On July 16 1546 Anne Askew was burnt at the stake outside the gatehouse of St Bartholomew the Great in West Smithfield.
West Smithfield today
In a modest ceremony just 480 years on, the Reverend Taylor Wilton-Morgan blessed a memorial to a woman who refused to compromise her beliefs despite being tortured on the rack in the Tower of London so extensively that she had to be carried on a chair to her execution.
This article by David Crowther on the History of England site, an extensive Wikipedia entry, and this BBC News item, explain the complex circumstances of Anne’s interrogation, trial and burning during the final months of Henry VIII’s reign.
Anne openly debated the scriptures, denied transubstantiation (the Catholic belief that communion bread turns into the literal body of Christ), and under interrogation refused to implicate members of a high-ranking network of reformists, potentially targeting King Henry VIII’s final wife, Queen Catherine Parr.
She wrote firsthand accounts of her interrogations (The Examinations of Anne Askew), making her one of the earliest known female prose writers and poets in the English language. Her texts were later immortalized in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
At the ceremony I talked to Matthew Bell, local resident and City councillor, who commissioned the memorial, and Emily Hoffnung, who carved it.
Apologies for the jump start, and thanks to Dan Wilcox for improving the audio.
Matthew and Emily also created another memorial in West Smithfield, to commemorate the Great Rising of 1381, more commonly known as the Peasants’ Revolt.
Here’s video of Reverend Taylor Wilton-Morgan’s blessing, with a transcript below.
Transcript
We recall something which I think should quite literally give us pause. And I hope that we will see people quite literally pause over this as they make their way into the church. Anne Askew was an extraordinarily courageous woman who lived in a febrile and violent time. She fell victim, as many of you will know, to court intrigue and the waxing and waning of power, and she was caught up in that. And in the midst of that religion, which can bring out the very best of us, can also bring out the very worst, and what she suffered belonged, I think, fervently to the latter. Though so often her own counsel and writing and speaking was quite explicitly intended to bring out the former.
The message that runs through the heart of so much of what she said was that we should be more like Christ. And that is a challenge and an invitation, which we like to think we give everybody who walks through the door to come and visit the church, to pray and worship with us, to come here out of curiosity. But how more eloquently and powerfully spoken it will be through this memorial to a woman who courageously challenged her contemporaries and everyone who followed her to be more like Christ, even if that means great personal cost. We know that when she was brought here to be executed finally, she was too weak to stand, for she had suffered dreadful torture at the hands of her captors.
The scriptures tell us that God’s strength is made perfect in weakness, and I think there is in Anne’s own life a wonderfully moving emblem of that. She joins an extraordinary company of those who were put to death on this site, and I shall read the names, or at least some of the names, because I think it’s impossible to say how many people were put to death or otherwise cruelly treated here in the smooth field outside the city walls. But that little fact that it was just outside the city walls brings all of this into rather wonderful resonance and moving resonance with that one who was put to death outside the city walls on a green hill far away. Jesus Christ himself, his figure is in echo, his pattern, his face seen in the histories of all those who suffered for their faith.
We know that a number of people were put to death here, William Wallace, who can’t quite be considered a traitor because he wasn’t English, but as the Scots, and I have Scots blood in me, like to remind us, his courageous witness stands here, but so too, of course, Wat Tyler, Margaret Cheyny, Edward Arden, and then those who were put to death quite explicitly for their faith. William Sawtrey, John Badby, Thomas Bagley, Richard Bayfield, John Tewksbury, James Bainham, John Frith, Andrew Hewet, John Lambert, John Forrest, William Collins, Robert Barnes, Thomas Gerrard, William Jerome, Richard Featherston, Edward Powell, Thomas Abel, Nicholas Belenian, John Adams, John Lascelles, Joan Bocher, John Rogers, Thomas Tomkins, John Cardmaker, John Warne, John Bradford, John Leaf, John Philpot, Thomas Wittle, Bartholomew Green, Thomas Brown, John Tudson, John Went, Isabella Forster, Joan Lushford, William Tyms, Robert Drake, Richard Spurge, Thomas Spurge, George Ambrose, John Cavel, John Rough, Robert Southain, Roger Holland, Nicholas Horner, Bartholomew Legate. A span in dates of well under 100 years. And those are only the names we know.
I invite you just to take a moment of silence to recall and to commend all those who lost their life here to the worst of our nature, even as they preached the best. And we do so with the help of Anne Askew’s own words just before she died here.
Oh Lord, I have more enemies now than there be hairs on my head. Yet, Lord, let them never overcome me with vain words, but light thou, Lord, in my stead, for on thee cast I my care. With all the spite they can imagine, they fall upon me, who am thy poor creature, yet, sweet Lord, let me not set by them that are against me. For in thee is my whole delight. And Lord, I partly desire of thee that thou wilt of thy merciful goodness forgive them the violence which they do. And have done unto me. Open also thou their blind hearts that they may hereafter do that thing in thy sight which is only acceptable before thee. To set forth thy verity aright without all vain fantasies of sinful men. So be it, oh Lord. So be it.
Further reading
- Mary I and the Smithfield Martyrs – article on London Museum website
- Virgina Rounding’s book The Burning Time tells the story of the Smithfield Martyrs, both Catholic and Protestant, the times they lived in, and the stories of two key figures: Richard Rich, Thomas Cromwell’s protégé, and John Deane, Rector of St Bartholomew’s.
- The many histories of Smithfield — overview from the London Museum. It connects market trade, plague, monasteries, Bartholomew Fair, executions, hospitals and the new museum site.
- History of St Barts — the church’s own laccount of its 900 years, including the priory, survival of the Great Fire, and later cultural life.
- History of Smithfield – Wikipedia
- List of people executed in Smithfield – Wikipedia