The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  The King and his court had other concerns than those of a young boy being burnt to death for alleged heresy in the summer of 1541, for it was on the last day of June that the King set off on his Great Progress to York, accompanied by his fifth wife Katherine Howard, with the aim both of meeting his nephew James V of Scotland and of demonstrating his power and authority in the north of England, in the wake of the failed popular rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, which was partly a protest at the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries. On 15 July when the court was at Grafton, Richard Rich was summoned by other members of the Privy Council (on behalf of the King) to join the Progress at Pipewell or Collyweston. All along the route of the Progress there was much evidence of the destruction of the monasteries; at Pipewell, for instance, the Cistercian abbey had been dissolved in 1538, despite representations against the closure having been made by members of the local nobility, including Sir William Parr, the brother of the woman who would become Henry’s sixth and final wife.

  The Progress was memorable not only on account of all the places through which it passed and the changes it witnessed in the English landscape, nor for the fact that the Scottish king declined to show up in York, thereby slighting his uncle, but also because it was during this journey that Queen Katherine Howard’s alleged pre- and extramarital liaisons came to light. Business transacted by the Privy Council at its meeting back in London on 14 November included the sending of letters to the Deputy of Calais and the ambassadors in Flanders, France and the Holy Roman Empire, declaring ‘the story of the Queen’s misdemeanour’. On 1 December Rich was appointed as one of the three privy councillors to examine Francis Dereham, William Damport and Joan Bulmer in the case against the Queen, and he was also a member of the special commission appointed to try Thomas Culpeper and Dereham at Guildhall the same day. The indictment against Katherine contained the accusation that she:

  queen of England, formerly called Kath. Howard, late of Lambeth, Surrey, one of the daughters of Lord Edmund Howard, before the marriage between the King and her, led an abominable, base, carnal, voluptuous and vicious life, like a common harlot, with divers persons, as with Francis Dereham … maintaining however the outward appearance of chastity and honesty. That she led the King by word and gesture to love her and (he believing her to be pure and chaste and free from other matrimonial yoke) arrogantly coupled herself with him in marriage …

  Katherine (who had been stripped of her title of Queen on 23 November) was accused of having continued her relations with Dereham, and of having seduced Culpeper, during the Progress at Pontefract, among other places. On 6 December Rich was involved, with other members of the Council, in examining the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, suspected of complicity with the accused. While Rich and other councillors remained in London to deal with the Howard affair (Culpeper and Dereham were executed at Tyburn on 10 December, Katherine herself being beheaded on 13 February 1542), the King went away to try to recover his spirits after this latest marital disaster.

  In April 1542 Bishop Bonner, determined to instil discipline among his clergy in order that they in turn might enforce it on the laity, issued some ‘injunctions’ which included the directive that priests should not:

  rehearse sermons made by other men within these 200 or 300 years, but shall take the Gospel or Epistle of the day, recite it all, desire the people to pray with them for grace after the usage of the Church of England, and then declare the same Gospel or Epistle according to the mind of some Catholic doctor; not affirming anything which cannot be shown in some ancient writer, and in no wise rehearsing any opinion not allowed, with a view to refute it, but leave that to preachers admitted by the King or bishop.

  So, according to Bonner, it was dangerous for most priests even to discuss heretical views, let alone to espouse them. He had a point – more perhaps than he thought – given that an ‘opinion not allowed’ today might become accepted doctrine tomorrow, and vice versa. Happy the man – or woman – who could avoid getting drawn into controversy in those dangerous days.

  One such appeared to be that unassuming priest, Sir John Deane. In 1544 Richard Rich was granted the right to purchase (at a very low price) the remaining monastic buildings of the former St Bartholomew’s Priory, in addition to the prior’s house which he already had, this being a right he had anticipated receiving all along. He wished to ensure the provision of a suitable parish church for what was now ‘his’ domain, and he was instrumental in securing the retention of the monastic quire (the east end of the great church of the priory, beyond the pulpitum or screen) for this purpose, rather than allowing it to be stripped of its valuable lead and fall into ruin. The site of the demolished nave would make an admirable churchyard for his parishioners, and that is what it became. Not only did Sir Richard own the physical property, he was also now patron of the living. He clearly saw no reason why the former parish priest of the monastic close, Sir John Deane, should not continue his ministry at St Bartholomew’s under the new dispensation, and so, on 18 June 1544, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood, Deane was duly created first rector of the Priory Church, by order of Sir Richard and in the presence of Alderman and wool merchant Sir Roland Hill, the auditor Thomas Burgoyne and a number of other inhabitants of the close.

  Chapter Six

  ‘LO, FAITHLESS MEN AGAINST ME RISE’

  Lo, faithless men against me rise,

  And for thy sake, my death practise.

  My life they seek, with main and might

  Which have not thee, before their sight

  Yet helpest thou me, in this distress,

  Saving my soul, from cruelness.

  I wot thou wilt revenge my wrong,

  And visit them, ere it be long.

  Part of a paraphrase of Psalm 54,

  believed to have been

  composed by Anne Askew

  SOMETIME IN THE autumn of 1544 Anne Askew arrived in London from Lincolnshire, leaving behind an unhappy marriage and two children. She had been born in about 1521 (so was around twenty-three years old when she came to London), the second daughter of Sir William Askew or Ayscough (who had died in 1540) and his first wife, Elizabeth Wrottesley. The family home was in Stallingborough, near Grimsby in Lincolnshire. She had two brothers, Francis and Edward, and two sisters, Martha and Jane. Her father, an owner of land in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, had participated in the wars against the French and been knighted by Henry VIII in 1513 at Tournai, attended the King at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 (the occasion of the fortnight-long meeting between Henry and Francis I of France) and been appointed High Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1521. He had also spent some time as the Member of Parliament for Grimsby. After the death of his first wife he married twice more and had two more sons, Christopher and Thomas. After Sir William’s marriage to his second wife, the widow of Sir William Hansard, the family moved to South Kelsey, closer to the county town of Lincoln.

  Anne’s eldest brother, Francis, followed in his father’s footsteps in fighting against the French and was knighted at the siege of Boulogne in 1544. Her other brother, Edward, became a member of Archbishop Cranmer’s household and, by the time Anne set off for London, he was a Gentleman Pensioner and Cup-Bearer to the King, while her half-brother Christopher had been appointed a Gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber (though he died a year before Anne arrived in the capital). Her sister Jane was married to George St Paul, steward of the Lincolnshire estates of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk.

  Anne is thought to have received a good education – for a woman of her time – possibly from tutors at home. Her difficulties seem to have begun with the death of her sister Martha, for whom a marriage had been arranged with one Thomas Kyme, the son and heir of a neighbouring farmer. Rather than abandon the match (with all the financial settlements that had been promised) when the original fiancée died, Sir William offered Thomas his second daughter, Anne, as a replacement. The marriage duly went ahead, the couple had
two children and, to begin with, Anne behaved as was expected. The change in her came about through personal reading of the Bible, an experience which encouraged her to challenge the authority of both the Church and her husband.

  Rather than confine herself to personal Bible study or to meeting with groups of like-minded people, Anne seems to have been quite willing, even determined, to court controversy in a public arena. Having been warned by her friends that, if she travelled to Lincoln, the clergy there – who had clearly heard about her, for she had not been keeping her reformist opinions to herself – would challenge her, she purposely set off for the town, and for the cathedral, in what sounds like an act of deliberate provocation. She related this decision herself, during one of her subsequent interrogations: ‘For my friends told me, if I did come to Lincoln, the priests would assault me and put me to great trouble, as thereof they had made their boast. And when I heard it, I went thither indeed, not being afraid, because I knew my matter to be good.’ She stayed in Lincoln for about a week, and her whole attitude seems to have been one of scorn for the men who tried to oppose her. As she stood reading the Bible in the cathedral, she was approached by small groups of clerics, who appeared to be about to speak to her but mainly just stared and went away again. Only one priest actually confronted her, and she asserted later that his words were ‘of so small effect’ that she could not remember what they were. (Throughout her encounters with authority – an authority which is inevitably male – Anne exudes contempt.) What was principally at issue here was not that Anne was reading the Bible per se – as a gentlewoman there was no prohibition on her doing that, in private – but the fact that she approached the Great Bible provided, as was now the requirement, in the cathedral, and began to read it out loud. This was expressly forbidden for a woman to do, according to the newly passed Act for the Advancement of True Religion.

  The editor and disseminator of Anne’s recollections, John Bale, claims that Anne’s act of defiance in going to Lincoln and reading the Bible there in public so infuriated her religiously orthodox husband that he drove her out of the house, using violence, and that after this she determined she was quite within her rights to seek a divorce. Having first come to self-awareness through her Bible reading, she turned again to the Bible to justify what was at this period a very unusual, countercultural way for a woman – particularly a woman with two young children – to respond to an unhappy marriage. And her interpretation of the Bible was highly individual – of just the sort to worry the authorities, fearing the anarchy that might be unleashed upon society if every unhappily married woman, reading the scriptures for herself, took it into her head that St Paul was encouraging her to leave her husband. The passage in the New Testament she was relying upon was from chapter 7 of St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and specifically verses 13 to 15: ‘And the woman, which hath to her husband an infidel, if he consent to dwell with her, let her not put him away. For the unbelieving husband, is sanctified by the wife: and the unbelieving wife, is sanctified by the husband … But and if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or sister is not in subjection to such.’ The inference Anne was drawing from these verses, after her husband had allegedly thrown her out, was that he was not ‘consenting to dwell’ with her; therefore she was free to ‘put him away’ as she was ‘not in subjection’ to him. She was further defining him as an ‘infidel’ and ‘unbelieving’ because he did not share her new-found evangelical beliefs; according to Bale, she ‘could not think him worthy of her marriage which so spitefully hated God the chief author of marriage’. Ultimately, the only true believers in Anne’s interpretation of St Paul are those who thought as she did. Such a hard-line attitude on Anne’s part inevitably gave rise to opinions of equal vehemence on the part of (male) traditionalists, such as the Jesuit Robert Parsons who, writing some fifty years later, characterized Anne’s decision to leave her husband as being in order ‘to gad up and down the country a-gospelling and gossiping where she might and ought not’.

  And so, either having been thrown out or having decided to leave, or maybe both, Anne Askew set off for London. (She had first attempted, unsuccessfully, to obtain a divorce from the ecclesiastical court in Lincoln; the conservative Bishop John Longland, whom we have already encountered as one of the interrogators of Thomas Garrett, would hardly have been sympathetic to an evangelical runaway wife.) Given that she had relatives and contacts already in the capital, and that London was known to be home to a significant number of evangelical believers, there was a certain logic in her decision to go there (though for any young gentlewoman, and a mother, to run away from her husband was in itself a daring and highly unusual act). In London Anne continued to petition for a divorce, this time in the Court of Chancery. Though there is no record of her ever having been successful in this endeavour, she consistently presented herself as either divorced or unmarried. She never, for instance, refers to herself in her writings, including on the statements she signed, as ‘Anne Kyme’; she always retains her own identity as ‘Anne Askew’.

  In addition to her brother Edward who was serving at court, Anne’s London contacts included her cousin, Christopher Brittayn, a lawyer of the Middle Temple, and an old friend and neighbour John Lascelles, another lawyer (he had studied at Furnival’s Inn – an Inn of Chancery attached to Lincoln’s Inn) and also a reformer. Dismissed from service in Sir Francis Bryan’s household because of his support for evangelical religion (Bryan was reported to have ‘put that man Lascelles from him for that he was so in the new learning, saying that he would have none in his house’), Lascelles had subsequently worked for Thomas Cromwell, acting as a messenger for him in 1538 and 1539, before being given the post of Sewer in the King’s Privy Chamber.

  Lascelles had been instrumental in the downfall of Katherine Howard, as he had passed on to Cranmer information gleaned from his sister, a lady in the Duchess of Norfolk’s household, about Katherine’s reputation – that she was known to be ‘light both in living and in conditions’ and that she had had a series of affairs before her marriage to the King. Other leading figures in the circle of reformers in which Anne moved included Edward Crome, Rector of St Mary Aldermary (referred to with approval by James Bainham at his trial in 1531), Nicholas Shaxton, former Bishop of Salisbury, and Hugh Latimer, former Bishop of Worcester. She did not confine herself to her own level of society, however, but included artisans and apprentices among her evangelical acquaintances. And, at a time when Bishop Bonner was known to be cracking down on dissent in the Church, it appears Anne did little, if anything, to hide her divergence from official doctrine and practice. At the same time, there is no indication that she wanted anything more than to be able to live her own life, and express her own opinions, in peace and without interference. But that was not possible for a lone woman, of outspoken character, in 1540s London.

  Anne was arrested on suspicion of heresy on 10 March 1545, being detained by order of the Aldermen of London ‘for certain matters concerning the vi Articles’. On the testimony of an unnamed woman, she was brought before a quest (an official commission appointed to hold a hearing into heresy) at Saddlers’ Hall in the City. The questioning was led by an official called Christopher Dare, who first asked Anne whether she believed that the sacrament hanging over the altar – that is, the ‘reserved’ sacrament hanging in a pyx, according to Catholic practice – was ‘the very body of Christ really’. Anne addressed the question by asking another: ‘why was St Stephen stoned to death?’ Dare replied, according to Anne’s account, that he did not know (or, at least, that he ‘could not tell’). ‘No more will I try answering your stupid question,’ countered Anne.

  It is clear from her answers, or her attempts to evade answering, that Anne had no wish to become a martyr, and intended to get herself out of trouble if she could, while also desiring to remain true to her beliefs: a tricky situation for anyone, particularly for a young woman already under suspicion for having left hearth and home, showing the temerity to claim in
dependence for herself in a world where women were nothing if not dependent.

  But Anne was not simply trying to avoid answering Dare’s question. Her choice of the martyrdom of St Stephen – the first martyr of the early Church – was deliberate. For one thing, Stephen’s martyrdom (as related in the Acts of the Apostles) came about after certain Jews entered into debate with him and, finding they couldn’t get the better of him in argument, procured some men to lay false allegations against him. So by introducing Stephen into the discussion, Anne is implicitly accusing her interrogators of acting unfairly towards her. Stephen had also warned his persecutors against idolatry and told them that God does not live in a house made by human hands (referring to Solomon’s great temple), and he had accused the Jews, who had benefited by being given the law, of also being the very ones who had not kept it. Again, Anne is implicitly levelling these accusations at her own accusers, as well as actually giving her answer to the question, if only by allusion – for if God does not live in a temple, she is suggesting, he certainly does not live in a box. Nevertheless, technically speaking, she avoided answering the question. The story of Stephen had also arisen as the unnamed woman who had testified against her had accused her of reading aloud that God was not in temples made with hands; Anne’s defence was that that was indeed what it said in the Acts of the Apostles, and she showed Dare the relevant passages. In addition to the story of the martyrdom of Stephen, she pointed to the words of St Paul to the Athenians, also from Acts: ‘God that made the world, and all that are in it, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, he dwelleth not in temples made with hands …’