The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  On the next day Anne was removed from Newgate to the Tower. Before she was sent there, Bishop Bonner made one final unsuccessful attempt to turn her back to orthodoxy. Nicholas Shaxton was also sent to try to persuade her to recant as he had done, but she gave him short shrift. According to Anne’s recollections, Richard Rich had accompanied the bishop and was also the one to send her to the Tower, where he and ‘one of the council’ questioned her about whether she knew certain ladies at court. Rich and the other councillor wanted to know who had paid for her upkeep while she was confined in the Counter and at Newgate; she replied that her maid had been free to come and go, and that she had managed to get money from various apprentices – ‘But who they were, I never knew.’ Her interrogators pressed her for more details:

  Then they said, that there were diverse gentlewomen, that gave me money. But I knew not their names. Then they said that there were diverse ladies, which had sent me money. I answered, that there was a man in a blue coat, which delivered me 10 shillings, and said that my lady of Hertford sent it me. And another in a violet coat did give me 8 shillings, and said that my lady Denny sent it me. Whether it were true or no, I cannot tell.

  And now there took place the event that shocked even many who agreed with Anne’s death sentence. Having confessed and been condemned, there should have been nothing left for Anne to do but await her punishment, but instead she was tortured in the Tower on the rack, in an attempt to force her to reveal the names of aristocratic and courtly ladies, especially those associated with Queen Katherine Parr, as her associates in heresy. Anne herself described what happened to her: ‘Then they did put me on the rack, because I confessed no ladies nor gentlewomen to be of my opinion, and thereon they kept me a long time. And because I lay still and did not cry, my lord Chancellor and master Rich, took pains to rack me with their own hands, till I was nigh dead.’

  It has generally been accepted, and repeated many times, that it was these two – Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich – named in Anne’s own account, who turned the wheels of the rack (the Lieutenant of the Tower having refused to go on pulling the young woman’s body apart). But there is nevertheless some doubt, particularly about Rich’s participation, for the first two editions of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments name Sir John Baker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as Wriothesley’s accomplice in the torture, Rich being substituted for Baker only in the edition of 1583. It is possible that Baker’s influential family brought pressure to bear on Foxe, and that in consequence he replaced his name with that of Sir Richard Rich.

  Rich has always been a convenient figure on whom to pin the blame for any act of skulduggery in the Tudor court. Having relinquished his post as Chancellor of Augmentations in April 1544, he had been named treasurer of the recently launched war against the French and had spent several months across the Channel handling finances and logistics. After the capture of Boulogne in September that year, he was one of the commissioners who negotiated peace (of a sort) with France. But then he resigned. He gave ill health as the official reason, but his resignation may have been forced, as the King himself had raised questions about his probity and had personally challenged his accounts. Whatever the reasons behind his resignation, Sir Richard had returned to England in November 1544, where he once again set about restoring and consolidating his position, continuing to be an active member of the Privy Council. He undoubtedly ‘had form’ when it came to betrayal and he always had his own best interests at heart – but his particular treacheries were usually far more circumspect, far more fastidious than this act of physical cruelty towards a young woman. These were desperate times, however, and if Anne could be persuaded – or, rather, forced – to name names in the Queen’s circle, the resulting shifts in power might be a prize worth fighting, or maiming, for. And what was published as Anne’s own account certainly named Rich as one of her torturers.

  Chancellor Wriothesley’s involvement has never been questioned, and it was he who went on talking to Anne after the torture: ‘Then the lieutenant caused me to be loosed from the rack. Incontinently I swooned, and then they recovered me again. After that I sat 2 long hours reasoning with my lord Chancellor upon the bare floor, whereas he with many flattering words, persuaded me to leave my opinion. But my lord God (I thank his everlasting goodness) gave me grace to persevere, and will do (I hope) to the very end.’ It is hard to imagine how anyone could address ‘many flattering words’ to someone he had just tortured, who now lay on the floor, unable to move.

  After Anne’s condemnation her earlier so-called confession, the statement drawn up by Bishop Bonner to which she had so reluctantly, and ambiguously, appended her signature, was publicized – ‘to the intent the world may see what credence is now to be given to the same woman who in so short a time has most damnably altered and changed her opinion and belief and therefore rightfully in open court arraigned and condemned’. These accompanying lines were inaccurate – Anne had been condemned in a closed session of the Privy Council rather than in open court – but the release of the statement was intended not only to justify her treatment as a relapsed heretic, but also to discredit her in the eyes of her supporters. And the latter objective seems to have met with some success, to Anne’s great distress, as she had to write to her fellow prisoner John Lascelles to assure him that she had never, as far as she was concerned, actually recanted. ‘Oh friend most dearly beloved in God,’ she wrote to Lascelles, ‘I marvel not a little, what should move you, to judge in me so slender a faith, as to fear death, which is the end of all misery. In the lord I desire you, not to believe of me such wickedness.’ Anne also informed Lascelles that she had heard that news of her torture had leaked out, and that the Privy Council (that is, those members who had not been involved in it) were ‘not a little displeased’ and were anxious that the King should not hear about it.

  After her torture Anne was taken away to recover, before being returned to Newgate: ‘Then was I brought to a house, and laid in a bed, with as weary and painful bones, as ever had patient Job, I thank my lord God thereof. Then my Lord Chancellor sent me word if I would leave my opinion, I should want nothing. If I would not, I should forth to Newgate, and so be burned. I sent him again word, that I would rather die, than to break my faith.’

  It was while she was in prison that Anne compiled the recollections of her two periods of interrogation, which she called her ‘examinations’: ‘by me Anne Askew, that neither wish death, nor yet fear his might; and as merry as one that is bound towards Heaven’. It seems most likely that she wrote them in two separate instalments, before and after her torture; for the second instalment she would certainly have needed assistance in the actual writing, and would have had to dictate most, if not all, of it, for her hands and arms had been rendered virtually useless, and it is also possible her eyesight had been affected by the pressure brought to bear on her entire body. According to the man who edited and published them and provided a commentary (advertised as his ‘elucidation’), the exiled reformer John Bale, they were smuggled out of prison and out of the country, and conveyed to him on the continent of Europe. The First and Latter Examinations first appeared, respectively, in 1546 and 1547 – very soon after the events they described – and quickly became popular. Versions of them were reprinted in the various editions of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.

  As she lay awaiting death, Anne ceased all prevarication and wrote plainly what she thought, viewing her writing not only as an account of what had happened to her but also as a testimony of her Protestant beliefs and an encouragement to fellow believers. So now she comes out firmly against the doctrine of transubstantiation: ‘But they both say, and also teach it for a necessary article of faith, that after those words be once spoken, there remaineth no bread, but even the selfsame body that hung upon the cross on good Friday, both flesh, blood, and bone. To this belief of theirs, say I nay.’ She also confirms her belief that all necessary truth is contained in the Bible: ‘Yea, and as St Paul saith, those scriptures are sufficient
for our learning and salvation, that Christ hath left here with us. So that I believe, we need no unwritten verities to rule his church with.’ She further expresses the view that, if the Eucharist or ‘sacrament of thanksgiving’ were to be carried out in the way Christ had intended, then it would be a great comfort to believers – ‘But as concerning your Mass, as it is now used in our days, I do say and believe it, to be the most abominable idol that is in the world. For my God will not be eaten with teeth, neither yet dieth he again. And upon these words, that I have now spoken, will I suffer death.’ This is a very similar formulation to the one uttered by James Bainham, when he was preparing for execution fourteen years previously: ‘The bread is not Jesus Christ, for Christ’s body is not chewed with teeth, therefore it is but bread; yet he is there, very God and man, in the form of bread.’

  On the day before the burning of Anne and three others (her friend John Lascelles, John Hadlam the Essex tailor with whom she had been arraigned at Guildhall, and an apostate Observant friar called John Hemsley), the City Corporation approved the building of ‘a substantial stage … against tomorrow in Smithfield for the King’s Councillors, [the] Lord Mayor and [the] Aldermen to sit in at the execution of Anne Askew and the other heretics which shall then be burned at the costs of this City’. The dignitaries who attended the burning, in addition to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, included Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, the Duke of Norfolk, other members of the Privy Council and a great number of lords and noblemen. Anne had been so broken on the rack that she was unable to stand or walk, and had to be carried in a chair to the site of her execution. The sermon (a long one, in which the condemned were once again asked to recant, and once again refused) was preached by Nicholas Shaxton, as part of the penance exacted from him following his recantation at Guildhall. Anne was tied to the stake by a chain which held up her body. The deaths were hastened on this occasion by gunpowder having been placed under the victims so that, when the flames reached their bodies, there was an explosion, their bodies blew apart, and all was over. The notables sitting on benches on the stage, just outside St Bartholomew’s church, had been anxious they might be injured themselves, but had been assured by Baron Russell that they were at a safe distance from the explosion. As Foxe describes Anne’s end, ‘Thus she being troubled so many manner of ways, and having passed through so many torments, having now ended the long course of her agonies, being compassed in with flames of fire, as a blessed sacrifice unto God, she slept in the Lord.’

  *The use of this technique can be seen, for instance, in the interactions between Sophie and her apparently kindly interrogator, the father of a son of around her own age, in the film Sophie Scholl – The Final Days.

  Chapter Seven

  DENUNCIATIONS AND NEAR-ESCAPES

  Now after this bloody slaughter of God’s good saints and servants thus ended and discoursed, let us proceed to entreat of such as for the same cause of Religion have been, although not put to death, yet whipped and scourged by the adversaries of God’s word, first beginning with Richard Wilmot and Thomas Fairfax, who about the time of Anne Askew, were pitifully rent and tormented with scourges and stripes for their faithful standing to Christ, and to his truth, as by the story and examination both of the said Richard Wilmot, and of Thomas Fairfax now following, may appear.

  Foxe, Acts and Monuments

  THE ATMOSPHERE OF denunciation, fear and reprisal pervading London in the summer of 1546 cast its shadow over St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield, as one of those to fall under suspicion was the son of Sir John Deane’s erstwhile patron, Sir Robert Blagge. This was George Blagge, who at the time was Member of Parliament for Bedford; for at least part of his life he lived with his mother in the parish of St Bartholomew, so it is likely that John Deane knew him well. In 1546 George was suddenly arrested on a charge of heresy. He was walking in the area around St Paul’s after the sermon on Sunday, 9 May, when – so he declared – he was tricked into denying the efficacy of the Mass. He was soon sent for by Chancellor Wriothesley and on 11 July was committed to Newgate prison, tried at Guildhall, where Sir Hugh Calverley and Edward Littleton testified against him, and condemned to be burnt on the following Wednesday. Blagge did have connections with the evangelical network – as is demonstrated by his spending time while imprisoned sitting with Lascelles by the window of the little parlour at Newgate, entertaining friends from court who were brave enough to visit them.

  According to Foxe, Baron Russell, the Lord Privy Seal, then appealed on Blagge’s behalf directly to the King who, hearing for the first time of this sentence delivered against one of his own servants – for George Blagge had a position at court as well as being an MP – was ‘sore offended’ and ordered Wriothesley to draw up a pardon at once. This duly happened, and Blagge was released – after what must have been a highly traumatic few days. Six months later he was appointed Comptroller of the Petty Custom in the port of London, and was never again accused of heresy. He died, possibly of the sweating sickness, in 1551 at Stanmore (having been granted the lease of the manor of Great Stanmore the year before), leaving a two-year-old son as his heir.

  Blagge was one of the lucky ones that summer in that no further action was taken against him. The dangers of loose talk, of incitement and consequent denunciation are also illustrated by the story of an eighteen-year-old apprentice, Richard Wilmot, one of the many ardent Bible-reading young men of the City and a godson of Sir Richard Rich. Wilmot worked in a shop in Bow Lane, and was a supporter of Dr Crome who, like other reformist preachers before him, had pleased his Protestant friends by preaching his first ‘recantation’ sermon in such an ambiguous manner that it served more to emphasize his beliefs than to abjure them. This had not, of course, pleased the bishop, who had ordered him to make a better job of recanting on the following Sunday. And in the meantime he had been sent to prison. It was these matters that were under discussion in the shop in Bow Lane one Tuesday in July. A Welshman called Lewes, a member of the King’s Guard, had come into the shop and another customer had taken the opportunity to ask him what news there was at court. Lewes replied that ‘the old heretic Dr Crome had recanted now indeed’ and that he would be announcing that fact in his next sermon at Paul’s Cross. At this, Wilmot, who had been getting on with work for his master, could not restrain himself from uttering his opinion. He was sorry to hear this, he said, and declared that if Crome were indeed to recant, it would be against both the truth of God’s word and his own conscience. Lewes countered with the official line that, as Dr Crome had preached and taught heresy, it was quite right that he should revoke his opinions in public. Wilmot, with all the enthusiasm of a young convert, told him that he was mistaken, that in fact the doctrine Dr Crome preached was entirely in line with what was written in the Bible. Lewes, already rather irritated by the bumptious young man, asked him how he knew that. ‘From the Bible,’ announced Wilmot. Lewes, now ratcheting up the discussion, announced that ‘it was never merry since the Bible was in English’ and that the man who had caused it to be translated into English (he meant Thomas Cromwell) had been both a heretic and a traitor and had got what he deserved.

  If Wilmot had had any sense, or someone there to warn him, he would have withdrawn from the discussion at this point. But he couldn’t resist defending Cromwell, another of his heroes, for having done what ‘all the Bishops in the realm yet never did’ and making the scriptures available to the people in a language they understood. What’s more, he went on, being able to read the Bible means that people don’t value bishops and priests so highly any more. Lewes was now clearly leading him on: ‘Why’s that then?’ he asked. ‘Because they don’t live or believe according to God’s word,’ said Wilmot. Lewes, a conservative if ever there was one, riposted that bishops and priests are the learned ones, and ordinary people should be instructed by them – that was all right for our fathers, he declared, so it should be all right for us. ‘The world has gone to the dogs’ was his view. But Wilmot, a very voluble young man, did not agree and no
w launched into a long speech about how he knew better, from having read the Bible for himself. And he continued unguardedly to criticize ‘bishops, priests, and learned men’, not by name, but lumping them all together as ‘blind leaders of the blind’ whom people would do better not to follow. By now Lewes had heard quite enough: ‘Marry, sir,’ he said, ‘you are a holy Doctor indeed. By God’s blood, if you were my man, I would set you about your business a little better, and not to look at books: and so would your master, if he were wise.’ And, just on cue, Wilmot’s master now arrived, accompanied by another young man called Thomas Fairfax, who worked in nearby Watling Street. Lewes expostulated that he had ‘a knavish boy here as his servant’ and that he would do better to hang him than to keep him in his house. Astonished, Wilmot’s master asked his other employees – who had so far kept very quiet – what had been going on. ‘They were talking about Dr Crome,’ they replied.