John Ayloffe

John Ayloffe (c.1645 - October 30, 1685) was an English lawyer, satirist and Whig conspirator, responsible for several pieces of violently anti-Stuart propaganda of the 1670s. In 1683, he was involved in the Rye House Plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother.

Accused of treason, he fled to Holland but was executed in London after becoming involved in Argyll's Rising of 1685.

Little is known of Ayloffe's early life. The spelling of his surname varies: Joseph Foster gives it as Ayliffe. The son of another John Ayloffe, he was born in Foxley in Wiltshire in about 1645. He has been described as either a family connection or more specifically as a nephew by marriage of the Earl of Clarendon: Clarendon's first wife was a daughter of Sir George Ayliffe of Grittenham, Brinkworth, Wiltshire, and Clarendon himself referred to Ayloffe's father as someone he "dearly loved". The Ayliffe family had owned Grittenham, Foxley and other manors in north Wiltshire for many years.

He has been presumed to be the Ayloffe admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1666, but the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that he matriculated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford in 1662. By the 1670s, he was practising as a barrister and his name appears regularly in the Calendar of Treasury Books, representing clients who were appearing before the Treasury Lords.

Ayloffe has been described as an extremist Whig, an anti-Catholic and a republican: in the latter he seems to have been at least partly inspired by the politics of classical-era Greece and Rome. Fountainhall, however, repeated a story that Ayloffe's father had been a wealthy man who had spent much of his money in the service of Charles I during the English Civil War, but had seen little reward at the Restoration, an experience that provoked Ayloffe to "draw up with the republicans". At the opening of Parliament in October 1673 he brought himself to notice by throwing a sabot under the chair of the Speaker of the House of Commons, supposedly a reference to French influence on the country. Ayloffe was briefly detained by the doorkeepers, but released on grounds of being "distracted" (insane): a detailed account of the incident was given in a letter from Charles Hatton, who describes Ayloffe as a "kinsman", to his father-in-law William Scroggs. The incident occurred during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. At this period Ayloffe was working covertly with his friend Andrew Marvell, for Dutch interests against the French. Both men were part of an intelligence network operating under the leadership of Peter Du Moulin, the secretary of William of Orange. As a propagandist and versifier, Ayloffe has been identified as the author of "much of the republican doggerel of the 1670s". In 1678 he gave evidence in a House of Commons debate on the danger posed by Catholic soldiers "going into Ireland": the affair of the sabot was again brought up and there were comments that he was"mad", but Sir Thomas Meres said "Mr. Ayliffe is a man of good sense, and points at what he intends".

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