Lord Russell (sometimes improperly called Lord William Russell, for he had succeeded to the courtesy-title by the decease of his elder brothers,) was son of William, Earl of Bedford, by Lady Ann Carr, daughter of Carr, Earl of Somerset; and he was beheaded in the year 1683, the last year but two of the reign of King Charles II., for an alleged conspiracy to seize the King's guards and put him to death. The conspiracy was called the Rye House Plot, but incorrectly as far as Lord Russell was concerned; for it is not proved that he ever heard of the house which occasioned the name; and he was condemned upon allegations which would have destroyed him, had no such place existed. The Rye House was a farm near Hoddesdon, in Hertfordshire, belonging to one of the alleged conspirators, and it had a bye-road near it through which Charles was accustomed to pass in returning from the races at Newmarket. It was said that the King was to have been assassinated in this road, but that a fire at Newmarket, which put the town into confusion, hastened his return to London before the conspirators had time to assemble. Charles II., and his brother, the Duke of York, afterwards James II., in the prosecution of those designs against the liberty and religion of the state, which are now acknowledged by all historians, had lately succeeded in producing a strong re-action against the party opposed to them. This party, the Whigs, in their dread of arbitrary power and popery, had attempted with great pertinacity to exclude the Duke of York, an avowed papist, from the succession. They had indicted him as a popish recusant: they had listened, with too great credulity, to the story of a Popish Plot, for which several persons were executed: and while these strong measures were going forward, to which the general dread of popery encouraged them, they were inquiring into the King's illegal connections with France, and putting the last sting to his vexation by refusing him money. Charles's gambling and debaucheries kept him in a perpetual state of poverty. He was always endeavouring to raise money upon every shift he could devise, and misappropriating all he obtained, which completed the ingloriousness of his reign by rendering him a pensioner of France. He had a strong party of corruptionists in the House of Commons; but the public feeling against the Duke gave the elections a balance the other way; and the poor King was compelled, from time to time, to purchase what money he wanted, by the surrender of a popular right.