November 1557, Geneva, Switzerland. John Calvin is delivering a midweek sermon and has arrived at Isaiah 38, King Hezekiah’s prayer to God when he fell ill. Preaching in French, Calvin speaks of God’s loving discipline and his presence with, and comfort to, his people during times of suffering. In the congregation is twenty-three-year-old Anne Lock (ca. 1534–after 1590), an English exile, herself no stranger to suffering. She had arrived six months earlier at the urging of her friend John Knox. He had fled to the Continent when the Roman Catholic Mary Tudor became queen of England, and the English Reformation, begun on shaky terms by King Henry VIII but propelled forward by the now-deceased Edward VI, was forced underground.

Lock, too, faced persecution if she remained in England. Her parents, Stephen and Margery Vaughan, now dead, had been active members of London’s evangelical circle, her father a vocal supporter of the martyred William Tyndale. Her husband, Henry Lock, belonged to a prominent family of cloth merchants. His mother and sister had actively encouraged the family to smuggle, purchase, and read the banned books that circulated surreptitiously during the early days of the Reformation. She herself, along with her husband and his sister, had publicly hosted Knox during his stays in London. She was a marked woman. Geneva offered religious freedom as well as the opportunity to grow in her faith; it was, Knox told her with characteristic hyperbole, “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles.”

Yet coming to Geneva was a fraught decision. She was a mother with two small children. Her husband, responsible for the family business, was unable to accompany her. Travel was difficult, and she could bring along only one maid. Geneva was already crammed with refugees, and housing was tight. Still, she came, arriving in May 1557. Almost immediately, tragedy struck. Within four days, baby Anne was dead, buried in a foreign country, leaving her mother to grieve among fellow exiles. To grieve, to suffer, but not to despair. Now, six months later and still in Geneva, Anne Lock listened to Calvin’s four sermons on Isaiah 38 and took them to heart. She also took them in hand, translating the French transcript, taken down by a shorthand stenographer, into English.

A Pillar of the English Reformed Community

If this is all we knew of Anne Lock, she would still be worth remembering as a young Reformed woman who persevered in her faith, despite trials that might well have overwhelmed her. But this is not all we know about Anne Lock, who, in fact, went on to become a pillar in the English Reformed community, recognized both in the church and in the public square. She deserves to be remembered today not only for what she did, but also for how she exemplifies the significant role of laywomen in the Reformation, of whom she was only one among many, and their honored status in the church.

We can begin with Knox. Despite his reputation, Knox had many women friends, none closer than Anne Lock, whom he claimed as a mother in the faith, although she was some twenty years younger. In his letters to her, he discusses theological issues and freely offers advice, but in matters of conscience he defers to her own judgment: “the Holy Spirit will guide you to make the right decision,” he concludes. After the exiles’ return to England upon the accession of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, Knox includes her among the “brethren” of Geneva, asks her to circulate his letters, requests that she select books for him to read, and implores her to use her influence to get the government and wealthy individuals to send money for support of the Scottish reformation. That she is a woman does not matter to Knox; that she is a fellow Christian does.

Sometimes we may forget that one of the fundamental principles of the Reformation was what was later called “the priesthood of all believers”—that all Christians have direct and unmediated access to God through his Word and the sacraments. As Calvin said, each and every Christian is a partaker in Christ’s priesthood (vol. 12 of Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries [Eerdmans, 1974], 266). The Reformers knew that laypeople were indispensable parts of the body of Christ, and because no one in the sixteenth century advocated for female priests, women were perfectly positioned to be exemplary laypersons. If women were partakers of Christ’s priesthood, then it was clear that all laypersons enjoyed that privilege. This is visually demonstrated in a woodcut from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs that illustrates the ideal of reformation under King Edward VI. It shows such an exemplary laywoman, reading the Bible for herself as she participates in public worship and takes her place at court.

The woodcut also neatly captures Anne Lock’s life after she returned to England from Geneva. Rather than slipping back into a comfortable middle-class life, she actively threw herself into defending and propagating her Reformed convictions. To be sure, she supported Knox and other Genevan brethren with spiritual and financial resources, but she also stepped up to the task of calling England itself, and England’s new queen, to repentance, following the devastating reign of Mary Tudor.

Calvin’s sermons on Isaiah 38 dealt with the illness and subsequent repentance of a wayward king. Lock recognized their relevance to England’s situation and set about to publish them. To her translation of the sermons, she added a sermonic preface of her own that called on her readers to recognize their spiritual need, repent of their sins, and turn to God by swallowing the wholesome medicine Calvin preached. To punctuate her message, she concluded the volume with a set of twenty-six poems that paraphrased Psalm 51, turning this classic psalm penned by another royal sinner into a national liturgy of repentance.

The emphasis on royalty—the sin and repentance of King Hezekiah and King David—was not accidental. Nor was the decision to foreground on the title page and in the preface that God’s good medicine came via the preaching of John Calvin. Although Anne Lock was not in imminent danger of persecution in 1560, when she was newly returned to London, her Reformed community remained out of favor. Queen Elizabeth was no fan of Calvin, whom she blamed for allowing Knox to author a book against the reign of queens, although Calvin had actually warned his friend against publication. Lock, however, refused to be intimidated. Recognizing that she did not have sufficient societal standing to address the queen directly, she dedicated her book instead to the most important Protestant woman at court, Katherine Brandon Bertie, the dowager duchess of Suffolk, who is actually pictured in the upper left-hand corner of the woodcut, standing near the young King Edward VI. The duchess, Lock knew, could and would carry Calvin’s sermons and Lock’s own preface and poems into the court itself. The book was published, and reprinted at least twice, by John Day, who also published Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

“My Poor Basket of Stones”

While we don’t know a great deal of Lock’s activities in the next decade, we do know that the prominent preacher Edward Dering, who had become convinced of Reformed teachings, wrote several proposal letters to her after Henry Lock’s death, asking her to return his deep affection. He acknowledged her godliness—you are God’s own possession, he told her—but also her intellectual prowess by including an untranslated Latin quotation. Their eventual marriage coincided with the growing animosity of bishops and the queen against the Reformed community. At one point, in the face of possible prosecution and arrest, her husband wrote confidently of Lock, “God hath made her rich in grace and knowledge to give account of her doing.”

Indeed, Lock was continuing to give account of her faith, in ways that were increasingly public. By 1576, when she was forty-two years old, she was praised in print as one of four exemplary Englishwomen “famous for their learning,” and held up as a model for the queen herself to emulate. What the queen thought of this suggestion, we do not know, but certainly Lock was sufficiently well-known that the mere mention of her name sparked recognition.

After Dering died, she helped shepherd his own writings into print. In 1583, after her third marriage, to Richard Prowse, she was honored with a book dedication. In the preface to a printed sermon by Knox, John Field described Lock as “virtuous,” “very godly,” and “no young scholar” in the school of Christ, an echo of Knox’s own description of Geneva and a fitting tribute to a woman famous for her learning. “I know you live to your God,” Field says, and then calls her a “remembrancer.” A remembrancer was an official in the Elizabethan court who represented the sovereign in collecting debts. Field here suggests that Lock is recognized in the church as one who represents God by reminding others of their obligations and their need for repentance and God’s grace, as indeed she had done in her first book.

By 1590, the Reformed community in England was reeling from further confrontations with the bishops and the court. Prominent leaders died; others were imprisoned or exiled. It was time for another book. This time Lock chose to translate French pastor Jean Taffin’s Of the Marks of the Children of God, a book that spoke of suffering as the mark of God’s promise to adopt us and to preserve us through affliction as his beloved children. It shows the esteem in which Lock was now held that the title page featured her name as prominently as that of pastor Taffin. This, it seemed to say, is a book you can trust. As with her earlier book, she intended the second one to reach not only her own community, which needed to be comforted, but also the wider English society, particularly the court that was the instrument of affliction. Dedicating the book to Anne Russell Dudley, the countess of Warwick, she reminded her fellow believer to be a light on the hill, shining for the gospel at court and throughout the land. For herself, Lock chose this biblical image to sum up her vocation: “I have according to my duty,” she says, “brought my poor basket of stones to the strengthening of the walls of that Jerusalem, whereof (by grace) we are all both citizens and members.”

The reference to Nehemiah, another layperson who faithfully served both church and court, is a fitting epigram for Anne Lock. From her childhood among the earliest English Reformers, through exile and personal suffering, to the persistent use of spiritual and intellectual gifts to strengthen her small Reformed community, Anne Lock built up the kingdom of God whereof, by grace, she was a citizen and member. Her contemporaries honored her as an exemplary layperson, and, in gratitude for her life and service, so should we.

The author is an OP member, emerita professor of English at Calvin University, and the editor of Anne Vaughan Lock: Selected Poetry, Prose, and Translations with Contextual Materials (2021). New Horizons, October 2025.