Rye House Plot lies less in what was actually plotted than in the public perception of it and the uses made of it by the government. Popular reaction to the Tories' reactive excesses, sometimes known as the "Stuart Revenge" though that term is contested, led to the discontent expressed decisively in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Rye House Plot The Rye House Plot of 1683 was a plan to assassinate King Charles II of England and his brother (and heir to the throne) James, Duke of York. The royal party went from Westminster to Newmarket to see horse races and were expected to
A Ballad upon the Popish Plot as records or descriptions of significant past political events but also because they give readers access to the subjective quality of the lives of that era's common people. As Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth, the editor and annotator of the second division of the published Bagford Ballad collection, evocatively phrases it: "Here, if we choose to pay attention, are clearly written the contemporary records of how men [and women] felt and spoke during the mad excitement, the servile terror, and the ferocious hatred of the days when clamours echoed against the so-called 'Popish Plot'" ("viii"). By giving readers access to the inner