Anne Askew

Anne Askew was a Lincolnshire gentlewoman, married against her will to a Catholic neighbor and turned out of the house when she would not stop reading the English Bible. She went to London, sought a divorce, and kept talking about Scripture in a city where that had become dangerous. Arrested and examined, she answered her questioners with quick, exact replies and denied that the bread of the Mass became Christ's body. Condemned already, she was taken to the Tower and racked — illegally, since she was a convicted gentlewoman, and so violently that the Lord Chancellor and another official worked the wheel themselves after the lieutenant refused. They wanted the names of noblewomen at court who shared her beliefs. She gave none. Her body was broken, and on 16 July 1546 she was carried to Smithfield in a chair and burned, aged twenty-five. The account she wrote in prison was smuggled abroad and printed within a year.