york00orns

INTERVIEW OF ASKE WITH THE KING. 263
of tlie Church. He promised also tliat a parliament
should be held at York in the ensuing year, and that
he would himself be present at it. A permanent
council, moreover, was to sit at York, to adjudicate
upon all questions relating to local claims or differences.
All the chief leaders in the insurrection were
invited to come up to London and "learn from the
king himself the bearing of the measures against
which they had clamoured, the motives which had
led to their adoption, and the extent to which the)
would be further carried." ^
Lord Darcy and Sir Robert Constable evidentl)
mistrusted Henry. The former refused to go to
London on the score of ill-health ;
the latter assigned
no satisfactory reason, but simply withdrew to the
shelter of a fortress on the Yorkshire coast. Of the
three chiefs, " Aske alone, the truest and the bravest,
ventured to the king's presence," and gave him a
plain, straightforward account of the feelings and
expectations of the people, and of his own conduct
throughout the rising. On his return into Yorkshire
he found a profound distrust of the king's intentions
prevailing among the people, and a feeling of grave
uncertainty respecting the pardon which it had been
represented to them the king was prepared to grant.
The wave of disaffection which had overflowed the
northern counties was not yet stilled, and the letter
which Aske addressed to the king, detailing all the
causes for uneasiness which still existed, concludes by
an expression of his conviction that the d.inger was
' Froude's "Hist, of England," iii. p. I7«.