Arthur Aston
Sir Arthur Aston (1590 – 1649) was a scion of a prominent Catholic family from Cheshire, and a professional soldier from a military family. His father had served on the continent in Russia in 1610, then in Poland, for whose king he raised thousands of British mercenaries for a war against the Ottomans in 1621. Arthur Aston joined his father in Poland with 300 mercenaries, who went on to form the Polish king’s bodyguard.
Aston then fought for the Poles in the Polish-Swedish War of 1626 – 1629 and was captured by the Swedes in 1627. After the war’s end, Aston joined the Swedes, whose king, Gustavus Adolphus, commissioned him in 1631 to recruit an English regiment to fight for Sweden in the Thirty Years War. He did, and Aston and his English regiment fought in Germany in the 1640s.
By the time he returned to England in 1640, Aston was a grizzled and highly experienced professional soldier. He commanded a regiment for King Charles I in the Second Bishops’ War against the Scots, but his Catholicism became an issue, as Catholics in those days were legally prohibited from a variety of public positions, and expressly barred from serving as army officers. The outcry forced him to resign, but as consolation for his efforts, Charles knighted him.
When the English Civil War erupted in 1642 between the king and his royalist supporters, pitted against the forces of Parliament, Aston, now Sir Arthur, sought to join Charles’ forces but was initially rejected because of his Catholicism. As the royalist cause deteriorated, however, desperation and the intercession of Prince Rupert, the king’s nephew and main military commander, finally convinced Charles I to commission him into the royalist army.
His authoritarian style of command, learned on the continent, was unpopular in England, and he was disliked by his troops, who viewed him as a martinet. He was wounded and captured in 1642, then released in a prisoner exchange, after which he was appointed governor of Oxford, headquarters of the royalist cause. There, he was severely injured in a fall from a horse, lost a leg, and used a wooden prosthetic leg thereafter. While recovering, he was relieved of his command and pensioned off.
In 1648, he joined royalists in Ireland and was made commander of the port town of Drogheda, where he was besieged in 1649 by Parliamentary forces led by Oliver Cromwell, who stormed and captured the town on September 11. He was captured, and Cromwell’s soldiers, convinced that Arthur Aston’s prosthetic must contain hidden gold, demanded that he show them how to access its secret hidden compartment. They refused to believe his denials, and frustrated at his perceived obstinacy, they ended up beating him to death with his own wooden leg.
