When John Hicks sought sanctuary after Monmouth’s defeat, Alice Lisle did not receive him in the light of day. A message, however, had reached her: Hicks asked whether he might find shelter under her roof. The answer, as recorded at the trial, was yes. A few nights later, the preacher arrived in the company of Richard Nelthorp, another fugitive. The Crown would not reprove her for harbouring Nelthorp; her crime, in the eyes of the court, was having granted asylum to Hicks, whom the prosecution held to be an armed rebel.
At Winchester, on 27 August 1685, Lisle stood before Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys. The nineteenth-century collection of state trials depicts her as aged, infirm, and hard of hearing; a kinsman was permitted to stand by her side to explain the proceedings. She pleaded not guilty. It fell to the prosecution to prove not merely that Hicks had borne part in the rebellion, but that Lisle was fully aware of the character of her guest.
The opening of the trial was thus devoted to Hicks. Three prisoners taken by Monmouth’s forces testified to having seen him in their camp. He had spoken to them of the Duke’s Protestant cause and inveighed against the government of James II. One placed him with the rebel army shortly before the battle; the others recounted conversations held during their captivity. The record further notes that Hicks admitted to being the man seen at Salisbury. Such depositions tethered the visitor at Moyles Court to the insurrection, yet they shed no light upon what Lisle herself knew.
To establish her guilt, the jury heard James Dunne, the messenger. At first, he recounted an almost trivial errand: an unknown man had sent him to ask whether Lady Lisle would receive Hicks. She had consented to see him on the Tuesday evening. Dunne then claimed that he had guided Hicks and Nelthorp along byways and sunken lanes, knowing neither their names nor their condition. Under Jeffreys’s menacing interrogation, his answers shifted. He denied having borne a letter, until Barter swore to having seen him deliver one to the bailiff. He denied having eaten at Lisle’s board, only to confess at last that he had shared a meal with the two men in a chamber where she was present.
The journey had been plotted in stages. Dunne placed his first visit to Lisle on the Saturday; Barter stated he had ridden with him to Moyles Court and witnessed a letter placed in the bailiff’s hands. On Tuesday, Dunne set out with the fugitives and met Barter upon Salisbury Plain. The travellers dismissed Barter before reaching their destination, bidding Dunne summon another guide. In the courtroom, the debate turned upon far more than who had unlatched the door: every detour, every name uttered or withheld, every divergent account of the tryst was weighed to determine whether the arrival of the two men could ever have worn the guise of innocence.
The Chief Justice pressed the witness with a vehemence that turned the examination into a public spectacle. Dunne was branded a liar, commanded to recall the “business” whereof he and Lady Lisle had spoken, and badgered once more regarding his route and the presence of the fugitives. He testified that she had asked whether Hicks was a Nonconformist; he could not recall her inquiring whether he had been in arms. Barter brought forth a darker version: Dunne, he claimed, had spoken of men of great estate, of a “good job” that would make his fortune, and of the fugitives having first lodged in his own house. Dunne disputed this. Thus the jury was presented with testimony riddled with contradictions and belated admissions, wrested from a witness publicly broken by the bench.
Barter recounted his own role in the betrayal. Upon learning that wanted men were bound for Moyles Court, he had ridden to alert Colonel Penruddock. The colonel dispatched soldiers to surround the house. They discovered Hicks and Dunne concealed in the malt-house; Nelthorp was dragged from a hole beside the chimney. Lisle denied the presence of other guests. She protested that the soldiers had burst in with violence and ransacked her dwelling. She maintained she had received Hicks solely as a dissenting preacher, knowing he was liable to arrest for his conventicles, but wholly ignorant that he had taken up the sword.
The soldiers had not crossed the threshold immediately. Penruddock testified that he had waited before the house for half an hour before Carpenter came to the door. The bailiff revealed that strangers lay hidden within, yet begged that his mistress might never know he had betrayed them. Penruddock then described the capture of the three men. The narrative afforded the defence ground to contest the search and Lisle’s initial denials, yet it produced no independent witness capable of proving her knowledge prior to the supper.
That supper, however, the defence could not efface. Mrs Carpenter swore that she had prepared it at her mistress’s bidding and carried it to the chamber where the men were lodged. She had seen Lisle in the room. The bailiff confirmed that the house had sheltered the guests, but could not recall hearing Nelthorp’s name before his capture. George Creed, for his part, reported Nelthorp’s declaration that Lisle knew nothing of his coming and was ignorant of his name. Jeffreys brushed this testimony aside as irrelevant: Lisle stood indicted not for harbouring Nelthorp, but Hicks.
When her turn came to answer, Lisle no longer denied all commerce with Hicks. She admitted having consented to receive him. She insisted she believed him hunted only for his preaching, not for rebellion, and that she would never have knowingly imperilled the fortunes of her children. She added that her heart had been with the King throughout the insurrection, and that her own son had borne arms in the royal forces. Her defence faltered against the reality of the supper and the choice to admit Hicks by night; it struggled, too, against the tangled depositions of witnesses called to swear to her secret thoughts.
In his summing-up, Jeffreys reminded the jury that they were to judge solely by the evidence, yet he lavished his rhetoric upon the horrors of rebellion and the duties of allegiance. He bore down heavily upon the assertion that Lisle had inquired whether Hicks had been in the army, and that she had not turned him away upon discovering he brought a companion. The record notes but a single hesitation on the part of the jurors: they asked whether it was indeed treason to harbour a rebel before he had been convicted by law. Jeffreys replied that it mattered not. Retiring once more, they returned with a verdict of guilty.
The conviction did not conclude the drama. On the morrow, Jeffreys upbraided the prisoner for failing to “satisfy” justice by laying bare the whole conspiracy. The statutory penalty for a woman convicted of high treason was the stake. Clergymen obtained a brief respite; her kinsfolk then petitioned the King to commute the sentence to beheading. The petition cited historical precedents of women of quality spared the flames. James II signed the warrant. Alice Lisle was beheaded in the market-place at Winchester on 2 September 1685.
The 1825 record leaves an unresolved knot at the heart of the case. The meal and the lodging were established by multiple witnesses; yet Lisle’s precise knowledge of Hicks’s part in the rebellion rested upon contradictory statements, wrung out amidst the browbeating and threats of the Chief Justice. The chronicle openly accuses Jeffreys of having forced the verdict. It affords us no window into Lisle’s conscience; it reveals only what the court made of her replies, and how, in the space of a few days, an act of acknowledged hospitality was transformed into a capital sentence.