In Season 4, Episode 9 of The Tudors, the story turns darker than ever, focusing on the brutal torture of Anne Askew, the growing danger surrounding Catherine Parr, and the downfall of Henry Howard. But how accurate are these events? From religious persecution to political paranoia, here’s what the show gets right and what it changes for drama.

Inside This Post:

• Why Was Anne Askew Targeted by Bishop Gardiner?
• Was Anne Askew Really Tortured?
• How Protestant Was Catherine Parr?
• Did Catherine Parr Debate Theology With Henry VIII?
• What Happened to Henry Howard?
• Minor Historical Inaccuracies

Episode 9: Secrets of the Heart

Why Was Anne Askew Targeted by Bishop Gardiner?

It’s 1545 and we’re headed into an appalling moment in English history, the arrest, torture, and execution of the Protestant reformist Anne Askew. But who was she, and why was she tortured for her religious beliefs?

Anne Askew was not randomly arrested; her prosecution was deeply tied to Bishop Gardiner’s efforts to undermine Catherine Parr.

Everyone at court knew the king would not live long, so everyone was thinking about what might happen next, since he had a young son who would need a Regent until he came of age. Henry’s affection for his wife, her close relationship with the prince and her friendship with the princesses, besides her serving as Regent while Henry was in France, made her a likely candidate for the Regency.

At this point in history, everything was about who would control Prince Edward and whether the country would lean Protestant or Catholic. Both factions were desperate to take out the opposition to ensure their hold over the throne, for political and religious reasons. The Catholics wanted to roll back the Reformation and establish Catholicism again, with an adherence to Roman Catholic teachings, which meant the Protestants at the Court would be persecuted and eliminated from power, facing potential reprisals for their beliefs. The Protestants wanted to ensure this did not happen and that they could keep their top positions. It might cost them money if they were forced to give back abbey lands to the Church. It was important in their minds to prevent a return to Roman Catholicism and to keep the Pope’s influence limited. So, it was both to protect themselves politically and to shape public opinion; whoever had the most influence over the child king would “rule” the realm.

Since Catherine Parr was a known Protestant who protected them at court, Bishop Gardiner and other Catholics angling for power in Henry’s Cabinet did not want her serving as Regent or influencing Edward. They feared her pro-reformist tendencies would favor the Protestants of the realm and undo all the Catholic-lite revisions of the last few years, as Henry reverted to “almost Catholicism.”

Gardiner and the others wanted to build a case against her that would see her arrested, interrogated, and executed as a heretic, so they looked for someone to prosecute as a heretic who might implicate her. That was Anne Askew, the daughter of a nobleman and wealthy landowner. Her father served Henry VIII and had been a juror at the trial of George Boleyn; one brother was a royal cupbearer, and the other served Archbishop Cranmer, another of their potential targets for extermination.

Best of all, in Gardiner’s mind, she was a militant Anabaptist Protestant. They believed in the total separation of church and state; Anne believed and preached that if you followed God’s laws, you could reject the laws of man, including those of the king. Which opened her up to accusations of heresy (for claiming Henry had no authority within the Church) and treason (she need not obey his laws where they contradicted scripture). She denied that the bread and wine taken at communion became the actual living flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, which was one of Henry’s Six Articles of Faith in his revised texts.

Twice, she got arrested, interrogated, and released, but the third time, Gardiner wanted her to implicate Catherine Parr through her ladies-in-waiting. He hoped she would give up their names, but she refused. Anne knew so much scripture that she also debated anyone who tried to “correct” her. She insulted her interrogators by saying she would not cast pearls before swine (when “acorns would be enough”).

Was Anne Askew Really Tortured?

When she refused to tell them what they wanted to know, they took her to the rack. This was unfathomable for reasons of her gender and because she had noble blood. Anne was one of only two women ever tortured in the Tower of London. Henry allowed it because she was an “extreme heretic and traitor.”

Most of what we see in this episode of The Tudors is horribly accurate. Her torturers turned the rack handles so hard that it pulled her shoulders and hips from their sockets and dislocated her elbows and knees. Those walking in the garden beside the Tower heard her screams. Still, she told them nothing.

The series eliminates her arguing with the man who tried to convince her to convert on her pyre. Anne listened to his sermon, agreed with him where he aligned with scripture, and said he was ignoring scripture whenever he interjected Catholic doctrines. On the series, Anne Stanhope-Seymour (Edward’s wife) pays a guard to tie gunpowder around her neck so she dies faster. The historical record says of the people burned at the stake that day, “some” had gunpowder, but not which ones.

It is largely because of Anne Askew that Catherine Parr was never arrested, since she refused to implicate Catherine to save herself from torture and death.

How Protestant Was Catherine Parr?

Some historians claim Catherine Parr married Henry VIII to promote Protestantism in England, but Don Matzat (author of Katherine Parr: Opportunistic, Queen, Reformer: A Theological Perspective) argues the opposite. He says she was a devout Catholic when she came to court, and it’s only through her increased education as queen and attempts to better herself that she brushed shoulders with prominent Protestant theologians and became convinced of being saved by faith alone (with no need for priests, confessions, or intercession).

At court, Catherine had access to the theological texts that shaped the Reformation, and became increasingly convinced of the need for reform within the Church. Her shift in beliefs may have come about because she read the humanist Erasmus.

Her two earliest books, Psalms or Prayers (an English translation of Bishop Fisher’s Latin Psalms, published anonymously in 1544) and Prayers or Meditations (published under her own name in 1545) hold mostly Catholic beliefs. Her change of attitude and Protestant sympathies happened as she started writing Lamentation of a Sinner in 1547, a book she did not publish until after her husband’s death because of its controversial departure from traditional Catholicism. Since Edward VI had a Protestant court, she could publish it without fear of Catholic reprisals. It omitted the usual prayers to the saints for the dead and emphasized a personal relationship with God. In this book, she described her spiritual journey and expressed her Reformist beliefs. It made her the first woman in England to print a book under her own name.

Henry criticizes her book in this episode and complains that it is hard to read, even though it was not yet written or published in history.

Did Catherine Parr Debate Theology With Henry VIII?

Catherine has a brilliant line about how Henry’s attempt to roll back the Reformation is like throwing a man off a high tower and asking him to stop halfway down. She also engages in a theological argument over whether to allow common people to read the gospels. She says no one should be afraid to read scripture, and Henry has done a great work in “banishing the monstrous idol of Rome.” She encourages him to “purge the Church of England of its [Roman] dregs.”

When Henry complains about his wife preaching at him, Bishop Gardiner says he does not need to be taught, for he has good theology; it is unseemly for anyone, much less the queen, to argue with the king… paving the way for her arrest warrant.

What was Catherine Parr thinking? Was she really this bold? Yes.

Catherine Parr was one of the best-educated of Henry’s wives (behind Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn). She studied many of the Reformists Henry read, so she could debate him in the same way his friend Sir Thomas More once did. She kept him distracted from the pain in his legs with “lively conversations,” which included theological arguments. Most of the time, Henry welcomed these discussions. Henry encouraged arguing, sparring, and discussing things with her. But Catherine forgot other people were watching and listening and plotting, and that her husband had a bad temper and disliked anyone pushing him too hard.

Catherine had already published books under her own name, for which Henry praised her and approved of what she wrote (her more Catholic books). She had no reason to assume her passionate views would irritate the king. But Stephen Gardiner and her critics took offense that she debated theology with the king and asserted her views so confidently. Her words could be reshaped to “instructing the king,” and they could claim she was undermining his authority.

What Happened to Henry Howard?

This episode has Surrey plotting against the king; he knows that when the king dies, whoever controls the prince controls the throne, and does not want Prince Edward left under the influence of Edward Seymour, with whom he has feuded all season. So he engages in a plot to kidnap Prince Edward.

Historically, Surrey wanted his father, Norfolk (Thomas Howard), to be Regent over Edward, but there’s no evidence he intended to kidnap the prince. His actual crime was that he changed his coat of arms to include those of Edward the Confessor. While he was entitled to bear those arms as a descendant, the paranoid and insecure Henry VIII saw it as an act of aggression and self-importance, a reminder to the common man that Henry Howard had royal blood in his veins. It might be a “first step” in challenging his son for the throne after his own death. Howard and his father were arrested, tried, and condemned to death on January 13, 1547.

His alteration of the coat of arms violated the Second Succession Act of 1536. He was accused of trying to “disturb or deprive the king and his heirs of their royal titles and dignities by words, writing, imprinting, or by any exterior act or deed.” His six-hour trial included his own sister, who hated him, talking about his plans to marry her off to Sir Thomas Seymour, and of his bitterness toward the “new men at court.” After being condemned, he wrote a confession that he used arms that were meant only for the king of England, but it failed to prompt mercy from Henry.

Surrey was executed on the 27^th, but his father survived because Henry VIII died that day and the new regime did not want to start Edward’s succession with blood. (His father remained imprisoned in the Tower for six years until Mary I freed him.) His execution was the last act of a tyrant king, but his trial and death has been brought forward several months to wrap up this plot line and give the writer Michael Hirst more time to conclude Catherine Parr’s storyline and let Henry reflect and face his literal ghosts before his death in the final episode.

What other reasons had they to get rid of Henry Howard / Lord Surrey? Well, he had the misfortune of being a Catholic in an increasingly Protestant-heavy court. It’s likely that the Protestant Seymours encouraged Henry to “take down” the Howards, as their only rivals for power, and out of the belief that the Howards, if they became Regent, would work with Bishop Gardiner and Richie Rich to usurp the Crown, reverse the Reformation, and return the English Church to Roman jurisdiction.

As you can see from the mounting power struggles in this episode, it all came down to whether the country would be Catholic or Protestant in the future, and which noble houses would fall before the decisions were made. Both sides were using Henry VIII’s instability to try to take each other out before he died.

Next week, I’ll finish out this series and talk about what happened to everyone who is left standing after the king’s death… which is not shown in the series, and it made me irate. I wanted to see this rat bastard die.

Minor Historical Inaccuracies:

• Mary hears Chapuys has died. It’s 1546. Historically, he lived until 1556.
• Sir Anthony Kingston was the Constable of the Tower, not Sir Edmund Knyvet.
• As previously said several times, Brandon had no French mistress.

Curious what personality types feature in The Tudors? Check out my analysis here!

This article is part of my Historical Accuracy in Historical TV Shows & Movies series, where I break down the real history behind popular historical dramas.

About the Author: Charity Bishop writes historical fiction, historical fantasy, and suspense novels that explores the darkness in human hearts, and the light that refuses to be extinguished. Discover her books.