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

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.