4 - The Hague, 1708–10
Summary
Holland was a European seedbed for conspiracies. It was not only the Williamite intrusion of 1688 that was devised in part in Dutch circles, for the exile community of Whigs had dreamt of a revolution since at least the early 1680s. In particular the circle of activists surrounding the first Earl of Shaftesbury (and containing John Locke) was complicit in the Rye House plot in 1683; they retreated to Holland on discovery of the plan. The subsequent Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 underlined this group's commitment to the transformation of England's political character and Holland's status as a refuge for the revolutionary republican movement.
Holland was also a European hotbed of conspiracy theory. The Rye House plotters were committed to a theory of politics that was infused with a vocabulary of plots, invasions, assassinations and combinations. Indeed they committed themselves to what Ashcraft terms
a code language. Certain key words and phrases were used by them, and only by them, since the use of these words revealed very clearly the ideological commitment of radicalism. This terminology spoke of ‘an invasion of rights’, ‘usurpation’, ‘tyranny’, the king's 'betrayal of trust, his use of ‘violence and force against us’, the fact that he had ‘degenerated into a beast’ and so forth. It is, and was meant to be a violent language. It was intended to convey to others that a state of war already existed, launched by the king, who was therefore the true ‘rebel’, ‘thief’ or ‘traitor’.
Nor were the English alone in situating their conspiratorial politics in Holland. In the wake of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 Amsterdam and The Hague became the rendezvous of a large Huguenot community, which railed against the conspiracy of absolutist power personified by Louis XIV and which was challenged by a Dutch Republic which the French King repeatedly confronted in armed conflict.
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- Information
- A Political Biography of John Toland , pp. 89 - 104Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014