So, 27 August — 338th anniversary of the trial of Lady Alice Lisle, in which Hanging Judge Jeffreys browbeat a deaf, infirm widow in her 70s, and bullied a jury into convicting her so she could be burned at the stake.
Well…
Alice, or Alicia, Lisle wasn’t really a Lady or Dame, and was probably 67 or 8, but was the widow of John Lisle, who had been involved in the trial of Charles I (and been assassinated in a Lausanne churchyard after the Restoration). She “leaned towards constitutional royalism”, but “combined this with a notable sympathy for religious dissent”, and had sheltered a nonconformist minister in her house after the Monmouth Rebellion which had attempted to overthrow James II.
This led her to be the first person tried in the two month long Bloody Assizes, when hundreds of men were sentenced to hanging, disembowelling and quartering, after which the heads and quarters were dipped in pitch and salt and displayed in public.
These are all facts, more or less, but — as always with history — there’s a bit more nuance in the story the further you dig. We’re not about to discover that Judge Jeffreys was secretly a pussycat, but…
The assizes did, indeed, order a great many executions, but whether it was true that “houses and steeples” were “covered as close with heads as at other times with crows” is debatable — and this passage is probably overdoing it just slightly:
This is an extract from the book that gave Jeffreys his posthumous reputation, The Western Martyrology, Or, The Bloody Assizes, which was written after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw off James II, who Jeffreys had been working for — so it might not have been altogether unbiased. And this bit? Blimey.
As Nabokov might have put it: history; victors. Lisle was old and frail, though, and apparently deaf enough to need someone in the dock with her repeating everything that was said in the court — and the National Archives do say that Jeffreys’ conduct of the trial was
…but the only account we have of the trial is the one written by a propagandist, so whether it’s true that the jury came back with a not guilty verdict three times before being bullied into the one the judge wanted is hard to say.
‘Lady’ Lisle was sentenced to be ignominiously done in — although after a petition from her family, she was given the kindness of a beheading, rather than the burning at the stake that would have been on the cards if she hadn’t been a gentlewoman.
As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography points out, though,
One of the central points to remember concerning the western assizes of 1685 is that it was James who pointedly denied mercy in this and scores of other instances that September.
“Jeffreys”, they say, “is better known for his caricature than for his character”. Unfortunately for his posthumous reputation, it is a very entertaining caricature: shitfaced, even in court, bloodthirsty, and entirely partisan — and luridly portrayed by Christopher Lee in a very silly 1970 horror film.
He was “sometimes given to spectacular bouts of drink and gluttony”, but some of his drinking at least was done to relieve the pain of a bladder stone. Samuel Pepys had had his operated on a few years earlier, but was lucky to have survived an operation which looked like this:
…and which would have involved being held down, having his perineum sliced open and a doctor shoving in either a finger or two, or an instrument — none of which would have been clean — and pulling out something which was (in Pepys’ case, allegedly) the size of a tennis ball.
Anaesthesia was invented around two centuries later.
Jeffreys shouldn’t really have been taking his troubles out on those who appeared before him, but perhaps we should have some sympathy for his human failings. And he was “little different from many of his detractors. He was a witty and convivial companion and a loyal friend…”
When they took power, William and Mary reversed the verdict on Alice Lisle — three or four years too late, but it meant her son could inherit her house. Jeffreys was imprisoned under the new regime and died of kidney disease in the Tower of London in 1689.
He was burnt in effigy the same year, and excluded from a general pardon in 1690 — but the greatest indignity was probably Jesús Franco’s sleazy, ludicrous film, dignified only by Christopher Lee rising, as so often, far above the material he was given.
