Russell

On the morning of the twenty-first of July 1683, on a public scaffold in the open ground of Lincoln's Inn Fields in central London, William Russell, Lord Russell, eldest son of the 5th Earl of Bedford, forty-three years old, Member of Parliament for Bedfordshire, principal organiser of the Whig opposition to the succession of James Duke of York to the Crown, was beheaded for high treason. The charge arose from the Rye House Plot, a Whig conspiracy of June 1683 to ambush Charles II and James on the road back from Newmarket to London at the Rye House in Hertfordshire. Russell had not been at the meetings where the assassination had been discussed, and the Whig defence, before and after the trial, was that he had been concerned only with the parliamentary opposition to the Catholic succession and not with the plot. He was convicted at the King's Bench on the thirteenth of July on the evidence of the perjured informer Lord Howard of Escrick. The execution was politically deliberate: Charles II wished to make a Whig example. The political consequence was the temporary collapse of the Whig opposition through the rest of Charles's reign and the accession of James in 1685. Russell was rehabilitated by Parliament in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution; his attainder was reversed and his family lands restored. The Whig succession movement of the next century, which culminated in Walpole and the political settlement of 1688–1714, was built on the explicit political martyrology of Russell and his fellow Rye House victim Algernon Sidney.

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At one o'clock on the afternoon of the ninth of July 1955, in the Caxton Hall on the Westminster city-of-London side near the Houses of Parliament, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, third Earl Russell, eighty-three years old, the Trellech-Monmouthshire-born grandson of Lord John Russell (the mid-Victorian Whig Prime Minister, told on this page) and the most internationally recognised philosopher-and-public-intellectual of the twentieth century, gave a press-conference at which he read aloud the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a eleven-paragraph statement signed by eleven prominent scientific-and-philosophical-figures (including Albert Einstein, who had signed the Manifesto from his Princeton deathbed on the eleventh of April 1955 and died on the eighteenth of April, exactly four days after signing), calling on the governments of the world to acknowledge that the thermonuclear-weapons-revolution had made the traditional war-as-political-instrument doctrine impossible, and to convene a scientific-and-political international-conference to address the existential-risk of thermonuclear-war. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto led directly to the founding of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957 (the first Pugwash Conference was held at the Cyrus Eaton Pugwash, Nova Scotia, family home in July 1957, with Russell as the honorary president); the Pugwash Conferences were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. The Manifesto is, by every careful judgment of Cold War intellectual-history (Sandra Ionno Butcher, Joseph Rotblat), the foundational political-philosophical-document of nuclear-disarmament thought.

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