Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, freed in the Storming of the Tower of London (Wikimedia Commons)
May, 1684
Just as Algernon Sidney prepared to set sail for France, he was summoned by King James into his quarters at Drogheda. There the King told him that he was concerned about affairs in England, as it had been some weeks since he last received any word from the Marquess of Halifax, who was supposed to be in charge of the Kingdom in his stead. Since Sidney was headed southeast anyway, the King requested that he stop first in London to check up on affairs there before crossing the Channel. Sidney, who shared the King's concerns about events in England and missed his home country in any case, readily agreed. But what he found when he arrived in London appalled him. The government was in a state of virtual anarchy, with its supposed head, Halifax, hiding inside Whitehall. Even worse, on picking up the latest issue of
The Observator, he found its pages to be openly preaching disloyalty against the King. Immediately Sidney wrote to the King, telling him to return to London at once and forget Ireland. Meanwhile, there was no time to lose while England continued in its rudderless condition. Halifax gladly gave up his command to Sidney, and so the wily old republican went to work. Consulting no authority but his own, he ordered the immediate arrests of L'Estrange and other seditionists in the Tory press. Though Sidney was able to find men to carry out these arrests, he could not have anticipated the reaction they would cause.
On the morning of May 19, a large mob followed the train of Tory pressmen who were being led to the Tower of London, heckling and jeering at the constables who held them. Just as the procession arrived at the Tower and the gates swung opened to accommodate the new prisoners, someone in the crowd made a signal, and suddenly the guards were set upon by the mobile, many of whom drew weapons. Rushing into the prison, they easily overpowered the guards and instantly began to wreak havoc, smashing and breaking anything in their way. While the rioters busted open cell door after cell door, there was one man in particular they were looking for. This was one Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, who had spent all of 5 years in captivity. Danby had previously served as one of Charles II's chief ministers, but was impeached and had passed against him a bill of attainder by supporters of Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury in 1679. If L'Estrange and the other Tory pressmen were the latest victims of Whiggish perfidy, Danby was one of the earliest. After bursting open the locks upon his cell, the Earl was greeted by a deafening chorus of huzzahs. The chaotic mass quickly ordered itself so as to place Danby at the front and marched out of the prison in triumph, belting out the words to
When the King Enjoys His Own Again. One eyewitness who was less than pleased, however, was the Puritan Roger Morrice, who looked out his window in horror at what unfolded before his eyes. "There hath never, in the entire history of this Commonwealth, been anything so terrible as what occurred at the Tower this day," he wrote in his diary.
Another Puritan left stunned by the cataclysm was Algernon Sidney. As soon as he got word of what was unfolding at the Tower, Sidney knew they would come for him next. Without wasting any time, he immediately set sail for France, under very different circumstances then those which he had originally intended at the beginning of the month. Sure enough, the mob stormed Whitehall next, and there they found documents which would totally discredit Sidney in the eyes of the English public and give them an idea of where he had fled to. In his haste, Sidney had forgotten to take with him the letters he had written to Louis XIV, which were found laying atop his desk by the mob inside Whitehall. The Sun King was despised by Whigs and Tories alike for his persecution of Protestants and aggressive foreign policy, and there were few connections more damning than a French one. The letters were quickly secured by the men at the front of the mob and parlayed to the Tory pressmen, whose arrests had caused the uprising in the first place. By the next day the letters had been reprinted in London and were quickly spreading elsewhere, allowing Englishmen all over the country to read the correspondence between Louis XIV and
le Bon Algernon. While these revelations would have been damning under any circumstances, it came at an especially bad time for Sidney. As copies of the letters multiplied over the next week, news arrived from the continent that a French navy was now bombarding the city of Genoa as punishment for the Doge's support of Spain in the ongoing War of the Reunions. Some reports suggested that two thirds of the city had been destroyed in the indiscriminate bombing, horrifying civilized opinion across Europe. Roger L'Estrange, who called the storming of the Tower of London and Whitehall Palace "acts of God", predictably used the news to lambast the Whigs: "How long now hath the True-Protestants railed against the French-Pensioners, only to disguise their true kinship with that nation? For now we know for certain, what hath oft been suspected, that these Whigs of ours are in a confederacy with France, which hath so barbarously levelled the fine city of Genoa and would do the same to our London."
