Probably the most celebrated of all the Smithfield martyrs was Anne Askew, who suffered during the last days of Henry VIII. She was a bright and pretty young woman from a well-to-do Midlands family who, early in her teens, became a keen student of the Bible, now available in English. Her father married her off to a country gentleman in Lincolnshire who had no sympathy for Anne’s spiritual convictions, and the young wife soon got into trouble for being a ‘gospeller’—a person who competed with the clergy by expounding the Bible to neighbours and friends, sometimes even at church. She boldly courted a confrontation with the religious hierarchy by going to London, attending Protestant meetings in the city, and proclaiming the Gospel of Christ from the Scriptures wherever she went.
Eventually she was brought to trial in the Guildhall. When asked if she denied that Christ was in the sacrament, she answered, ‘I believe faithfully the eternal Son of God not to dwell there’, and quoted from memory texts from Daniel 3, Acts 7 and 17 and Matthew 24. Her conclusion was, ‘I neither wish death nor yet fear his might; God have the praise thereof, with thanks’. She was put to the most excruciating torture in the Tower, but refused to deny her Lord. An enormous number of Londoners witnessed her death in July 1546, many of them sympathetic. Even today she is somewhat of a legend in the grim history of the Smithfield fires.