There was a sterner side to the religious movement in England than its relation to matters intellectual or even moral. The Reformation under Henry VIII. had added the names of certain women to those of the noble army of martyrs of all the ages. To be false to conscience was to be false to the very principles of their being, and both Catholic and Protestant women became intensely strong in their convictions and intolerant of those of others. The Roman Church offered up its holocaust to the passions and prejudices of the leaders of the Protestant movement, just as the Roman Church in turn exacted the tribute of their lives from many adherents of Protestantism. Woman was looked upon as inferior to man and less capable of responsible action, but in meting out persecutions there was no distinction as to sex, the weaker suffering equally with the stronger. The history of religious persecutions in England is one of its least engaging chapters, and extends over a long period. Puritan, Prelatist, and Catholic alike darkened the annals of the times by deeds of violence. To recite the sufferings of women under the crossfires of persecution would be at best an ungracious task; and as such experiences form but a part of the history of the sex during the period which we have broadly styled the period of the Commonwealth, an instance or two of the sufferings of notable women, irrespective of their party affiliations, will suffice for citation. One of the most sorrowful of the judicial murders of which a woman was the victim, which occurred during the whole of this extended period, was that of Lady Lisle, who, because of her sympathies with Monmouth's rebellion against the king, was brutally executed, the specific charge being the harboring of fugitives. The king's project to hand over the nation to papacy nowhere aroused such outbursts of indignation as among the Covenanters of Scotland, who saw in it the destruction of all their hard-wrought-out religious liberties, and the endangering of their lives, besides the return of the nation to the chaos from which it was emerging. The address of Lady Lisle before her execution is an example of the sublimity to which woman's character may rise under persecution, when the spirit is buoyed by faith: "Gentlemen, Friends, and Neighbors, it may be expected that I should say something at my death, and in order thereunto I shall acquaint you that my birth and education were both near this place, and that my parents instructed me in the fear of God, and I now die of the Reformed Protestant Religion; believing that if ever popery should return into this nation, it would be a very great and severe judgment.... The crime that was laid to my charge was for entertaining a Non-conformist Minister and others in my house; the said minister being sworn to have been in the late Duke of Monmouth's army." Continuing, she said: "I have no excuse but surprise and fear, which I believe my Jury must make use of to excuse their