The Path to Martyrdom

The story is about the short life of Anne Askew, one of the last heretics and the only noble lady to be burnt at the stake during King Henry VII's reign. She was born into a family of wealthy Lincolnshire landowners in 1520. Her father Sir William Ayscough, was a contemporary of King Henry and served at court for several years during which he was knighted during one of the King's many military incursions into France. Anne was the youngest of the five children from the first of his three marriages. Although too preoccupied with royal and sheriff duties to have a great influence on Anne's life, in contrast to most Tudor women, he arranged for her to be educated.
In later years he was to regret this. Able to understand basic Latin, at an early age, Anne became suspicious of the Roman Catholic liturgy of that time. She was severely punished on several occasions for her outspoken criticism of how in Latin parables and miracles were misinterpreted to glorify Catholicism. In her teens she was confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church and at her first communion realised that transubstantiation, when ostensibly the bread and wine, once blessed by the priest actually became the flesh and blood of Jesus was a lie. In the places where she lived in Lincolnshire she went about openly questioning the tenets of the Catholic faith. She became known as a 'gospeller' and, despite the efforts of her father and elder brother Francis to stop her, openly read stories from William Tyndale's banned translation of the New Testament.
In an effort to curb her, her father forced her into a marriage to Thomas Kyme a coarse fenland farmer. In the Lincolnshire fens she found a community abjectly servile to the Catholic religion and set about doing something about it.
This brought her into conflict with the local priests and, eventually John Longland, the Bishop of Lincoln. Her marriage to Kyme foundered and she arrived in London seeking a divorce, There she joined groups of early protestants sympathetic to her views. She became a popular speaker and soon came to the notice of the Catholic hierarchy. She was tries as an heretic a number of times but often baffled her accusers with her knowledge of the bible and her intelligent rhetoric. Eventually she was committed to be burnt at Smithfield. A few weeks before this was to be done she was taken to the Tower and racked until her joints were dislocated. The racking was done by Thomas Wriothesley , the Lord Chancellor and Richard Rich member of the King's Privy Council. Their aim was to make her confess to having had contact about protestant views to entrap Catherine Parr, Henry's sixth wife.
They were unsuccessful but so bad was the injuries they inflicted that Anne had to be carried to the stake in wicker basket. She was only 26 when she died, but her mantra, 'Rather Deathe than False to Faithe' became a rallying cry for the early protestants in England. The story is based upon true historical fact.