74  Ann Askew, intituled, I am a Woman Poor and Blind [Pepys 2.24-25]

This ballad was clearly popular from c.1590 until c.1700 (see Editions) but there is not much evidence of its survival into later periods. It is written in the imagined voice of the celebrated Protestant martyr, Anne Askew, who was burned at the stake for heresy in 1546. Her story became very well-known as a result of a sequence of texts that connect Askew’s own writings with the work of her posthumous editors, particularly John Bale and John Foxe (see Related texts). These publications presented Askew as a Protestant saint who, under intense questioning, remained steadfast in her faith, displaying a degree of theological knowledge and argumentative dexterity that bamboozled her cruel oppressors.

Askew was a gentleman’s daughter from Lincolnshire. She was pressured into marrying a man named Thomas Kyme but subsequently converted to Protestantism, left her husband and reverted to her maiden name. She travelled to London, where she had influential friends in and around the royal court. This brought her to the attention of the authorities in the capital and she was questioned at length by Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, in 1545.

On this occasion, Askew was released after signing a confession but the situation worsened dramatically in 1546, partly because she became caught up in the tense politics of Henry VIII’s final years. Askew was examined before the Privy Council (which included Bishop Stephen Gardiner) and condemned for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. Unusually, she was then tortured on the rack in the Tower of London as members of the Council attempted to force from her the names of her contacts at court. Askew refused to comply and her already broken body was burned alive before a large crowd at Smithfield on 16^th July.

Scholars have written a great deal about Anne Askew, focussing particularly on the relationship between the various available texts (especially those written or assembled by Bale and Foxe). Askew’s defiance of authority while under examination has also attracted considerable attention, as has her subsequent status as Protestant heroine. Her sex was a key concern in the sixteenth century too. Askew clearly fashioned her own identity as an indomitable female Protestant but her life and death were also extremely valuable to male propagandists. They could use her own writings to emphasise the cruelty of the Catholic bishops and councillors in torturing a ‘tender’ woman. The weakness of the prosecutors' case was also apparent in their abject failure to defeat her in argument.

Moreover, Askew’s defiance shamed male Protestants who had abjured rather than face the flames, and it was noted that Askew, unlike them, had managed to ‘stand... manfully to the truth’ (Crowley) while displaying ‘Such a masculine faith’ (Trapp). Through the inspiration of God, she transcended the alleged limitations of her sex. As Bale put it, ‘Whan she seemed most feble, than [then] was she most stronge’.

Comparatively little has been written about our ballad, however. It was not registered with the Stationers until 1624, and numerous commentators have taken it to be a composition of this decade. In fact, the ballad was already well-known by 1596, when Thomas Nashe alleged that a line in a book by Gabriel Harvey had actually been ‘stolne out of the Ballet of Anne Askew’ (Nashe had spotted Harvey’s use of the expression ’a woman poore and blinde’). The ballad may even have been in circulation rather earlier than this; the verse in which Askew says she cannot pray for Bishop Gardiner because of what he has done ‘since that time’ may conceivably hint at a date of composition in the 1550s or 1560s.

The song is not to be confused with ‘The Balade whych Anne Askewe made and sange whan she was in Newgate’, included in Bale’s Lattre examinacyon (1547). This is unrelated to our title, except perhaps in the sense that it established Askew’s reputation as a rather unlikely singer-songwriter, paving the way for our ballad.

Historians have noted the success of Ann Askew, intituled, I am a Woman Poor and Blind but it is safe to say that they have not been much impressed by the song. Tessa Watt, for example, argues that the martyr, as portrayed in the ballad, is ‘a generic victim of popery, bearing little resemblance to the strong, intelligent woman revealed in her “examination”.’ Askew, it is claimed, becomes a mere victim, stripped of ‘stubbornness and strength’ and reduced to lamenting her woes ‘in a tone of feminine weakness and supplication to her oppressors’. Ian Green agrees, calling the ballad ‘a travesty of the original story which... reduces the central figure to a cardboard cut-out’. And John King sees the ballad’s version of Askew as a ‘scarcely humanised embodiment of faith’.

The evident disappointment of recent commentators leaves us with the usual challenge of understanding the song’s success in its own day. It seems possible that the ballad-makers, far from reducing Askew virtually to nothing, were instinctively capitalising on the fact that the story of her heroic martyrdom was already so well known that it could be assumed. Is it possible that they sensed the need to tell an old story in a new way if they wanted to achieve commercial success?

For this reason, arguably, widely known aspects of Askew’s story – her subjection to ‘prison, fire, fagot’ and her eventual burning, for instance – are touched upon but not treated expansively. The same is true of Askew’s famous defiance. Her resistant spirit is not highlighted, though it can nevertheless be detected. In the ballad, Askew accuses her persecutors of doing ‘the Devils work’ and of being ‘bloody Butchers’. They are purveyors of ‘stinking meat’, determined to keep ordinary people ‘in blindness still’. It is not entirely clear how such terms can be interpreted as ‘supplication to her oppressors’.

The suggestion that the ballad-makers were supplementing existing knowledge rather than replacing a potent martyr with a pathetic victim can be amplified by considering briefly the companion piece that appears alongside the Askew ballad on our featured edition (and on most other surviving editions of the late seventeenth century). A Rare Example of a Vertuous Maid in Paris introduces us to a highly confrontational French Protestant whose burning for heresy is described in some detail. The two songs were clearly designed to complement rather than contradict one another, and their appearance together seems to undermine the argument that the song about Askew was intended to render a once dangerous heroine harmless.

Instead, it presented a fresh impression of her, while simultaneously calling up in the minds of readers and listeners a body of knowledge that they already possessed. The authors may even have been playing with consumer expectations when they placed in Ann’s mouth the faintly apologetic acknowledgement ‘that now I have no space,/ the cause of my death truly to show’. She hopes that ‘all faithful men’ will hear the full story elsewhere, ‘by Gods holy grace’. In reality, the ballad-makers probably knew that this was a sure thing, given her appearance in Foxe’s exceptionally successful Acts and martyrs.

Under this interpretation, other aspects of the song emerge as possible contributors to its popularity. It allows us, for example, to encounter Askew while she is in unusually reflective or summative mood. She looks back over her life in a manner that had no precedent in the other texts with which she is associated.

The apparent conflation of Gardiner and another priest, approached by  Askew as she searches for truth, is also interesting. In effect, it turns the song into a conversion narrative, almost a prequel to the tale of persecution and death that was already widely disseminated. We are taken through the phases of Askew’s journey: her initial misery and confusion; her consultation of priests and the wickedness of their responses; her turning to Christ and the Bible; her new-found strength as a true believer; her good death and her place in heaven. Like all conversion narratives, it set an example to others. And perhaps the garden/body metaphor, with its pun on the name of Bishop Gardiner, helped to endear this example to a society in which virtually everyone knew well the challenges of horticulture.

Furthermore, Askew’s ready acknowledgement of her sufferings (‘My spirit within me is vexed sore’) may actually have served to humanise the heroine, rather than the opposite. Her chosen coping mechanism – trust in God – was also readily comprehensible. Building on this, the ballad plays down some of Protestantism’s highest demands – detailed theological knowledge and readiness to die a martyr – in a manner that perhaps allowed consumers to feel its appeal more keenly than was sometimes the case. In the ballad, Askew models the believer who is humble of spirit, willing to learn, keen to please God, ready to trust in Christ, hostile to corrupt Catholic practice, and eager to repent. She does not conceal completely the theological knowledge for which she was famous, but here she wears it more lightly than usual. And the ballad makes extensive use of the first person and associated terms, facilitating a close identification between the singer or reader and the martyr (‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’ are used twenty-nine times).

Finally, it is interesting to note that only two heroes of mid-sixteenth century English Protestantism appear in our collection of hits, and both of them were female. Ann Askew is joined by Katherine Bertie, the subject of The most Rare and Excellent History Of the Dutchess of Suffolks Callamity. Furthermore, the two women knew each other. During Askew’s final interrogations in 1546, one of the courtiers about whom she was urged to spill the beans was the Duchess of Suffolk. Askew, as always, refused to cooperate.

Christopher Marsh

References

Anon, A Rare Example of a Vertuous Maid in Paris (late seventeenth century, regularly printed with Ann Askew, intituled, I am a woman poor and blind).

John Bale, The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe, lately martyred in Smythfield, by the Romysh popes upholders, with the Elucydacyon of Johan Bale (Wesel, 1546).

John Bale, The lattre examinacyon of Anne Askewe lately martyred in Smythfelde, by the wycked Synagoge of Antichrist, with the elucydacyon of Johan Bale (Wesel, 1547).

Elaine V. Beilin, ‘Anne Askew’s self-portrait in the Examinations’ in Margaret Patterson Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the word. Tudor women as patrons, translators, and writers of religious works (Kent, Ohio, 1985), pp. 77-91.

Elaine V. Beilin (ed.), The examinations of Anne Askew (New York and Oxford, 1996).

Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), pp. 370-76.

Robert Crowley, The confutation of the xiii articles, wherunto Nicolas Shaxton, late byshop of Salilburye [sic] subscribed (1548), K5r-v.

John Foxe, Actes and monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (1563), pp. 725-34.

Thomas S. Freeman and Sarah Elizabeth Wall, ‘Racking the body, shaping the text: the account of Anne Askew in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’, Renaissance quarterly 54.4, pt. 1 (Winter, 2001), pp. 1165-96.

Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in early modern England (Oxford, 2000), pp. 452, 458.

Megan Hickerson, ‘Negotiating heresy in Tudor England: Anne Askew and the Bishop of London’, Journal of British Studies 46.4 (2007), pp. 774-95.

John N. King, English Reformation literature (Princeton, 1982), pp. 443-44.

Nicholas Jonathan Moone, ‘ “A people’s history of England”: print, authority and the past in early modern English ballads’, (PhD in English, University of York, 2013), pp. 64, 206-10.

Thomas Nashe, Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596), R4r.

Christine Peters, Patterns of piety. Women, gender and religion in late medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 274-79 and 284-86.

Jennifer Richards, 'The voice of Anne Askew', Journal of the northern Renaissance, 9 (2017).

Hyder E. Rollins, An analytical index to the ballad-entries (1557-1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (Hatboro, Pennsylvania, 1967), nos. 74 and 1184.

John Trapp, A clavis to the Bible (1649), p. 59.

Diane Watt, Secretaries of God. Women prophets in late medieval and early modern England (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 4.

Diane Watt, ‘Askew [married name Kyme], Anne (c. 1521-1546)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Tessa Watt, Cheap print and popular piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 93-96.

The ballad can be compared to any number of early-modern texts about Ann Askew but the most important are Bale’s two Examinacyons and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (commonly known as the ‘Book of martyrs’). The accounts by Bale and Foxe were intimately connected with one another: Bale assured readers that his version was an edited transcript of Askew’s own hand-written text (an unverifiable claim); and Foxe clearly based his story on Bale’s.

The ballad, however, is clearly not part of the same family of texts and there are very few echoes or cross-references. In Bale’s frequently reprinted account, the ballad-makers might easily have found inspiration in a ready-made song, said to have been composed by Askew herself, that was included at the end of the Lattre examinacyon. The published broadside, however, bears no relation to it. As suggested in the Song history, the marked lack of overlap between the ballad and other sources may have been the result of a deliberate decision on the part of the song-writers to take Askew’s story in a new direction.

Christopher Marsh

Texts (in chronological order):

John Bale, The first examinacyon of Anne Askewe, lately martyred in Smythfield, by the Romysh popes upholders, with the Elucydacyon of Johan Bale (Wesel, 1546; frequently republished).

John Bale, The lattre examinacyon of Anne Askewe lately martyred in Smythfelde, by the wycked Synagoge of Antichrist, with the elucydacyon of Johan Bale (Wesel, 1547; frequently republished).

John Foxe, Actes and monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (1563; frequently republished), pp. 725-34.

Ann Askew, intituled, I am a Woman Poor and Blind (mid-late sixteenth century; frequently republished).