12 July 1537 – The execution of Robert Aske

12 July 1537 – The execution of Robert Aske

On the 12th July 1537 Robert Aske was executed , Aske was one of the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace. The Pilgrimage of Grace was a rising in the northern counties of England, which could be described as the only single display of discontent shown against the Reformation legislation of King Henry VIII Aske was executed at York Castle. He was hung from Clifford’s Tower in chains until he died. A strong & decisive message for the Northern counties, that this rebellion would not be tolerated by the Crown. Here is the story in details On this day in history, 12th July 1537, Robert Aske, lawyer and rebel, was hanged in chains outside Clifford's Tower, the keep of York Castle. Aske was one of the leaders of the rebels in the 1536 northern uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace - click here to see a Pilgrimage of Grace timeline and here to read an article on the rebellion. Being hanged in chains was an awful way to die. Those executed this way were usually hanged alive in chains - rather than being hanged first in the usual manner and then put in chains on display - and took several days to die, being slowly suffocated to death.1 Horrible! I haven't found an eye-witness account of Aske's suffering, but Hilda Prescott, in her novel The Man on a Donkey imagines Aske's final moments and last words: God did not now, nor would in any furthest future, prevail. Once he had come, and died. If He came again, again He would die, and again, and so forever, by His own will, rendered powerless against the free and evil wills of men. Then Aske met the full assault of darkness without reprieve of hoped for light, for God ultimately vanquished was no God at all. But yet, though God was not God, as the head of the dumb worm turns, so his spirit turned, blindly, gropingly, hopelessly loyal, towards that good, that holy, that merciful, which though not God, though vanquished, was still the last dear love of a vanquished and tortured man. By this time that which dangled from the top of the Keep at York, moving only as the wind swung it, knew neither day nor night, nor that it had been Robert Aske, nor even that it had been a man. Even now, however, it was not quite insentient. Drowning yet never drowned, far below the levels of daylight consciousness, it suffered. There was darkness and noise, noise intolerably vast or unendurably near, drilling inward as a screw bites and turns, and the screw was pain. Sometimes noise, pain, darkness and that blind thing that dangled were separate; sometimes they ran together and became one. But in his dying, his consciousness moved on, beyond a point where any of us are ever entitled to knowledge For now (yet with no greater fissure between then and now than as a man's eyes are aware, where no star was, of the first star of the night), now he was aware of One - vanquished God, Saviour who could as little save others as Himself. But now, beside Him and beyond was nothing, and He was silence and light.2 Screen image of actor Gerard McSorely, portrayed Robert Aske in Showtime’s production ‘The Tudors’, Season Three. Photo of Clifford’s Tower, York. The place of Aske’s execution.

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