The Hanging Judge's First Victim

In the summer of 1685, England erupted in rebellion. The Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate Protestant son of the late King Charles II, landed in the West Country and tried to seize the throne from his Catholic uncle, King James II. It ended in disaster at the Battle of Sedgemoor — the last pitched battle ever fought on English soil — where Monmouth’s ragtag army of farmers and labourers was slaughtered. Monmouth was caught hiding in a ditch and beheaded. And then James II set out to make the West Country pay.

The instrument of his vengeance was a man whose name still means cruelty three centuries later: Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys — “the Hanging Judge.”

THE HORROR But the first person to fall to Jeffreys wasn’t a rebel soldier. It was an elderly widow whose only crime was answering her own front door.

Her name was Lady Alice Lisle. She was around seventy years old, a well‑respected gentlewoman who lived at Moyles Court, a manor house near Ringwood in the New Forest in Hampshire. She was not a political firebrand. By all accounts she was an apolitical old lady living quietly on her estate.

On the 20th of July 1685, two weeks after Sedgemoor, two men came to her door in the night, exhausted and asking for shelter. One was John Hickes, a well‑known Nonconformist minister. The other was Richard Nelthorpe, a lawyer. Both were fleeing the collapse of Monmouth’s rebellion. Alice Lisle took them in and gave them a bed for the night, as country hospitality demanded — an old woman giving two tired travellers a place to sleep.

The next morning, soldiers arrived on a tip‑off and arrested the two men. And they arrested Lady Lisle, too, and charged her with high treason — for harbouring traitors.

Her defence was simple and, by any fair reading, true. She said she’d taken Hickes in believing he was only wanted for illegal preaching — a minor offence — and that she’d had no idea he’d been part of the rebellion. She said she’d never even heard of Nelthorpe before that night. She was an old woman who’d given shelter to a preacher; she hadn’t fought anyone, plotted anything, or raised a hand against the King.

None of it mattered, because her trial, at Winchester on the 27th of August 1685, was the opening act of what history remembers as the Bloody Assizes — Judge Jeffreys’s campaign of terror through the West Country, which would see around three hundred people executed and eight hundred more shipped to the colonies as slaves. And Jeffreys wanted to set the tone.

He was monstrous to her from the bench. He bullied and browbeat the witnesses. He harangued the elderly, frail defendant. And when the case went to the jury, they did something remarkable for that terrified courtroom: they hesitated. They retired to consider, and they stayed out a long time, because they could see the case against a seventy‑year‑old woman for giving a man a bed was thin and cruel.

Jeffreys was enraged. He sent word to the jury room that if they did not come back at once, he would adjourn the court and lock them all up together for the entire night — no food, no fire, no rest. It was, in effect, torture of the jury to force their verdict. Even then, they came back only to say they doubted the charge had been proven. Jeffreys expostulated with them, sent them back again, and finally ground a reluctant verdict of “Guilty” out of them.

There was, at the time, no legal distinction between a traitor and someone who merely helped one. So the sentence for this old woman who’d given shelter to a preacher was the sentence for treason: she was to be burned alive. And Jeffreys, in a final act of gratuitous cruelty, ordered that it be carried out that same afternoon.

The horror of burning a seventy‑year‑old woman to death within hours of her conviction was too much even for that brutal age. There was an outcry. The clergy of Winchester Cathedral intervened and won her a few days’ respite. And King James II — petitioned for mercy — refused to spare her life, but did grant one concession: in respect of her rank, she could be beheaded instead of burned.

On the morning of the 2nd of September 1685, Lady Alice Lisle was taken to the marketplace in Winchester. She was old, and reportedly so composed — or so weary — that witnesses said she seemed to leave the world without fear or regret, some even claiming she dozed as she waited, as she was said to have done during her own trial. She stepped out onto a scaffold and was beheaded with an axe.

She was the last woman in all of English history to be beheaded by a judicial sentence. Contemporaries called it plainly what it was: a judicial murder.

THE MODERN RELIC Almost everyone knew it was a crime. When William and Mary took the throne just a few years later in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, one of the first acts of their Parliament was to formally reverse the attainder against Alice Lisle — an official declaration by the English state that her conviction had been a wrong. Judge Jeffreys himself was caught trying to flee the country disguised as a sailor, was thrown into the Tower of London, and died there, reviled, his name becoming a permanent byword for judicial tyranny.

There’s a bitter footnote, too, that tells you what the Bloody Assizes were really about: Lady Lisle’s confiscated estate, worth over £5,000 a year, was simply handed to the Earl of Feversham as a reward for his services to the King. Her death made someone rich.

The relics are still there, and they’re wonderfully specific. In the heart of Winchester, just off the old square, stands a beautiful Tudor‑fronted pub called The Eclipse Inn. It was here that Lady Alice Lisle spent her final night. And if you stand in the street and look up at the upper window, that is the window she stepped out of — straight onto the scaffold specially built against the front of the building — to be beheaded. You can buy a drink there today and look up at the exact spot where a seventy‑year‑old woman was executed for giving two men a bed.

And she went home in the end. Lady Alice Lisle is buried in the quiet churchyard of St Mary and All Saints at Ellingham, near her old home in the New Forest, where her grave can still be found. The apolitical old widow who answered her door one night, and was murdered by the law for it, lies at peace a few miles from the house where she made a cup of tea for two tired strangers and lost her head for it.

← Back to the archive