In June 1683, about a year after the commencement of the London shrieval election of 1682, subjects throughout the kingdom were startled by the government's disclosure of a “horrid conspiracy” of the “fanaticks” to assassinate the king and his brother and to mount an insurrection. After years of loyalist charges about Whig disloyalty, the news concerning this Whig plot was an immediate and lasting sensation that dominated the prints and public conversation for months. Tory writers like Sir Roger L'Estrange and Thomas Sprat were quick to argue that the Rye House Plot, as historians would dub the affair, was a natural conclusion to Whig opposition in parliament and the city. The fanatics had at last been detected in their efforts to return the nation to the circumstances of 1649 or 1659. The fact that most of those apprehended, tried, or executed for their part in plotting were London dissenters or national figures, like Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney, who had kept company with leading civic Whigs, did not escape loyalist notice.

The government's propaganda campaign and its successful plot prosecutions of Russell, Sidney, and many lesser figures enabled it, at last, to gain the upper hand against its opponents. Few were prepared to continue to oppose Charles II, his Catholic successor, or the church leadership, when opposition talk or behavior invited questions about loyalty or provoked suspicions about plotting. The treason trials that began in 1683 permitted a resolution of the Restoration Crisis on uncompromising loyalist terms.

THE LOSS OF THE INITIATIVE

The London shrieval election of 1682 had brought the king and the Whigs to the brink of a confrontation unlike anything seen in the city since 1641–2, except the standoff between the Rump and the Corporation in 1659–60. Although the government believed it had begun the political reconstruction of the Corporation with the declaration of Tory sheriffs on 28 September, the London Whigs were reconciled neither to this result nor to the process that had achieved it. Moreover, the boundary dividing legal action and maneuvre from the outright defiance of authority had begun to dissolve as Whig anger mounted through the summer months of 1682. Whig citizens had accused Lord Mayor Moore of seeking to impose his “will” upon them, contrary to law. They claimed that unjust and unlawful force had been utilized in an electoral process and that a “military government” had been established over them. They accused loyalist magistrates of violating their oaths and their “trusts” to preserve the rights of citizens. Most ominously, Sheriff Pilkington had defended the people's right to “fortify” themselves in defense of their “Lives, Religion, and Liberty.” This was not the language of political acquiescence, and the London Whigs would have been surprised to learn that their contest with the crown was over.

City and Country Whigs were, nevertheless, not entirely agreed about how best to proceed in response to the “imposition” of magistrates upon the city.

INTRODUCTION: UNSETTLING THE STATE IN THE ERA OF DANBY'S ANGLICAN POLITY

The future of the church establishment remained the most critical domestic issue confronting the Restoration regime in the 1670s. If the Conventicle Act of 1670 and the rejection of coercion by London dissenters left the church unsettled, the inability of Charles's governments to achieve religious accommodation thereafter left the state vulnerable to unsettlement as well. Recognizing this vulnerability, the ministry of the Cabal sponsored a royal indulgence for dissenters in 1672 that provoked both a parliamentary reaction and a strong parliamentary effort to find new grounds for Protestant accommodation. But parliament left the work of Protestant accommodation unfinished in 1673. Some historians have assumed that the Anglican settlement was impregnable in 1672–3, but urban dissenters and their parliamentary friends remained determined to free conscience from its cavalier shackles.

Unfortunately for these advocates of conscience, however, the dominant ministerial agenda of the 1670s was not the search for accommodation but rather a strengthening of the confessional exclusivity of the Restoration state. After the Cabal dissolved in 1673, the political dynamics of the early 1660s reappeared. Thomas Osborne, who was soon made Earl of Danby, emerged as the king's principal minister. The new lord treasurer and his associates encouraged another Anglican reaction, claiming that the Protestant establishment was imperiled by papists and sectarians alike. By the spring 1675 parliamentary session, the ministry was, however, more focused upon reviving the sectarian alarms of 1659–60 than upon any perceived Catholic threat.