University of Virginia Library

Anne Ascue:
1546.

The fierce old tyrant, Henry VIII., was drawing towards his
end; bloated, diseased, unwieldy, he had lost every vestige of
those good looks which in his younger days had delighted the
eyes—of that gallant and bold activity which had awakened the
admiration—and of that bluff and jovial good humor which
had won the affections—of his people. Like a gaunt old lion he
became but the more fierce and cruel as his physical and mental
powers decayed; arose despotically barbarous in the maintenance
of his sovereign power, in proportion as he felt himself
the less capable of maintaining it.

During his long and bloody reign, on one pretence or another,
he had put to death by the block many of the brightest
ornaments of his nobility; he had half decimated his people by
the stake and the faggot, burning protestants alive for denying
the “real presence,” and hanging papists for maintaining the
supremacy of the Pope; he had sacrificed two wives to his jealousy
or his satiety by a bloody death; he had, throughout his
protracted sovereignty of seven and thirty years, showed himself
the most vicious and inhuman monster that ever sat upon a
throne: and yet—strange to say! owing to some personal qualities,
such as daring bravery, profuse expenditure, a sort of wild

and capricious generosity, and his rough and ready accessibility
to all his subjects, he had preserved to the last the regard and
even the admiration of his subjects; and is even now regarded
traditionally by the lower orders of England, as a sort of roi
bonhomme, under the sobriquet of Bluff King Hal—much as
in the neighboring kingdom of France, the Fourth Henry of
that realm has been with much more justice esteemed by his
people.

In the latter years of his reign, his violent dogmatism on
religious points and niceties of creed increased in a greater degrace
than any other of his strange and fearful inconsistencies.
Since he had taken to holding public controversies in his own
person against the wretches, who, in case of his failing to persuade
and convert them, were doomed to the horrors of a fiery
death, he had come to regard the acceptance of any creed
different from his own as a personal insult to his understanding,
and an overt act of treason against his sovereignty.

Since his mania for arguing on the subject of the real presence,
and punishing those who disputed or denied it, increased
hourly, it became actually a position of peril to be admitted to
a few minutes' conversation with the polemical king, who was
almost certain to entrap any person, whom he desired to confound,
between the horns of a dilemma from which he could
scarce hope to escape without incurring the perils of heresy or
high treason.

The mental energy and physical activity of the king had
now both failed; he was not able to take any part in the athletic
exercises which still continued down to his day—the last
expiring sparks of feudalism and chivalry, or in those bold and
stirring sports of the field, the stag hunt, cheered by the deep
chorus of the full-mouthed Southron hounds, and the blast
of the merry bugles—or the fierce brief gallop after the

long-winged falcon, striving with all its wings to outsoar the
towering ascent of the grey heron hawk; in both of which
pursuits he had taken so much delight, until the increasing corpulence
of his huge bloated frame, and the growing infirmities
of an advanced age, rendered it impossible for him to bestride
a horse, much less to follow the hawk or the greyhound by mere
fleetness of foot, as it had been his wont to do at a time when
it was not the mere flattery of cringing courtiers which proclaimed
him the best and boldest rider, the swiftest runner, and
the strongest man, of all within the limits of his kingdom.

A stroll in the beautiful gardens of Hampton Court, or on
the lordly terraces of Windsor, was now the longest excursions
of which the king, once so energetical and restlessly active, was
now capable; and in these, when he was not at the council
table, fulminating the terrors of his deathful decrees on all who
questioned his authority in sacred matters, or arguing in
person with protestants who dared question the doctrines of
the church of Rome, and with catholics who ventured to maintain
the supremacy of the head of that church, he spent many
hours daily, attended by his wife, the queen Catherine Parr,
her bevy of fair ladies in waiting, and a body of greater
and more influential courtiers.

There has been much error in the estimate usually formed
of the religious feelings or principles—for opinions or convictions
I cannot bring myself to call them—of the eighth Henry,
and of the extent and nature of the reformation which he set
on foot in England. In the end, it is true that the changes
which he set on foot did lead to the almost total extinction in
England proper of the catholic faith, and to the establishment
of what Henry would himself have called the Lutheran heresy.
But nothing is more certain than that no end was farther than
that from his desire or his contemplation. Infuriated in the

first instance by the steady and persevering opposition of Clement,
who then occupied the papal chair, to his divorce from
Catharine of Arragon, and contemplated marriage with the
beautiful Anne Boleyn; and encouraged in his rebellious sentiments,
by the unwillingness which had ever existed in the
church as well as the laity in England—fostered, probably, in
some degree, by its insular position—to submit implicitly to the
absolute authority of a foreign head, Henry had absolutely
rejected all obedience and allegiance, on his own part and on
that of his subjects, to the head of the church at Rome,
and had not only declared himself to be, but had obtained the
acknowledgment of the church of England, that he indeed
was the supreme and sole head of that church. But that
church was, it must be remembered, not what we now understand
as the church of England, but a purely and thoroughly
Romish church, differing in no respect from the continental
churches which professed the same faith, except in referring to
the English monarch, instead of to an Italian priest, the supreme
direction of its religion and care of its consciences.

It had its cardinals, its censorials, its altars and its incense,
its confessionals and its sacraments, its canons and its creed,
precisely as they existed in the Vatican: and it was no less
jealous of its authority, and severe in the punishment of its hereties,
than was the original foundation of St. Peter.

Henry, in fact, did not for an instant desire the abolition of
Catholicism, for he was probably as sincere in his own profession
of that faith, as a man of his fieree, impulsive, uncontrollable,
and sensual nature could be sincere in any religion. Nor
did he desire to destroy papacy itself—so far from it, that he
desired ardently and strove earnestly to perpetuate it, in a
divided form, making himself the Pope of England.

At an after period, he was compelled by the resistance of

the monastic bodies to secularize the possessions of the abbeys
and monasteries throughout the land, and to drive out the monks
and nuns from their time-honored residences, bestowing their
broad acres and rich tithes on lay proprietors, or on the collegiate
institutions of which he was a munificent founder and
benefactor. Still, for the most part, the dispossessed churchmen
were in some degree provided for by pensions and the
like, while all the incumbents of church preferment, all the
priests officiating at all churches, whether urban or rural, were,
of course, of the old religion.

The reformers were everywhere regarded by kings and
governments with more or less of political suspicion and distrust,
as well as of religious abhorrence; and in fact it was not
wonderful that such should be the case, for many of their
earliest and wildest sects—such as the fanatical followers of
Huss and John Zisca, and many of the Albigenses, Lollards,
and Waldenses—held to opinions utterly subversive of all
government both civil and social, affecting a levelling of all
classes and conditions, and some of them were insisting on the
abominable and disgusting tenets of Fourier and the modern
socialists in regard to sexual relations. This reason would
have been enough in itself to have steeled the heart and armed
the hand of Henry against all the true and thorough-going
reformers; as it was unquestionably in other days the cause of
his great and manly-minded daughter's unrelenting persecution
of the puritans and dissenters, whom she in truth punished as
assailants of the prerogatives of her crown, not as schismatics
beyond the pale of her church.

And indeed it is remarkable to this day, that the followers
of the Romish church are invariably the most subordinate to
discipline, and obedient to authority no less political than religious,
and that in direct proportion as sects withdraw themselves

farther and farther from that church so do they recede
from the sentiment of loyalty, and from submission to political
government. So that in almost every case the extreme dissenter
will be found the extremest dissenter.

How far this may have weighed with Henry and prompted
him to the cruel rigor with which he repressed the advance of
protestant reform, is not so directly apparent as it is in the
case of his daughter Elizabeth; but as Henry in no respect
lacked political shrewdness or foresight, though he at times
suffered his violent passions to prevail against the maxims of
sound statesmanship, and as no king ever lived who was more
jealous of his authority, there is no reason to doubt that he
clearly foresaw the parallel and contemporaneous spread of
liberal feelings in matters of church and state, of religious and
political reform. But apart from this, he had the stern and
obstinate veneration of the bigot for his own creed—a veneration
enhanced in his proud and despotical mind by the consideration
that it was his own—a consideration which led him to
regard all dissent from it as an affront in some degree personal
to himself.

Besides this, he prided himself on his learning and orthodoxy
as a theologian, on his subtilty as a polemical casuist, and
on his eloquence as a religious disputant; so that vanity, selfishness,
bigotry, and interest all urged him to the infliction of
the cruellest punishments on the wretches who differed from
the tenets of the catholic church, and held opinions at variance
to his own, especially on the question of the “real
presence.”

So far, therefore, was Henry from being a religious reformer,
or a favorer of protestantism, that the condition of the Lollard,
the protestant reformer, or the heretical disbeliever in any of
the peculiar doctrines of the Romish church, was infinitely

more perilous than that of the most violent and steadfast
catholic who held out to extremity for the supremacy of the
Pope. The latter might indeed be, and very probably was,
arraigned for high treason, brought to trial, and beheaded for
political criminality.

The former was very certain, in case of suspicion falling on
him, to be incarcerated, interrogated before the council; to be
preached at and disputed with by the king in person, to be
racked with unmerciful severity in order to extort from him
confession concerning his own belief, and the persons of his co-religionists;
and lastly, if resolute in his belief and steadfast in
refusing to abjure it, or, as it was the mode then to term it, obstinate
in his contumacy, to be burned alive at the stake, as had
been, and still were to be, so many martyrs to what they equally
believed on both sides to be the cause of conscience and truth.

Henry indeed was scarcely second in his persecution of hereties,
and his predilection for autos-da-fè, to the barbarous
and bigoted Philip of Spain, though his butcherings and
burnings were on a more limited and less general scale.
Terrible, however, they were, and atrocious, and of them no
worse or more sad example is recorded than in the instance
of the beautiful and good Anne Ascue.

There was not at that day in all England, it was said, a
lovelier being than Anne Ascue; and being highly born and
bred, closely connected with many of the chief ladies of the
court, and among others with the queen Catherine herself, she
became herself one of the brightest ornaments of that gay
circle, so that the charms, which, had she been less prominently
elevated before the eyes of men, would have only perhaps obtained
for her the honor of being the “toast of a county,” were
now talked of far and wide, and herself followed and flattered
by all the gallants of the capital, nay; but by royalty itself.

Of the very highest stature to which a woman can attain
without forfeiting one feminine attraction, Anne Ascue was at
once slenderly and voluptuously formed, her perfectly symmetrical
and rounded figure was full of every grace, whether in
repose or in motion, and its soft and undulating outlines
impressed the spectator with an idea of a perfect harmony
between the proportions of the delicate and balanced figure, and
the composed and happy soul which informed it. Her complexion
was as fair as can be imagined, and her face so pale,
that it was only at moments of the strongest emotion that even
a transient flush was seen to color it; still there was nothing of
unhealthy or livid pallor in the clear, life-like, and transparent
huelessness of those pure cheeks, while the rich sentient lips,
colored with the rose tints of the deep clove carnation, vouched
for the ruddy hue of the warm current which flowed through
her large blue veins. Her forehead was almost too high,
too solid and intellectual for that of a woman, giving at first
sight the idea of a character too grave and thoughtful,
perhaps; too self-composed and tranquilly great to condescend
to be moved by any of the small sublunary emotions, the
passing pleasures, transient sorrows, the gentle affections, the
daily cares, which make up the sun of this mortal life.
And this character was even enhanced by the long straight
dark brown eyebrows, curved into no regular symmetric
curve of beauty, but crossing the broad marble forehead with
a delicate yet decided line, full of pureness and character.
One glance, however, of the deep black fringed azure eyes,
when they were lifted to your face flashing with limpid
merry lustre, and laughing in their own clear light—one
smile from those red lips wreathing her cheeks and chin into
a score of radiant dimples—you could not doubt that you saw
in Anne Ascue,

Such indeed she was in disposition, and neither care nor
education had been spared in order to render her acquired
gifts equal to and worthy of her natural endowments. She was
not only accomplished—as we use the word of our ladies in this
latter day—in the knowledge and familiar use of modern
tongues, a beautiful and almost inspired musician, a chaste and
graceful dancer, a fearless and elegant equestrian, but she was
learned in the sense in which we speak of men, and of but few
men, too, of this age and country—though in the sixteenth century
it was by far less rare than it is in the nineteenth, to find
the blithest and most radiant ladies reading the immortal bards
of old in their original classic tongues—and Anna could read
not only Plato and the tragedians in their own dialect, redolent
of all the attic honey of Hymettus, but could follow the sages
and prophets of the Old Testament through the grand metaphors
and magnificent hyperboles, which, a part and parcel of all

oriental languages, belong to none more thoroughly than to the
noble and sonorous Hebrew.

Better for her, however, had it been, in this world at least,
had her studies been confined to the light melodies of Southern
bards; had the smooth and effeminate Italian, the gay and
gentle Provencal, or the statelier Spanish tongues been her
highest acquisition. Better had it been for her, had her companions
with whom she loved to converse, now mirthfully, now
gravely and on deeper lore, been the gay gallants of the court,
rather than the deep designing churchmen, the wily Romish
priests and cardinals, who, ever fearful of seeing yet more of
their power escaping from their clutch, were making the most
desperate efforts to establish catholicism on the broadest base;
and for that end to detect, discover, or, if needs must be, to make
heretics in the highest places, for the purpose of publicly
degrading, and as publicly destroying them. At this moment,
the catholics were extremely powerful at court, Wriothesley,
the chancellor, who had succeeded Audley, and was deeply
attached to the Romish party, never ceasing to inflame the
king, on all occasions, in season and out of season, against all
heretics and reformers, and constantly exacerbating his rancor
against them, by representing the dangers which he was incurring,
not only to the safety of his realm, but to the salvation of
his immortal soul, by overlooking in the least degree the obstinate
contumacy of these levellers of all social right, and subverters
of all authority, human or divine.

Nor did the jealousy of the cruel, old, suspicious tyrant, whose
habitual peevishness was now increased by illness, need any
farther stimulus. As he became aware that his own latter day
was approaching, it really seemed as if he feared that he should
be deprived of the privilege of shedding a due quantity of blood
before his own demise; as if he dreaded that any victim should

escape his rancor. His own queen Catharine, whose sweet,
gentle temper, moderate and circumspect life, united to an extraordinary
degree of tact, talent, and insight into her husband's
character, had enabled her to retain his esteem and affections
for so many years, now fell under his suspicions. It was his
favorite habit to converse on points of theology; and Catharine,
whose good sense enabled her to converse well on all subjects,
fell in some degree into the snare, and being secretly inclined
to the doctrines of the reformers, suffered him to discover too
much of her mind on the subject. Henry consulted Gardiner
and Wriothesly, and both of them encouraging, nay, urging
him to extreme measures, he ordered articles of impeachment to
be drawn against her. Her fate was quivering in the balance;
a hair would have turned the scales. For though she, with
rare tact and ingenuity, represented that in her conversations
with the king she had only feigned to differ from him, in order
to have the pleasure of being conquered by his eloquence, and
instructed by his superior erudition, the old savage still doubted;
and on one occasion is said to have exclaimed, in reply to her
defence—“Not so! by St. Mary! Not so! you are now become
a doctor, Kate, and better fitted to give than receive instruction.”
Had he continued in that mood many hours, the head
of Catharine Parr had rolled on the same scaffold with that of
the gentle Anna Boleyn, that of the shameless Catharine Howard;
she was saved, but saved only by vicarious blood—by
the agonies and death of a most pure and spotless victim.

For at this time charges were brought against Anne Ascue,
the friend and maid of honor of the queen, that she dogmatized
in secret on the most delicate questions of doctrine, and more
especially that she denied the “real presence.”

At first she openly avowed her opinions, which scarcely, it
would seem, amounted to such a degree of dissent as the Inquisition

itself would pronounce heresy. Henry, however, was furious
that a woman's weakness should dare to dispute on points
of reason with his manly understanding, and resolved that no
indulgence should be shown to her; and Henry's ministers,
hopeful that if put to the rack she would accuse other great
ladies, and perhaps the queen herself, whose friend and confidante
she was known to be, determined that whatever was to be
the end, she should not escape the horrors of the question.

She was prevailed upon indeed by Bonner to make a seeming
recantation, but it was either in reality insufficient, or it was
determined to consider none that she could make as satisfactory.
She was cast into prison, where she spent her time in
fortifying her mind by prayers and religious exercises to endure
the horrible extremities which, as she now perceived, too certainly
awaited her. She even wrote to the king, and told him
“that as to the Lord's supper, she believed as much as Christ
himself had said of it, and as much of his divine doctrine as the
church itself required.” Still, as she refused her assent to
Henry's polemical explanations and interpositions of authority,
she was sentenced, as she had expected, to be burned alive at
the stake as an heretic.

But even this extremity failed to shake her; she prayed fervently
for power from heaven to endure her agonies with equanimity,
and for pardon upon those who for no cause had consigned
her to a fate so barbarous.

But even the little remnant of her life was not to be permitted
to elapse without an aggravation of cruelty and horrors.
Wriothesly, the chancellor, was sent to interrogate her, as to
the religious tenets of the great ladies in correspondence with
her, and above all of the queen herself—but Anne, although
she knew all, and was promised a free pardon if she would
make disclosures, endured the extremity of the rack even

until all the joints of her body were entirely dislocated, in profound
and resolute silence. Then, horror of horrors! when she
would make no confession, the chancellor commanded and
reiterated his commands, to increase the tension of the rack yet
further, and when the lieutenant of the Tower still refused, that
truculent minister put his own hand to the wheel, and almost
tore her body in twain. Still no confession followed; and reluctantly
they left her for execution on the morrow.

And now the last day had arrived; the fatal morn had
broken in the east, and Anne awoke from the disturbed and
fitful slumbers which had not sufficed to render her unconscious
of the tortures which she endured throughout every portion of
her rent and dislocated frame—awoke only to the knowledge
that these tortures were to be ended, within a few short hours,
by a death the most agonizing that the human imagination can
conceive, or human fortitude endure.

Serene and quiet to the last, she baffled all the malice of her
enemies by her gentle and uncomplaining fortitude, and by the
unexampled constancy with which she had borne all agonies of
the rack without a word of confession, by the saint-like tranquillity
with which she looked forward to her release through
the medium of the last anguish.

The fatal moment arrived, and, unable to stand erect, even
when chained to the stake, so thoroughly wrenched asunder
were all her joints, she was carried in a chair to the stake, and
so endured her appalling doom.

Three others perished with her for the same crime, and by
the same awful death—Nicholas Bellerian, a priest, and two
others of humbler station, but all with the same constancy, all
with the same confidence of receiving the reward of martyrdom
in a crown of everlasting and immortal glory.

One trial more awaited them—for when they were already

bound to the stake; with the torches already kindled around
them, a free pardon was offered to them on condition of their
recantation. But not one of the number faltered, or flinched
from the horrid ordeal. Silent and serene they looked on as
the executioners kindled the pile which was to consume them,
and without a groan or shriek they endured that last worst torment.
The flames soared up to the abhorrent and indignant
heavens, and bore upwards on their raging volumes four souls,
acceptable to their Creator.

Never was there a more unjust or pitiable doom, never a
nobler or more constant example of courage in a holy cause of
fidelity in the last extremity, than was seen in the fate, and
shown in the conduct of young, beautiful, and true Anne
Ascue.

She died for her religion and her queen; but the memory of
her shall be green and fresh for ever in the hearts of men, when
that of the mistress to save whom she perished shall be forgotten,
and that of the cruel bigot who condemned her shall be
detested in all lands, and through all ages. Honor eternal to
Anne Ascue!