Ballad which Anne Askew made and sang when she was in Newgate

In 1546, a twenty-two-year-old woman sat in a damp prison cell, awaiting execution for her Protestant faith. She picked up a pen and wrote a ballad - not a plea for mercy, but a declaration. Anne Askew's final song survives as one of the earliest known poems written by a woman in English, a fierce and unflinching testimony composed on the eve of her burning at the stake. The ballad moves through prayer and protest, mixing biblical language with raw personal defiance. There is no self-pity here, only a clear-eyed reckoning with mortality and a stubborn insistence on conscience over compliance. Askew was executed alongside three other Protestants in the Smithfield flames, condemned by the very king whose religious whims had reshaped a nation. This is not comfortable reading. It is a voice pulled from silence, a woman who refused to recant and paid the price. For anyone interested in the history of religious dissent, the early modern period, or the rare survival of women's voices from centuries past, this small poem carries an almost unbearable weight.