The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  When she is requested to answer explicitly, rather than in what amount to riddles, she refuses, but again by reference to the scriptures (with which she shows herself to be very familiar). This time she quotes words attributed to Jesus, from Matthew’s Gospel, contained in the so-called Sermon on the Mount: ‘Give not that which is holy to dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they tread them under their feet, and the other turn again and all to rent you.’ Her choice of verse implies both an insult to her questioners, who appear to be equated by her with dogs and swine, and an awareness of the danger she is facing – that her interrogators may use whatever she says to ‘rend’ her.

  Dare also asked her whether it was true that she had said she would rather read five lines in the Bible than hear Mass said five times in church. She admitted that she had indeed said that, for the reason that ‘the one did greatly edify me, and the other nothing at all’. He then asked what she thought about ‘the King’s Book’ (the latest formulation of authorized doctrine, which had appeared, with Henry’s approval and a preface by him, in 1543; its full title was A Necessary Doctrine and erudition for any Christian man). She replied that she could say nothing about it, as she had never seen it. Dare called upon a priest to ask the central question: ‘what I said to the Sacrament of the altar?’ Though Anne did not know the identity of this priest, she ‘perceived him [to be] a papist’, and refused to answer.

  Anne was then taken to be interrogated by the Lord Mayor, William Laxton, a wealthy merchant and Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Grocers but far from being a sophisticated theologian. He asked similar questions to those already put to her, and she gave him similar replies, but then he asked her something which she claims had never occurred to her to ask herself. ‘If a mouse were to eat the host [that is, the consecrated bread],’ asked the Lord Mayor, ‘would it be receiving God, or not?’ Anne said nothing, merely smiling at this strange question. One wonders what the Lord Mayor himself considered to be the correct answer. (Someone who was prepared to address this question, doing so in a sermon delivered around this time, possibly in Lent 1546, was the Dominican Father William Peryn, who would later become head of the small community of Black Friars based for a time at St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield. In his defence of transubstantiation, Father Peryn declared that if a mouse should eat the Blessed Sacrament, it would gnaw only on the outward appearance, while the body of Our Lord would remain inviolate.)

  When Anne was brought before the bishop’s chancellor, he berated her for having the temerity to read out and talk about the scriptures. For St Paul himself, he expostulated, had forbidden women to speak or talk about the word of God. Anne parried his rebuke, telling him she knew what St Paul had said at least as well as he did, and contending that what Paul had actually forbidden women to do was to teach. And this she certainly had not done; neither, she pointed out, had any other woman: ‘And then I asked him, how many women he had seen, go into the pulpit and preach. He said, he never saw none.’ In which case, declared Anne, he should stop criticizing women who had not broken the law.

  After being cross-examined, Anne was imprisoned in one of the two Counters (or ‘compters’, prisons under the City’s jurisdiction and managed by the sheriffs, in some ways not unlike a modern police station) for twelve days. She had asked the Lord Mayor whether she might not be bailed instead, but he had refused. And during those twelve days no friends were allowed to visit her. The bishop did arrange for a priest to be sent to her, but she was clearly not impressed. He had been sent, she said, ‘to give me good counsel, which he did not’. The priest also asked her why she had been put in the Counter – ‘And I told him I could not tell. Then he said, it was great pity that I should be there without cause, and concluded that he was very sorry for me.’ He, like the priest she had dismissed as a ‘papist’, wanted to ask her about the sacrament of the altar, and the answer she records herself as having given him makes deliberate allusion to the Passion narrative and to the words attributed to Pontius Pilate when he had the inscription ‘The King of the Jews’ affixed to the cross on which Jesus was crucified. ‘What I have written, I have written,’ declared Pilate. ‘What I have said, I have said,’ declared Anne. And about this subject she had so far actually said nothing. Next, the priest asked her whether she had been to confession and received absolution. She said ‘no’, and he offered to send her another priest for this purpose. But Anne was choosy, and told him she would be pleased to see one of the clergymen she knew and approved of – such as her acquaintance Dr Crome, or one or two others she mentioned – but she would have to reserve judgement about any other priest, as she did not know them. The priest she was talking to seemed rather taken aback at this, and asked why she should think that he, or any other priest sent to her, might not be as good as the ones she had named. ‘For if we were not, you may be sure,’ he protested, ‘the King would not suffer us to preach.’ Anne again answered with a biblical text, this time actually a paraphrase of a verse from Proverbs: ‘By communing with the wise, I may learn wisdom, but by talking with a fool, I shall take scathe [harm].’ All the time she is pushing the boundaries, barely concealing her contempt, while he, one senses, is bewildered at a young woman expressing such independence of thought and setting herself up as an authority. He also tried the Lord Mayor’s question on her – ‘if the host should fall, and a beast did eat it’, did the ‘beast’ receive God or not? Anne suggested this was some kind of trick question, and requested he answer it himself. He told her that the rules of scholastic debate did not allow for the person who asked a question to answer it, and here she cleverly gave him a reply he could not argue with: ‘I told him, I was but a woman, and knew not the course of schools.’ Finally the priest asked her whether she intended to take communion at Easter. ‘Of course,’ she replied, ‘else I were no Christian woman.’ And then he left, ‘with many fair words’; he seems to have been endeavouring to be friendly, though Anne was unimpressed.

  On 23 March Anne’s cousin Christopher Brittayn arrived at the Counter, with the intention of getting Anne out on bail. Achieving this took a certain amount of toing and froing. He first set off to see the Lord Mayor (as it was the Lord Mayor who had sent her to prison), who said he would be happy to oblige but could not authorize bail in a heresy case without the consent of the church authorities. So he sent Brittayn off to the bishop’s chancellor. The chancellor too declined to make the decision on his own authority, as ‘the matter was so heinous’, and said he would have to ask the bishop. The latter not being available until the next day, Brittayn was told to come back then. He duly did so, when he met with both the chancellor and the bishop. The decision had been taken that Anne was to appear before the bishop himself on the following day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, and allowed to be accompanied by any ‘learned men’ she liked, so that they might see she was not being treated badly. Bishop Bonner asked Brittayn to persuade Anne to speak frankly at this hearing – from ‘the very bottom of [her] heart’ – and he promised that her words would not be used to her own disadvantage. What Bonner hoped to do was convince this misguided young woman, from a well-regarded family and highly respectable background, that she was mistaken in her views, and to guide her gently but firmly back onto the right path. Success for him would be to send Anne back to her husband and children and to a quiet, obedient life in Lincolnshire. He was yet to meet her in person.

  The interview on the following day got off to a bad start, as far as Anne was concerned, through the bishop’s poor timekeeping. ‘On the morrow after,’ she noted in her recollections, ‘my lord of London sent for me, at one of the clock, his hour being appointed at three.’ The friends whom Anne had requested should be present, including Dr Crome, would not be arriving for another two hours, and she did not want to be questioned by the bishop until they were present. He agreed to wait, and arranged for Anne to be spoken to by his archdeacon, John Wymmesley, in the meantime. Wymmesley had not been expecting this, and seemed to know little
of what was going on. ‘Mistress, what are you accused of?’ he demanded. ‘Ask my accusers,’ Anne replied, ‘for I know not as yet.’ Anne had been reading and was still holding her book. The archdeacon took it from her, glanced at it, saw – or thought he saw – that it was by John Frith and declared that it was books like this that had got her into trouble. ‘Beware,’ he said, ‘for he that made it was burnt in Smithfield.’ Anne scornfully berated him for passing judgement on a book without having read it. She made him look at it again, whereupon he could find nothing wrong with it, and left her.

  Anne’s cousin Christopher and her other friends having now arrived, the bishop was able to proceed, and again he stressed that he wanted her to feel free to tell him everything that was troubling her. He seemed to imagine that she needed doctrinal guidance, and that he was the man to give it to her (a not unreasonable view for a bishop to take). But Anne could not be so easily won over. ‘And therefore he bade me, say my mind without fear. I answered him, that I had nought to say. For my conscience (I thanked God) was burdened with nothing.’ Bonner’s predominantly kindly manner during his interview with Anne was most probably based on a genuine desire to set her back on what he perceived as the right track, rather than to have to condemn her, his questions and the opportunities he gave her to avoid uttering outright heresies corroborating this, but she was nevertheless wise to be cautious. It is a tried and trusted technique of interrogation, from the Inquisition to the Gestapo and beyond,* and recommended by the fourteenth-century Inquisitor General, the Catalan Nicolau Eymerich, to ‘suddenly shift gears, approaching the person being interrogated in a seeming spirit of mercy and compassion, speaking “sweetly” and solicitously, perhaps making arrangements to provide something to

  eat and drink’. The person under interrogation can be thrown off balance by such a change of tone, and before they know where they are they have ‘confessed’. But not so Anne: ‘I answered, that my conscience was clear in all things. And for to lay a plaster unto the whole skin, it might appear much folly.’

  Anne’s refusal to confess anything of her own accord meant Bonner next resorted to telling her what she was alleged to have said. One such allegation was that she had contradicted the doctrine that the unworthiness of the minister does not affect the validity of the sacrament – that is, she was alleged to have said that if a priest who was a sinner administered the sacrament, he would be administering the devil rather than God. Anne denied having said this, asserting that she had already told the quest and the Lord Mayor that the wickedness of the priest would not affect her – she would still be receiving the body and blood of Christ, ‘in spirit and faith’. Bonner seizes upon these words, knowing they could be used to condemn her – ‘what a saying is this? In spirit …’ But then he backs off – ‘I will not take you at that advantage.’ It is as though they are playing a game of chess; he has seen the move he could make to checkmate her, but has declined to make it. And she fully understands the game they are playing, and answers his move: ‘My lord without faith and spirit, I cannot receive him worthily.’ He cannot argue with that, and she has not said one way or the other whether she believes the bread and wine become the body and blood ‘really’ rather than merely ‘in spirit’.

  In his manual for interrogators, the Directorium Inquisitorum, Inquisitor General Eymerich had listed a number of ways in which heretics were known to ‘hide their errors’. These techniques included ‘equivocation’, ‘redirecting the question’, ‘feigned astonishment’, ‘twisting the meaning of words’, ‘changing the subject’, ‘feigning illness’ and ‘feigning stupidity’, and we can see Anne using all of them – except, it would appear, ‘feigning illness’; it seems that she did feel genuinely unwell at various points during her interrogations. One can only conclude that, in addition to reading and study, she had been rehearsing and preparing for such an encounter for some time.

  Bonner then revisited another question previously asked by the quest:

  Then he laid unto me, that I should say, that the sacrament remaining in the pyx, was but bread. I answered that I never said so: But indeed the quest asked me such a question, whereunto I would not answer (I said) till such time as they had assailed me this question of mine. Wherefore Steven was stoned to death. They said, they knew not. Then said I again, no more would I tell them what it was.

  Bonner attempted to press her on this central question, trying everything he could think of to get her to reply with a yes or a no:

  Then asked he me, what my faith and belief was in that matter? I answered him, I believe as the scripture doth teach me. Then enquired he of me, what if the scripture doth say, that it is the body of Christ? I believe (said I) like as the scripture doth teach me. Then asked he again, what if the scripture doth say, that it is not the body of Christ? My answer was still, I believe as the scripture informeth me. And upon this argument he tarried a great while …

  One can sense Bonner’s frustration at what Eymerich would have termed Anne’s ‘equivocation’. He next repeats another piece of hearsay against her – that she has declared the Mass to be idolatry. No, she hasn’t said that, she replies. But she does admit to having used the word, as part of a question, when asked by the quest about the efficacy of private masses (that is, masses said for souls in purgatory). She had implied that it would indeed amount to idolatry if people were to place more faith in private masses for the dead than in the life-giving death of Christ. ‘What kind of an answer is that?’ expostulated the bishop. ‘Good enough for the question,’ retorted Anne. Something Eymerich does not include in his list of devices used by heretics is that of poking fun at their interrogators – though it is, perhaps, related to ‘feigning astonishment’ – but this is something Anne does frequently. When Dr Standish, the Rector of St Andrew Undershaft, interrupts to suggest the bishop ask Anne what she thinks about a particular text of St Paul, she is quick with her riposte: ‘I answered, that it was against Saint Paul’s learning, that I being a woman, should interpret the scriptures, specially where so many wise learned men were.’ Here she is playing back to her interrogators what the bishop’s chancellor had earlier tried to rebuke her for – that it would have been contrary both to St Paul’s teaching and to the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, if she had acceded to the request of these ‘wise learned men’ to speak out loud her interpretation of the scriptures – and, she implies, they should have known better than to have asked her to do so.

  Despite this unsatisfactory and inconclusive interrogation, Bishop Bonner was still determined to let this young woman go – but he needed something in writing to justify his leniency. If Anne herself would not comply and recant, when he was giving her the opportunity to do so, without the threat of any penalty (a rare enough event in itself), he would just have to write her recantation for her. So he left the room and went off to write what Anne dismissively referred to as ‘a great circumstance’. She claims not to have remembered most of what Bonner wrote, because he refused to give her a copy. She is recalling this a year later, and at least part of the reason for the apparent failure of her normally very retentive memory is that this document had recently been paraded as a genuine recantation, with the intention of discrediting her in the eyes of her fellow Protestants. What she can remember is Bonner reading out:

  Be it known (saith he) to all men, that I Anne Askew, do confess this to be my faith and belief, notwithstanding my reports made before to the contrary. I believe that they which are houseled [i.e. have received communion] at the hands of a priest, whether his conversation [i.e. his behaviour] be good or not, do receive the body and blood of Christ in substance really. Also do I believe it after the consecration, whether it be received or reserved, to be no less than the very body and blood of Christ in substance.

  So, in short, the bishop had written down what he considered Anne ought to have said in reply to the questions posed by the quest and by himself.

  Having read out all he had written, Bishop Bonner asked Anne whe
ther she agreed with it. And still she equivocated, and to the bishop it must have felt as though she were trying to throw his gift of mercy back in his face, for he knew – and surely she knew too – how easily he could have done the opposite and declared her a convinced heretic. She believed as much of it, she declared, as was consistent with holy scripture, so would he kindly add that phrase? His patience, unsurprisingly, was now running out – ‘Don’t tell me what to write!’ was the gist of his reply. He then went into his main reception chamber (so some of this conversation must have taken place in private, despite Anne’s friends being in the building) and read out the statement to those who were there. And they, with perhaps more sense of the danger she was in than Anne seemed conscious of herself, encouraged her to sign the statement. The bishop now admitted why he had been taking such pains with her; it was not on account of anything she had said or done herself, he said, but because of the pleas of her influential friends and the fact that she came from a good family. (This underlines the great contrast between Anne’s case and that of the poor orphan Richard Mekins, who had no one influential, or of the right social class, to intercede for him.) And so Anne was given the statement to sign, and she finally appeared to have been persuaded to be compliant. But even now she was still determined to keep the upper hand. She took the pen offered to her and wrote: ‘I Anne Askew do believe all manner things contained in the faith of the Catholic church.’ The bishop took one look at what she had written, seized the paper, and stormed out of the room ‘in a great fury’. Anne’s cousin Christopher hurried after him. ‘Please be kind to her,’ he pleaded. ‘She’s a woman, and she doesn’t deceive me,’ stormed the bishop. ‘Yes, she’s just a woman,’ agreed her cousin, ‘but don’t let her weak woman’s wit influence your Lordship’s great wisdom.’ So, with flattering and cajoling, Brittayn calmed the angry prelate down.