Alice Lisle

On 20 July 1685, a fortnight after the Battle of Sedgemoor, Lady Lisle agreed to shelter John Hickes, a well-known Nonconformist minister, at Moyles Court, her residence near Ringwood.

Repeatedly he reminded the jury of John Lisle's role in the trial and execution of Charles I, always with the admonition that they should not consider it when weighing the question of her guilt.

'[5] Jeffreys respited the sentence for a week but James II refused to extend mercy to her, though he allowed beheading as befitted her social rank to be substituted for burning at the stake.

Lady Lisle was publicly executed by an axe in Winchester marketplace on 2 September 1685;[6] the last woman in English history to be beheaded by judicial sentence.

She died with courage and dignity: onlookers remarked that, perhaps due to her age, she seemed to leave the world without regret (some other accounts, however, suggest she was as prone to napping during the procedure as she had been during her trial[2]).

A plaque on the wall of the Winchester city museum marks the spot of Lady Lisle's execution, opposite The Eclipse Inn near the cathedral.

[7] One of the first acts of the parliament of William and Mary after the Glorious Revolution was to reverse her attainder on the grounds that the prosecution was irregular and the verdict injuriously extorted by "the menaces and violences and other illegal practices" of Judge Jeffreys.