Rye House Plot

The Rye House Plot of 1683 was a plan to assassinate King Charles II of England and his brother (and heir to the throne) James, Duke of York.

After the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, there was concern among some members of Parliament, former republicans, and sections of the Protestant population of England, that the King's relationship with France under Louis XIV and the other Catholic rulers of Europe was too close.

The plan was to conceal a force of men in the grounds of the house and ambush the King and the Duke as they passed by on their way back to London from the horse races at Newmarket.

The "Rye House plotters", an extremist Whig group who are now named after this plot, allegedly adopted the plan out of a number of possibilities, having decided that it gave tactical advantages and could be carried out with a relatively small force operating with guns from good cover.

[2] The royal party were expected to make the journey on 1 April 1683, but there was a major fire in Newmarket on 22 March, which destroyed half of the town.

The conspirators of this period were numerous, and the resort to some sort of armed resistance was widely debated from the early 1680s, on what was becoming the Whig side of the factional division of British politics.

The subsequent historiography of the Plot was largely partisan, and scholars are still clarifying who was closely involved in the planning of violent and revolutionary measures.

The assassination plot centred on a group that was convened in 1682–1683 by Robert West of the Middle Temple, a Green Ribbon Club member:[3] it is now often called the Rye House cabal.

[11] During the spring of 1683 there were further contacts between the Monmouth cabal and West's group about drafting a manifesto, through Sir Thomas Armstrong in particular, there being disagreements about whether a republican or monarchical constitution should result from revolutionary measures.

In April 1683, some Scottish contacts of the Whigs arrived in London, as briefed by Smith, meeting Essex and Russell of the Monmouth cabal.

[16] The Earl of Argyll had left London for the Netherlands in August 1682 but kept in touch with Whig notables through couriers and ciphered correspondence.

A meeting of the plotters had been held at his house on 18 June; but rather than escape, he chose to write to Jenkins, with the offer of a full confession in return for a pardon.

[7] Among the plotters, John Row from Bristol was considered particularly unreliable, and he had a direct connection to the Monmouth household to offer as information; a number of steps were taken to silence him, and his life was under threat more than once.

Although the principal conspirators were minor figures, and not directly concerned in the Monmouth cabal, the court party made no distinction between the groups.

Richard Greaves cites as proof that there was a plot in 1683, the 1685 armed rebellions of the fugitive Earl of Argyll and Charles' Protestant illegitimate son, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth.

[33] Popular reaction to the Tories' reactive excesses, sometimes known as the "Stuart Revenge" though that term is contested, led to the discontent expressed decisively in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Rye House, Hertfordshire in a 1793 watercolour by J. M. W. Turner
Route from Newmarket to London in 1683, past Rye House.
Rye House in an engraving from 1777. The gate across the road signifies the toll payable for use of the route. There were miscellaneous buildings on the large site, to the right of the road. The crenellated brick gatehouse dates from the 15th century.
Account of Rye House, from the official history of the Plot by Thomas Sprat (2nd edition, 1685).
Late 17th-century composite engraving by John Savage , and comprising seven portraits of figures of the Plot all of whom were dead by 1685 ( Sir Thomas Armstrong , the Earl of Argyll , the Earl of Essex , Henry Cornish , William Russell, Lord Russell , the Duke of Monmouth , and Algernon Sidney ), with one of Edmund Berry Godfrey , whose unexplained death triggered the Popish Plot allegations against Catholics.
Title page of Thomas Sprat's official account of the Plot.
Sir Thomas Armstrong was among those hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason in connection with the plot
The Trial of William Lord Russell at the Old Bailey . George Hayter , 1825.