Out Of Joint - Anne Askew

1521–46

There are certain times of history that just seem, as Shakespeare put it, “out of joint.” The sixteenth century in England was one of those times. Christians were fighting, torturing, and killing other Christians. The young preacher-poet Anne Askew lived and died in that world, an imperfect victim of a culture that had gone, well, askew.

Well educated, especially in the Bible, Anne Askew was committed to the Protestant cause. At age fifteen, she was married off to a husband she didn’t want. (Her older sister had been engaged to him but died before the wedding. Anne took her place.) The marriage was a mess from the start. Anne wouldn’t take her husband’s name, wouldn’t assume his Catholic religion, and left the home to go “gospelling” (preaching) in London.

Anne’s evangelical views—particularly on the symbolic nature of Communion—were suddenly out of favor with English authorities. (King Henry was trying to make nice with the Catholic powers of Europe; evangelical reform was discouraged.) So Anne was arrested, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and tortured on the rack. Her tormentors tried to get her to rat out the ringleaders of the evangelical cause, but this stubborn young woman wouldn’t give in. She was burned at the stake on July 16, 1546—her body so broken from the rack, they had to tie a chair to the stake.

While in prison, Anne wrote a ballad that you can still find in poetic anthologies:

Like as the armed knight

Appointed to the field,

With this world will I fight,

And faith shall be my shield.

In her closing stanzas, she imagines God’s judgment on her tormentors but then adopts a Christlike attitude:

Yet Lord, I thee desire,

For that they do to me,

Let them not taste the hire

Of their iniquity.

Our world is still “out of joint.” Often it’s hard for us to do the right thing. But with faith as our shield, we can let the love of Jesus guide us.

Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.

Luke 23:34