wife. Thomas Kyne pursued Anne, and had her arrested and brought back to Lincolnshire, but she escaped back to London and continued to preach. She was arrested and then brutally tortured, both at Newgate prison and the Tower of London, being almost split apart on the rack. Refusing to confess or to identify other Protestants she was burned alive at Smithfield, her body having first been sprinkled with gunpowder. She was so badly injured from her tortures that she had to be carried to her execution on a chair. Before she died, however, she composed poetry, of which the best-known example is her ballad from Newgate. If she hadn’t been tortured by then, she was about to be. It’s full, as we’d expect, of traditional Christian imagery:
Like as the armed knight
Appointed to the field,
With this world will I fight
And Faith shall be my shield.
Faith is that weapon strong
Which will not fail at need.
My foes, therefore, among
Therewith will I proceed.
As it is had in strength
And force of Christes way
It will prevail at length
Though all the devils say nay.
Behind the familiar Arthurian images we can feel the urgent drumbeat of a rebellious mind; and indeed it’s a brave poem on many levels, including a direct attack on the royal authority:
More enmyes now I have
Than hairs upon my head.
Let them not me deprave
But fight thou in my stead.
On thee my care I cast.
For all their cruel spight
I set not by their haste
For thou art my delight.
I am not she that list
My anchor to let fall
For every drizzling mist
My ship substancial.
Not oft use I to wright
In prose nor yet in rime,
Yet will I shew one sight
That I saw in my time.
I saw a rial throne
Where Justice should have sit
But in her stead was one
Of moody cruel wit.
Anne Askew’s horrific fate shouldn’t blind us to the fact that she was, in her way, a fanatic. In the sermons and other writings by the reformers, and also by their enemies, no quarter is given. Another poem by her, in which she pictures herself as a poor, blind woman in a garden full of dangers and snares – the garden being her own body – provides a window for us into the Reformation mind in its full urgency. In today’s world there is little, outside the more extreme edges of Islamism, that feels like this:
A garden I have which is unknown,
which God of his goodness gave to me,
I mean my body, wherein I should have sown
the seed of Christ’s true verity.
My spirit within me is vexed sore,
my flesh striveth against the same:
My sorrows do increase more and more,
my conscience suffereth most bitter pain:
In Anne’s world, the gardener working on her body is Satan, busy trying to entrap her, with the older generation and the Catholics all on his side:
Then this proud Gardener seeing me so blind,
he thought on me to work his will,
And flattered me with words so kind,
to have me continue in my blindness still.
He fed me then with lies and mocks,
for venial sins he bid me go
To give my money to stones and stocks,
which was stark lies and nothing so.
With stinking meat then was I fed,
for to keep me from my salvation,
I had trentals of mass, and bulls of lead,
not one word spoken of Christ’s passion.
In me was sown all kind of feigned seeds,
with Popish ceremonies many a one,
Masses of requiem with other juggling deeds,
till God’s spirit out of my garden was gone …
…‘Beware of a new learning,’ quoth he, ‘it lies,
which is the thing I most abhor,
Meddle not with it in any manner of wise,
but do as your fathers have done before.’
My trust I did put in the Devil’s works,
thinking sufficient my soul to save,
Being worse than either Jews or Turks,
thus Christ of his merits I did deprave …
Towards the end of the poem Anne’s imagery seems to prefigure her own violent ending. This is a world of savagery as well as of salvation:
Strengthen me good Lord in thy truth to stand,
for the bloody butchers have me at their will,
With their slaughter knives ready drawn in their hand
my simple carcass to devour and kill.
O Lord forgive me mine offense,
for I have offended thee very sore,
Take therefore my sinful body from hence,
Then shall I, vile creature, offend thee no more.
I would with all creatures and faithful friends
for to keep them from this Gardener’s
