In March 1545, a young evangelical heretic named Anne Askew sat in the Counter Prison in London awaiting examination by the bishop of London, Edmund Bonner. As she waited, her cousin Christopher Brittain negotiated the terms of her interview with the bishop, who presented the health of Askew's soul as his greatest concern. Determined, as he would later say to Askew herself, to see the “wounde” on her conscience “uncovered” that he might better heal it, he asked Brittain to convince his cousin to utter the “very bottom” of her “heart” to him, promising that “no man shult take anye advauntage of [her] wordes.”Footnote 1 If she said “anye maner of thynge amys,” he promised, he—Bonner—would not harm her but “reform” her “with most godly counsel.” The response to Bonner's assurances by Askew's first martyrologist, John Bale, is typically unrestrained: “O vengeable tyraunt and devyll. How subtyllye sekyst thu the bloude of thys innocent woman, under a coloure of fryndelye handelynge. … Thu art not all unlike unto Herode, whom Christ for lyke practices … called also a most craftye cruell foxe, Luce 13. Thu laborest here, to have thys woman in snare, with serten of her fryndes. But God put in her mynde at thys tyme, to recken the a dogge and a swyne. Matt. 7. and therupon to have fewe wordes.”Footnote 2 Bale hopes, he goes on to say, that his “dylygent reader” can “perceyve the gredynesse of thys Babylon Byshopp, or bloudthurstie wolfe, concernynge thys praye.”Footnote 3

The actual report of Bonner's conversation with Christopher Brittain is Askew’s, or rather Askew's according to Bale, who edited and published as martyrology what he claims are her own written remembrances of her experience of religious persecution (the First Examinacyon [1546] and Lattre Examinacyon of … Mastres Anne Askew [1547]).Footnote 4 To the modern reader, Bale's celebration of Askew as a religious martyr is unsurprising: in an age in which religious identity was “forged” in conflict and “dramatic deaths,” her execution in 1546 as a Protestant evangelical under a Catholic—if not Roman Catholic—regime would make her an obvious candidate for this kind of panegyric.Footnote 5 The combination of her youth (she was twenty-five when she died), sex, gentle birth, and irregular torture on the rack (conducted by members of the king's Privy Council) gave Bale ample ammunition with which to attack her persecutors as examples of the bloodthirsty cruelty of Antichrist (the Catholic Church) and its servants that became such a topos of Protestant polemic.Footnote 6 But, in presenting her in this way, Bale was not merely integrating her into an existing pantheon of celebrated martyrs for his evangelical cause. As framed by Bale, Askew both serves as a “type,” in English Protestant eyes, of the true church itself, conceived of as a weak woman whose very helplessness in the face of persecution proves her status as the bride of Christ, and provides a model for later literary endeavor.Footnote 7 In combination, the two Askew Examinations, along with Bale's earlier account of the examinations and death of a fifteenth-century Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle (d. 1417), stand as the first published martyrologies of English Protestantism, providing models (and text) that would be extremely influential, for example, in the enormous martyrological work Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church (popularly known as the Book of Martyrs), published by Bale's friend John Foxe during the reign of Elizabeth Tudor (1558–1603).Footnote 8

The story of Askew's religious persecution is relatively straightforward. She was arrested in London for heresy in March 1545 and examined first before a quest (Tudor equivalent of the modern grand jury) and later by Bonner, bishop of London and a cleric with cure of her soul.Footnote 9 The questions put to her in these interviews are exactly what one would expect. Askew was asked about matters of doctrine of key importance to the later regime of Henry VIII, particularly the nature and performance of the Mass and, therein, the nature of the sacramental bread and wine, the role of the officiating priest, and the efficacy of private masses (masses sung for dead souls residing in purgatory, according to Catholic doctrine). Having undergone quite lengthy examination, she signed a confession of faith written for her by Bonner, who then released her. However, in June 1546, she was summoned before the king's Privy Council, who condemned her under the Act of the Six Articles (1539) for denying transubstantiation (the complete transformation of the consecrated bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Altar into Christ's body and blood). Following her condemnation she was tortured by privy councilors intent on linking her—as a gentlewoman with high connections—with supporters of reform at court. After being crippled on the rack, she was then carried to Smithfield in London, where she was burned in July. So far, so simple; to Bale, Askew was a holy martyr for the cause of Christ's true church, suffering at the hands of agents of Antichrist—men like Edmund Bonner. But as she continued to develop under Foxe's pen, she became even more than this: no longer just a victim of general Catholic ferocity, in the Acts and Monuments she becomes a victim also of a specific, late Henrician conservative “backlash” against the religious reforms enacted during the 1530s (following Henry VIII's famous break with Rome) and as such, a potent example and symbol of King Henry's ultimate failure as a reformer.Footnote 10

As suggested of Foxe's appropriation of the Askew story, the Henrician 1540s were years of difficulty for the English evangelical movement—a period when, as he put it, “doctrine” went “backward.”Footnote 11 During the 1530s, the regime had not only severed the relationship between the English and Roman Catholic churches; it had issued a number of reformist-sounding statements of religious policy flexible enough to give the growing evangelical party in England reason to feel optimistic for the future. In particular, statements of doctrine like the Ten Articles (1536) had expressed a certain ambiguity about the nature of the bread and wine of the Sacrament of the Altar, allowing for the development of a public, if tense, debate on their exact relationship with the actual body and blood of Christ. This, however, changed following the passage by Parliament, in July 1539, of the Act of the Six Articles, by which all forms of belief in the sacramental elements rejecting Catholic transubstantiation were deemed heretical and punishable by burning for a first offense. This draconian straightening of doctrine had a profound effect on evangelicals in England. Prior to this, most of them had embraced a quasi-Lutheran formulation of the Real Presence—admissible under the Ten Articles—by which Christ's body and blood existed in the sacramental elements, substantially present along with, and discrete from, the material bread and wine.Footnote 12 This comparatively “moderate” rejection of transubstantiation was now, however, outlawed: a fact that paradoxically seems to have led, as Alec Ryrie has argued, to the creation in England of a significantly radicalized evangelical party, now rallying around a “reformed” (sacramentarian) rejection of the Real Presence altogether and suffering harsh, if sporadic persecution during the last years of the king's life (persecution to which their Lutheran friends were now also, technically, subject).Footnote 13

But does this mean, as Foxe suggests in the Acts and Monuments, that the 1540s witnessed a broad conservative “backlash” against the reforms of the 1530s? Despite centuries of historiography, and even allowing for the problem of the Act of the Six Articles, Ryrie has recently and compellingly argued that Henry's last few years did not, in fact, see the conservative ascendancy generally interpreted of them. Not only did the Henrician 1540s continue to witness an often-productive negotiation for reform between an evangelical minority and the royal conscience; the Act of the Six Articles itself failed to usher in widespread persecution. Whatever the diatribes against Nicodemism and dissimulation emerging from the pens of various continental Protestants and exiled English evangelicals, Henrician evangelicals, like their Catholic counterparts recently described by Ethan Shagan, had options when faced with difficult policy other than either meek submission or blatant resistance, and during the 1540s they often relied for survival on the principle that one could conceal one's belief without compromising it, as the English Lollards had done before them.Footnote 14 After all, Henry's church was not clearly Antichrist: sometimes promising, sometimes disappointing, as Ryrie puts it, “the ambiguity of English religious policy ensured that the evangelical response to it was equally ambiguous.”Footnote 15

If English evangelicals still had reason to feel optimistic about their prospects during the years after 1539, however, this changed in April 1546, the catalyst a provocative sermon denying the sacrificial nature of the Mass given by one of Askew's friends, the famous London preacher Edward Crome.Footnote 16 The Mass's status as a propitiatory sacrifice—whereby according to Catholic doctrine it enacts, with the production (through transubstantiation) of his crucified body, Christ's salvific sacrifice on the cross—was an important issue to the regime, and one, as we shall see, that would factor into Askew's own experience of persecution. Following his sermon, Crome was arrested and forced into a series of public recantations, and during the summer that followed a number of evangelicals, including men of prominence like Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Shaxton, and John Lascelles, felt the effect of the king's displeasure or, at least, his Privy Council’s—conservative members of the latter's urgency fueled by the former's noticeably declining health.Footnote 17 In this context, it is not surprising that when put to the test by the Privy Council two months after Crome's sermon, Askew failed to avoid—as she so dearly wished to do—the fires of Smithfield. But that was in 1546; in 1545, she survived her examination before the bishop of London, successfully refusing to “utter the secretes of [her] harte” to him, as she had earlier refused to utter them to a number of other interrogators, both lay and clerical. And this is the crux of the First Examinacyon: a crux, or cross, that Bale, if not Askew herself, had to bear in transforming the account into martyrology, as he did after her execution for heresy a year after the events described in them took place. For the First Examinacyon, as any number of modern scholars (and some not-so-modern ones) have argued, is not a straightforward testament to Askew's evangelical confession; rather, it seems a story of evasion and witty dissimulation, one ending in its heroine's orthodox confession and release.Footnote 18 Indeed, standing alone—outside the spectacular glare of Askew's later torture and fiery death fairly beaming from the Lattre Examinacyon—one would think the First anything but satisfactory propaganda for the evangelical cause or at least for martyrology but for its spotlighting, or Bale's spotlighting within it, of the bloodlust of men like the “Babylon” bishop of London: servants of Antichrist.

But while Bale's presentation—or rather, “elucidation”—of Askew's experience with Bonner, in the First Examinacyon, presupposes the “bloody” bishop's determination to achieve her painful death, Bonner himself did not actually push her to that point. In the spring of 1545, when the events described in the First Examinacyon took place, there may well have been good reason to believe that martyrdom was not Askew's destiny—certainly she had no wish for it to be, and Bonner seems to have agreed with her on this point. There is, in fact, a significant divergence between Bonner's treatment of Askew as it is described in the text Bale attributes to the woman herself and Bale's own elucidation of the Bonner-Askew relationship: for if this relationship worked itself out according to the words attributed to Askew, then the fact that she walked away from Bonner at the end of the story told in the First Examinacyon requires some explanation. Bonner knew that Askew was a heretic in 1545, and he had the tools with which to punish her heresy. According to recent scholarly understanding of a sixteenth-century belief in the “duty of intolerance,” shared by clerics and administrators of all major confessions, he surely felt both obligated and entitled either to compel her to reconversion or to facilitate her death for heresy.Footnote 19 And yet he did neither: when Askew emerged from her encounter with Bonner a free woman in the spring of 1545, she did so as a heretic according to the law, a fact of which Bonner was well aware. I argue that Bonner let Askew go despite the fact that her heresy was plain. And while it may remain unclear exactly why he made the decision to do this, the fact that he did suggests that far from feeling what Brad Gregory describes as a broad “duty”—or even a “willingness”—“to kill” over precise matters of doctrine, in this case he felt determined not to. This choice on his part and the means by which he orchestrated Askew's release resonates with recent interpretations of the Henrician Reformation as hinging for success neither on strict enforcement of the king's will nor on popular enthusiasm, but rather on a process of negotiation between members of competing groups within and outside the ecclesiastical and administrative halls of power.Footnote 20

Askew's reticence under interrogation, described in the First Examinacyon, has been attributed in some scholarship to a self-restraint deriving from either an absence of confessional self-identification on her part or from her awareness, as a woman, of her own exclusion from male-dominated theological debate.Footnote 21 As I have argued elsewhere, however, in her reluctance to incriminate herself during the set of interviews comprising the First Examinacyon, as well as in the means by which she is described doing so, Askew was a typical persecuted Henrician evangelical with a concrete, discernible, and unsurprising goal—to avoid the fires of Smithfield without committing an act of apostasy.Footnote 22 Nevertheless, while her determination to avoid self-incrimination thus fairly leaps from the pages of the First Examinacyon, its authorial voice (presumably Askew’s) does also make itself heard on those pages, giving words not just to the text's protagonist (representing Askew herself) but also to any number of antagonists. And this is a material point: both Examinations—First and Lattre—are products of creative authorship. They are not transcripts of the historical Askew's interrogations before authority, nor are they unbiased accounts. Askew had an agenda in creating them, just as Bale had an agenda in his editing of them, the extent of which it is impossible to establish with any certainty. And while this should not eliminate the Examinations’ value as a source for studying the Henrician evangelical experience of interaction with authority, use of them for that purpose must take into account the question of their veracity. While they are surely not fictional accounts produced as an elaborate fraud by Bale, they are nevertheless, like Natalie Davis's sixteenth-century French pardon tales, stories, and in that respect the First Examinacyon carries two stories within itself, one told as part of the other.Footnote 23 The first of these, the story of the historical Askew's experience of persecution, was written for an evangelical audience to whom the author did not wish to appear apostate, despite the fact that the tale ends with her signing an “orthodox” confession, presumably in order to escape execution. In her self-description, therefore, the authorial Askew's goal had to be to write a believable story in which she is shown expressing a clear fidelity to her faith before her examiners that, nevertheless, results in the historical fact of her submission and release from prison. And in this goal, she seems to have succeeded. Even if Askew did not express herself during her actual examinations as she is described doing in the text attributed to her, as author she does describe both herself and her various antagonists in a manner both believable and presumably acceptable to her evangelical peers. Ultimately, while Askew's actual experiences in 1545 might have differed substantially from the First Examinacyon's account of them, the story told in the Examinacyon is nevertheless believable: it is a true historical account of what could have happened, and in that respect it remains a valuable source for considering the relationship between late Henrician evangelicals and their antagonists—members of the ecclesiastical and administrative Henrician regime.

But the story of Askew's persecution also carries within it a second story told to a second audience. This is the story of Askew's faith, and its audience is Henrician authority, most importantly represented by Bishop Bonner. As a woman under examination by this authority, the protagonist Askew's goals are in constant virtual collision, for above all other things she is a heretic attempting to avoid conviction for heresy and yet also a committed evangelical striving to avoid the apostasy that alone—according to the legal framework of her persecution—can save her. Her approach, therefore, is both to express herself truthfully and to avoid doing so—in effect, to express her fidelity to the “true” faith while satisfying the needs of the representatives of the “false” standing before her. Her utterances thus have layers of meaning, permeated with doctrinal implication: her witty and, at times, pointed statements are orthodox and yet heretical, intended to save her life but also to protect her soul. This tension is not lost on the antagonist Bonner; but he, working in this sense with his prisoner rather than against her, allows her both to avoid impaling herself on the sword—or rather, the stake—of religious policy and nevertheless to emerge from their interaction as disdainful of Henrician-Catholic sacramental practice and theology. The extent to which she achieves this is perhaps obscured by the fact of the historical Askew's release at the end of her encounter with Bonner, purchased at the cost of the confession written by the man himself. But confession or no, when released by Bonner, the protagonist Askew, however apparently witty and sure of her own intelligence, has not tricked him into believing her orthodox: Bonner, himself a man of no mean intellect, has not been outwitted by this young, female heretic, nor does the author of the First Examinacyon wish to portray him as duped. My approach to Askew's First Examinacyon is thus to engage with it as written, to accept the problem of its historical veracity, and nevertheless to consider it, not as a discrete text, but rather as an artifact of, product of, and source of evidence for the context in which the historical Askew lived, experienced persecution for her religious beliefs, presumably wrote something that became the published Examinations, and died. In this context it was apparently believable both to her and to her evangelical audience that the bishop of London would release her, despite, as according to her own attributed testimony, being “nothynge deceyved” in her.Footnote 24

This seems out of character for the man known through the ages as “Bloody Bonner.” A rather neglected figure in his own right in studies of Henrician religious history, Bonner nevertheless has had an appallingly bad press. For obvious reasons frequently mentioned in chronicles of Protestant persecution, he is “Bloody Bonner,” not just according to Bale and Foxe, but, as we know from his own testimony, according to Marian Londoners. As bishop of London, he was heavily involved in enforcing religious policy during both Henry's and Mary Tudor's reigns, and so it is not surprising that he was loathed by many of his contemporaries, a situation he deplored but one not helped by his apparently volatile temperament.Footnote 25 In The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy goes a certain distance toward restoring some dignity to the “bloody” bishop by viewing his participation in the Marian Reformation through the lens of his pastoral duties, often neglected in favor of his obligation to eradicate heresy from his diocese.Footnote 26 Similarly, Gina Alexander has argued that during Mary's reign Bonner was actually a reluctant participant in what he saw as a premature resort to immolation rather than education in stamping out evangelical—and by then Edwardian—heresy. Alexander points to the pressure Mary and her Council applied to Bonner to pursue heretics, in letters reprimanding him for delay in his execution of government policy, by ordering specific arrests and by instructing justices of the peace and local commissions to send him suspects to interrogate.Footnote 27 The tension that seems to have existed between Bonner and his queen over his handling of heretics during the 1550s resonates in Askew's own journey toward martyrdom a decade earlier. For while Bonner released her in 1545, her final persecution in 1546 involved him not at all; rather, she was summoned by the Privy Council, tried by the Privy Council, condemned by the Privy Council, and tortured by privy councilors before suffering “the death.”Footnote 28

Bonner's apparent discomfort with the extremities of Marian religious policy notwithstanding, if “nothing deceived” in Askew in 1545, it remains surprising that he would have chosen to allow her to escape from him unreconciled to orthodoxy. As Gregory has so influentially argued in Salvation at Stake, sixteenth-century religious authorities felt a pastoral duty to protect the souls in their cure from the “eternal oppression of Hell” by eliminating completely—in fire—the contagion of heresy. While the desired outcome for ecclesiastical authorities examining heretics was reconversion rather than martyr marking, according to Gregory, a “relaxed attitude” toward heresy on their part would have been considered “unconscionably negligent.”Footnote 29 In addition, as Ryrie also stresses, the achievement of sincere reconversion and recantation, especially in prominent heretics, had significant propagandistic value for regimes waging war against heterodoxy; but in fact one of the most surprising things about Askew's confession of 1545 is not that she put her signature to it but that it was not publicized until well after it was signed. It was not even copied into Bonner's register until after her condemnation over a year later, and it seems, according to the letter she wrote at that time to her friend and fellow prisoner (with whom she later burned) John Lascelles, that he had just learned of its existence.Footnote 30 This upset Askew, and the publication of her confession likely motivated, at least in part, her decision to write her account of her experience of persecution—one that serves explicitly to deny her apostasy.Footnote 31

While Askew, as she awaited death during the summer of 1546, was thus embarrassed by the publication of her confession, in the Examinations her submission in signing it is portrayed as no submission at all. According to her account (as related both in the First Examinacyon and in the letter to Lascelles included in the Lattre), she added an addendum to her signature reading “I Anne Askewe do beleve all maner thynges contayned in the faythe of the Catholyck Church,” thus both avoiding apostasy and (in the process) driving Bonner into one of his characteristic rages.Footnote 32 Perhaps true, perhaps not—the addendum, in any case, did not make it into Bonner's register. Nevertheless, Askew's written recollection of this moment in her larger experience coheres with the rest of her account, one that shines a light on the negotiation of and around late Henrician religious policy, a negotiation that in Askew's case apparently consisted of her revealing her heresy during her first series of examinations and Bonner choosing, effectively, not to harry her to her death—fulfilling his promise to her cousin. Between the two of them—governor and governed, persecutor and persecutee—Askew and Bonner participated in a dialogue allowing her to express her rejection of Henrician religious policy and him to release her anyway.

The success of the negotiation taking place between Bonner and Askew on the pages of the First Examinacyon depended on both parties understanding the policies with which they sought to avoid collision, policies defined in the Act of the Six Articles of 1539 and—despite Askew's claim never to have read it—the King's Book, or A necessary doctrine and erudicion, published in 1543. The Act deals with three issues—clerical and monastic celibacy, auricular confession, and the Mass, including the fraught issue of private masses. Its first article demands belief in the Real Presence by way of transubstantiation (by definition if not by word), explicitly precluding the possibility of Lutheran interpretation. Communion in one kind is defended in the second article, and the fifth directs that private masses “be contynued and admytted … as wherby good Cristen people orderinge them selfes accordingly doe receyve bothe godly and goodly consolacions and benefyttes, and it is agreable also to Gods lawe.”Footnote 33 Confession, on the other hand, the subject of the sixth article, is merely “expedient and necessary to be retained and continued”—this unenthusiastic phrasing marking a victory for reformers.Footnote 34 Clerical and monastic vows of celibacy are enforced in the third and fourth articles.

Whether or not the last several years of Henry's reign saw a strong “backlash” against the reforms of the Cromwell era, the passage of the Act of the Six Articles in 1539 does stand as a critical moment in Henrician Reformation history: clearly, the “Whip with Six Strings,” as John Foxe termed it, or what Edward VI called his father's “Six Fists,” marked a victory for conservatism, at least when it comes to the issue of the Real Presence.Footnote 35 This does not, however, mean that the Act as a whole reflects the regime's actual priorities, and in fact much recent scholarship poses it as more a product of international diplomacy than a real reflection of Henry VIII's personal doctrinal concerns—with the important exception of article 1, on the Real Presence.Footnote 36 As Ryrie notes, not only are significant areas of contention in England missing from the Act—for example, the way to justification and the existence of purgatory—some of the issues addressed, specifically communion in both kinds and clerical marriage, were not important matters of debate in the English context. Yet the first article, enforcing belief in transubstantiation, was the “central, critical clause of the act … qualitatively different from the other five articles.”Footnote 37 The nature of the sacramental elements was the issue of most importance both to the king and to his conservative counselors, a fact reflected in the draconian penalty attached to article 1—death by burning for a first offense without the option of abjuration.

Tellingly, neither clerical marriage nor the issue of communion in both kinds gets a hearing in the interrogations described in the Askew Examinations; given Ryrie's analysis this is unsurprising, as is the fact that the remaining issues addressed in the Act—of more importance to the regime—are all raised by Askew's several examiners (this also tends to support the veracity of the Askew account, at least in its outline). Thus, according to the First Examinacyon, Askew was asked, in 1545, to speak to her beliefs on auricular confession, private masses, and the Real Presence; in doing so, she (as written) revealed both her awareness of the regime's policies and her ambivalence toward them, as well as her contempt for the Catholic sacramental system. So, for example, according to her description, when asked by Christopher Dare, the juryman who interviewed her before the quest, what she “sayd concernynge confession,” she answered, “as Saint James sayth, that everye man ought to acknowlege hys fautes to other, and the one to praye for the other.” This answer is typical of Askew. She uses Scripture to avoid explicitly attacking auricular confession, while at the same time revealing her dismissal of the priest's role in its practice; and while in reality she answers Dare's question not at all, her statement seems to satisfy him. Dare moves on, according to the published account—to ask her opinion of the King's Book.

Modern critics engaging with the Askew Examinations have tended to neglect the King's Book in their contextualization of her persecution. This is perhaps in part because Askew herself claimed, responding to Dare's query about her opinion of it, never to have read it. But this disclaimer on her part does not mean that she was unaware of what it said (or even, necessarily, that she actually had never read it), and, in this respect, Dare's reference to it—following, as it does, her answer on confession—is perhaps telling. It is impossible for the modern reader to get a sense of this particular juryman's expertise when it comes to the subtleties of prescribed doctrine, but he must have realized that Askew's answer here—if this account reflects her true testimony—was a dodge. If so, he likely also realized that it was a dodge in keeping with the discussion of confession in the King's Book. Askew refuses, in answering his question, to acknowledge the necessity of confessing one's sins to a priest, but the King's Book effectively does the same (as the Act of the Six Articles does not), by emphasizing repeatedly the singular agency of God in freely remitting sin—provided that the sinner acknowledge his sins, feel and show contrition for them, and truly “purpose through goddies grace, to change and amend the same.” The priest's role in hearing confession is lauded but ultimately relegated to one of convenience, his value lying in his ability to influence penitents “drowned in synne” to “be stirred and moved to detest and lament their synne.” While confessing to a priest is the “ordinary mean for penitent sinners to obteyne remission of synnes,” this is not a deal breaker: even without the priest's involvement, whether due to a “lacke” of ministers or even to constraints on the penitent's “leisure or oportunitie,” if a man “truly repent,” the King's Book insists, “he shal undoubtedly have pardon and forgiveness of all his myssedoinges.”Footnote 38 The key to achieving forgiveness is therefore contrition, recognition of the faults that Askew, in her answer, has “everye man,” clerical or lay, acknowledging to one another—men who then pray for each other in accordance with the king's own obsession with Christian charity and good neighborliness.

In her answer on confession Askew thus manages to avoid embracing sacramental orthodoxy while also remaining, technically, on the legal side of the regime's carefully crafted definitions—if not necessarily according to a strict interpretation of the Act of the Six Articles, then certainly in line with the King's Book. The majority of the questions directed toward her, however, at all stages of the Examinations address the Mass—an issue nearly singular in its clarity of definition according to both the Act of the Six Articles and the King's Book. Accordingly, the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ; and crucially, the sacramental elements, following the priest's words of consecration, are wholly body and blood, with no substance of bread or wine remaining in them. As both she and her various examiners well knew, it was for her rejection of the Real Presence in the sacramental elements that Askew found herself under examination at all, and according to the First Examinacyon she repeatedly avoided answering with clarity on this issue by comparing herself to St. Stephen the protomartyr, demanding, for example, in answer to Dare's question before the quest on the matter, that he explain to her “wherfore S. Steven was stoned to death” (he was stoned to death for insisting, among other things, that God is not to be found in temples made with human hands).Footnote 39 But there is more than one way to skin a cat: Askew would reveal her heretical opinion on the issue of the Real Presence (and her linked rejection of the Mass's nature as a propitiatory sacrifice), if not in response to direct questions about the sacramental elements themselves, then in other, and broader, discussion of the Mass.

Following Askew's appeal to the example of St. Stephen, Dare, according to her account, asks Askew two more questions about the Mass, both of which Bonner will redress with her, challenging her on the answers that she delivers before the quest. When Dare returns to the issue of the Mass the first time, it is to ask Askew whether she believes that the moral “condition” of the priest performing it can lessen its efficacy to the recipient. This time Askew's answer—again, as described in the Examinacyon—is quite revealing: “what so ever he were, whych mynystred unto me, hys yll condycyons coulde not hurte my faythe. But in sprete I receyved never the lesse, the bodye and bloude off Christ.”Footnote 40 While orthodox in its assertion that the condition of the priest officiating at the Mass cannot affect her receipt of the sacramental elements, this answer reveals an evangelical soteriology in its explanation as to why that is. Askew's receipt of the body and blood of Christ, and thus the fruits of Christ's sacrifice, remains unaffected by the priest's condition, not because of his unconditional power—linked to his ordained status and independent of his moral condition—but because of her faith alone, juxtaposed, in her answer, against his condition. But even more provocative than her reliance solely on her own faith in receiving Christ's body and blood is her quite unnecessary claim that her ingestion of them takes place at the level of “sprete”: her sacramental eating is solely a “spiritual eating,” a conclusion with which neither Zwingli nor Oeclampadius would disagree, but her king (and Luther) would.Footnote 41 Again, however, rather than attempt to catch her out on her evangelical allusions both to spiritual eating and to justification by faith alone (it is solely her faith that facilitates her receipt of the substance of Christ in spirit), Dare, according to the authorial Askew, moves on.

Askew's apparent tendency under examination to express her heterodoxy, if implicitly, and to go further in this than is actually required of her is manifested most strongly before the quest in her response to Dare's final attempt to question her on the Mass, his attempt this time turning on the issue of private masses: does Askew think, he asks, “that pryvate masses ded helpe sowles departed.” “And I sayd,” she reports, “it was great Idolatrye to beleve more in them, than in the deathe whych Christ dyed for us.”Footnote 42 With this answer, as it is described in the Examinacyon, Askew raises a doctrinal red flag, speaking not against private masses themselves so much as against the doctrines implied by their practice, again traveling beyond the scope of Dare's purported question, which is in itself quite a safe one, addressing as it does an efficacy for the dead in private masses not addressed in the Act of the Six Articles and, importantly, all but dismissed in the King's Book.Footnote 43 While when it comes to private masses the Six Articles states merely that they are of benefit to “Christian people” (and consistent with God's law), the King's Book sets out, in an extended discussion, the futility of attempting to “limit & dispence, how muche, and in what space of time, or to what person particularly the saied masses … do profit and availe.” Yes, since private masses profit the living as visible acts of charity done on behalf of dead members of Christ's mystical body, “men ought to judge and thinke, the same to be wel and profitably doen [sic].”Footnote 44 But, and with a serious swipe at purgatory, “the state and condicion” of the souls of the dead are to us so uncertain, that while we should trust in God to accept our prayers for them, we should not “take upon us neither in the one part, ne yet in the other, to geve any fond and temerarious judgement, in so highe thynges, so farre passing our knowlage.”Footnote 45

According to both the Act of the Six Articles and the King's Book, therefore, Askew should have been prepared (as she doubtless was not) to acknowledge the efficacy of private masses for the living; but this was not, according to the published account, the subject of Dare's question. He asked her about their effect on the dead, something on which she would have been, following the King's Book, safe in simply refusing to pass judgment: she could not know the truth about such a “highe thynge.” But by moving outside the parameters set by Dare in his question and contrasting private masses in efficacy to the “deathe whych Christe dyed” in the answer she actually gives, Askew brings into question the much more dangerous issue of the nature of the Mass as an efficacious performance of Christ's propitiatory sacrifice on the cross. All evangelicals rejected the idea of the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice, their rejection closely related to the doctrine of justification by faith alone—faith in the sufficiency of Christ's initial and completely unique sacrifice.Footnote 46 But this was heresy—and indeed, Askew's friend Edward Crome found himself in prison more than once during the 1540s for preaching the same.Footnote 47

If Askew's implicit denial of the sacrificial nature of the Mass, made before the quest, was dangerous and, given the question actually asked of her, unnecessary, it was even more so in bringing into view her heretical rejection of transubstantiation. Rejecting the sacrificial nature of the Mass itself did not necessarily imply a wholesale rejection of the Real Presence in the sacramental elements, but it did imply a rejection of transubstantiation, by which, as Duffy describes it, Christ's body, “immolated on the altar of the cross, became present on the altar of the parish church, body, soul, and divinity.”Footnote 48 To Catholics, the appearance of Christ's crucified body during the Mass was the sacrifice of the cross at Calvary, this sacrifice serving effectively as the sine qua non of both transubstantiation and the efficacy of private masses, a linchpin to their doctrinal relationship. Without transubstantiation there can be no enactment of Christ's sacrifice at Calvary; and without its sacrificial nature the Mass can hold no efficacy for the dead (and it is not unreasonable to suppose that it is the centrality of transubstantiation to the propitiatory nature of the sacrifice of the Mass that had now driven the regime to declare as heretical both evangelical and sacramentarian opinion on the sacramental elements). For Lutheran-leaning evangelicals and sacramentaries alike, this question of the Mass as a sacrifice was a nonstarter; the only propitiatory sacrifice was the one performed by Christ himself at Calvary, faith alone in which provided salvation. As Crome would preach at Paul's Cross in 1546, “the sacrifice of the masse dothe not take nor put awaye synne … a sacrifice it is of thanks gevinng to the only shepherde for his ones afferd offering which hath made a full satisfaccion of all the synnes of them which beleve and cleave to hym by faythe … and it is to us a comemoracion of Chrysts deathe and passion according to his owne woorde hoc facie in meam comemoracionem.”Footnote 49 The contrast is clear: Christ's “ones afferd offering” has justified those who “cleave to hym by faythe”; thus, the conflation of Christ's sacrifice and the sacrifice offered by the priest during the Mass is a false construct. The two sacrifices, according to evangelical belief, are separate and profoundly different in nature—one salvific, one commemorative: as Askew puts it, clearly distinguishing the two, “it was great Idolatrye to beleve more in them, than in the deathe whych Christ dyed for us.”

Like Crome’s, Askew's heresy regarding the nature of the sacramental elements was inherently linked to her belief in the sufficiency of Christ's first and only sacrifice to justify her by her faith alone. In her written statement of faith to the Privy Council included in the Lattre Examinacyon, she describes the sacrament much as Crome had done in his sermon two months before, as “to be receyvd with thankes gevynge, in remembraunce of Christes deathe, the onlye remedye of our sowles recover.”Footnote 50 Both Crome and Askew—he in his cataclysmic sermon and she in her confession to the Privy Council—only hint at a sacramentarian interpretation of the Mass but nevertheless reveal an evangelical heresy. Without explicitly denying the Real Presence altogether, by nevertheless defining the Mass as a commemoration or thanksgiving for Christ's sufficient sacrifice, they emphasize the singular efficacy of Christ's unique sacrifice on the cross—“the onlye remedye of our sowles recover”—and in the process deny the miracle of transubstantiation. More precisely, Askew couples these two tenets of her belief—the singularity of Christ's sacrifice and her now fully revealed sacramentarian heresy—at the close of her final confession of faith made from Newgate Prison (in the Lattre Examinacyon): “as concernynge your Masse, as it is now used in our dayes, I do saye and beleve it, to be the most abhomynable ydoll that is in the worlde. For my God wyll not be eaten with tethe, neyther yet dyeth he agayne.” As she notes, this admission carries great cost: “And upon these wordes, that I have now spoken, wyll I suffer deathe.”Footnote 51

But that was in 1546. In 1545, according to the First Examinacyon, Dare did not follow up on Askew's expostulation against private masses. It is possible that as a layman he failed fully to grasp the implications of Askew's unexpected answer to his question: in one sense, who could argue that private masses were more profitable to the dead than Christ's initial sacrifice? But one man who certainly understood Askew's meaning had to be the bishop of London, and he, rather than asking Askew her belief regarding the efficacy of private masses as such, instead, as reported in the First Examinacyon, used her recorded answer to Dare to “[lay] unto my charge, that I shuld saye, that the Masse was ydolatrye.” Understanding Bonner's spin on her answer to Dare and realizing the potential danger attached to admitting to this, Askew shows herself denying it, ratcheting up, however, her dismissal of private masses: “O Lorde, what ydolatrye is thys” she laments, “that we shuld rather beleve in private masses, than in the helthsom deathe of the dere sonne of God?”Footnote 52 In this answer, Askew makes the two sacrifices—“private masses” and Christ's “helthsom” sacrifice on the cross—mutually exclusive: it is idolatry to believe in private masses—and thus the sacrificial nature of the Mass itself—not more than, but rather than the “helthsom deathe of the dere sonne of God.” How does the bloodthirsty “Babylon Bishop” respond? He asks, “What an answere was that?”—before moving on to other things.

Bonner's rather bemused decision to dodge Askew's heretical rejection of the sacrificial nature of (at the least) private masses—if indeed he did dodge it—is rather remarkable, but this is not the only opportunity he seems to have had to catch her out on a burnable heresy.Footnote 53 It is possible that he himself retained enough sympathy for the evangelical agenda in 1545 to allow Askew's questionable attitude toward the Mass's sacrificial nature, and even her implied rejection of transubstantiation (if not necessarily the Real Presence), to slide.Footnote 54 But if, as Ryrie argues, he was “clearly appalled” by her sacramentarian heresy,Footnote 55 nevertheless he explicitly refused to detect it when given a clear opportunity, at least according to the account of his interview with her provided in the First Examinacyon. For according to this account, after throwing down a veritable gauntlet in her rejection of private masses, Askew then proceeded to toss down the other glove in her answer to Bonner's next important accusation: that she “ded saye, he that doth receive the sacrament by the handes of an yll prest or a sinner, he receyveth the devyll, and not God.” Askew denies this—“I never spake soche wordes”—but rather than stop there she goes on with abandon: “as I sayd afore … so saye I now agayne, that the wyckednesse of the prest shuld not hurte me, but in sprete and faythe I received no lesse, the bodye and bloude of Christ.” At this, Bonner predictably begins the process of catching her out—“What a saynge is thys? In sprete?” But again, not only does he fail to follow through, he refuses to: “I wyll not take yow at that advauntage,” he remarks, to which Askew replies, “My lorde without faythe and sprete, I can not receive hym worthelye.”Footnote 56

This is an important moment. Askew does not answer the question at hand—again, whether the condition of the priest affects his ability effectively to administer the Sacrament (she could simply say “no” and remain in line with both evangelical and Catholic teaching)—instead claiming that whatever the condition of the priest, she receives the body and blood of Christ in spirit and faith. As with Dare, she again asserts her belief that the key to her receipt of the fruits of Christ's sacrifice lies in her faith alone, with the priest's importance dismissed—but she also, in so doing, attaches a “reformed” formula to the nature of her very receipt of the elements: she receives them in spirit and faith. Receiving the body and blood in spirit and faith is a very different thing from receiving it in substance—even if the latter receipt requires the former—which Bonner realizes:Footnote 57 indeed, in ten years' time he will respond to this sort of formulation with determined hostility.Footnote 58 But in this case, rather than pushing Askew—asking her to clarify her meaning—according to the Examinacyon he gives her an out, both acknowledging that she has set herself up and explicitly refusing to take advantage of her, giving her the opportunity to attach her “spirit and faith” to orthodoxy, becoming, as they do, no longer her means of receiving Christ's body and blood but signs of her worthiness to do so. Remarkably, Bonner has proven himself unwilling to make any real effort to plumb the depths of Askew's soul. And so, content with his pretense of “not knowing” what she actually believed, he went away and prepared a confession for her signature, which she signed—she claims—with her addendum: “I Anne Askewe do beleve all maner thynges contayned in the faythe of the Catholyck Church.”

Askew's signature constitutes the climactic moment of the First Examinacyon; from this moment she is safe, if temporarily. In the context of the martyrological account made of her story by Bale, her manipulation of Bonner's orthodox confession, by way of her addendum, is heroic. Her faith remains intact (“A vyrgyne was she in that behalf”) despite the wily ways of the evil bishop of London (whose “sekynge was here, to make her to worship the … beast”). But what was the nature of the confession prepared by Bonner? As copied into his register—and differing little from Askew's own memory of it—it reads as follows:

What is in this confession? Many things undoubtedly unpalatable to Askew—an emphasis on the priest's role in performing the sacrament, whatever his condition; corporeal receipt of the body and blood of Christ, whatever the condition of the recipient; the immutability of the nature of the consecrated elements but nothing on the sacrificial nature of the Mass itself and not transubstantiation. Different from the Act of the Six Articles and the King's Book, this confession allows for both a rejection of the propitiatory nature of the sacramental sacrifice and an interpretation of the nature of the sacramental elements themselves consistent with much evangelical—if not sacramentarian—belief, of the sort permissible according to the Ten Articles of 1536 (published at a time when “doctrine” was moving “forward”): “As touchyng the sacrament of the Alter … under the forme and fygure of breade and wyne, whiche we there presently doo se and perceive by outwarde senses, is verily, substancially, and really conteined and comprehended, the very selfe same body and bloud of our saviour Jesus Christe.”Footnote 60

While some modern scholars have described the formula in the Ten Articles as a “traditional” definition of transubstantiation, and while it does allow for an interpretation consistent with orthodoxy, these words do not demand recognition of transubstantiation.Footnote 61 Lutheran theology of the Real Presence also allows for the comprehension of the body and blood of Christ under the form and figure of bread and wine, and the flexibility of this definition was not accidental, as neither was Bonner's wording of Askew's confession: both were designed to embrace moderate evangelical opinion. This is glaringly clear when both this passage from the Ten Articles and Askew's confession are read against the examinations of two famous fifteenth-century Lollard heretics, William Thorpe and Sir John Oldcastle, whose stories were appropriated by and published for the “evangelical” cause in 1530, with the latter, as noted above, reedited, expanded upon as “martyrology,” and published from exile (with popular reception in London) by Bale in 1544.Footnote 62 Both Thorpe and Oldcastle were examined early in the fifteenth century by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury; like Askew, both rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation; and also like her, they attempted during their examinations to avoid both self-incrimination and apostasy, as in the following passage from Thorpe's autobiographical account:

According to this account, Thorpe both rejects the use of the term “materiall” in speaking of the bread of the sacrament and affirms that the sacrament is Christ's flesh and blood “in fourme of bread and wine,” an answer that, as both he and Arundel realize, does not make explicit the absence of bread in substance, now, as according to orthodoxy, presumably fully displaced by Christ's body.Footnote 64 Similarly, Oldcastle also attempts to avoid answering clearly to his disbelief on the question of transubstantiation, affirming only that “the moste worshipfull sacrament of the altare is very Christes body in fourme of breade.”Footnote 65 As with Thorpe, this answer fails to satisfy Arundel—as it should: Thorpe and Oldcastle were both gesturing before him toward a doctrinal orthodoxy that they did not embrace in their attempts to bluff their way out of condemnation for heresy. And they failed—they failed to fool Arundel using a formula reminiscent of the one expressed in the Ten Articles of 1536, and one fairly handed to Askew by Bonner.

Even apart from old problems like the artful dissimulation practiced by fifteenth-century Lollards, the fact that the 1536 article on the Real Presence did not serve to guarantee an orthodox interpretation is evident in the revised definition of the nature of the sacramental elements set out in 1539, in the Act of the Six Articles: “By the strenghe and efficacy of Christes myghtie worde, it beinge spoken by the prest, is present really, [in the most blessed Sacrament of the Aulter], under the forme of bread and wyne, the naturall bodye and bloode of our Saviour Jesu Christe, conceyved of the Virgin Marie, and that after the consecracion there remayneth noe substance of breade or wyne, nor any other substance but the substance of Criste, God and man [my emphasis].”Footnote 66

Of critical importance in this definition is the final clause precluding the possibility of an interpretation of the nature of the eucharistic elements according to which the body and blood exist in the bread and wine with the bread and wine themselves, as according to evangelical interpretations of the Mass upholding the Real Presence while rejecting transubstantiation—broadly speaking, quasi-Lutheran interpretations characteristic of 1530s evangelical belief and legal according to the now defunct Ten Articles. If, as Ryrie argues, the straightening of religious policy represented by the Act of the Six Articles contributed to the growth of radical, sacramentarian heresy in England, it is likely that Bonner was able to recognize this too. But even if he could not (and even if the 1539 Act did not, in fact, have this broad effect), he must have hoped that by drawing on a more flexible statement of sacerdotal theology than the one provided by the Act, he could convince Askew to sign a confession—one that could be construed as but was not necessarily “orthodox.” And as it happens, he was right: he asked Askew merely to acknowledge Christ's bodily presence—present somewhere. And she signed.

If Askew signed her confession as she describes in her Examinations—“I Anne Askewe do beleve all maner thynges contayned in the faythe of the Catholyck Church”—then her deception was plain in a context in which subterfuge was not unexpected, and the question remains why Bonner, although “nothing deceived” in her, allowed her to walk away.Footnote 67 But even if she did not, she was provided with a confession by Bonner himself—copied into his register independent of its description in the Examinations—ambiguous enough to allow her some room to maneuver. In this, Askew and Bonner, adversaries, confessional enemies, and diametric opposites in the battle between good and evil described by Bale—she for Christ and he for Antichrist—negotiated a space in which she could survive. Her part was to express her heterodoxy within the elastic boundaries of the law and before a man who would not press her; his was, first, to ensure that those boundaries retained their elasticity and then to provide her with a confession flexible enough for her to sign. Ultimately, whether the account of their encounter attributed to Askew is an accurate one, even in merely producing the confession for her that he did, Bonner gave her a gift.

Again, my engagement with Askew's testimony—and with her engagement with her various interrogators—relies largely on the version of events provided in the First Examinacyon, itself a work of propaganda for the evangelical cause, if not for Askew's personal (and posthumous) self-promotion. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to give it credence. It is perhaps unsurprising that Christopher Dare, interviewing Askew before the quest, would decide against pushing Askew to an indictable, spoken sacramentarian heresy. As Susan Brigden, Richard Rex, and others have argued, in a context in which religious division seemed less shocking than it had only a decade before, London juries became increasingly unwilling during the 1540s to cooperate with what many thought draconian, unnecessary, and even arbitrary religious policy.Footnote 68 Nevertheless, by 1545 Bonner had proven himself fully capable of moving against heretics even despite initial resistance from sympathetic grand juries, if much to the disgust of many Londoners. But even given this, there are any number of possible reasons for him to have hesitated to plumb the depths of Askew's faith. Perhaps he was concerned that if he drove this young woman to her death he would incur a popular revulsion similar to that shown after his successful prosecution, in 1541, of the teenager Richard Mekins; perhaps Askew's “worshipful stock,” as he called it, inspired a certain reverence on his part; perhaps he felt threatened by her powerful connections.Footnote 69 There are many possible explanations for his apparently gentle treatment of her, including genuine sympathy for her and even for certain elements of her system of belief. But whatever the reason for it, Bonner gave Askew room to maneuver and survive, ensuring her success in this if only by writing her a confession palatable to her, the existence of which is attested to by its reproduction in his own register. But again, that was in 1545, a year and a bit before Crome's provocative sermon precipitating the crackdown on London evangelicals.Footnote 70 As of April 1546, wiggle room was gone, as a number of the king's evangelical friends realized—some to their very great cost: if John Lascelles and Nicholas Shaxton could now be targeted, Anne Askew was comparatively easy prey. Ultimately, Bonner could let Askew go when he did—and he did let her go. It would be a very different story when the king's conservative councilors turned their attention to her.

When Askew was summoned before the Privy Council in June 1546, her antagonist was no longer the temperamental bishop of London: instead she now faced the calculating bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, who nursed an agenda reaching well beyond the problem of the heretical young woman standing before him. Gardiner, with a number of his “conservative” allies at Henry VIII's court, was seeking to collapse evangelical influence over the ailing king—much of which centered on the person of the queen, Catherine Parr, and her chamber and court. What remains—and will likely forever remain—unclear, is whether Askew's fate in 1546 hinged on her actual heresy or on her potential value on the rack to Gardiner and his associates. For, following her condemnation by the Privy Council, this is exactly where she found herself: being questioned about the countesses of Suffolk and Hertford and the Ladies Fitzwilliam and Denny, ladies of the queen's chamber and, in most cases, wives of prominent male supporters of reform at court.Footnote 71 Askew's brutal torture, conducted by prominent conservative privy councilors themselves following the lieutenant of the Tower of London's horrified refusal to continue breaking his young, female prisoner's body, seems clearly to have been intended to help bring down the queen or at least some prominent reformers connected to her.Footnote 72 But whether it was conducted as a matter of convenience following Askew's condemnation or was in fact the whole point of her latter persecution is a matter of informed conjecture. What does bear mentioning, however, is that Bonner's conduct of Askew's earlier persecution seems unlikely to have been contrived in connection with Gardiner's later pursuit of Catherine Parr and her ladies. Gardiner did not need Askew's 1545 confession to attack her in 1546. By bringing her before the Privy Council, he both avoided the common law process and ensured his victim's condemnation. In light of her pending death, and of the public relations debacle her treatment became—particularly following leaks of the details of her torture—Askew's earlier confession, signed before Bonner, was now publicized, “to thentent the woorlde may see what credence ys nowe to be gyven unto the same woman who in shorte a tyme hathe most damnablye altered and chaunged her opynyon and beleaf and therefore rightfullie in opyn courte arrayned and condempned,” but it is unlikely that Bonner knew, in 1545, that it would serve this purpose a year later, just as neither Gardiner nor Bonner could have known that Crome would provide, with his provocative sermon, the opportunity he did to conduct the “purge” of summer 1546.Footnote 73 In any case, a crippled Anne Askew was burnt to death in July 1546, driven to that end by Stephen Gardiner and his allies on the king's Privy Council, and not for purely pastoral reasons. We do not know how Bonner felt about the cruel treatment in the Tower and ultimate death of this particular young woman whose soul was still of his cure, but, given his earlier handling of her, it seems unlikely that he celebrated it.