So we take leave of Robert Aske, closing his brief greatness with, a felon's death—an unhappy ending! Yet, as we look back now, at a distance of three centuries, when the noble and the base, the conquerors and the conquered, have been all long dead together, when nothing remains of any of them but the work, worthy or unworthy, which they achieved, and the few years which weak false hearts could purchase by denying their faith and truckling to the time[1] appear in the retrospect in their proper insignificance, a man who risked and lost his life for a cause which he believed a just one, though he was mistaken in so believing it, is not among those whose fate deserves the most compassion, or whose career is least to be envied.
The insurrection had sunk down into rest; but it had not been wholly in vain. So far as it was just it had prevailed; and happy were they whose work was
- ↑ Like Cuthbert Tunstall, for instance, who when upbraided for denying his belief in the Pope, said, 'he had never seen the time when he thought to lose one drop of blood therefore, for sure he was that none of those that heretofore had advantage by that authority would have lost one penny to save his life.'—Tunstall to Pole: Burnet's Collectanea, p. 481.
should hereafter have only heard the names of sedition and rebellion.
'Yet the King's most royal Majesty, of his most tender pity and great desire that he hath rather to preserve you from the stroke of justice imminent upon your deserts, than to put you to the extremity of the same, trusting and supposing that the punishment of a few offenders in respect of the multitude, which have suffered only for an example to others to avoid the like attemptations, will be sufficient for ever to make all you and your posterities to eschew semblable offences, of his inestimable goodness and pity is content by this general proclamation to give and grant to you all, every of you, his general and free pardon.'—Rolls House MS. A 2, 28; State Papers, vol. i. p. 558.