Robert Aske

Robert Aske is portrayed as the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a Yorkshireman whose religious cause drew a force large enough to threaten the whole kingdom. His rise from the head of a popular northern movement to a favored guest of Henry VIII, and then to a condemned prisoner displayed and hanged in York, gives the rebellion its starkest human reversal. Through Margaret Pole’s account, Aske appears at once as a capable political leader and as a figure whose appeal rests on the movement’s claim to defend the Church and the people who depended on it.

Identity and the Pilgrimage

Aske is introduced as a good and honest Yorkshireman at the head of the people calling themselves pilgrims. Their name was a declaration of purpose: they rejected the label of rebellion and understood their march as a religious undertaking, one undertaken beneath the Five Wounds of Christ. This language made their resistance more than a contest for political advantage. It represented the threatened Church as the heart of England and gave the movement a sacred identity that its supporters believed no Christian could rightly oppose.

The rising gathered extraordinary strength. By the middle of October, Aske rode into York, whose gates were opened to him without an arrow being fired in its defense. The force now called the pilgrims numbered twenty thousand—four times the force that had taken England at the Battle of Bosworth Field, in Margaret Pole’s comparison. The size of the army made the northern movement a plausible national danger, not a disturbance the Crown could simply dismiss as local unrest. At the same time, the status of Thomas Percy remained uncertain: he had been captured by the rebels, or perhaps joined them, and no one seemed to know which.

The pilgrims’ first actions in York gave their religious demands visible form. They restored two Benedictine houses, Holy Trinity and the nunnery of St. Clement. When the bells rang at Holy Trinity, townspeople went in to hear Mass and cried for joy. The scene connects the movement’s political strength to a public religious need: the return of worship in the city was welcomed not as an abstract policy but as something people could enter and share.

Strategy and Royal Negotiation

The scale of the rising shaped the plans of Margaret Pole’s family. Lord Montague judged that she should return to the country and prepare to lead in Berkshire if the south rose in support of the pilgrims, with money and supplies available for the cause. He and Geoffrey planned to go north with their force and join the pilgrims when the time was right; Montague also intended to summon Reginald Pole. These were preparations, not proof that the southern rising took place. They show, however, that Aske’s movement could be imagined as the center of a broader alliance, with the potential to attract leadership and resources beyond Yorkshire.

Aske’s most consequential encounter with the Crown came after this initial advance. Henry VIII gave him his own scarlet-satin jacket and the gold chain from his neck, then asked what he wanted. Aske knelt but raised his head and spoke without fear. He condemned Thomas Cromwell as a tyrant, defended the men driven from the monasteries into poverty, and argued that people could not live without the abbeys. He described the Church as the heart of England, insisting that an attack upon it injured the whole country. Henry listened to him and, at the end of the meeting, said he would make Aske a member of the council.

The account makes the contrast between the two men’s positions especially sharp. Aske spoke as a subject addressing the king, yet did not soften his indictment of royal policy and Cromwell’s role in it. Henry’s gifts and attentive hearing suggested recognition; the reported offer of a council place suggested that Aske might be drawn into government. The apparent welcome did not protect him. In retrospect, the scarlet jacket and gold chain become measures of how completely royal favor could be reversed.

Character and Reputation

Aske’s authority is shown through both public action and the impression he leaves on others. Harry Pole recalls him as quiet, smiling, and easy to overlook at first, but then unmistakably the most important person present. Harry also describes him as good-looking despite being blind in one eye, and, above all, brave. The restrained quality of this portrait complements the public scale of the rebellion: Aske’s forcefulness is not represented as theatrical bluster, but as the courage to speak plainly before the king.

That courage is most evident in the substance of his appeal. He speaks for displaced religious men and for people whose lives depended on the abbeys, while making the Church’s welfare a matter of national well-being. His case joins practical consequences—poverty and the loss of institutions—to a religious principle. In Margaret Pole’s telling, this helps explain why the movement could gather such numbers and why the people of York greeted the restored services with joy. The account does not reduce Aske to a military commander: his leadership carries the pilgrims’ defense of religious life into a direct confrontation with royal power.

Trial, Execution, and Aftermath

The welcome at court did not last. Aske was taken from the Tower of London to court for his trial and returned to prison, despite having feasted at court and been embraced by Henry during his earlier visit. He was then taken from London back to the north, where he would die in sight of the people who had heard him promise them a pardon. The journey returned him to the region where his leadership had mattered most, but now as a condemned prisoner rather than the head of a victorious procession.

In York, his captors paraded him through a city stunned into silence by the fall of what Margaret Pole calls its bravest son. They took him to the top of Clifford’s Tower, where he read a confession. A rope was placed around his neck where the king’s gold chain had rested; iron chains replaced the ornament of royal favor, and he was hanged. The sequence turns clothing and restraint into a bitter visual account of the change in his standing: the king’s chain, once an emblem of welcome, gives way to the rope and iron of execution.

Margaret Pole and other lords appealed to Thomas Cromwell for mercy for the northerners, but their pleas achieved nothing. Aske’s death belongs to a wider punishment of those associated with the rising, and the narrator later names him among the people she failed to defend. She compares the spread of Tudor tyranny to the Sweat: it arrives suddenly, takes loved ones without warning, and leaves people unable to protect them. Aske’s fate thus extends beyond the defeat of one leader. His execution becomes part of the book’s recurring account of how a public promise, a moment of apparent reconciliation, and a plea for mercy can all be overtaken by the Crown’s power to punish.