Dryden, Bower, Castlemaine, and the Imagery of Revolution, 1682–1687

In 1683, when details of the Rye House Plot emerged, there was a sharp swing of public opinion against the Whigs, who had held the political initiative in England since 1678. The original plot had been to assassinate Charles II and his brother James Duke of York on their way back from Newmarket in October 1682, and to follow that regicide with an insurrection in November. As Richard Ashcraft has shown, many more Whig leaders knew of the Rye House Plot than has usually been admitted by historians of the past centuries. ¹ Indeed, the confessions of the plotters were so damaging to some powerful aristocratic families that Bishop Thomas Sprat, who had received virtually all the documentary material to write the second part of the history of the plot, declared in a public letter printed in1689 that he had silently suppressed much of the evidence to spare the reputation of those great families. ²

Two images from the 1680s show how the Rye House Plot revelations at first made the public see the Whig leaders as regicides and violent revolutionaries. The first image, designed by George Bower in 1683, pictures the Whig leaders engaged in the assassination plot, while the second image, commissioned by lord Castlemaine and executed by John Michael Wright and others in 1687, depicts the Popish Plot, the Rye House Plot, and Monmouth's invasion as three related moments in the unceasing struggle to exclude James from the British throne.

In 1682, George Bower had produced a medal with a profile head of Shaftesbury to celebrate a London jury's having acquitted the party leader for treason (Plate 1). In 1683, he produced another medal in which he replicated the very same profile of Shaftesbury at the end of a serpent's neck (Plate 2). ³ Thus, a man who held a government office as engraver to the Mint from 1664 to around 1690 created in two years one medal honoring the Whig leader for his resistance to the king and another medal damning him for attempted regicide. By repeating the same profile and in effect satirizing his own artwork, Bower showed that he repented. His atonement was a second medal cancelling the first. Meanwhile, in 1682, John Dryden had published The Medall and had anticipated Bower by brilliantly satirizing that first medal.

In the Rye House medal, Bower puts Shaftesbury's head among five other Whig heads threatening to devour the king:: Lord William Russell, John Hampden, Jr., Algernon Sidney, the earl of Essex, and Lord Howard of Escrick. Present, too, is Satan, horned and smiling, chin pressing down on Shaftesbury's head to show them near allied. These heads on serpent necks are joined in one lion's body with extended claws, fiend's wings, and a tail armed with a scorpion-sting, to show the projected regicide as a blow from the back. Shaftesbury had died in Holland early in 1683, before the Rye House Plot became public, but he was known to have been its mastermind, which explains why he holds the central place--from the king's perspective--among the seven heads of the Hydra.

Superficially, Bower's 1683 medal depicts the struggle between Hercules and the Hydra, but there is a deeper biblical element not to be overlooked. As in much baroque art, the classical element is fused with Christian symbolism. Indeed, the presence of Satan as the seventh head makes the monster a type of the seven-headed Dragon of Revelation 13, the Antichrist who "utters blasphemy" and "makes war upon the saints." The Whigs in fact used religious persecution (and so, made "war upon the saints") from 1678-82 as a blind for their main project of reducing kingly power. It is telling that Bower's monster has serpent necks, a lion's body, and human heads, for in scripture, the Dragon of Revelation 13 likewise has features of a serpent...