Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

To return to the Rye House plotters. We are told by those given to speculation and organisation that in all calculations a large allowance should be made for that which upsets most plans – the unforeseen. On this occasion the conspirators were so sanguine of their scheme as never to imagine it might be put to nought by pure accident. The farm had been engaged, the men instructed, the necessary hiding-places prepared, and all things were ready for the murderous deed. Suddenly the unforeseen occurred, and all the careful measures of the would-be regicides were rendered abortive. Owing to his house having caught fire, Charles was obliged to leave Newmarket eight days earlier than he had intended, and thus, thanks to this happy conflagration, passed unscathed by the Rye House, then completely deserted; his Majesty was comfortably ensconced at Whitehall, toying with his mistresses and sorting their bonbons, whilst his enemies, unconscious of his escape, were congratulating themselves that in another week their work would be done, and their victim fall an easy prey to their designs.

And now the result ensued which invariably attends upon treason which has failed and which fears detection. It was an age when plots were freely concocted against the Crown and those in supreme authority, yet, often as conspiracies were entered into, there were always witnesses ready to come forward and swear away the lives of their former accomplices, to divulge what they had pledged themselves to keep secret, and if need be to follow in every detail the example of the biggest scoundrel of the seventeenth century, Doctor Titus Oates of Salamanca. Among the minor persons engaged in the Rye House plot was, as we have said, Josiah Keeling; he was now fearful of the fate which might befall him should the authorities at Whitehall get wind of the past deliberations, and accordingly with that prudence which characterised him he was determined to be first in the field to make a clean breast of all that had been planned and suggested. First he went to Lord Dartmouth, of the Privy Council, and told his tale, and then was referred by that statesman to his colleague, Mr. Secretary Jenkins. Jenkins took down the deposition of the man, but said that unless the evidence was supported by another witness, no investigation of the matter could be proceeded with. Keeling was, however, equal to the occasion, and induced his brother John, a turner in Blackfriars, to corroborate his statements. The plot now authenticated by the two requisite witnesses, the Secretary of State thought it his duty to communicate the affair to the rest of the advisers of the Crown. It appears, however, that a few days after his confession the conscience of the younger brother, John Keeling, pricked him, and he secretly availed himself of the first opportunity to inform Richard Goodenough that the plot had been discovered by the Government, and advised all who had been engaged in it to fly beyond sea.

This news coming to the ears of Colonel Romsey and Robert West, who were bosom friends, the two, unconscious of the revelations of the Keelings, thought it now prudent to save their own skins by informing ministers of all that had occurred, and, indeed, to make their story the more palatable to the Government, of a little more than had occurred. Accordingly they wended their way to Whitehall, and there told how the house at Rye had been offered them by Rumbald, the maltster; how at this house forty men well armed and mounted, commanded in two divisions by Romsey and Walcot, were to assemble; and how on the return of the King from Newmarket, Romsey with his division was to stop the coach, and murder Charles and his brother, whilst Walcot was to busy himself in engaging with the guards. So far the narrative of the informers tallied with the confessions of the Keelings. But Romsey and West, aware how hateful Lord William Russell, Algernon Sydney, and the rest of the cabal were to the Government, by their open opposition to the home and foreign policy of the court, essayed to give the impression that the Council of Six were also implicated in the detestable designs of the Rye House plotters.73 When unscrupulous men in supreme power are anxious to gratify their animosity, any evidence calculated to bring foes within reach is acceptable. The hints of Romsey and West were sufficient for the purpose, and orders were instantly issued by the Secretaries of State for the arrest of the Six. The first victim was Lord William, who was at once taken before the council for examination; but as he denied all the charges brought against him, he was forthwith sent to the Tower. Algernon Sydney next followed. He had been seized whilst at his lodgings, and all his papers sealed and secured by a messenger. Once before the council, he answered a few questions, “respectfully and without deceit,” but his examination was brief, for on his refusal to reply to certain queries put to him, he also was despatched to the Tower. Monmouth, having received timely warning, had placed the North Sea between him and the court. Ford, Lord Grey, had been brought before the council, had been examined and sent to the Tower, but managing to bribe his guards, had escaped. Lord Essex and Hampden were imprisoned: shortly after his confinement, Essex, who was subject to constitutional melancholy, committed suicide by cutting his throat. Lord Howard was still at large, protesting that there was no plot, and that he had never heard of any. Orders were, however, issued for his arrest, and when the officers came to his house, they found him secreted up the chimney in one of his rooms. As Keeling had informed against the Rye House plotters, so Lord Howard now informed against the Six. Weeping at the fact that he was a prisoner, he promised to reveal all; his revelations were considered so satisfactory that within a few days after their being taken down by the council, both Lord William Russell and Algernon Sydney were put upon their trial for high treason.

Russell was the first to stand at the bar. It appears that one evening he had been present at the house of Thomas Shepherd in Abchurch Lane, where the Rye House conspirators were occasionally in the habit of meeting and discussing their plans. He had gone thither to taste some wine. “It was the greatest accident in the world I was there,” said Russell at his trial, “and when I saw that company was there I would have been gone again. I came there to speak with Mr. Shepherd, for I was just come to town.” His excuse was raised in vain. Romsey, Shepherd, and Howard were playing into the hands of the Crown, and each did his best by hard swearing and false testimony to make the prisoner’s conviction certain. The gallant colonel asserted that he had seen his lordship at the house of Shepherd, where discourse was being held by the cabal of conspirators as to surprising the King’s guards and creating an insurrection throughout the country. Thomas Shepherd next followed, and gave very much the same evidence as Romsey – that his house in Abchurch Lane was let as a place of rendezvous for the disaffected; that the substance of the discourse of those who met there was how to surprise the guards and organise a rising; that two meetings were held at his house, and that he believed the prisoner attended both, but that he was certainly at the meeting when they talked of seizing the guards. Then Lord Howard was called as a witness. He said that he was one of the Six, and had attended the meetings at the house of Shepherd; at such meetings it had been agreed to begin the insurrection in the country before raising the city, and there had also been some talk of dealing with the discontented Scotch; at these deliberations no question was put or vote collected, and he of course concluded by the presence of Lord William that the prisoner gave his consent like the rest to the designs of the cabal.

In his defence Russell denied that he ever had any intention against the life of the King; he was ignorant of the proceedings of the Rye House plotters, and his mixing with the conspirators on the sole occasion he had visited Shepherd at Abchurch Lane was purely due to accident. He had gone thither about some wine. He did not admit that he had listened to any talk as to the possibility of creating an insurrection; but even had he made such an admission, talk of that nature could not be construed into treason, for by a special statute (the old statute of treasons) passed in the reign of Edward III., “a design to levy war is not treason;” besides, such talk had not been acted upon; they had met to consult, but they acted nothing in pursuance of that consulting. The attorney-general held a different view, and asserted it had often been determined that to prepare forces to fight against the King was a design within the statute of Edward III. to kill the King. The presiding judge, as a creature of the court, was, of course, of the same opinion; he summed up the evidence, deeming it unfavorable to the prisoner; and the jury, basing their verdict upon the tone of the bench, brought in a sentence of guilty of high treason. In spite of every effort that affection could inspire and interest advocate, Lord William Russell ended his days on the scaffold. “That which is most certain in the affair is,” writes Charles James Fox in his history of James II., “that Russell had committed no overt act indicating the imagining the King’s death even according to the most strained construction of the statute of Edward III.; much less was any such act legally proved against him; and the conspiring to levy war was not treason, except by a recent statute of Charles II., the prosecutions upon which were expressly limited to a certain time which in these cases had elapsed; so that it is impossible not to assent to the opinion of those who have ever stigmatised the condemnation and execution of Russell as a most flagrant violation of law and justice.”

The same measure was now meted out to Algernon Sydney as had been dealt to Russell. In the eyes of the bench, conspiring to levy war and conspiring against the King’s life were considered one and the same thing. It was in vain that Sydney asserted that he had not conspired to the death of the King, that he had not levied war, and that he had not written anything to stir up the people against the King. It was in vain that even the Rye House plotters had to confess they knew nothing of him, and had never seen him at the different meetings. Canting Nadab, however – as Dryden, in his immortal satire, calls Lord Howard – was there, ready to swear away a colleague’s life or do any other dirty trick provided his own skin and estate were not forfeited for past misdeeds; his evidence was the chief trump card on which the court relied to score the game. Accordingly his lordship began his testimony by relating what had passed at the meetings of the Six, as to the best means for defending the public interest from invasion, and the advisability of the rising breaking out first in the country instead of in the city. He also stated that it was the special province of Algernon Sydney to deal with the malcontent Scots, and had carried out this task through the agency of one Aaron Smith, who had gone north and been provided with funds for the purpose. This assertion, though Howard candidly said he only spoke from hearsay, was deemed sufficient by the advisers of the Crown to place Sydney’s head in jeopardy. As the law, however, demanded that in all trials for high treason there should be two witnesses against the prisoner before sentence could be passed, and as no other witness had the baseness to act the part so well played by Lord Howard, it was necessary for the court to resort to some expedient which would sufficiently answer its purpose of convicting Sydney. The Court was equal to the emergency. Search was made among Sydney’s papers, and it was discovered that he had written a treatise – his famous discourse on Government – which particularly discussed the paramount authority of the people and the legality of resisting an oppressive Government. A few isolated passages of the work were read here and there, the extracts given were garbled, and, thanks to the coloring of the prosecution, the case against the prisoner looked black indeed. Entering upon his defence, Sydney, like Russell, denied that he had ever conspired to the death of Charles; nor was he a friend of Monmouth, with whom he had spoken but three times in his life: he objected to the evidence of Howard, which was based upon hearsay, but if such testimony were true, he was but one witness, and the law required two. As for regarding a mangled portion of his treatise as a second witness, it was iniquitous. “Should a man,” he cried, “be indicted for treason for scraps of papers, innocent in themselves, but when pieced and patched with Lord Howard’s story, made a contrivance to kill the King? Let them not pick out extracts, but read the work as a whole. If they took Scripture to pieces, they could make all the penmen of the Scripture blasphemous. They might accuse David of saying there is no God; the evangelists of saying that Christ was a blasphemer and seducer, and of the apostles that they were drunk.” Then he ended by denying that he had any connection with the malcontents in Scotland. “I have not sent myself,” he said, “nor written a letter into Scotland ever since 1659; nor do I know one man in Scotland to whom I can write, or from whom I ever received one.” He refuted the charges brought against him in vain. The notorious Jeffries was now the presiding judge, and never was summing up from the bench more culpably partial or more flagrantly at variance with the clauses of the judicial oath. “I look upon the meetings of the Six,” said Jeffries to the jury, “and the meetings of the Rye House plotters as having one and the same end in view; I place implicit faith in the evidence of Howard; I deny that it is necessary that there shall be two witnesses to convict a prisoner of high treason; and as for the treatise of Sydney, I declare it is sufficient to condemn the author as being guilty of compassing and imagining the death of the King.” Upon the jury retiring to consider their verdict, Jeffries sternly informed them that he had explained the law, and that they were bound to accept his interpretation of it. Thus left without any option in the matter, the jury returned at the end of half an hour into court, and brought in a verdict of guilty. After a brief confinement. Algernon Sydney was beheaded on Tower Hill, Dec. 7, 1683.

Thus ended one of the most iniquitous and unjust trials that the annals of justice ever had to record. “The proceedings in the case of Algernon Sydney,” writes Fox, “were most detestable. The production of papers containing speculative opinions upon government and liberty, written long before, and perhaps never intended to be published, together with the use made of those papers in considering them as a substitute for the second witness to the overt act, exhibited such a compound of wickedness and nonsense as is hardly to be paralleled in the history of judicial tyranny. But the validity of pretences was little attended to at that time in the case of a person whom the court had devoted to destruction; and upon evidence such as has been stated was this great and excellent man condemned to die.” Upon the accession of “the Deliverer” to the throne, an Act was passed annulling and making void the attainder of Algernon Sydney on account of its having been obtained “without sufficient legal evidence of any treason committed by him,” and “by a partial and unjust construction of the statute declaring what was his treason.” The fate of the Rye House conspirators was very various. Some fled never to return, and were outlawed like Ferguson and Goodenough; others confessed, and were pardoned like Romsey; whilst a third offered in vain to purchase life by turning informers, as was the case with Walcot and Armstrong. Two years later those who had been outlawed, and were living in exile, again tried their hand at insurrection by aiding Monmouth in his revolt. —Gentleman’s Magazine.