heraldryofyorkmi01custuoft

274 THE HERALDRY OF YORK MINSTER.
they could not reduce the castle by fair means, threatened that, if the
attack failed the next day, they would bring them in front of the castle,
and insult them in the very presence of the Earl. This was a brutal
threat, but, at that day, no villainy was impossible. It was clearly an
imminent danger, and there was no time to be lost.
Robert Aske had two brothers, Christopher and John. They had
remained loyal, and, with forty of their retainers, made their way
cousin, the Earl of Cumberland, and threw themselves into the castle.
to their
the dead of the night, Christopher, with the Vicar of Skipton and a groom
and a boy, stole through the camp of the besiegers, crossed the moors with
led horses by unfrequented paths, and reaching Bolton Abbey under cover
of the darkness, brought all the party safely back and into Skipton, "so
" close and clean," says the old
" chronicler, that the same was never mis-
" trusted nor perceived
till
they were safe within the castle." Proudly the
little garrison looked down, when the day dawned, from the battlements
upon the fierce multitude howling below in baffled rage.
This staunchness of the Earl of Cumberland, supported by the Dacres
and the Musgraves, the Eures, and the Earl of Northumberland, held the
rebels in check until the Earl of Shrewsbury, with the King's troops, could
force the passes of the Don and cross the swollen river, when, after a
conference between the leaders on both sides, the rebellion melted away.
Martial law was proclaimed. Aske was beheaded at York, Darcy at London,
Constable at Hull, and the gallows made short work of many of their
companions. But it was the Earl of Cumberland who first stayed the
rising tide, and saved the country, perhaps, from a civil war; and we are
not disposed to grudge him the reward of his- courage and loyalty, which
he received from the King a short time before his death, viz., a grant of
the priory of Bolton, with all
the lands belonging thereto, in the parish of
Skipton, with the manors of Storithes, Heselwood, Embsey, Eastby, Cononsby,
&c., and the manor of Woodhouse, which had belonged to this
dissolved monastery of Marton.
I say nothing concerning the policy or equity of Henry VIII. in thus
laying hands on Church property; but, at least, it was better to give it
to a gallant and independent gentleman than to any of the crowd of
sycophants and timeservers, mere creatures without any definite faith or
principle, who cringed before the arbitrary, wanton, reckless King, that
they might obtain some share of the spoil to gratify their selfishness or
ambition, with little heed for the houses of God, for the purity of whose
worship they professed to be so deeply concerned.
His son Henry succeeded him, and passed his life in comparatively
quiet times. At sixteen years of age he had been made a Knight of
the Bath at Anne Boleyn's coronation, and in 1537 during his father's
In