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These Times History Took a Turn for the Batty

Khalid Elhassan November 3, 2019 34 min

Sir Arthur Aston, getting the business from his wooden leg. Flickr

27. Getting Beat to Death With His Own Wooden Leg

Sir Arthur Aston had an authoritarian style of command, learned on the continent. It was unpopular in England, leading his troops to view him as a martinet and hate his guts. Aston 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 the royalists in Ireland, and was made commander of Drogheda. He was besieged in 1649 by Parliamentary forces led by Oliver Cromwell, who stormed and captured the town on September 11^th. Aston was captured, and Cromwell’s soldiers, convinced that his prosthetic must contain hidden gold, demanded that he show them how to access its secret compartment. They refused to believe his denials, and frustrated at his perceived stubbornness, beat him to death with his own wooden leg.

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.