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city politics.

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

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