The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  Why was Bonner so furious at the seemingly innocuous words Anne had added to the statement he had prepared for her? Again, it is as though interrogator and interrogated are playing a game of chess, and the moves they each make are designed to be understood by the other, if not by the wider audience. By her words, Anne had managed simultaneously to assert her own orthodoxy – ‘I … do believe all manner things contained in the faith of the Catholic church’ – while implying that what he had written and she was being asked to put her name to might not actually be so ‘contained’. For she had not merely assented to what he had written, as she would have done with a simple signature. There is also the ambiguity surrounding the word ‘catholic’. Was she implying that the church to which she herself gave allegiance – a new reformed church, representing the body of true believers – was the real ‘catholic’ church, rather than the official one represented by the bishop? Another interpretation, as advanced by Megan L. Hickerson, is that she is merely pretending to recant, ‘the addition of a few ambiguous words’ somehow invalidating the confession of faith that has been written for her. Whatever her precise meaning, and Bonner’s interpretation of her words, he recognized that she was still putting up a challenge both to his authority and to his intended leniency. Principally, it was her continued insistence on maintaining her independence of thought, her own agency and ownership of what she wrote, her refusal to submit as a woman should, that infuriated the Bishop of London. He had all the power in this relationship, and yet Anne seemed somehow immune to it. Her friends and family must certainly have brought a lot of influence to bear, for they also managed to get Dr Hugh Weston, the conservative Rector of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, to put in a good word for her with the bishop. There was clearly no appetite whatsoever in the spring of 1545 to let a young gentlewoman get anywhere near the stake, no matter how intransigent and provoking she might be. ‘So with much ado,’ recalled Anne, ‘they persuaded my lord to come out again,’ and he agreed to her being granted bail, with her cousin Christopher Brittayn and another lawyer, Francis Spilman, standing as sureties for her. She had hoped to be let out immediately, but there was some further delay. The bishop sent her back to the Counter for that night, ordering her to appear at Guildhall on the following day. She did so, but the City officials still seemed hesitant to release her, and it was not until they were quite certain both of the bishop’s intention and of the reliability of her two sureties, that they finally let her go.

  Anne was briefly back at Guildhall on 13 June that year, accused with two others of speaking against the sacrament of the altar. But no reliable witnesses came forward, and she was once again released. She seems then to have returned to Lincolnshire, at least temporarily, with her friends, perhaps hoping, as no doubt was the Bishop of London, that that was the end of her (mis)adventures.

  It was, however, one of Anne’s friends, the famous London preacher Dr Edward Crome, who was responsible, at least in part, for a hardening of the line against heresy and heretics in the following year, for in April 1546, on the fifth Sunday in Lent, he preached a provocative sermon in St Thomas Acons, the chapel of the Mercers’ Company, denying the sacrificial nature of the Mass, which went too far to be ignored. Following his sermon, Crome was arrested on the orders of Bishop Bonner and brought before Bishop Stephen Gardiner and other Privy Council members and ordered to recant, several times, in public (the first time to be on the second Sunday after Easter, at Paul’s Cross). A number of other prominent evangelicals, including Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Shaxton and John Lascelles, found themselves in trouble too, Crome’s arrest leading to the uncovering of the secret network of reformers in the City and the Inns of Court to which they – and, by association, Anne Askew – belonged. There was an atmosphere of nervousness among evangelicals in London, and virtually anyone could suddenly find themselves implicated. It could take just one indiscreet word – or someone alleging an indiscreet word – to set the wheels in motion and (much like the process following an allegation of ‘historical’ sexual abuse in our own time) it could be very difficult to stop those wheels turning.

  The Privy Council issued an order for Anne Askew to be rearrested in May, rumours having reached them that Anne had been continuing to express her unacceptable views. Anne had enemies – including some who considered her ‘wanton’ for having gone off to London without her husband – and someone betrayed her. The letter containing the order, dated 24 May, was addressed to her husband, Thomas Kyme, and it required him and his wife to appear before the Council within fourteen days.

  Between the issuing of this order and its fulfilment, there took place in the City a celebration of the signing of the treaty of Camp which marked the end of the war with France, the ceremonial demonstrating how the established ecclesiastical traditions continued to thrive:

  Item the 13th day of June after was Whit Sunday, and then was a general procession from Paul’s unto St Peter’s in Cornhill with all the children of Paul’s school, and a cross of every parish church, with a banner and one to bear it in a tenache, all the clerks, all the priests, with parsons and vicars of every church in copes, and the choir of Paul’s in the same manner, and the Bishop bearing the sacrament under a canopy with the Mayor in a gown of crimson velvet, the Aldermen in scarlet, with all the crafts in their best apparel; and when the Mayor came between the cross and the standard there was made a proclamation with divers heralds of arms and poursuivants in their coat armours, with the trumpets, and there was proclaimed a universal peace for ever between the Emperor, the King of England, the French King, and all Christian kings for ever.

  On 19 June Thomas Kyme and Anne Askew duly appeared before the Privy Council. Here Anne, feisty as ever, denied that Thomas was her husband. The Council did not agree, but nevertheless sent him back to Lincolnshire. Anne, on the other hand, ‘for that she was very obstinate and heady in reasoning of matters of religion, wherein she showed herself to be of a naughty opinion’, they committed to Newgate prison to await questioning.

  The political situation in the country was now very tense, not least because Henry VIII was clearly in the last stages of his life, and there was enormous uncertainty about what would happen after his death, particularly in church circles. Traditionalists, especially those currently exercising power, such as Bishop Stephen Gardiner, were desperately seeking ways to ensure that power would not swing on the King’s death towards those of an opposite, reformist and evangelical, persuasion. A central figure in the evangelical camp was the Queen, Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth and final wife, and there were those who suspected that her network might include the alleged heretic now under arrest, Anne Askew. Anne’s position and fate had ceased to hinge purely on personal religious beliefs and were now mixed up with politics, though she may not herself have realized this.

  Anne was subjected to a two-day interrogation by the Privy Council at Greenwich, her questioners including Sir Thomas Wriothesley (the Lord Chancellor), Stephen Gardiner (the Bishop of Winchester), John Dudley (Viscount Lisle), William Parr (the Earl of Essex) and Sir William Paget (the King’s Principal Secretary). Bishop Bonner, who had expended so much effort in getting Anne released the previous year, was not involved this time around, and none of the interrogators in 1546 was prepared to give her any leeway. She was not brought before an official quest, a fact which made her condemnation more likely (though also not entirely lawful). It is noticeable from the list of questioners that this was not a unified group in matters of religion, in that, while Wriothesley and Gardiner were unequivocally on the side of tradition and conservatism, Viscount Lisle and William Parr have always been seen as belonging firmly to the other, more ‘Protestant’ of the two factions then battling for supremacy at court. Paget, one of the King’s closest advisers, was a waverer but ultimately settled for the Protestant side. The hostility towards Anne must therefore have been led by Wriothesley and Gardiner, and they maintained the upper hand throughout. It is possible that Dudley, Parr and Paget viewed this young Prote
stant woman as an expendable casualty in a larger war being waged; appearing to side with the traditionalist faction now may have been a matter of covering their tracks, helping to give a false sense of security to Gardiner and Wriothesley. Either that, or they were too frightened to admit that they actually shared many of Anne’s views.

  Where none of the powerful men ranged against her was likely to agree with Anne was in her attitude to her marriage (even Foxe found this hard to accept and evaded the question in his Acts and Monuments), and one of the first questions put to her concerned her relationship with her husband – or, as she refers to him, ‘master Kyme’. She replied that the Lord Chancellor already knew what she had to say on that matter. They pressed her, telling her it was the King’s wish that she should explain the situation to them. She told them she was quite happy to tell the King, but she wasn’t going to tell them. They protested that it was not appropriate for the King to be troubled on her account; she pointed out that even Solomon, believed to have been the wisest king that ever lived, had been prepared to listen to, and resolve, the argument between two ‘poor common women’. The councillors gave up questioning her further about her marriage, and turned to the matter of the sacrament of the altar. What was her opinion? asked Lord Chancellor Wriothesley. As in the previous year, she gave an equivocal answer, avoiding mentioning the ‘real presence’ one way or the other. ‘The Bishop of Winchester bade me make a direct answer. I said, I would not sing a new song to the lord in a strange land.’ Unsurprisingly, this quotation from the Psalms did not satisfy Gardiner: ‘Then the Bishop said, I spake in parables. I answered it was best for him. For if I show the open truth (quoth I) ye will not accept it. Then he said I was a parrot.’ Gardiner was suggesting that Anne was just ‘parrotting’ verses of scripture she had learned off by heart, without understanding them; in fact she was deploying them with great pertinence and with the intention both of saving her life, if she could, and of ridiculing her interrogators. By the end of this session she was exhausted, for it went on for more than five hours. She was then returned to ‘my lady Garnish’, her term for prison, ‘garnish’ being slang for the money jailers extorted from new prisoners.

  Newgate, where Anne was being held between interrogations, was the main prison of the City of London and the county of Middlesex (it was on the site now occupied by the Central Criminal Court, better known as the Old Bailey), and often used for holding those considered the most dangerous and hardened of criminals, including rebels, traitors and heretics, before their trials. Other inmates were serving sentences or awaiting execution, while still others were incarcerated for debt. The prison had been reconstructed in the early fifteenth century to include a central hall where meals could be served and where there was a drinking fountain, water for which came through pipes connected to the cistern which served St Bartholomew’s hospital. To the north and south of the hall there were groups of rooms that boasted chimneys and privies, and there was a chapel built into the gate, with recreation rooms on either side of it. But such rooms and facilities were for those who could afford to pay for them and who were not suspected of heinous crimes; there were other, less salubrious, spaces and, in the south part of the prison, dark, damp and unventilated basement cells. These were where someone accused of heresy (and bereft of important connections, or having exhausted the patience and efficacy of such connections) could expect to be sent. Even such unpleasant accommodation did not come free, however, particularly if the prisoner wanted anything to eat. Food could either be bought from the jailers, or brought in by the prisoner’s friends.

  When Anne was brought back before the Council on the following day, she was asked yet again about her views on the sacrament and, yet again, she refused to answer. And she would not give an inch when Gardiner tried to change tack and used a more personal tone: ‘Then the Bishop said, he would speak with me familiarly. I said, so did Judas when he unfriendly betrayed Christ. Then desired the Bishop to speak with me alone. But that I refused.’ She clearly feared being left on her own with Gardiner, and she was probably right to do so. But her refusal did her no good either: ‘Then the Bishop said, I should be burnt. I answered, that I had searched all the scriptures yet could I never find there that either Christ or his Apostles put any creature to death.’ And so ended Anne’s interrogation by Bishop Gardiner.

  Next it was the turn of Sir William Paget. He seemed to do rather better at getting Anne to express an opinion about the sacrament. He asked her how she could ignore the words of Christ – had he not actually said ‘Take, eat. This is my body, which shall be broken for you’? What more did she need? Was this not sufficient proof that the consecrated bread was indeed the body of Christ? Anne’s answer demonstrated that she took these words to be symbolic only – that when Christ said ‘this is my body’, he was speaking the same kind of language as when he said ‘I am the true vine.’ ‘Ye may not here (said I) take Christ for the material thing that he is signified by. For then ye will make him a very door, a vine, a lamb, and a stone, clean contrary to the holy Ghost’s meaning.’ Though at first reading, Anne’s argument makes perfect sense here – in fact, it seems ‘common sense’ – it demonstrated, at least to the theologians present, precisely the problem with allowing untrained lay people to determine their own interpretation of the scriptures. The conversations are going past one another, the discourses operating on different levels. Anne shows no understanding or awareness of the Aristotelian concepts of ‘substance’ and ‘accidents’ underlying the Catholic interpretation of the consecrated host as ‘the body of Christ’; she thinks she is arguing on the same level as her ecclesiastical interlocutors, but she is not.

  Perhaps the only way most of us can understand this kind of argument today is to consider the discussion that might be had between a reasonably well-read member of the public and a trained academic in a discipline such as literary theory. We, the untrained, may believe we understand the discussion – after all, it’s conducted in the language we speak and read ourselves, it may concern books we’ve actually read and thought about. We believe we have a valid contribution to make and we certainly think our opinion is worth listening to. But if, say, the academic gives us her latest article to read or tells us what she is currently working on, we may well start to think such things as: ‘But all this is obvious – why do people need to spend years studying something that we could have told them in the first place?’ or perhaps ‘What rubbish! This is a load of verbiage and the usual incomprehensible quotations from Foucault and Derrida; literary theorists should just read the literature in front of them and stop tying themselves in knots about nothing.’ This is very much Anne’s attitude – ‘If only these old priests and bigwigs would actually read what it says in the Bible, they’d stop making such ridiculous assertions and realize I’m right!’ The academic knows there is little point in arguing with someone outside her discipline or ‘discourse’ – someone who, while appearing to be using language in the same way as herself, is actually not doing so – and will confine her discussions to peer-reviewed journals and scholarly seminars. (What, fortunately, she won’t do is suggest her interlocutor be arrested or banned from expressing an opinion at all.)

  Be that as it may, Anne, perhaps losing patience with what to her seems a dim-witted discussion, now makes quite clear that she does not view what is contained in the pyx above the altar as something to be revered: ‘And though he did say there, Take, eat this in remembrance of me, Yet did he not bid them hang up that bread in a box, and make it a God, or bow to it.’ Paget, himself not a theologian, clearly felt he was coming off the worse in this argument (and, indeed, given his later support of the Protestant faction at court, he may even have been in agreement with Anne), and he asked her if she would prefer to talk with ‘some wiser man’. She, apparently agreeing that he wasn’t very wise himself, consented. Two ‘wiser men’ later (Drs Coxe and Robinson), Anne was still refusing to give an unequivocal answer about her view of the sacrament, or to sign anything. She ask
ed to speak to Dr Latimer (currently out of favour as a reformist), but this was refused. She was returned to Newgate, exhausted and in pain.

  On 28 June Anne Askew was arraigned for heresy at Guildhall, along with Nicholas Shaxton (former Bishop of Salisbury), a ‘gentleman’ of London called Nicholas White and an Essex tailor called John Hadlam. Their judges (there was no jury) comprised an overwhelming array of ‘the great and the good’: the Lord Mayor (Sir Martin Bowes), the Duke of Norfolk (Thomas Howard), the Master of the King’s Household, the Bishop of London (Bonner), the Bishop of Worcester (Nicholas Heath), the two Chief Justices of the King’s Bench and Common Pleas, the Chief Baron of the Exchequer (Sir Roger Cholmley), the Master of the Rolls (Sir Robert Southwell), the Recorder of London (Sir Robert Broke), and three of Bishop Bonner’s officers – the archdeacon (John Wymmesley), the chancellor and the commissary. Though some of the old arguments were rehearsed, this was not so much a trial as the handing down of a predetermined verdict; Nicholas Shaxton abjured, but Askew and Hadlam were condemned to burn. Anne seems to have realized before the sentence was read out that there was no hope for her now, and that assurance gave her the freedom to say what she really thought, without ambiguity. So when she was asked if she denied the sacrament to be Christ’s body and blood, she spoke up boldly and said yes, she did deny it – for Christ was in heaven, ‘And as for that ye call your God, it is but a piece of bread. For a more proof thereof (mark it when ye list) let it lie in the box but 3 months, and it will be mouldy, and so turn to nothing that is good. Whereupon I am persuaded, that it cannot be God.’