We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

      Let them not me deprave

      But fight thou in my stead.

      On thee my care I cast.

      For all their cruel spight

      I set not by their haste

      For thou art my delight.

      I am not she that list

      My anchor to let fall

      For every drizzling mist

      My ship substancial.

      Not oft use I to wright

      In prose nor yet in rime,

      Yet will I shew one sight

      That I saw in my time.

      I saw a rial throne

      Where Justice should have sit

      But in her stead was one

      Of moody cruel wit.

      Anne Askew’s horrific fate shouldn’t blind us to the fact that she was, in her way, a fanatic. In the sermons and other writings by the reformers, and also by their enemies, no quarter is given. Another poem by her, in which she pictures herself as a poor, blind woman in a garden full of dangers and snares – the garden being her own body – provides a window for us into the Reformation mind in its full urgency. In today’s world there is little, outside the more extreme edges of Islamism, that feels like this:

      A garden I have which is unknown,

      which God of his goodness gave to me,

      I mean my body, wherein I should have sown

      the seed of Christ’s true verity.

      My spirit within me is vexed sore,

      my flesh striveth against the same:

      My sorrows do increase more and more,

      my conscience suffereth most bitter pain:

      In Anne’s world, the gardener working on her body is Satan, busy trying to entrap her, with the older generation and the Catholics all on his side:

      Then this proud Gardener seeing me so blind,

      he thought on me to work his will,

      And flattered me with words so kind,

      to have me continue in my blindness still.

      He fed me then with lies and mocks,

      for venial sins he bid me go

      To give my money to stones and stocks,

      which was stark lies and nothing so.

      With stinking meat then was I fed,

      for to keep me from my salvation,

      I had trentals of mass, and bulls of lead,

      not one word spoken of Christ’s passion.

      In me was sown all kind of feigned seeds,

      with Popish ceremonies many a one,

      Masses of requiem with other juggling deeds,

      till God’s spirit out of my garden was gone …

      …‘Beware of a new learning,’ quoth he, ‘it lies,

      which is the thing I most abhor,

      Meddle not with it in any manner of wise,

      but do as your fathers have done before.’

      My trust I did put in the Devil’s works,

      thinking sufficient my soul to save,

      Being worse than either Jews or Turks,

      thus Christ of his merits I did deprave …

      Towards the end of the poem Anne’s imagery seems to prefigure her own violent ending. This is a world of savagery as well as of salvation:

      Strengthen me good Lord in thy truth to stand,

      for the bloody butchers have me at their will,

      With their slaughter knives ready drawn in their hand

      my simple carcass to devour and kill.

      O Lord forgive me mine offense,

      for I have offended thee very sore,

      Take therefore my sinful body from hence,

      Then shall I, vile creature, offend thee no more.

      I would with all creatures and faithful friends

      for to keep them from this Gardener’s hands,

      For he will bring them soon unto their ends,

      with cruel torments of fierce firebrands.

      The final lines, assuming they really are by Anne Askew and not a later Protestant propagandist, are genuinely horrific. She is going to leave her carcass on earth, she says:

      Although to ashes it be now burned,

      I know thou canst raise it again,

      In the same likeness as thou it formed,

      in heaven with thee evermore to remain.

      Anne was one of sixty-three people listed in the famous Foxe’s Book of Martyrs as being burned alive in the reign of Henry VIII alone. They include priests, courtiers, servants, musicians, professional actors or ‘players’, a tailor, Richard Mekins, ‘a child that passed not the age of 15 years’, Frenchmen and a Scot – a pretty good cross-section of Tudor society. There is also William Tracey, a squire from Worcestershire, the sixty-fourth victim – irritatingly for the authoriries he was already dead, so he was dug up and then burned. In the reign of Henry’s daughter Mary nearly three hundred Protestants were burned alive, and it’s an even fuller list, coming from every social class and almost every trade: upholsterers, shoemakers, candlemakers, bricklayers, servants, carpenters, wheelwrights, glovers, merchants, gentlemen and royal courtiers. Men and women, old and young, they came from every part of Britain. When the Protestants were in the saddle under the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, similar numbers of Catholics, many of them priests, were martyred in turn and beatified by the Vatican.

      The punishment of death by burning alive was an ancient one, but was revived in Tudor times to cause the maximum fear – in a sense it was a terrorist punishment, worse than a public beheading. It was particularly popular for women like Anne Askew for a bizarre reason: male traitors had been traditionally hanged, drawn and quartered. For the crowd to see them being disembowelled alive, and often having their private parts cut off, they clearly needed to be naked. But while it was acceptable to torture and burn women alive, for them to be seen naked in public was indecent. William Blackstone, one of the fathers of English law, explained that ‘For as the decency due to sex forbids the exposing and public mangling of their bodies, their sentence (which is to the full as terrible to sensation as the other) is to be drawn to the gallows and there be burned alive.’

      It’s a bleak view of Tudor London, and to balance it we could do worse than look at the writing of a very different woman. Isabella Whitney was Britain’s first published professional writer of secular poetry. We don’t know a lot about her, but she was from Cheshire and came down to London to work as a servant. Her verse – clear, punchy and very much from a woman’s point of view – is a useful counterblast to the courtly sonnets and sexual innuendo of more famous male Tudor writers. Here she is, warning young gentlewomen and maids in love about how men really behave. ‘Mermaids’ was a euphemism for prostitutes, in this case inverted and subverted to refer to wanton male lovers. Personally, I like to think it’s also a reference here to the Mermaid Tavern, the favoured haunt in Cheapside of so many poets and playwrights, from John Donne to Fletcher and Beaumont. If so, Isabella was writing a direct response to the flamboyance