“The premisses piously considered, and for that the other weighty affairs of this land will not permit the speedy accomplishment of these particulars (by your Excellency) as your petitioners humbly conceive, in gaining a new representative; from which lawyers, and all ill-affected persons to be excluded. Your petitioners therefore humbly pray that in the meantime there may be such a course established as that the poor may by some easie and speedy way reap the fruit of justice.” It has been said that “women have not suffycent understanding for to lerne the lawes;” but, as the old writer who commented on this statement observed, “the contrary is made open by experyence.” Certainly the Puritan dames of the seventeenth century had “suffycent understanding” to realize the defects and hardships of the laws. The fearful suffering caused to the inhabitants of the western counties after Monmouth’s rebellion by that incarnation of cruelty, Judge Jeffreys, brought forth a women’s petition of another kind. It is styled “The Humble Petition of the Widows and Fatherless Children in the West of England,” and begins-- “We to the number of a thousand and more, widows and fatherless children, of the counties of Dorset, Somerset and Devon, our dear husbands and tender fathers having been so tyrannously butcher’d and some transported, our estates sold from us, and our inheritance cut off by the severe and harsh sentence of George Lord Jeffreys, now we understand in the Tower of London a prisoner, who has lately, we hear, endeavoured to excuse himself from those tyrannical and illegal sentences by laying it on information by some gentlemen who are known to us to be good Christians, true Protestants and Englishmen. We your poor petitioners, many hundreds of us, on our knees have begg’d mercy for our dear husbands and tender parents, from his cruel hands, but his thirst for blood was so great and his barbarism so cruel that instead of granting mercy to some which were made to appear innocent and petitioned for by the flower of the gentry of the said counties, he immediately caus’d them to be executed.... These with many hundred more tyrannical acts are ready to be made appear in the said counties by honest and credible persons; and therefore your Petitioners desire that the said Lord Jeffreys, late Lord Chancellor, the vilest of men, may be brought down to the Counties aforesaid, where we the good women in the West, shall be glad to see him; and give him another manner of welcome than he had there years since.”[48]