Anne Askew

Anne Askew, the wife of a Catholic, was an English Protestant poet burned at the stake during Henry VIII’s reign along with three other ‘heretics’. Prior to her martyrdom at age 25, she had been in an arranged marriage, and divorced from, a man named Thomas Kyme, with whom she had two children. She was compelled to leave her home in Lincolnshire for refusing to give up reading and studying the Bible and expressing her evangelical views. In London, she met other Protestants and preached the gospel on the streets. She was arrested twice and ordered to recant her faith and betray fellow Protestant believers, but she refused, arguing with her examiners with unusual vigor and brilliance, proving herself more knowledgeable of the Scriptures than they. After her second arrest, she was tortured in the Tower of London, condemned for heresy, and burned at the stake. She wrote an autobiographical account of her persecution called Examinations, which was adapted by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs.