Page 13 - History 2020

anyway. Jeffreys was suffering from painful kidney stones at the time of the Bloody

Assizes which took place all over the west country. Fifty died in Somerset alone.
Many however were offered and received Royal Pardons after the payment of bribes.
Men like Dorset attorney Andrew Loder made fortunes as “pardon mongers”.

*The Sheriff of Somerset ordered the authorities in Bath to provide funding for a gallows, furnace,
cauldron and salt to boil the heads, axes and cleavers, tar to treat the body parts, poles and spears
to display them, wagons and oxen to transport them, plus payment of gaolers, executioners and
gallows-builders.

Dame Alice Lisle of Moyles Court, Ringwood, was 70, the widow of Sir John Lisle. He
was a regicide, having been one of the judges at the trial of the executed Charles I in
1649. She was accused of harbouring two fugitives from the Battle of Sedgemoor, a
non-Conformist minister and a London lawyer. At her trial in Winchester it was
established that there was no evidence that she was involved in the Rising, nor knew

that the men she was harbouring were rebels; nor had they yet been convicted of
treason. Yet when the jury asked Judge Jeffreys whether her actions could be
considered in law as treasonable, he answered said yes; virtually directing the jury to
convict her. She was sentenced to be burnt at the stake, but after a petition to King
James, it was commuted to beheading. An account of her execution said she made no
comment on the scaffold as “she was old and dozy and died without much concern.”
Jeffreys was certainly guilty of vindictiveness and harsh sentencing, but the Lisle case
is the only one of his convictions to be considered legally improper. Alice’s late

husband, the regicide Sir John Lisle, had died in Lausanne in 1664, murdered by
Royalist agents. Now Alice was dead, executed on the authority of a son of Charles
I’s. There is no evidence of any connection.

What happened to “Hanging” Judge Jeffreys? We take up his story in November
1688. The 1688 Revolution was under way. King James II ordered Jeffreys, now

promoted to be his Lord Chancellor, to remain close by; he wanted access to the
Great Seals which Jeffreys held. These Seals gave documents the force of law which
could only be repealed by an Act of Parliament. James intended to destroy them if, as
expected, he was forced to flee, as a final act of defiance. Sure enough, on 11
December, as he fled down the Thames on a small skiff, he threw the Great Seal into
the river. (According to not very reliable legend, they later turned up in a fisherman’s
nets, proof of God’s approval for the Revolution).

After James fled, London now descended into near anarchy. Anti-Catholic riots broke
out. The mobs carried oranges stuck on staves to show their support for William. Key
servants of the Crown were seized as they tried to escape. Jeffreys was one of them.
He had disguised himself by shaving off his distinctive beetle brows, blackening his