Hebrews 11:35-36 Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance… Rich and another of the council came to her (Anne Askew) in the Tower, where she was then confined, and demanded that she should make the disclosures which they required concerning her party and her friends. She told them nothing. "Then they did put me on the rack," she relates, "because I confessed no ladies or gentlemen to be of my opinion; and thereupon they kept me a long time; and because I lay still and did not cry, my Lord Chancellor and Mr. Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands till I was nigh dead." Provoked by her saint-like endurance, these two ordered the lieutenant of the Tower to rack her again. He (Sir Anthony Knevett), "tendering the weakness of the woman," positively refused to do so. Then Wriothesly and Rich threw off their gowns, and threatening the lieutenant that they would complain of his disobedience to the king, "they worked the rack themselves, till her bones and joints were almost pinched asunder." When the lieutenant caused her to be loosed down from the rack, she immediately swooned. "Then," she writes, "they recovered me again." After that, "I sate two long hours reasoning with my Lord Chancellor on the bare floor, where he, with many flattering words, would have persuaded me to leave my opinion; but my Lord God (I thank His everlasting goodness) gave me grace to persevere, and I will do, I hope, to the very end." Unable to walk or stand from the tortures she had suffered, poor Anne Askew was carried in a chair to Smithfield, and when brought to the stake, was fastened to it by a chain which held up her body; and one who beheld her there describes her as "having an angel's countenance and a smiling face." The three Throckmortons, the near kinsmen of the queen, and members of her household, had drawn near to comfort Anne Askew and her three companions; but they were warned that they were marked men, and entreated to withdraw. At the vary last, a written pardon from the king was offered to Anne Askew, upon condition that she would recant. The fearless lady turned away her eyes, and would not look upon it. She told them that she came not thither to deny her Lord and Master. The fire was ordered to be put under her, "and thus the good Anne Askew, with these blessed martyrs, having passed through so many torments, having now ended the long course of her agonies, being compassed in with flames of fire as a blessed sacrifice unto God, she slept in the Lord, A.D. 1546, leaving behind her a singular example of Christian constancy for all men to follow." Her crime was the denial of the mass. "So this," she wrote, "is the heresy that I hold, and for it must suffer death." She kept the faith to her God; she kept the faith to her friends, for she betrayed no one, enduring shame and agony with meek, unshaken constancy. (H. Clissold, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: |
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