John Ayloffe ( 1645 – 30 October 1685) was an English lawyer, political activist, and satirist, described as "one of the most consistently committed radicals of the century". According to his contemporary and political opponent Sir Roger L'Estrange, there were few 'more daring men for a desperate exploit'. Throughout his career, he was a hardline opponent of the Stuart monarchy, producing a stream of satire and propaganda. His writings were characterised by their bitterly anti-French, anti-Irish, anti-Catholic tone, while the Stuarts were constantly compared to tyrants seeking to destroy English liberties. In addition to his writings, he served William of Orange as an intelligence agent, and was a trusted supporter of Lord Shaftesbury during the 1679 to 1680 Exclusion Crisis. In 1683, he was forced into exile in the Dutch Republic due to his involvement in the 1683 Rye House Plot, an alleged attempt to assassinate Charles II and his Catholic brother James. When James became king in 1685, he joined Argyll's Rising, a Scottish attempt to overthrow him; he was captured and executed in London on 30 October 1685. Early life The spelling of his surname varies, and contemporaries often spelt it Ayliffe. He was born in Foxley in Wiltshire about 1645; his father John was a younger son of Sir George Ayloffe of Grittenham, Brinkworth, Wiltshire. The Ayloffes owned Grittenham, Foxley and other manors in north Wiltshire for many years. Ayloffe was a nephew by marriage of Royalist leader, the Earl of Clarendon, whose first wife was a daughter of Sir George Ayloffe. Clarendon himself referred to Ayloffe's father as someone he "dearly loved". This also linked Ayloffe to the royal family through Clarendon's daughter Anne, first wife of the future James II of England. Although he has been identified as the John Ayloffe admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1666, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states he matriculated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford in 1662. By the 1670s, he was practising as a lawyer and his name appears regularly in the Calendar of Treasury Books, representing clients before the Lords of the Treasury. He may have been the Ayloffe who represented Thomas Skinner in the constitutionally significant 1668 Skinner's Case. Political activism According to contemporaries, Ayloffe was strongly anti-Catholic, an extremist Whig and "doctrinaire republican" opposed to the Stuart monarchy. His motives are disputed; Fountainhall claimed his father spent much of his money serving Charles I