31 This Tory populism aimed at giving the freemen of the city a
greater say in the election of aldermen and it drew much of its strength from the small traders and manufacturers who were being left behind in the Whig boom. Popular politics of this sort was organized around clubs, meetings, and processions, and so it was not that surprising when these activities spilled over into disorder and riot. Yet this disorder never seems to have contained a real threat of rebellion or revolution. It is doubtful whether radical Whigs could have launched a rising in London after the Exclusion Crisis. Holmes thinks that the Sacheverell rioters of 1710 were "respectable," with clearly specified and ideologically informed aims (i.e., tearing down Nonconformist meeting houses): the Whig and Tory mobs, the Church and Jacobite mobs, even the "No Excise" crowds, all seem to have been mouthing the slogans of their social superiors, rather than any distinctive grievances of their own. Politicians and parliament were also prepared to give way to opinion "without doors," as happened in the Excise Crisis, over war fever in 1739, or the Jew Bill. The only rebellion of our period (excluding the invasions of 1688, 1715, and 1745) was Monmouth's rising of 1685, which drew upon the strength of the good old cause in the West Country. This puritan legacy was probably the reservoir of English political radicalism: former Cromwellians, ex-soldiers and sectaries, artisans and Nonconformists formed a shadowy underground which bred many abortive plots during the 1660s and 1670s. However, their potential leaders, men like Algernon Sidney or Edmund Ludlow, were in exile: it was the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis which brought these radicals once again to the fore in alliance with Shaftesbury and the Whigs. The ideology of this radical Whig party was complex: here there are hints of Leveller ideas, there evidence of die-hard republicanism; the radicals were convinced that Charles was subverting parliament and that civil rights were in jeopardy; but the most significant and pervasive strand of their thought was their hatred of religious intolerance and persecution. This mentality has been recently brought to life in Richard Ashcraft's study of John Locke's Two Treatises; here Locke's work appears as firmly democratic and as a clear justification for rebellion after the failure of Exclusion, and as a rationale behind the Whig plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother at Rye House in 1683. Ashcraft's Locke is firmly placed within the radical camp. Yet the Locke of the eighteenth century was a far more moderate figure: the fate of Locke, his later reputation, may stand as an example of the fate of English radicalism. The radical tradition was recuperated, it was claimed by the Whig aristocrats and oligarchs, and turned into one more prop of the social order. But it could equally be said that radical opposition had lost its