Charles the Second, always in want of money, might very possibly have commissioned Blood, after he had stolen the Crown, to pawn or sell its gems in Holland or elsewhere, and the thieves could then have divided the spoil. There can be little doubt that had not young Edwards and his brother-in-law arrived at the Tower when they did, Blood and the two, or others, would have got safely away with the jewels. The plot had been admirably planned, and only the accident of the return of the keeper’s son, which Blood could not possibly have foreseen, prevented its successful accomplishment.
In later years Blood is said to have become a Quaker—not a desirable recruit for that most respectable body, one would imagine. He died in 1680, and has had the honour of having had his bold, bad face placed in the National Portrait Gallery; it fully bears out Evelyn’s description of the “villainous unmerciful” look of the man.
A very different individual from Blood, who was also in the Tower about the same time, was William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. He had been imprisoned for no offence, unless that of writing a pamphlet on Unitarianism could be considered a punishable crime. William Penn’s father, the celebrated Admiral, Sir William, had accused the Duke of York of showing cowardice in a sea fight with the Dutch, and the son’s pamphlet was made the stick with which to beat the father. Young Penn passed some months in the Tower, where he wrote his famous work, “No Cross, no Crown.” Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, was sent to the Tower to see, and to convert, the young Quaker from his errors in belief, but Penn only said to the prelate: “The Tower is to me the worst argument in the world,” and Stillingfleet found that he could make no impression.
In 1678, William Howard, Viscount Stafford, a Roman Catholic peer, was accused of being concerned in the Popish Plot, that monstrous tangle of lies, invented, for the greater part, by the infamous Titus Oates. Stafford was accused by Oates, with four other Roman Catholic peers, of being mixed up in the plot to overthrow the King, and to place the Duke of York upon the throne. From his place in the House of Lords Stafford had declared his innocence of the charge, but he was committed to close imprisonment in the Tower in the month of October (1678), remaining a prisoner until the month of November 1680, when he was tried at Westminster Hall, Titus Oates being the principal witness against him. In Reresby’s “Memoirs” it is said that Charles wished to save Stafford, whom he knew to be innocent; but his mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, whom Reresby believed to have been bribed, prevented the King from acting in the matter as he would otherwise have done, and Charles allowed an innocent man to be judicially murdered in order not to thwart his mistress’s wishes. Stafford was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 29th of December 1680, the crowd hooting him on his way to the scaffold, for Titus Oates’s infamous accusations had made any Roman Catholic an object of hatred to the populace. On Stafford asking one of the Sheriffs, of the name of Cornish, to interfere, the latter brutally replied: “I am ordered to stop no man’s mouth but your own.” So fervently, however, did Stafford proclaim his innocence on the scaffold, that many of the spectators, “with heads uncovered, exclaimed: ‘We believe you, God bless you, my Lord!’” “He perished,” writes Sir J. Reresby, “in the firmest denial of what had been laid to his charge, and that in so cogent and persuasive a manner, that all the beholders believed his words, and grieved his destiny.” The same tribunal which had condemned Stafford, three years after his death reversed the attainder they had pronounced against him, it having, in the meanwhile, been proved that Stafford had perished an innocent man, done to death by the false witness of the villain Oates. Lord Stafford was buried in the Chapel of St Peter’s.
William, Lord Russell.
(From the Portrait in the National Portrait Gallery)
The Rye House Plot brought two of the best and noblest heads in England to the block—William, Lord Russell, and Algernon Sidney. Both suffered death for the good cause of the liberty of England. Russell was the proto-martyr in that faith, Sidney the second.
England under Charles the Second was fast drifting back into the worst of the tyrannies that had darkened her former history. The King, as he proved on his death-bed, was a Roman Catholic in religion, and although professing to belong to the Church of England, moved in the steps of his brother James, who was an avowed Papist; and the country was rapidly becoming, politically, a dependency of the French King, and, in religion, a fief of the Pope. The four most conspicuous Englishmen who clearly saw the danger that threatened the freedom, both civil and religious, of England, and who had done their utmost to save their country—patriots in the best sense of that much-abused term, were at the time of the discovery of the Rye House Plot in 1683, either out of the country or in prison.
Shaftesbury, after an imprisonment of five weeks in the Tower, had crossed to Holland after his liberation in November 1681. The news of his acquittal had been received with great rejoicings in the city, Reresby writing that “the rabble lighted bonfires.” The Duke of York, according to Lenthall, expressed his indignation publicly at “such insolent defiance of authority such as he had never before known.” But Shaftesbury’s friends and admirers had a medal struck in honour of his liberation, on one side being the Earl’s portrait in profile, and on the other a view of London taken from the Southwark side of the Thames, with the sun casting its rays over the Tower from out the clouds; above is inscribed the word, “Laetamur,” with the date 24 of November 1681 beneath. This medal gave rise to Dryden’s satirical poem called “The Medal,” in which he compares Shaftesbury to Achitophel.
Russell, Sidney, and Essex were arrested and placed in the prisons of the Tower. They suffered death in the cause of constitutional liberty, as against the arbitrary power of the King, and also for wishing to exclude the Duke of York from the succession to the throne after his brother’s death. This plan was quite distinct from the Rye House Plot—a plot that arranged for the assassination of the King and the Duke of York on their road to Newmarket races.