The siege dragged on wearily for six or seven weeks, at the end of which time Sir Thomas Fairfax resigned his post to Colonel Rigby. The castle forces amounted to three hundred soldiers, while the besieging force numbered between two and three thousand men. In the contest five hundred of these were killed, while the countess lost but six of her soldiers, who were killed through their own negligence. The colonel manufactured a number of grenadoes, and then sent an ultimatum to the countess, who tore up the paper and returned answer by the messenger to "that insolent" [Rigby] that he should have neither her person, goods, nor house; and as to his grenadoes, she would find a more merciful fire, and, if the providence of God did not order otherwise, that her house, her goods, her children, and her soldiers would perish in flames of their own lighting, and so she and her family and defenders would seal their religion and loyalty. The next morning the countess caused a sally of her forces to be made, in which they got possession of the ditch and rampart and a very destructive mortar which had been used to bombard the besieged. Rigby wrote to his superiors, begging assistance and saying that the length of the siege and the hard duties it entailed had wearied all his soldiers, and that he himself was completely worn out. In the meanwhile, the Earl of Derby and Prince Rupert made their appearance, and Rigby made a hurried retreat; in his endeavor to escape the Royalist forces, he fell into an ambush and received a severe punishment before he reached the town of Bolton. Such were the deeds of women of spirit upon each side of the civil conflict; and because of their elements of character and loyalty to conviction, the women of the better classes of England, irrespective of their affiliations, mark a high point of progress in the sex toward the goal of independence and individuality which the civil strife aided them to secure. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, was one of the religious communities of the Commonwealth, whose members suffered grievously on account of their religion. To the lot of their women fell an abundant share of persecutions and martyrdoms; they were scourged, and ill treated in every conceivable way. Their lives, inoffensive and pure, were a constant rebuke to those of the loose livers about them. Although Charles II. had promised, on coming to the throne, that he would befriend them, their miseries were not greatly abated. The persecution of Quaker women had continued from the middle of the sixteenth century, when, in the west of England, Barbara Blangdon was imprisoned for preaching, and other Quakeresses were placed in the stocks by the Mayor of Evansham, and also treated with other indignities. Throughout the seventeenth century, cruel persecutions of women of the Quaker persuasion were often repeated.