Russell, Lord William

views updated May 18 2018

Russell, Lord William (1639–83). Russell, son of the earl of Bedford, entered Parliament in 1660 for the family borough of Tavistock and became a leader of the Shaftesbury Whigs. In 1678 he moved an address asking Charles II to remove his brother James, duke of York, from his counsels and in 1680 he joined in presenting the duke as a notorious papist. He was a strong advocate of the bill to exclude James from the throne. But the court took its revenge. In 1683 Russell was accused of complicity in the Rye House plot to assassinate James and Charles and was beheaded in Lincoln's Inn Fields. After the Glorious Revolution, his services to the Whig cause were recognized in the dukedom granted to his father, the patent of which described Russell as ‘the ornament of his age’. The Complete Peerage, by contrast, called him a ‘canonised ruffian’.

J. A. Cannon

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