Why would a 17th-century writer
warn people that a chapel was only for "private or secret suffrages"?
Because suffrage has been used since the 14th century to mean
"prayer" (especially a prayer requesting divine help or
intercession). So how did suffrage come to mean "a vote" or "the
right to vote"? To answer that, we must look to the word's Medieval Latin
ancestor, suffrāgium, which can be translated as meaning "vote,"
"support," or "prayer." That term produced descendants in a
number of languages, and English picked up its senses of suffrage from two
different places. We took the "prayer" sense from a Middle French
suffrāgium offspring that emphasized the word's spiritual aspects, and we
elected to adopt the "voting" senses directly from the original
Latin.
