Russell · 1683
Lord William Russell on the scaffold
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.
It is twenty past eleven on the morning of the twenty-first of July 1683, on the scaffold in the centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields, central London, in heavy summer sun. He is forty-three years old. He is William Russell, Lord Russell, eldest surviving son of the 5th Earl of Bedford, Member of Parliament for the county of Bedfordshire since 1660, the parliamentary figure of the Whig opposition since the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, husband of Lady Rachel Wriothesley (the second daughter of the 4th Earl of Southampton, herself in her forty-seventh year and at this hour at home at Southampton House in Bloomsbury).
He has, on the scaffold with him, the Anglican bishop Gilbert Burnet (who has been his spiritual counsellor through the Tower months) and the Dissenting minister John Tillotson (who has, by Rachel Russell's request, also been admitted). The form of the scaffold is observed. He has, in his hand, a folded paper which is the scaffold-speech he has drafted with Burnet's help in the past three days. The speech is in the standard Whig form: a denial of the indictment, a defence of the principle of opposition to the royal prerogative, and a statement of faith.
He thinks: Rachel was in the trial galley behind me for the whole four days. Rachel was the only person in the courtroom taking notes for the defence. The defence by Hawles and Pollexfen relied on her notes.
He thinks: the conviction was on the evidence of Lord Howard. Lord Howard has perjured himself in three previous depositions. The court took Lord Howard's word.
He thinks: the principle on which I am being executed is the principle that organised parliamentary opposition to the Catholic succession is itself treason. The principle, in plain reading of the constitution, is not the law of the country.
He thinks: Charles wants the example. James wants the example more. The example will, in the long run of the country, fall on the people who set it.
He thinks: Rachel will, by my instruction yesterday, raise our two daughters and the boy without the Whig rancour. The principle will outlive the family. The Russells will, in two generations, have the political ground they did not have today.
He gives the speech to the sheriff, who passes it to Burnet for safe-keeping (it would be printed by Hawles within the week and would run to seven editions before Christmas). He kneels at the block. He lays his head. The executioner Jack Ketch takes the head off in three strokes, by the tradition the worst execution of the Stuart period, for which Ketch was, by the London Gazette of the twenty-third of July, publicly censured by the Lord Chamberlain.
Lord William Russell's body was returned to the family at Southampton House and was buried at Chenies in Buckinghamshire on the twenty-fifth of July 1683 in the Russell family vault. The Whig opposition collapsed through the remaining two years of Charles II's reign and through most of the four-year reign of James II that followed. The Glorious Revolution of November 1688 brought William of Orange to England on the explicit political project of preventing the Catholic succession that Russell had died opposing. Parliament, in 1689, reversed the attainder, restored the Bedford family lands, and (by the Act of Reversal of 1689) declared that Lord William Russell had been wrongly attainted and that the said attainder be utterly null and void to all intents and purposes whatsoever. The Russell line, in the form of the Dukes of Bedford from 1694 onwards, provided three Whig statesmen of the next two centuries (the 4th Duke as Secretary of State, the 6th Duke as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Lord John Russell as Prime Minister 1846–1852). The scaffold-site in Lincoln's Inn Fields is now in the public garden at the centre of the square; the tradition of the Inns of Court holds that the spot is, by the reckoning of the four Inns, the most consequential single yard of ground in the political history of the English Bar.