THE MOST PLEASANT SURPRISE for me while writing this book, was the discovery of Anne Askew. She doesn't have the historical weight of the larger names of the Reformation, at least by traditional observance, but she stood close enough to center stage for me, and earned a place of honor, not only on the pages of my book, but in my heart of heart, as Hamlet might have said it. 

Known by many as “the Faire Gospeller,” Anne Askew was a witty, well-informed, attractive, independent modern woman in a male-dominated early modern world. They didn’t know what to make of her. Cruelly tormented, then burned at the stake at twenty-five, her ordeal exposes a pitiless Rome in ways others do not.

Born Anne Ascough (Askewe) in Stallingborough, Lincolnshire in 1520, she was married against her will at fifeen to Thomas Kyme, a man betrothed to her sister Elizabeth (who died). Mr. Kyme, however, lost patience with his young wife’s Protestant beliefs and eventually put her out. Or that is one account. Either way, she left him and went to London and assumed her maiden name. A friend of Queen Katherine (Parr), Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, Anne began to preach, teach, inquire, enter debate, and exercise the gospel wherever there was opportunity. A contemporary, once her enemy, said Anne Askew “was the devoutest and godliest woman” he ever knew.

A firebrand, a street preacher (women were not allowed in a pulpit), attractive and outspoken, Anne Askew was burned at the stake essentially for not believing in transubstantiation and speaking publicly against it. She was tortured on the rack with such ferocity, bones were separated from their sockets. When they brought her to the scaffold for execution days later she had to be brought in on a chair. And her convictions remained intact. "I would rather die than break my faith," she cried. One of the innovations in GODSPEED, is the presence of memoriam, requiem. Anne Askew inspired this.