Vulgar History - How To Lose A Queen In Nine Days, part 4： Anne Askew

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Vulgar History Season 3. My name is Anne Foster and this is a feminist 1.00

00:00:19.940 women's comedy history podcast. I might have said those words in a different order, but

00:00:24.840 the meaning is still there. This is where we look at women from history, often lesser known women 0.97

00:00:31.340 from history, and often, especially this season, women from English history. So this season is

00:00:40.120 titled How to Lose a Queen in Nine Days, and we're inching closer and closer to Lady Jane Grey,

00:00:47.000 because I guess the subtitle for the season is The Lady Jane Grey Situation. So we're looking at

00:00:53.440 nine women one of whom is jane who is technically a girl and looking at how just what the world was

00:01:01.080 like and what led up to her weird nine-day reign and then what the aftermath was after that

00:01:07.260 and part of this whole saga and we've touched on this especially in the last couple episodes is

00:01:14.020 the whole protestant thing so i want to give a gigantic caveat that this is a women's history

00:01:22.200 podcast it's a social history so we're really looking at the personalities of the people

00:01:28.160 theorizing what their psychology was what they were thinking really sitting there

00:01:33.420 with them this is not a theology podcast so i'm not going to focus a lot on the details

00:01:41.700 of religious beliefs of the people in this and i'm mentioning that especially now because today

00:01:48.400 we are looking at protestant martyr and ask you who i just said she was a martyr so guess what

00:01:56.940 she's going to be killed for her beliefs so religion is a huge part of her whole situation

00:02:03.300 but i'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty what specifically she believed but we'll talk

00:02:09.280 about it i think hopefully enough that you can understand the trajectory of her story but my

00:02:12.980 angle on this is not the specifics of the religion it's going to be more on her and what her life was

00:02:19.860 like and the choices that she made although that being said i do want to just mention that for all

00:02:26.120 of the religious battles were going on during this era which is the mid 1500s in england it was

00:02:35.560 partially obviously about religious beliefs and religious freedom and that sort of thing but it

00:02:42.720 also about power and control and who got to be in charge of what and really struggling to retain

00:02:50.380 the status quo which was a very hierarchical system where there were we're still in an era

00:02:56.540 where the people in charge of the churches especially now that henry the eighth removed

00:03:01.900 the pope from the equation he was enriched by the churches so it's not like religion in this time

00:03:07.940 and place was squeaky clean in general. The people who had different religious agendas also had their

00:03:14.940 own schemes they were doing. But that's not who we're looking at today. We're looking at someone

00:03:18.020 whose religious belief was actually quite straightforward. And that is a woman who's

00:03:22.240 named Ann Askew. Now her last name is spelled A-S-K-E-W, like the word askew. But I asked on

00:03:32.100 Twitter and two people both said they think it's pronounced ask you. And I think that's how I've

00:03:38.080 heard other people with that as a surname pronounced their surname. That being said,

00:03:42.420 there's no recordings of people from the mid 1500s. And who knows how they pronounce things,

00:03:47.920 they wrote things really chaotically, just like making up spellings of everyone's name constantly.

00:03:52.780 So we're going with Anne Askew. It might be Anne Askew, but that's a pronunciation choice

00:04:00.580 I have made for today. So Anne Askew was born in, you know, the same old thing. She was born in

00:04:10.880 either 1520 or 1521. People kind of didn't care about birthdays back then. She was the middle

00:04:16.600 child of a family of land owners and here's the thing about her unlike most women of her era and

00:04:24.780 frankly most men most people of this time she was the author of a book outlining her first person

00:04:32.500 account of life in Tudor England so instead of just being like well this one ambassador said that

00:04:37.440 she looked like this or 20 years later somebody saying like I'm pretty sure she meant this when

00:04:43.540 she was talking to me she actually left effectively a memoir so this is a lot of her own

00:04:50.960 her own words her own explanation of what her life was like so that's new and thrilling for

00:04:58.860 this podcast so her life was anything but ordinary but the fact that she even created a book just

00:05:05.880 allows us a fuller understanding of her life than even what could be gleaned about many of the queens

00:05:11.640 and princesses living at the same time and the fact that she wrote it down shows kind of what a

00:05:16.720 sort of person she was she's someone who wanted this to be seen and read and known about so she

00:05:22.920 was born again 1520 or 1521 and her life as so many in the season of this podcast ran sort of

00:05:31.040 parallel to that of Henry VIII's six marriages so she was born about midway through Henry VIII's

00:05:38.360 first marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and Askew was married around the same time that Henry VIII

00:05:43.380 married his third wife, and she died when he was married to his sixth wife. So her life was spent

00:05:51.360 during a time of enormous religious upheaval, and she was, and that all kind of started when

00:05:57.820 she was 10 years old, and Henry VIII switched the national faith from Catholic to the Church

00:06:04.120 of England. So quick religious history aside. Anglicanism, aka Episcopalianism, aka the Church

00:06:12.500 of England, diverges from the Catholic Church in a few key ways, most notably on the issue of

00:06:18.340 transubstantiation. What is transubstantiation? This is the belief that bread and wine turn into

00:06:25.340 the body and blood of Christ during church services. Catholics believe in it, and Anglicans

00:06:31.160 do not. Anne Askew was a believer in a kind of, so this is the Church of England. So the Church

00:06:39.380 of England, especially at the beginning, especially under Henry VIII, was really similar

00:06:43.680 to Catholicism in the sense of, I talked about this in one of the previous episodes, but there's

00:06:50.020 still, you know, a priest in robe. Mass was, I think, still said in Latin. They had a lot of

00:06:58.260 fancy elegant ornate decorations up around the church like it was made to look really

00:07:05.060 luxe and really wealthy versus there was a whole bunch of other protestant religions coming up

00:07:13.080 for instance martin luther believed in a similar sort of protestantism to what anne askew

00:07:18.700 was about so he and she not that they knew each other but they did not believe in transubstantiation

00:07:24.500 she also did not believe in the hierarchy of the church with even with no pope she didn't believe

00:07:30.460 in like bishops and priests and that there should be any people between you and your relationship

00:07:37.960 with god and the bible purgatory is another thing that she and other protestant people didn't

00:07:45.000 believe in purgatory is the place between heaven and hell and she did not believe in the excesses

00:07:52.600 of either catholicism or anglicanism so all of the you know expensive shoes and like velvet curtains

00:07:59.840 and gold stained glass windows and stuff she just thought church should be in a plain white room

00:08:06.880 with no decorations and it should be all about one person and their relationship to to their faith

00:08:14.740 so part of that is that you would read the bible yourself because the whole thing about church

00:08:19.760 mass being said in latin is not everybody knew latin so you had to go through a priest to be

00:08:24.620 able to even hear parts of the bible but she wanted it to be in english so people could read

00:08:30.240 it themselves and come to their own decisions and this approach you can imagine would challenge the

00:08:37.020 strict hierarchy of the catholic and anglican ministers and priests etc because that challenged

00:08:44.700 their whole power if nobody had to go through them so she was faith her faith was one in which

00:08:50.140 people were encouraged to develop their own personal relationship with god when not supervised

00:08:54.620 or restricted by clergy or ministers and that the written word of the bible was the only law they

00:09:00.240 should follow so that's just a little background background information for what's going to happen

00:09:07.840 later. So Anne Askew was well-educated for this era in general and for a girl also. She got access 1.00

00:09:16.700 to more education than most would have. She was extremely intelligent and scholarly, not unlike

00:09:24.440 the two Catherines who we looked at in the last two podcasts. She had older brothers who studied

00:09:30.280 at Cambridge University. It was likely partly their influence which instigated within her a

00:09:36.480 lifelong curiosity about religion. So just picture family, everybody breaking bread around

00:09:42.460 the table and just having these debates and discussions about very intellectual debates

00:09:48.000 about religion and faith. So Anne spent much of her time considering and memorizing the Bible

00:09:54.200 and her religious faith was of paramount importance to her. She was one of several

00:09:59.520 siblings and half-siblings raised together, including an older sister named Martha.

00:10:04.420 side note that's the first Martha I can recall coming across in any of these stories I'm always

00:10:10.620 excited when someone's called something different when Anne was about 15 years old Martha died

00:10:17.340 I'm not sure what but there's lots of gruesome diseases going around at that time and because

00:10:22.680 Martha died Anne inherited her sister's betrothal so Martha was supposed to marry this man named

00:10:27.400 thomas kyme k-y-m-e but when martha died and was the younger sister and surprise you get to marry

00:10:34.780 this guy because the whole marriage being a way to join two families and fortunes together etc

00:10:39.720 so ann askew did not like this she did not want this but despite her strong will and fiercely

00:10:47.680 independent spirit she was still a teenage girl in the 16th century and she wasn't able to avoid

00:10:53.000 this marriage although she did try apparently her father had to physically force her into

00:10:58.500 consenting to the match so like literally carry her there or that sort of thing the pairing between

00:11:04.940 ann and thomas was troubled from the start because thomas kyle was a devoted catholic

00:11:11.620 and she was very much not and thomas was also from the sort of traditional

00:11:16.300 women should be seen and not heard school of thought so and very independent nature 0.99

00:11:25.760 e.g. she didn't want to change her last name to his in the 1500s she was like she knew what she 1.00

00:11:33.360 wanted and she was not afraid to say it so in the midst of this unhappy marriage English law

00:11:40.580 change regarding what types of religious practices were permitted. From 1538 till 1543, roughly the

00:11:47.500 entire period of Anne's marriage to Thomas Keim, it was permitted for English subjects to read the

00:11:52.460 Bible on their own and to attend Bible studies. During this period, newer sects of Protestantism,

00:11:58.900 like the one that Anne followed, began to flourish around England. But in 1543, the law was changed

00:12:05.420 so that no women or men below the rank of gentlemen were permitted to read the Bible

00:12:10.080 on their own because you know they might come up with their own thoughts rather than its intended

00:12:16.760 effect of discouraging evangelical practices and i just want to clarify too the term here

00:12:21.900 actually let me just look this up the term evangelical has certain connotations

00:12:29.140 in the year 2020 that are different from the connotations

00:12:35.840 that i was so the term evangelical derives from the greek word evangelion meaning gospel or good

00:12:44.580 news technically speaking evangelical refers to a person church or organization that is committed

00:12:49.220 to the christian gospel message that jesus christ is the savior of humanity so here's from

00:12:55.980 the atlantic so the thing about evangelicals is that there's not a single authority like the

00:13:03.220 roman catholic pope or the mormons have a first president um so there's not someone in charge of

00:13:09.500 evangelicals there's all kinds of denominations churches and organizations

00:13:13.440 so in the 1500s martin luther used the latinized form of the word evangelium to describe the

00:13:23.180 non-catholic churches birthed by the protestant reformation so it was just it was sort of like

00:13:30.360 probably the way that i'm using protestant potentially incorrectly is what they meant

00:13:34.460 by evangelical but it meant somebody for whom religion was a really personal thing

00:13:39.200 is very important to them and they didn't go through any higher authority other than god

00:13:44.980 for it so there's a lot change so the people wouldn't be able to read the bible themselves

00:13:49.340 except for rich men because they wanted to stop all of these little protestant sects from

00:13:55.080 popping up and ask you felt moved when this happened so remember she'd spent her whole life

00:14:02.720 reading and memorizing the bible so she had the whole bible memorized and so she decided that she

00:14:08.280 it was now her job if other people weren't allowed to read it that she would recite passages to other

00:14:14.380 people who weren't allowed to read the bible on their own because of this her awful husband

00:14:21.120 Thomas Keim kicked her out of their house because he they didn't get along anyway but this was to

00:14:29.640 him such a horrible thing for her to be doing and then Anne Askew became the first woman to petition 0.86

00:14:36.240 for divorce on scriptural grounds basing her request on bible passages which you know she

00:14:41.200 had memorized which she felt dictated that women married to godless men should leave them and that's

00:14:46.800 kind of the other thing about her approach to religion slash the bible is that it was also

00:14:51.380 saying like the only laws that I need to obey are the ones literally in the bible and she's like and 0.98

00:14:56.420 the bible says this so therefore here we go in order to get this divorce she first brought her 0.89

00:15:01.980 request to her local court but they refused her probably because divorce just wasn't a thing

00:15:10.100 at the time so she was like no big deal i'll just go to london and plead my case to literally henry

00:15:17.620 the eighth now well henry the eighth is now these days often thought of as having divorced three of

00:15:24.200 his wives in fact his marriages to catherine of aragon and boleyn and anne of cleves had all

00:15:29.200 ended in annulment not actually divorce so divorce was just kind of not a thing anyone did

00:15:35.920 But still, Anne Askew is like, guess what?

00:15:38.500 I know what the Bible means, I have it all memorized,

00:15:40.940 and I'm pretty sure I can convince him to let me divorce my husband, who is awful.

00:15:45.420 And if you're like, well, how can she just go see the king?

00:15:48.520 Here's the thing.

00:15:49.340 So she's able to book an appointment to see the king

00:15:51.980 because her family had numerous connections to royal court.

00:15:56.180 Her father, William Askew, was a gentleman of the royal court.

00:16:00.080 And actually, fun fact, her father had been a member of the jury

00:16:03.740 who had convicted Anne Boleyn's alleged lovers of treason and adultery a few years before.

00:16:10.780 One of her brothers was the king's cup bearer, and another of her brothers was a gentleman of

00:16:15.740 the king's privy chambers. The Askew family was high up there in terms of people who Henry VIII

00:16:20.840 was interacting with. So the combination of all of these men were able to get Anne's name put on

00:16:26.760 a list of appointments, and she headed over to the royal court to plead her case. Unfortunately,

00:16:33.060 perhaps not surprisingly to us,

00:16:35.240 Henry VIII did not agree with her interpretation of the Bible

00:16:37.980 and would not grant her dispensation to divorce her husband.

00:16:42.200 In fact, her religious fervor and her passion and enthusiasm

00:16:46.280 about evangelical-style religion was so obvious,

00:16:50.660 and this was sort of a threat to the king slash the government.

00:16:55.080 That's why they had passed that law about not being allowed to read the Bible.

00:16:59.220 So Henry VIII assigned a spy to follow her.

00:17:02.300 and report back to him if he saw her doing any heresy and Anne Eskew was like you know what I'm

00:17:09.120 just going to stay in London and not go back to my awful husband because this is where I feel like

00:17:14.340 God wants me to be which made it even easier for the spy to keep an eye on her because that was a

00:17:18.460 super crowded place where he could blend into the background what the spy would have seen was Anne

00:17:24.560 who at this point was just 21 years old who spent hours each day in prayer and she became quickly

00:17:31.760 popular among the protestant scholars of the time she's friendly with several high profile

00:17:37.240 protestants all men some of whom were connected to henry the eighth's wife katherine parr who

00:17:43.640 talked about last time who we know had sympathies for the protestant evangelical movement so she

00:17:50.600 was just it's like her childhood writ large just getting to hang out preach debate scripture with

00:17:57.880 other people. She was just preaching on the streets by day, debating biblical philosophy by

00:18:03.080 night. As she was young and beautiful and charismatic, she became popular as a gospel-er,

00:18:09.840 a street preacher. She was apparently just as comfortable preaching to peasants as to the 0.88

00:18:14.640 nobility, because she had those connections. Her family was rich-ish, so she'd be comfortable 0.55

00:18:20.380 there, but she was comfortable with other people too. Clearly, she had found her life's calling,

00:18:25.480 but this was a dangerous thing to be doing in london in the middle of religious tension when

00:18:31.000 the king has sent a spy to watch you so by june 1545 anne askew was among a group of protestants

00:18:39.160 arrested for heresy they were released due to lack of evidence and witnesses but then she was caught

00:18:45.320 up in a raid again one year later in march 1546 she was questioned for hours by a man named edmund

00:18:52.340 Bonner, whose nickname was Bloody Bonner, because he was known for his ruthless persecution and

00:18:58.460 questioning of suspected heretics. And knowing what we do about Anne's personality, her outspokenness,

00:19:05.700 her faith, her knowledge of the Bible, it's easy to understand how this questioning wound up taking

00:19:10.280 hours and hours, because she liked to talk, and she could talk, and she loved debating.

00:19:16.540 So she was held in prison for 12 days and then released, but with a catch.

00:19:19.860 she was sent back to live with her husband who she hadn't seen in a year she'd been living in

00:19:25.060 london she had to go back to the countryside away from all the people who she wanted to

00:19:29.180 preach to um and this was not what she wanted to do so i think you know her well enough to know

00:19:35.300 that she refused and instead she stayed for a short time with one of her brothers outside the

00:19:39.740 city before sneaking back into london to do some more gospel work by this time the climate was now

00:19:47.280 even more fraught for protestants and this was because this is where we overlap with last week

00:19:53.260 a little bit some of the king's top officials were obsessed with proving that katherine parr

00:19:58.200 the king's sixth wife was secretly a heretic as well because they didn't like her katherine

00:20:03.520 had put a target on her back prior to even being married to henry when she had criticized

00:20:09.140 legislation that said people couldn't study the bible so that had people thinking like oh who's

00:20:16.080 woman who says what she thinks and what she thinks is evangelical protestantism so in opposition to 0.86

00:20:23.380 this law the law that people can study the bible on their own katherine parr had hosted bible study

00:20:29.440 groups with her ladies-in-waiting aka the renaissance reformation girl squad and at some

00:20:35.780 of these meetings they invited evangelical preachers to speak for them these facts were

00:20:41.780 known. People knew that Catherine Parr had done all these things, but it wasn't enough to arrest

00:20:46.200 literally the queen at this point. But the queen had enemies and they wanted to bring her down. 0.98

00:20:53.360 So they enacted a plan to arrest sort of low level, less important Protestants and torture

00:20:59.900 them until they confessed that they were in league with Catherine Parr and that Catherine

00:21:04.180 Parr was secretly a Protestant. Now, why were the Protestants seen as such a threat? It was

00:21:10.260 effectively, again, this is not theology podcast, the evangelical faith was predicated on everyone

00:21:18.100 having a personal relationship with God. No middleman like a priest or a bishop was needed

00:21:22.720 to interpret the text of the Bible. Everyone could look to their own heart and to the Bible

00:21:26.760 to learn how to live. This meant that if that was your belief, then you might not be respecting

00:21:34.420 or following the instructions from powerful government and church officials.

00:21:39.460 And that made them, this whole group, all these people who believe this way,

00:21:43.880 a threat to society in general.

00:21:46.300 And so it was that Anne Askew was arrested for a third time, 0.98

00:21:50.840 again, part of a larger group of evangelical Protestants

00:21:55.780 who were arrested on the king's orders.

00:21:58.540 The thing is that among her many professional acquaintances,

00:22:01.780 Anne had had some dealings with Catherine Willoughby

00:22:05.280 one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting

00:22:07.940 who we talked about a couple episodes ago

00:22:09.960 and Catherine Willoughby was a major supporter

00:22:13.340 and benefactor of the evangelical movement

00:22:15.620 and Catherine Willoughby was good friends with Catherine Parr 0.99

00:22:19.220 and so they were hoping by arresting Anne Askew

00:22:23.220 that she would say yes

00:22:24.380 I had dealings with Catherine Willoughby

00:22:26.380 and Queen Catherine Parr 1.00

00:22:27.820 so they could then arrest those other richer women 1.00

00:22:31.720 So they hoped, that's what they hoped, that Anne Eskew would reveal the queen's secret religious practices in order to save her own life.

00:22:38.060 But guess what? Anne Eskew was not going to do that because this was her life's work. 0.52

00:22:45.900 She wasn't going to sacrifice that.

00:22:48.160 She wasn't going to name names.

00:22:50.340 She wasn't going to put anybody else in danger.

00:22:52.540 So first they tried flattering her, acting like her friend.

00:22:56.400 When that didn't work, they tried to change her mind about transubstantiation.

00:22:59.880 but she would not have her mind changed so finally the lieutenant of the tower of london was instructed

00:23:05.400 to torture her in hopes that she would name catherine power or catherine willoughby or other

00:23:09.880 prominent women as secret protestants but the thing is that this is unprecedented before or since

00:23:17.000 because at the time it was illegal to torture a woman and other than anne askew no woman was

00:23:24.100 recorded before or since of having been physically tortured so the illegality of the request caused

00:23:31.160 the lieutenant to refuse the instruction let me see so someone the king not sure anyway somebody

00:23:38.260 higher up instructed the lieutenant of the tower of london to torture her the lieutenant of the

00:23:42.520 tower of london was like no sorry that's illegal but and then he left and in his absence other

00:23:49.880 Other people, other Tower of London staff members, took on this task. 0.75

00:23:55.180 They subjected Anne to torture on the rack, which is where you stretch the human body past the point it can actually be stretched.

00:24:04.440 The lieutenant petitioned the king to put an end to the torture, but they didn't get the instruction that they were allowed to stop it until after Anne had already been subjected to a lengthy amount of suffering on the rack.

00:24:16.280 she fainted from the pain, was revived, and continued to be questioned, but she would not

00:24:20.940 name names. These are some of the writings herself from Anne in her book, her memoir,

00:24:27.680 The Examinations of Anne Askew. Quote, After that, I sat two long hours arguing with the

00:24:33.580 Lord Chancellor upon the bare floor. With many flattering words, he tried to persuade me to

00:24:38.100 leave my opinion. I said that I would rather die than break my faith. Her time on the rack,

00:24:44.020 the torture had dislocated ann's shoulders hips elbows and knees and following the torture she

00:24:49.720 lay on the bare floor as the inquisitors continued to pressure her to name names and or confess to

00:24:55.120 her own heresy when an order came from the king to stop the torture and return her to jail

00:25:00.700 ann was sent to a private house to recover from her injuries and offered yet another opportunity

00:25:06.080 to confess because the thing is they didn't want to they didn't want to torture her they

00:25:10.100 didn't want to execute her they just wanted her to name names so they could arrest the queen

00:25:13.340 but after refusing yet again she was transferred to newgate prison to await execution it was at

00:25:21.180 this time that she set to work on the writings that would form her book examinations from which

00:25:25.760 we now know these details of her torture so her execution date was set for july 16th 1546 still

00:25:34.780 too injured to walk on her own and the crime that she was being executed for was i do believe

00:25:40.820 just heresy for doing things against the law like reading the bible and telling it to people 0.55

00:25:48.340 so still too injured to walk on her own with every movement of her broken body causing her severe

00:25:53.760 pain and was carried in a chair to the stake at which she was to be burned which is just so

00:25:59.300 gruesome in another accommodation to her injuries rather than having to stand she was chained to

00:26:05.120 another special chair that had been a fix there for her to sit on one of the bishops delivered

00:26:10.540 a speech encouraging her and the other people being executed for heresy to repent and save

00:26:16.480 themselves but at this point none of them took him up on the offer like no one was they're well

00:26:20.840 past the point of any of them changing their mind in fact anne is said to have paid close attention

00:26:25.880 to his speech and responded audibly when she agreed with what he had to say as well as when

00:26:31.020 she disagreed because she was a person who liked to talk and share her opinions sort of luckily for

00:26:39.860 her someone who supported her before they had been brought out to burn someone had secretly

00:26:45.560 thrown gunpowder onto the wood being used for the burning which caused an explosion which made her

00:26:50.840 die faster than slowly burning to death apparently the skies clouded over at the moment of her and

00:26:57.140 the other, prisoners' deaths, which some people took as a sign that this martyrdom had displeased

00:27:03.380 God. And almost immediately, so Anne Askew, who died age 25, became revered among many Protestants

00:27:10.640 as a martyr to the faith, the evangelical faith. Her writings were published quickly after her

00:27:16.100 death. So that's the book, The Examinations of Anne Askew, which lent her even more fame.

00:27:21.780 this book is still available today in various forms and it not only details her experiences

00:27:27.440 in prison and being tortured but also describes her opinions about women in society and expands

00:27:32.460 upon her religious convictions anne askew is remembered for her bravery in the face of

00:27:38.360 religious persecution her devotion to her faith her independence and for her strength

00:27:42.260 in standing apart from what was expected of women in her society through her writings we gained

00:27:48.800 fascinating and important details about the daily lives of women in Tudor England, as well as a hint

00:27:53.520 of the great things she may have achieved had her life not been cut short. The sources I used,

00:28:00.860 I meant to say this earlier on, but I didn't, but I got information about Anne Eskew from

00:28:05.780 a website called Spartacus Educational, from the Anne Boleyn files, from the Dangerous Women

00:28:12.380 project and from an ebook version of her book the examinations of anne askew there's a book called

00:28:20.040 the queen and the heretic subtitle how two women change the religion of england by derrick wilson

00:28:26.560 and it's a dual biography of queen katherine parr and of anne askew which if you want to learn more

00:28:34.380 about this whole story and situation and where this ties into the season's overall theme of the

00:28:41.380 lady jane gray of it all so she and askew died in 1546 which at which point lady jane gray was

00:28:50.680 11 years old and just a few years away from her weird nine-day queen scenario that we're going 0.99

00:28:56.540 to get to lady jane gray was for a time lived in the household of catherine parr probably would

00:29:04.520 have met catherine willoughby and she would have known at this point about and ask you who as as i

00:29:11.060 said a few minutes ago, like instantaneously became a revered Protestant martyr and saint.

00:29:17.060 And when we get to Jane Gray and her personality and her behavior and how she handled herself

00:29:22.460 after she was arrested, I think the influence and seeing Anne Askew as a role model seems

00:29:29.320 kind of quite plausible for her.

00:29:33.620 And now it's time, this is a weird one, the scandalous scale for Anne Askew now.

00:29:40.180 so as i think i reframed this last time as well so for other people's

00:29:47.100 scandalousness we're looking at did they murder somebody did they perpetuate a jewel heist like

00:29:54.860 what's the juiciness of the scandals in which they were caught up in and often i'm thinking

00:29:58.900 of that as like to me like what seems exciting to me but for ann askew and for some of the other

00:30:04.320 people this season i think we need to also consider how scandalous was this to everybody

00:30:08.500 else at the time and at the time the fact that she petitioned her own husband for divorce was

00:30:15.340 super scandalous the fact that she memorized the bible and then would tell it to people because

00:30:22.360 it was illegal for the people to read it super scandalous like she was arrested and burned at

00:30:29.040 the stake slash exploded for all this these actions like these were super scandalous things

00:30:34.000 to people in the era and time in which she was living and she would have known that these things

00:30:39.320 were scandalous and she still did it because that was her commitment to her beliefs so i am

00:30:45.060 gonna give her with all that in mind i'm gonna give her an eight for scandalousness seems high

00:30:52.280 but remember she was killed for this so it's really scandalous to the people who disagreed

00:31:00.160 with her in terms of scheminess so again we're not thinking about like how is she at putting

00:31:05.800 together this murder plot or this jewel theft or whatever this is just kind of about how much did

00:31:11.900 she take control of her own life and actions and come up with plans and do them now what we know

00:31:18.340 about her is that she came up with the method to hopefully divorce her husband she decided to go

00:31:24.500 would talk to the to the king about it she seemed to have helped arrange her own meeting with him

00:31:31.440 and then probably just a hundred little schemes of meeting up with the the reformation renaissance 0.99

00:31:37.180 girl squad and other groups you know book clubs and things to talk about religious matters like 0.81

00:31:42.160 she would have had to outsmart a spy like i'm sure there's scheminess we just don't know what 0.98

00:31:46.360 the schemes were and since we don't know what the schemes were and i don't know like would a schemier

00:31:52.660 person have broken out of jail anyway I'm gonna give her a six for scheminess because certainly

00:31:59.300 she had plans and she saw them through but it's not we just don't have a lot of examples for her

00:32:04.840 her significance this is another interesting one because her significance to for instance

00:32:10.780 well I mean the title of that book like how her life and death really helped develop the

00:32:18.900 evangelical faith um how it sort of kept kept that going how it gave hope to other people

00:32:27.240 how lady jane gray followed her example and then even just being a woman who wrote these memoirs

00:32:33.900 so her significance just as a person who wrote this first person narrative about her life that's

00:32:39.000 significant this is i'm giving her a seven for significance but these are like the reasons are

00:32:44.840 so different from why i give people scores like this in other contexts the sexism bonus so 0.95

00:32:52.120 it sucks that she had to marry this catholic douchebag because her sister died and she like 0.99

00:33:00.840 inherited the betrothal that's some bullshit otherwise i mean there's like the regular 1.00

00:33:07.100 bullshit she had to put up with obviously but it wasn't like the main thing about her that 0.99

00:33:15.360 sort of defines her life is her faith and her religion and that was sort of outside of her 0.99

00:33:20.800 her sex I think so I think of five for sexism and I forgot to mention this when I was talking about

00:33:31.600 her so i'll talk about it just quickly while i'm adding these up but apparently when she was married

00:33:37.960 to thomas they had some children but then you just stop hearing about the children so presumably they

00:33:44.980 like so many children and so many of these stories died at some sort of young age and she was just 20

00:33:51.560 when she when they broke up and she tried to leave him so i'm not sure at what point the children

00:33:57.520 died but that sort of gets bypassed by people like even me just now looking at at her whole

00:34:07.320 life but i think that's probably a crucial part of her whole story there's this misconception

00:34:12.640 that because a lot of children died young because of lack of health care and medicine and

00:34:21.720 understanding of science people had a lot of children in this era and lots of historical

00:34:29.240 eras people just had a lot of children because partially because they knew that there was a

00:34:34.700 high child mortality rate and they wanted to make sure that some children would survive

00:34:38.340 but that doesn't mean that when the children died that people were like okay there goes another one

00:34:42.960 whatever we have 10 other kids that's fine like that was still devastating to somebody to lose a

00:34:50.440 child. It's my metaphor will be like, if I was walking down the street and somebody punched me

00:34:56.180 in the stomach, that would hurt. And if I walked down the street further and someone else punched

00:35:00.580 me in the stomach, like that would also hurt. And if someone punched me in the stomach, like

00:35:03.560 every time they punched me in the stomach, that would hurt, even though it had happened to me

00:35:07.700 before. So I do think that perhaps part of the reason why she was so strong and so assured in

00:35:18.940 her faith was maybe because that had helped see her through well this unhappy marriage situation

00:35:25.900 and then also through the death of her children that's my theory so her total is 26

00:35:34.060 which so she's the 19th person on the scandalous scale so it's really expansive the scandalous

00:35:42.720 the scale so she's one point above katherine willoughby actually and towards the bottom

00:35:49.660 she's fifth from the bottom but i mean again like we're looking at different things and her

00:35:53.780 the people who are the top of the scale are just people who have top marks in every category and

00:35:58.040 she had high marks in scandalousness um and even in the significance but the other ones were less

00:36:03.140 so but it's not a competition it's just kind of seeing just a nice way to wrap things up and see 0.82

00:36:08.080 how everybody compares if we measured her on four different things she would have been higher i i

00:36:13.980 always feel like apologizing to people when their scores aren't high on the scandalous scale but i

00:36:18.320 think and ask you would not want to be frankly i don't think she'd want to be on a scandalous scale

00:36:23.040 at all but i think that she wouldn't want to be at the top of it so just a few closing remarks

00:36:30.620 so you can follow me slash this podcast or on instagram at vulgar history pod on twitter at

00:36:37.520 vulgar history my writing is at annfosterwriter.com which is where you can find a lot of the longer

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00:36:53.040 help me build up a little fun to buy more books to research with slash one day maybe get an editor

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00:37:08.200 there's also some patreon only mini podcasts called so this asshole where i talk about men who suck

00:37:13.700 so that's on patreon and there's merch all new merch for season three is all set up in our shop 0.63

00:37:22.200 on teespring the link is in the show notes but it's also at teespring.com slash stores slash

00:37:26.480 vulgar history i'm doing my best to have a new pattern or new design per each episode this season

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00:37:55.280 buy books online and the money goes towards independent bookstores and there's a list there

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Vulgar History - September 23, 2020

How To Lose A Queen In Nine Days, part 4： Anne Askew

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