The Only Woman Tortured In The Tower

Anne Askew is one of the most extraordinary and almost forgotten figures of the Tudor age — a 25-year-old gentlewoman from Lincolnshire who preached Protestantism in the streets of London, out-debated bishops in open court, and endured an execution so barbarous that it scandalised even the England of Henry VIII. She was the only woman in recorded history to be tortured in the Tower of London. And the men who broke her body were the two highest legal officers in the realm.

Anne was born around 1520 into a minor gentry family, the Ayscoughs of South Kelsey, Lincolnshire. She was highly educated — unusual for a woman — and had read the Bible in English, which was itself becoming an act of defiance. In her early twenties, she was married off to Thomas Kyme, a Catholic Lincolnshire landowner. The marriage was miserable. Anne refused to take his name permanently, began preaching against the doctrine of transubstantiation — the belief that the bread and wine of the Eucharist literally became Christ’s body and blood — and eventually left him to come to London, where she joined a circle of radical Protestant reformers. She was a woman preaching theology in public. In Henry VIII’s England, that was already dangerous. When she began denying the Real Presence, it became fatal.

The Horror

In 1545, she was arrested and interrogated by Edmund Bonner, the Bishop of London — a man who would later earn the nickname “Bloody Bonner” for burning Protestants under Mary I. Anne debated him on Scripture, refused to recant, and was imprisoned for twelve days before being released on bail. She did not stop preaching. In May 1546, she was arrested again, brought before the Privy Council, and questioned by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and Sir Thomas Wriothesley, the Lord Chancellor of England. They wanted names. Specifically, they wanted the names of the ladies at court who shared her beliefs — women close to Queen Catherine Parr, Henry’s sixth wife, whom the conservative faction suspected of Protestant heresy.

Anne gave them nothing. She said she knew no one of her “sect.” When they pressed her on Lady Suffolk, Lady Sussex, Lady Hertford, Lady Denny, Lady Fitzwilliam — all women in or near the Queen’s circle — she replied that she knew nothing she could prove. So Wriothesley ordered her to the Tower, and there, on an unspecified day in June 1546, she was taken to the lower room of the White Tower and shown the rack.

The Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Anthony Kingston, was ordered to put her to the question. He fastened her wrists and ankles, turned the wheel once, and asked again for names. She said nothing. He turned it again. She fainted. He revived her. And then, according to her own account — smuggled out of prison and published after her death — Kingston refused to continue. He would not torture a gentlewoman further. He left the Tower to seek an audience with the King and beg pardon for his disobedience.

So Wriothesley and Sir Richard Rich — the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, two of the most powerful men in England — threw off their robes and took the handles themselves. They turned the rack until Anne’s body was drawn taut five inches above the bed. They turned it until her shoulders and hips were pulled from their sockets, her elbows and knees dislocated. Her cries were heard in the garden outside by Kingston’s wife and daughter. She fainted again. They revived her. She still gave no names. In her own words: “The Lord Chancellor and Master Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands, till I was nigh dead.” Afterward, she sat for two hours on the bare floor, arguing with Wriothesley, before being taken to a private house to recover. Her body was so destroyed that she could not walk.

On 28 June 1546, she was condemned for heresy at the Guildhall, alongside three men. One of them, Nicholas Shaxton, a former bishop, recanted to save his life. Anne would not. She was returned to Newgate Prison to await death.

The Modern Relic

On 16 July 1546, Anne Askew was brought from Newgate to Smithfield for burning. She could not walk. The guards carried her through the streets in a chair. At the stake, because she could not stand, a small wooden seat was placed at the bottom of the pyre and she was tied to it — by her ankles, her wrists, her chest, and her neck — while seated. A huge crowd had gathered. Wriothesley was there, watching. So was the Duke of Norfolk. Nicholas Shaxton, who had betrayed his faith, was sent to preach the sermon, offering Anne one last chance to recant and receive the King’s pardon. She answered for all four of the condemned: “I came not hither to deny my Lord and Master.” Then the fire was lit. Some accounts say a barrel of gunpowder was tied to her to hasten death. Others say the fire was deliberately kept low, so that she burned slowly. Either way, she was twenty-five years old, and she had outlasted the Lord Chancellor’s rack.

The relic is her words. Anne Askew’s account of her examinations and torture — The First Examinacyon and The Lattre Examinacyon — were smuggled out of prison and published in 1546 and 1547 by the Protestant propagandist John Bale. They were later reprinted in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, one of the most influential books in English history. In them, Anne speaks in her own voice: precise, unyielding, theologically learned, and absolutely without fear. She is one of the first Englishwomen to publish a first-person prose narrative of persecution. You can read her words today — the voice of a 25-year-old woman who debated bishops, defied the Lord Chancellor, and went to the fire in a chair, because two of the most powerful men in England had personally torn her body apart and she still would not speak.

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