page_title: Alice Lisle
section_title: Execution
hierarchical_section_title: Alice Lisle / Execution
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of the Eclipse Inn, Winchester, where Alice Lisle spent the night before her execution in 1685
context_page_description: Lady Alice Lisle, commonly known as Alicia Lisle or Dame Alice Lyle, was a landed lady of the English county of Hampshire, who was executed for harbouring fugitives after the defeat of the Monmouth Rebellion at the Battle of Sedgemoor. While she seems to have leaned to Royalism, she combined this with a decided sympathy for religious dissent. She is known to history as Lady Lisle although she has no claim to the title; her husband was a member of the "Other House" created by Oliver Cromwell and "titles" deriving from that fact were often used after the Restoration.
  She is the last woman to have been executed by a judicial sentence of beheading in England.
context_section_description: 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 Alice Lisle was publicly executed by an axe in Winchester market-place on 2 September 1685; 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). She is buried in a tomb on the right hand side of the porch at St Mary and All Saints Church, in Ellingham, Hampshire.
  A plaque on the wall of the Winchester city museum marks the spot of Lady Alice's execution, opposite The Eclipse Inn  near the cathedral. She spent the night before her execution in one of the upper rooms of the inn, whence she exited via a window directly onto the scaffold erected for her beheading.
caption: The Eclipse Inn, Winchester
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