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Lilias Gillespie Skene

1626 - 1697

About MeBorn Lilias Gillespie in Kirkcaldy, in 1626 or 7. Her father and grandfathers were Church of Scotland ministers and her elder brothers were Covenanters: she was a steadfast Presbyterian and described herself as ‘a true lover of that called the Glorious Gospel…’.

In 1646 at the age of 20 she married Alexander Skene, a wealthy Aberdonian merchant and ardent Covenanter. They went on to have ten children, at least three of whom died in infancy, including their first child who died during the last major plague epidemic in 1647.

With restoration of the monarchy there was also the restoration of the episcopacy and moves to make life difficult for radical Presbyterians. Skene's brother Patrick was arrested for treasonable practices. Her first known poem dates from this period, 1665 and is On Growing Tryalls: links Presbyterians to Isrealites in Egypt. In 1666 she converted to Quakerism, which had developed out of the religious radicalism of the Civil war.

Quakerism arrived in Aberdeen with Cromwell’s army. Aberdeen Burgh council persecuted them as they did with other religious minorities, as was the same in all of Scotland. Persecution heightened in the 1670s - there were no martyrs in Aberdeen, but long imprisonments and crippling fines.

Lilias Skene's conversion was a huge issue at the time: she had previously been held in high esteem by Aberdeen’s ministers also for some time it placed her at odds with her husband, for 6 years prior to his conversion. This propelled her into the public light, but this was a role that she very much grasped. Once she and her husband were converted they became effectively the centre of Quakerism in Aberdeen. The couple opened their house to meetings, and the Friends from England and took part in all major public affairs, publications and meetings. Speaking and writing were the heart of her activism - she wrote verse and prose.

In total 33 of her lyric poems survive, comprising some 1,472 lines. The originals are now lost and the best copies that survive are 19th century ones. Some of her poems were published in her lifetime as were some of her sermons and her open letters to royalty in Europe (namely Princess Elizabeth of the Rhine). Of her work the historian Gordon Des Brisay has written: ‘Though her surviving works of poetry and prose are few and currently exist only in archives and rare editions, they constitute one of the largest bodies of literary work by a non-aristocratic Scottish woman of her day’.

Her sermons and her activism meant that she was also extremely well known in her day. Notorious in fact. The Privy Council in Edinburgh levied fines in abundance on Quaker men throughout the country. In 1676 when fining Alexander Skene the penalty was increased by half because of Lilias’s ‘transgressions’. Perhaps one of her most startling acts was her sermon of 1677 ‘A word of warning to the magistrates and inhabitants of Aberdeen.’ In this she answered accusations from the Episcopal ministry and put herself forward as their equal, if not in fact better. This was at a time when women’s interventions in public life were by definition transgressive.

The end of persecution of the Quakers in Aberdeen in 1679 brought an end also to her prose, but her poetry continued. She died in 1697. However since her death her prominence has completely fallen away and it is only much more recently that attention has been drawn to her, both as an important figure in the history of Quakerism, as a Scottish historical woman and finally as having a role in the history and development of Scottish literature and poetry.

"Lilias Skene: A Quaker Poet and Her 'Cursed Self'." In Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, edited by Sarah Dunnigan, Evelyn S. Newlyn and C. Marie Harker, 162-77. (Palgrave, 2004).