In 1546, Anne Askew, a young Englishwoman of noble birth, was carried to the stake in a chair. She could no longer walk. Her body had been torn on the rack in the Tower of London, stretched until her joints dislocated. The punishment was intended to force her into naming others or recanting her Protestant beliefs. She did neither. At the age of twenty-five, she was burned alive for refusing to betray her conscience.
Askew left behind not only the record of her trial but also a collection of writings, including religious meditations and poetry. Her voice is steady, composed, and intellectually clear. She does not rage against the men who condemned her, nor does she appeal for pity. Instead, she inhabits a form of integrity so unwavering that it threatened the structures built to silence her.
To her inquisitors, Anne’s way of speaking posed a particular threat. The prevailing religious culture, as summarised by Bishop Stephen Gardiner, viewed “plain speaking” with suspicion, believing it to be a tactic used by the devil to conceal heresy. Anne’s direct, unembellished responses stood in defiant contrast to the rhetorical and hierarchical language of her examiners. Questioned by Bishop Edmund Bonner, who commanded her to “utter al thynges that burdened [her] conscience,” she responded with a blend of scriptural clarity and disarming brevity:
“God hath given me the gifts of knowledge, but not of utterance. And Salomon sayth, that a woman of few words, is a gift of God.” (Sirach 26:14)
Her ability to deploy scripture with concision and precision was a challenge to her interrogators’ authority. Asked to explain her beliefs about the Eucharist, she replied with razor-edged logic:
“If the host should fall and a beast did eat it, [did the] beast … receive God or no?”
Faced with questions meant to trap her, she refused their terms and reframed the exchange entirely, even turning to irony:
“It is agaynst saynt Paules lernynge, that I being a woman, should interpret the scriptures, specially where so many wise men were.”
There is, in her words, something that speaks across time to neurodivergent ways of thinking and resisting: her refusal to play social games, her grounding in logic, her use of language as a scalpel rather than a veil. Her clarity, literalness, and moral consistency echo traits that, while often pathologised in dominant cultural frameworks, here become radical tools of survival and truth-telling. Her insistence on returning to scripture alone, and her refusal to embellish or self-censor, made her not only unmanageable but unforgettable.
Her life invites us to ask: what does it mean to live in truth when doing so comes at great cost?
This poem is offered as a response to that question. It does not seek to romanticise Askew’s suffering or reduce her story to metaphor. Rather, it gathers voices across centuries that resonate with the principles she embodied. These voices come from diverse contexts – religious mysticism, existential philosophy, ethical attention, and feminist critique – but they converge in their shared commitment to truth, integrity, and moral courage.
Saint Catherine of Siena, writing from a cloistered cell in fourteenth-century Italy, prayed to be “clothed in Eternal Truth” so she might “run this mortal life in true obedience.” For Catherine, truth was not a set of propositions but a divine presence one could inhabit. Her notion of obedience did not imply submission to authority but fidelity to what is right and enduring. Askew lived this kind of obedience, not to the crown or the clergy, but to the integrity of her own soul.
Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in the aftermath of war and totalitarianism, reminds us that “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” For Sartre, existence precedes essence. Our lives are not predetermined by birth or role but shaped through choice and action. Askew’s refusal to accept the identities imposed upon her – obedient wife, passive believer – aligns with Sartre’s vision. She defined herself through decisive, deliberate acts of resistance.
Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic shaped by exile, hunger, and war, wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Weil understood attention not as passive observation but as an ethical act, a disciplined turning toward what is real. Askew’s writing reveals this same attentiveness. She does not seek spectacle or sympathy. She engages the world with clarity, responding with thought rather than reaction, even from the confines of a cell.
bell hooks, the American writer and activist, brought the language of love and justice into conversation with the politics of identity and voice. In All About Love, she writes that “When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other’s truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling.” Askew lived at a time when a woman speaking theological truth was considered dangerous. Her insistence on being heard, on her own terms and in her own words, is precisely the kind of integrity hooks describes.
These figures do not speak for Anne Askew. She did not need spokespeople. Rather, they speak beside her. They offer a kind of fellowship that crosses time and tradition. They suggest that no one who stands in truth stands entirely alone.
What follows is a poem shaped by their words and by hers. It does not narrate her story but echoes the moral architecture she carried within her. It is written not in her voice but in the company of voices that, like hers, refused silence when truth demanded speech.
The title Plain Speaking is drawn from the very language that made Anne Askew both dangerous and unforgettable. In an era when religious and political authority relied on elaborate rhetoric, guarded phrases, and rigid hierarchy, Askew’s clarity unsettled. Her directness – what Bishop Gardiner and others called “plain speaking” – was viewed not as virtue, but as threat. By reclaiming the term, this poem joins her in resisting the suspicion that plainness is simplistic, or that truth must come adorned. Here, plain speech becomes not just a style, but a stance: unembellished, attentive, and brave. It reminds us that clarity is not the absence of depth, but often its most distilled form, and that speaking simply can be a radical act.
Plain Speaking
Wrap us in truth -
not as armour, but as skin -
so we can move through this weathered life
with steady stride, with clear pulse.
We are not carved from stone,
but shaped like riverbanks -
formed by what we choose,
by what we lean into,
by the slow pull of what we follow.
To live well
is to root ourselves in what is real:
to feel the hum beneath our feet,
to notice the small wingbeats
that pass for silence
until we listen.
Integrity
is a quiet line of iron
threaded through the spine.
It holds us upright
when the wind leans hard.
To speak truth
is to strike flint in the dark -
we might startle the night,
but we make space for flame.
This post is part of Kate Coldrick’s wider body of writing. More of her work can be found at katecoldrick.com
On the Skyline 