Anne Askew

Anne Askew (1521 - 16 July 1546) was an English member of the Reformed Church who was persecuted as a heretic. She is the only woman on record to have been tortured in the Tower of London, before being burned at the stake.

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Born at Stallingborough into a notable family of Lincolnshire, she was forced by her father Sir William Askew to marry the Catholic Thomas Kyme, as a substitute for her sister who had died. Although the couple had two children, the marriage did not go well, not least because of her strong Protestant beliefs. After she went to London to preach against the doctrine of transubstantiation, her husband turned her out of the house. She then went again to London to ask for a divorce, justifying it from scripture (1 Corinthians, 7.15), on the grounds that her husband was not a believer.

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Askew enlisted her friends at court for support, in particular Catherine Parr, but Parr could not save Askew from charges of heresy; in 1545 the young woman imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured on the rack, in the hopes that she would implicate Parr. Askew did not break under the months of torture, although she was too badly crippled to walk to the stake.

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During the ordeal, she wrote a first-person account of her ordeal and her beliefs, which was published as the Examinations by John Bale, and later in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of 1563.

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