In the first two editions of the Lattre Examinations edited by John Bale(both published in 1547), Bale elucidates on this question from the Privy Council by informing his reader of the circumstances of Askew's marriage, as well as offering justification for her pursuit of a divorce. He first explains that Askew was married against her will (following the death of her sister who had been betrothed to Sir Thomas Kyme, Anne's husband). He then argues that she yet 'demeaned her selfe lyke a Christen wyfe', having two children with her husband. However, 'by oft readynge of the sacred Bible', she converted from 'all olde superstycyons of papystrye, to a perfyght beleve in Jhesus Christ'. Having been driven for her faith from her husband's house, he claims, Askew considered herself 'free from that uncomelye kynde of coacted marryage, by thys doctryne of S. Paul 1 Cor. 7. If a faytfull woman have an unbelevynge husbande, whych wyll not tarrye with her, she may leave hym. For a brother or syster is not in subjeccyon to soch, specyallye where as the marryage afore is unlawfull'. Askew sought a divorce for this reason and, 'above all', because of her husband's cruel expulsion of her from their home, 'in despyght of Christes veryte'. She could not, supposes Bale, have considered Kyme 'worthye of her marryage' when he so 'spyghtfullye hated God the chefe autor [sic] of marriage' (Bale, Lattre Examination [1547], 15r-v).

Despite Bale's ability energetically to defend Askew's pursuit of a divorce from Kyme, Foxe's decision to withhold comment himself on Askew's marital problems has been interpreted as reflecting discomfort on his part with this aspect of her story (Thomas F. Freeman and Sarah E. Wall, 'Racking the Body, Shaping the Text: The Account of Anne Askew in Foxe's Book of Martyrs', Renaissance Quarterly 54 [2001], 1180).

The Lord Chancellor (whom Foxe calls Wrisley) will later be identified as one of Askew's torturers.

The Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, and the Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley will be the main players in the supposed plot against Catherine Parr.

Both Lisle and Essex were known evangelicals; thus Askew's comment that it was 'great shame for them to counsayle contrary to their knowledge'.

Askew's retort to Wriothesley, in which she asked 'how long he woulde halt on both sides', does not indicate suspicion of evangelical tendencies on his part. Rather, halting on 'both sides' is a reference to the state of the English Church, which has rid itself of popery, and yet maintains idolatry; is no longer papist, and yet (in the evangelical view) retains the practices and priesthood of Baal. As Bale adds in his elucidation of Askew's words against Wriothesley, 'For all our newe Gospell, yet wyll we styll beare the straungers yoke with the unbelevers, and so become neyther whote nor colde, that God may spewe us out of hys mouth' (Bale, Lattre Examination [1547], 19r-v). For further discussion of this sort of evangelical critique of the Henrician Church, see Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 132-33.

Askew's desire to see Hugh Latimer is another indication of her clear familiarity with the prominent evangelicals of her day. When she requested this audience, Latimer had himself recently survived interrogation for counseling Crome against recantation (See Letters & Papers Foreign and Domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, ed. James Gairdner and R.H. Brodie [London, 1862 1932], I: 823 [14 May 1546].

Askew's illness and request for Latimer's counsel, at this point in her Lattre Examination, has been interpreted as a moment of self-described epiphany modelled on that of Saul of Tarsus (marked by physical suffering), in which she realized her fate and stopped attempting to save herself from condemnation. Her request for Latimer and illness is immediately followed, in the Lattre Examination, by her 'first' confession of her sacramentarian belief denying the Real Presence before the Privy Council, after which she is formally condemned as a heretic. (See Paula McQuade, '"Except that they had offended the Lawe": Gender and Jurisprudence in the Examinations of Anne Askew', Literature & History 3 [1994], 9.) However, Kimberly Coles has contested this view, pointing out that Askew had already, when she asked for Latimer, revealed her heresy to William Paget (Kimberly Anne Coles, 'The Death of the Author [and the Appropriation of her Text]: the Case of Anne Askew's Examinations', Modern Philology 99 [May 2002], 535). (The relevant discussion between Paget and Askew does not appear in Foxe's version of the Examinations. This is possibly because Paget, having survived Henry's reign to retain his office of principal secretary to the king during Edward's, was still too important a man, early in Elizabeth's reign, deliberately to antagonize, but it is more likely that the discussion with Paget was omitted from Foxe's base text. The pages with the Paget discussion on them are glued together in many surviving copies of Bale's 1547 Lattre Examination (p. 21), and it is excised in later editions. As Freeman and Wall point out, Paget was dead by 1570 (he died in 1563), and in the second edition of the Acts and Monuments (1570), Foxe identifies him as having advised Philip and Mary to execute Elizabeth (Thomas F. Freeman and Sarah E. Wall, 'Racking the Body, Shaping the Text: The Account of Anne Askew in Foxe's Book of Martyrs', Renaissance Quarterly 54 [2001], 1172-3).