A Hungarian Revolution in Restoration England: Henry Stubbe, Radical Islam, and the Rye House Plot

Abstract

This essay argues that the rise of Islamic-Ottoman power in Hungary took center stage in English national debates about monarchical succession and religious authority, mostly as a reaction to two analogous events that took place in the summer of 1683: the discovery of the Rye House plot to assassinate King Charles II and the Duke of York during the aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis, and the Austrian-Polish defeat of the Ottoman Turks and their Hungarian allies during the siege of Vienna. After Charles II dissolved parliament, opposition leaders grew desperate to pass the Exclusion Bill preventing a Catholic succession; meanwhile, Catholic Austria defeated Imre Thököly, the rebellious Hungarian leader who sought to protect his country's Protestant constitution by forming an alliance with the Ottoman Porte. As a strategy for containing the threat of revolution in the wake of the Rye House Plot, Tory burlesques cast Whig Exclusionists as Hungarian rebels, regicidal Muslims in disguise. This form of polemical satire was a coded response to a vibrant strain of English radical Protestantism as emblematized in Henry Stubbe's pro-Islamic manuscript: The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism (circa 1671), which circulated privately among radical freethinking circles. Building on the work of Nabil Matar and Matthew Birchwood, this essay treats Tory satires as a crucial site for investigating how radical Islam lent ideological coherence to a series of national crises that culminated in the redefinition of British constitutional liberty in 1688-91.