ABSTRACT
John Locke and Algernon Sidney have long been recognized as totemic figures in the birth of English Whiggism during the Exclusion Crisis of the late 1670s and early 1680s. Both wrote tracts to demonstrate the legitimacy of resistance against a tyrant, both fearful of the direction the Restoration monarchy might take should a Catholic, James Duke of York, succeed his brother Charles II to the throne of England. Locke’s contribution, Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689, has made him one of the most securely canonical of early modern English political theorists. The career of Algernon Sidney, author of Discourses Concerning Government, first published in 1698, took him on a rather different route to political celebrity. The manuscript of the text was used as a witness against Sidney in the trial for treason in 1683 that resulted in his judicial murder, and this was a development that ensured the lasting fame of the man and his writing.
