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The Judicial Murder of Dame Alice Lisle?

Alice Lisle's sister was Lady Elizabeth Tipping, my 10th great-grandmother. Alice and Elizabeth were the daughters of Sir White Beckonshaw and Elizabeth Bond. We know nothing of the Beckonshaws but the Bonds came from the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset. Alice, my 10th great-aunt, married John Lisle, a leading member of the parliamentarians; eventually he was appointed to Oliver Cromwell's House of Lords and was made Commissioner of Oliver Cromwell's Seal.

The first we knew of Alice was NOTE II of the family bible, "Passages from The Diaries of Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys", edited by Emily J Climenson and published by Longmans Green in 1899.

The above eventually led me to GEC's superb Complete Peerage and found therein a short article on John, Lord Lisle. This in turn led me to find the article on him in the British Dictionary of National Biography, leading on rapidly to the articles on Alice Lisle herself and those on the two men she sheltered, John Hicks and Richard Nelthorpe. I also found her in that useful but none-too-thorough compendium, Burke's Commoners.

I put all this on this internet site.

This then led to a fascinating correspondence with Phil Roberts who had taken a special interest in this case and had obtained copies of the text for both Alice's trial and her speech at the executioner's block, now added to this site. He also provided a useful outline of the events. Finally he takes the view that Alice was, of course, guilty.

Read for yourselves:

In parenthesis I am surprised the Emily Climenson did not pick up the articles in the DNB, published apparently seven years before the publication of her edition of the diaries.


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