Little is known about Anne Askew (c. 1521-46) prior to her examination before a London Grand Jury (quest) in March, 1545. She was the daughter of a Lincolnshire knight, Sir William Askew (or Ayscough), and was married at a young age to another knight, Sir Thomas Kyme, apparently against her will. According to John Bale, the first editor of Askew's Examinations (John Bale, The Lattre Examinacyon of the worthye servaunt of God mastres Anne Askewe [Marburg, 1547]), Kyme had been previously betrothed to Askew's older sister, Martha, but she died before their wedding took place and Anne was offered as a substitute bride. Askew and Kyme had two children, but the couple became estranged due to her conversion to and proselytizing of the evangelical heresy and his subsequent decision to expel her from their marital home, seemingly in response to pressure from local priests whom she had antagonized (Bale, Lattre Examination [1547], 15r-v). After fruitlessly petitioning for a divorce in the ecclesiastical court in Lincoln, Askew travelled to London, where her sister Jane and brother Edward served at court. There she continued her unsuccessful pursuit of a divorce, this time in the Court of Chancery.

In London, Askew came into contact with prominent evangelicals like Edward Crome, Nicholas Shaxton, Hugh Latimer, David Whitehead, and John Lascelles (with whom she was burned), and it seems she had some sort of contact with either Catherine Parr (Henry VIII's sixth queen) or some of the ladies of her court. It is also possible that she was in contact with the sometime Lollard executed for Anabaptism during Edward VI's reign, Joan Boucher (John Davis, 'Joan of Kent, Lollardy and the English Reformation', Journal of Ecclesiastical History 33 [1982], 231). She was arrested on suspicion of heresy in March 1545 (confirmed by the City of London Record Office Repertory 11, fol. 174v), but then released on bail without indictment after a preliminary hearing before a quest (Grand Jury) and a series of interrogations by the Lord Mayor of London and Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London. According to the Windsor Herald, Charles Wriothesley, she was arraigned in June of 1545, but this arrest and arraignment are not mentioned in the Examinations (Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors: from AD 1485 to 1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton, 2 vols [London, 1875], 1: 155-56). In June 1546, Askew was summoned before the king's Privy Council at Greenwich (Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. John Roche Dasent, 46 vols (London, 1890), 1, p. 462), who condemned her under the Act of the Six Articles for denying the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Altar (article one in the Act of the Six Articles condemned any interpretation of the nature of the sacramental elements other than transubstantiation, and mandated death by burning for a first offense).

Following her condemnation, Askew was illegally tortured in the Tower of London at the hands of two members of King Henry's Privy Council, in an apparent attempt by conservative members of the council to gain information to implicate, as supporters of evangelical reform, female members of Catherine Parr's circle, with whom Askew was thought to be acquainted. According to the description of her torture in the Examinations, Askew was asked, on the rack, about her connections to the Countesses of Suffolk and Hertford, and Ladies Denny and Fitzwilliam; she confessed that two men who had brought her money in prison had told her they were sent by Lady Denny and Lady Hertford, but would say nothing more than that. Crippled from the rack, Askew was burned at Smithfield in London on 16 July 1546, along with three male Protestants, including John Lascelles. Nicholas Shaxton, who had been arrested for his part in counseling Crome against recantation, and who had been arraigned with Askew in June, preached his sermon of recantation at her execution.

The story of Anne Askew is told through two sets of documents, first published by John Bale (along with his own lengthy 'elucidation') as the First Examinacyon and the Lattre Examinacyon of… Mastres Anne Askewe (in 1546 and 1547 respectively). Following the appearance of these first editions of these two texts, the popularity of Askew's story soon led to a demand for more editions. The two Examinations subsequently appeared bound together in three further editions, once with Bale's commentary, in 1547, and twice without it, in 1548 and 1550. Foxe reproduced the Examinations (translated into Latin and without Bale's commentary) in his 1559 Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum. Another English edition of the two texts, again omitting Bale's elucidation, was produced early in Queen Elizabeth's reign (1560), and the Examinations appear again, shaped by Foxe's editing, in the several editions of the English Acts and Monuments.

The original authorship of these documents is a thorny question. Bale claims that the texts describing Askew's series of examinations, along with various letters and statements of faith included in the Lattre Examination, were written by the woman herself and smuggled out of her prison to him in his exile on the continent, where he received them from merchants (both Examinations were first published from Marburg). But even if this is so, there is no reason to think that anyone but Bale ever saw the original manuscripts used by him, and this includes John Foxe. It has been convincingly argued that Foxe's base text for his Askew account is the 1550 edition of Bale's Examinations (published by William Copland), with both First and Lattre accounts bound into one book without Bale's commentary (See Thomas F. Freeman and Sarah Elizabeth Wall, 'Racking the Body, Shaping the Text: The Account of Anne Askew in Foxe's Book of Martyrs', Renaissance Quarterly 54 [2001], 1165-96).

Foxe's use of the Askew account has been neglected in modern scholarship in favor of Bale's editing of it, primarily because Bale so explicitly imposed much of his agenda on the account, by virtue of his elucidation. But recently, Foxe's shaping of the account has also come under scrutiny, most significantly by Freeman and Wall. Taking careful note of the fact that it is impossible to determine to what extent Bale wrote or edited the actual text of the Askew Examinations prior to publishing them - and no autographed manuscript has been found of any of the texts attributed to Askew - Freeman and Wall argue that both Bale and Foxe must be considered collaborators in the production of the Askew narrative. They were both its mediators and shapers.

In this respect, Foxe's Examinations of Anne Askew tell the reader as much about his agenda as they do about her experiences. Again, the base text used by Foxe is a 1550 edition of the Examinations in which the two sets of examinations and other texts appear together, without Bale's commentary. But Foxe does not simply reproduce his base text: he makes stylistic and substantive alterations to it (Freeman and Wall, 1176), in the process altering both rhythm and emphases, with a skilled eye to dramatic effect. But Foxe's own editing of the Examinations also changes from edition to edition of his martyrology, first between the Latin Rerum (1559) and his first English edition of the Acts and Monuments (1563), and then, significantly, between first and second (1570) editions of the English work. Perhaps most significant in terms of Foxe's broad framing of the Askew account is the shift of his placement of her account between the first (1563) and second (1570) editions of the English Acts and Monuments, which Freeman and Wall suggest reflect his growing impatience with the progress of the Elizabethan religious reform (Freeman and Wall, 1186-89). Whereas in the 1563 edition of his work Foxe places the Askew account as merely one of a number of stories relevant to the last years of Henry VIII's reign - arranged with 'no apparent order…at all' (Freeman and Wall, 1186) - the 1570 edition sees the development of Askew's account as a 'keystone' for a number of related incidents, reflecting linked themes: resistance to reform by some of Henry VIII's councilors; the responsibility of the monarch to pursue reform regardless of opposition; and the 'disastrous consequences' if the monarch fails to do so, as had Henry (1188). Thus, Askew's story in the 1570 edition, which also sees expanded accounts of her torture and execution, stands as a reminder to Queen Elizabeth of her responsibility to pursue further religious reform - to complete the reformation she had begun - in a context in which it seemed increasingly unlikely that she would do so.

Megan L. HickersonHenderson State University