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These Times History Took a Turn for the Batty

Khalid Elhassan November 3, 2019 34 min

Sir Arthur Aston. Royal Berkshire History

28. The Successful Renaissance Commander Who Came to an Ignoble End

Sir Arthur Aston (1590 – 1649) was a professional English soldier from a renowned military family. He plied his trade as a mercenary commander in the era’s numerous European wars, and gained a fair measure of prestige and renown. By the time he returned to England in 1640, Aston was a highly experienced commander. He led a regiment for King Charles I in the Second Bishops’ War against the Scots, but Aston was a Catholic, and that became an issue.

Catholics were legally prohibited from a variety of public positions, and expressly barred from serving as army officers. The outcry forced Aston to resign, but as a consolation, Charles knighted him. When the English Civil War erupted soon thereafter, he served the king – who was hard pressed enough now to ignore Aston’s Catholicism – and lost a leg in the process. He got a prosthetic, but it ended up doing him in.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.