Blood's plot

Blood's plot, a plan by disaffected Protestants to seize Dublin Castle and stage provincial risings, discovered in March 1663 but subsequently renewed, with further arrests in May and June. Seven members were expelled from the House of Commons for complicity in the plot; an eighth, Col. Alexander Jephson, MP for Trim, was hanged. Their involvement reflects the hostility, extending well beyond irreconcilable opponents of monarchy and episcopacy, created among Irish Protestants by the Act of Settlement.

The conspiracy took its name from Thomas Blood (c.1618–80), a former parliamentary soldier born in Co. Meath. In 1670, acting ostensibly for private reasons but possibly as the agent of a rival courtier, he tried to murder Ormond in London. Arrested the following May while attempting to steal the English crown jewels, he was pardoned and granted Irish lands worth £500 a year, returning to the radical underground as a government spy, a role he may have already played in the 1660s.