to define their terms. She told them the consecrated bread, if left in a box for three months, would go mouldy. She told them she would not throw pearls among swine. She told them she had been given the gift of knowledge but not of utterance — and then she used it anyway.
The second phase began when they understood she would not be argued into recantation. They stopped asking what she believed. They started asking who she knew. Lady Suffolk. Lady Sussex. Lady Hertford. Lady Denny. Lady Fitzwilliam. Who had given her money? Who shared her opinions at court? What did the queen read?
She named no one.
Sir Anthony Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, was ordered to put her on the rack. He refused. Racking a gentlewoman was illegal. Racking a prisoner already condemned was illegal. Racking a woman was unprecedented in the recorded history of the Tower. Kingston rode to the king for instructions.
While he was gone, Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley and Sir Richard Rich took hold of the wheels themselves.
They worked her with their own hands. Her shoulders gave first, then her elbows, then her hips and her knees. She fainted. They revived her. Wriothesley sat with her on the floor of the chamber for two more hours, offering her life and comfort if she would name one woman of Catherine Parr’s circle.
She named no one.
She was burned at Smithfield on July 16, 1546, with three companions: John Lascelles, John Adams, and Nicholas Belenian. A bag of gunpowder was placed at her neck to shorten the dying. It rained on the proceedings. A spectator shouted that vengeance would fall on the men who burned Christ’s member, and a Catholic carter struck him down. That was the execution.
The harder decision she had already made, in Newgate, with her hands ruined and her body broken, when she chose to write.
She wrote down the questions. She wrote down her answers. She wrote down who held the wheels and what they had offered her. She gave the manuscript to evangelical sympathizers, who passed it to German merchants, who carried it across the Channel to John Bale, the exiled reformer in Wesel.
Bale printed her First Examination in November 1546, four months after the fire. He printed the Latter Examination — the one that recorded the rack and the names — in January 1547. Both bore a false imprint: Marburg in the land of Hesse, the cover Tyndale had used. Copies began to circulate inside England within weeks.
Henry VIII died on January 28, 1547. The conservative faction fell. Catherine Parr survived. The Reformation accelerated through the brief reign of Edward VI and, after the Marian interlude, became the established faith of England.
When John Foxe assembled his Acts and Monuments in 1563, he placed Askew’s Examinations near the center of his account of the Henrician martyrs. The book ran through edition after edition and lived on the shelf of every English parish church by royal injunction. For the next three centuries, every literate Englishman who read about the burnings at Smithfield read them in her words.
Wriothesley died of his own private causes in 1550. Rich became one of the most loathed men in Tudor government and is now best remembered for his performance in A Man for All Seasons. Gardiner served Queen Mary and died in 1555. Their names survive because she put them in her book.
The state could break her body. It could not control what she wrote about being broken.
This is the harder thing about Anne Askew, and it is what places her at the beginning of a long line. Bonhoeffer in Tegel. Solzhenitsyn in the camps. Mandela on Robben Island. The prison letter, the smuggled manuscript, the testimony composed by a person the regime believed it had already silenced.
She was twenty-five. She had been racked by two of the highest officers of the realm. She could not lift a pen without help. And she chose, with whatever remained of her hands, to make a record that would outlive the men who broke her.
She named no one.
She wrote everything.
Anne Askew needs to be remembered.
Sources: Anne Askew, The First Examinacyon (1546) and The Lattre Examinacyon (1547), ed. John Bale, printed at Wesel; John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1563); Elaine V. Beilin, ed., The Examinations of Anne Askew, Oxford University Press (1996); Megan L. Hickerson, “Negotiating Heresy in Tudor England,” Journal of British Studies (2007); The Examinations of Anne Askew Online, University of Amsterdam (anne-askew.humanities.uva.nl).
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Charles C. Jett is a Naval Academy graduate, Harvard MBA, former Cold War submarine officer, Professional Certified Coach (PCC), and the author of six books. He writes the Courage and Consequence series at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com, and hosts the podcasts Making a Great America, Jefferson-Adams Letters, and It’s All About Skills.