gious
persecutions in England is one of its least engaging chapters, and
extends over a long period. Puritan, Prelatist, and Catholic alike
darkened the annals of the times by deeds of violence. To recite the
sufferings of women under the crossfires of persecution would be at
best an ungracious task; and as such experiences form but a part of
the history of the sex during the period which we have broadly styled
the period of the Commonwealth, an instance or two of the sufferings
of notable women, irrespective of their party affiliations, will
suffice for citation.

One of the most sorrowful of the judicial murders of which a woman was
the victim, which occurred during the whole of this extended period,
was that of Lady Lisle, who, because of her sympathies with Monmouth's
rebellion against the king, was brutally executed, the specific charge
being the harboring of fugitives. The king's project to hand over
the nation to papacy nowhere aroused such outbursts of indignation as
among the Covenanters of Scotland, who saw in it the destruction of
all their hard-wrought-out religious liberties, and the endangering of
their lives, besides the return of the nation to the chaos from which
it was emerging. The address of Lady Lisle before her execution is
an example of the sublimity to which woman's character may rise under
persecution, when the spirit is buoyed by faith: "Gentlemen, Friends,
and Neighbors, it may be expected that I should say something at my
death, and in order thereunto I shall acquaint you that my birth and
education were both near this place, and that my parents instructed me
in the fear of God, and I now die of the Reformed Protestant Religion;
believing that if ever popery should return into this nation, it would
be a very great and severe judgment.... The crime that was laid to my
charge was for entertaining a Non-conformist Minister and others in my
house; the said minister being sworn to have been in the late Duke of
Monmouth's army." Continuing, she said: "I have no excuse but surprise
and fear, which I believe my Jury must make use of to excuse their
verdict to the world. I have been also told that the Court did use to
be of counsel for the prisoner; but instead of advice, I had evidence
against me from thence; which, though it were only by hearing, might
possibly affect my Jury; my defence being such as might be expected
from a weak woman; but such as it was, I did not hear it repeated
to the Jury, w