Anne Askew

1521–1546

Anne Askew was an English poet, Protestant reformer and religious witness who openly challenged traditional Catholic doctrines during the final years of Henry VIII’s reign. Arrested and interrogated for her beliefs, she refused to recant or to implicate reform-minded women close to Queen Catherine Parr. In 1546 she was illegally tortured on the rack despite her gentle birth and then burned at Smithfield, leaving written accounts that made her a lasting Protestant martyr.

Historical novels about Catherine Parr and the religious conflict of the 1540s often include Askew as both a character and a warning of the danger surrounding evangelical reformers. She appears in Alison Weir’s Katharine Parr, The Sixth Wife and is part of the political world recreated in Elizabeth Fremantle’s Queen’s Gambit. Fiction tends to emphasise her intellectual courage, uncompromising faith and the court faction’s attempt to use her testimony against more powerful women.

In C. J. Sansom’s Lamentation, Shardlake and Jack Barak trace the manuscript through printers, merchants, radicals and courtiers as the execution of Anne Askew demonstrates the danger facing reformers.

Series

Series featuring Anne Askew (2 series)

The Shardlake Series in Order

by C. J. Sansom 7 books 4.6

The Shardlake Series follows Matthew Shardlake, a London barrister with scoliosis whose legal work repeatedly draws him into murder investigations and affairs of state between 1537 and 1549. He begins as an idealistic supporter of religious reform and an agent of Thomas Cromwell, but the violence of the…

All books in this series