THE BANISHMENT OF ATTERBURY.
[Sidenote: 1722--Funeral of Marlborough]
On Thursday, August 9, 1722, the "pompous solemnity" of Marlborough's
funeral took place. The great procession went from the Duke's house in
St. James's Park, through St. James's and the Upper Park to Hyde Park
Corner, and thence through Piccadilly, St. James's Street, Pall Mall,
Charing Cross, and King Street to Westminster Abbey. A small army of
soldiers guarded the remains of the greatest warrior of his age; a whole
heralds' college clustered about the lofty funeral banner on which all
the arms of the Churchills were quartered. Marlborough's friends and
admirers, his old brothers-in-arms, the companions of his victories,
followed his coffin, and listened while Garter King-at-Arms, bending over
the open grave, said: "Thus it hath pleased Almighty God to take out of
this transitory life unto His mercy the most high, most mighty, and most
noble prince, John Churchill, Duke and Earl of Marlborough."
In Applebee's _Weekly Journal_ for Saturday, August 11th, two days after
the funeral, we are told that the Duchess of Marlborough, in honor of the
memory of her life-long lover, had offered a prize of five hundred pounds
for a Latin epitaph to be inscribed upon his tomb, and that "several
poets have already taken to their lofty studies to contend for the prize."
At Marlborough's funeral we see for the last time in high public estate
one of the few Englishmen of the day who could properly be named in the
same breath with Marlborough. This was Francis Atterbury, the eloquent
and daring Bishop of Rochester. Atterbury came up to {212} town for the
purpose of officiating at the funeral of the great Duke. On July 30,
1722, he wrote from the country to his friend Pope, announcing his visit
to London. "I go to-morrow," Atterbury writes, "to the Deanery, and I
believe I shall stay there till I have said dust to dust, and shut up
this last scene of pompous vanity." Atterbury does not seem to have been
profoundly impressed with the religious solemnity of the occasion. His
was not a very reverential spirit. There was as little of the temper of
pious sanctity in Atterbury as in Swift himself. The allusion to the
last scene of pompous vanity might have had another significance, as well
as that which Atterbury meant to give to it. Amid the pomp in which
Marlborough's career went out, the career of Atterbury went out as well,
although in a different way, and not closed sublimely by death. After
the funeral, Atterbury went to the Deanery at Westminster--he was Dean of
Westminster as well as Bishop of Rochester--and there, on August 24th,
the day but one after the scene of pompous vanity, he was arrested by the
Under-Secretary of State, accompanied by two officers of justice, and was
brought, along with all papers of his which the officers could seize,
before the Privy Council. He underwent an examination, as the result of
which he was committed to the Tower, on a charge of having been concerned
in a treasonable conspiracy to dethrone the King, and to bring back the
House of Stuart. In the Tower he was left to languish for many a long
day before it was found convenient to bring him to trial.
[Sidenote: 1722--The King's speech]
England was startled by the disclosures which followed Atterbury's
arrest. On Tuesday, October 9, 1722, the sixth Parliament of Great
Britain--the sixth, that is to say, since the union with Scotland--met at
Westminster. The House of Commons, on the motion of Mr. Pulteney,
elected Mr. Spencer Compton their Speaker, and on the next day but one,
October 11th, the Royal speech was read. The King was present in person,
but the speech was read by the Lord Chancellor, for the good reason which
we {213} have already mentioned that his Majesty the King of England
could not speak the English language. The speech opened with a startling
announcement. "My Lords and Gentlemen"--so ran the words of the
Sovereign--"I am concerned to find myself obliged, at the opening of this
Parliament, to acquaint you that a dangerous conspiracy has been for some
time formed, and is still carrying on, against my person and government,
in favor of a Popish pretender." "Some of the conspirators," the speech
went on to say, "have been taken up and secured, and endeavors are used
for the apprehending others." When the speech was read, and the King had
left the House, the Duke of Grafton, then Lord-lieutenant of Ireland,
brought in a bill for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act, and empowering
the Government to secure and detain "such persons as his Majesty shall
suspect are conspiring against his person and government, for the space
of one year." The motion to read the Bill a second time in the same
sitting was strenuously resisted by a considerable minority of the Peers.
A warm debate took place, and in the end the second reading was carried
by a majority of sixty-seven against twenty-four. The debate was renewed
upon the other stages of the Bill, which were taken in rapid succession.
The proposal of the Government was, of course, carried in the end, but it
met with a resistance in the House of Lords which certainly would not
have been offered to such a proposal by any member of the hereditary
chamber in our day. Some of the recorded protests of dissentient peers
read more like the utterances of modern Radicals than those of
influential members of the House of Lords. The strongest objection made
to the proposal was that the utmost term for which the Constitution had
previously been suspended was six months, and that the measure to suspend
it for a year would become an authority for suspending it at some future
time for two years, or three years, or any term which might please the
ministers in power. On Monday, October 15th, the Bill was brought down
to the Commons, and was read {214} a first time on the motion of Walpole.
The Bill was passed in the Commons, not, indeed, without opposition, but
with an opposition much less strenuous and influential than that which
had been offered to it in the House of Lords. On October 17th it was
announced to Parliament that Dr. Atterbury, the Bishop of Rochester, the
Lord North and Grey, and the Earl of Orrery, had been committed to the
Tower on a charge of high-treason. A few days after, a similar
announcement was made about the arrest and committal of the Duke of
Norfolk.
[Sidenote: 1722--Proclamation of James]
By far the most important of the persons committed for trial was the
Bishop of Rochester. Francis Atterbury may rank among the most
conspicuous public men of his time. He stands only just beneath
Marlborough and Bolingbroke and Walpole. Steele, in his sixty-sixth
_Tatler_, pays a high tribute to Atterbury: "He has so much regard to his
congregation that he commits to memory what he has to say to them, and
has so soft and graceful a behavior that it must attract your attention.
His person, it is to be confessed, is no slight recommendation; but he is
to be highly commended for not losing that advantage, and adding to a
propriety of speech which might pass the criticism of Longinus, an action
which would have been approved by Demosthenes. He has a peculiar force
in his way, and has many of his audience who could not be intelligent
hearers of his discourse were there not explanation as well as grace in
his action. This art of his is used with the most exact and honest
skill; he never attempts your passions until he has convinced your
reason; all the objections which he can form are laid open and dispersed
before he uses the least vehemence in his sermon; but when he thinks he
has your head he very soon wins your heart, and never pretends to show
the beauty of holiness until he hath convinced you of the truth of it."
Atterbury had, however, among his many gifts a dangerous gift of
political intrigue. Like Swift and Dubois and Alberoni, he was at least
as much statesman as churchman. {215} He had mixed himself up in various
intrigues--some of them could hardly be called conspiracies--for the
restoration of the Stuarts, and when at last something like a new
conspiracy was planned, it was not likely that he would be left out of
it. He had courage enough for any such scheme. There was no great
difficulty in finding out the new plot which King George mentioned in his
speech to Parliament; for James Stuart had revealed it himself by a
proclamation which he caused to be circulated among his supposed
adherents in England, renewing in the boldest terms his claim to the
crown of England. A sort of junto of Jacobites appears to have been
established in England to make arrangements for a new attempt on the part
of James; the noblemen whom King George had arrested were understood to
be among its leading members. Atterbury was charged with having taken a
prominent if not, indeed, a foremost part in the conspiracy. The Duke of
Norfolk, Lord North and Grey, and Lord Orrery were afterwards discharged
for want of evidence to convict them. The arrest of a number of humbler
conspirators led to the discovery of a correspondence asserted to have
been carried on between Atterbury and the adherents of James Stuart in
France and Italy.
Both Houses of Parliament began by voting addresses of loyalty and
gratitude to the King, and by resolving that the proclamation entitled
"Declaration of James the Third, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland,
to all his loving subjects of the three nations," and signed "James Rex,"
was "a false, insolent, and traitorous libel," and should be burned by
the hands of the common hangman, under the direction of the sheriffs of
London. This important ceremonial was duly carried out at the Royal
Exchange. Then the House of Commons voted, "that towards raising the
supply, and reimbursing to the public the great expenses occasioned by
the late rebellions and disorders, the sum of one hundred thousand pounds
be raised and levied upon the real and personal estates of {216} all
Papists, Popish recusants, or persons educated in the Popish religion, or
whose parents are Papists, or who shall profess the Popish religion, in
lieu of all forfeitures already incurred for or upon account of their
recusancy." This singular method of infusing loyalty into the Roman
Catholics of England was not allowed to be adopted without serious and
powerful resistance in the House of Commons. The idea was not to devise
a new penalty for the Catholics, but to put in actual operation the terms
of a former penalty pronounced against them in Elizabeth's time, and not
then pressed into execution. This fact was dwelt upon with much emphasis
by the advocates of the penal motion. Why talk of religious persecution?
they asked. This is not religious persecution; it is only putting in
force an edict passed in a former reign to punish Roman Catholics for
political rebellion. This way of putting the case seems only to make the
character of the policy more clear and less justifiable. The Catholics
of King George's time were to be mulcted indiscriminately because the
Catholics of Queen Elizabeth's time had been declared liable to such a
penalty. The Master of the Rolls, to his great credit, strongly opposed
the resolution. Walpole supported it with all the weight of his argument
and his influence. The plot was evidently a Popish plot, he contended,
and although he was not prepared to accuse any English Catholic in
particular of taking part in it, yet there could be no doubt that Papists
in general were well-wishers to it, and that some of them had contributed
large sums towards it. Why, then, should they not be made to reimburse
some part of the expense to which they and the friends of the Pretender
had put the nation? The resolution, after it had been reported from
committee, was only carried in the whole House by 188 votes against 172.
[Sidenote: 1723--Lord Cowper's opposition] The resolution was embodied in
a bill, and the Bill, when it went up to the House of Lords, was opposed
there by several of the Peers, and especially by Lord Cowper, the
"silver-tongued Cowper," who had {217} been so distinguished a Lord
Chancellor under Anne, and under George himself. Lord Cowper's was an
eloquent and a powerful speech. It tore to pieces the wretched web of
flimsy sophistry by which the supporters of the Bill endeavored to make
out that it was not a measure of religious persecution. Indeed, there
were some of these who insisted that, so far from being a measure of
persecution, it was a measure of relief. Our readers will, no doubt, be
curious to know how this bold position was sustained. In this wise: the
penalties prescribed for the Catholics in Elizabeth's reign were much
greater in amount than those which the Bill proposed to inflict on the
Catholics of King George's time; therefore the Bill was an indulgence and
not a persecution--a mitigation of penalty, not a punishment. Let us
reduce the argument to plain figures. A Catholic in the reign of
Elizabeth is declared liable to a penalty of twenty pounds, but out of
considerations of humanity or justice the penalty is not enforced. The
descendant and heir of that same Catholic in the reign of George the
First is fined fifteen pounds, and the fine is exacted. He complains,
and he is told, "You have no right to complain; you ought to be grateful;
the original fine ordained was twenty pounds; you have been let off five
pounds--you have been favored by an act of indulgence, not victimized by
an act of persecution." Lord Cowper had not much trouble in disposing of
arguments of this kind, but his speech took a wider range, and is indeed
a masterly exposure of the whole principle on which the measure was
founded. On May 22, 1723, sixty-nine peers voted for the third reading
of the Bill, and fifty-five opposed it. Lord Cowper, with twenty other
peers, entered a protest against the decision of the House, according to
a practice then common in the House of Lords, and which has lately fallen
into complete disuse. The recorded protests of dissentient peers form,
we may observe, very important historical documents, and deserve, some of
them, {218} a careful study. Lord Cowper's protest was the last public
act of his useful and honorable career. He died on the 10th of October
in the same year, 1723. Some of his enemies explained his action on the
anti-Papist Bill by the assertion that he was a Jacobite at heart. Even
if he had been, the fact would hardly have made his conduct less
creditable and spirited. Many a man who was a Jacobite at heart would
have supported a measure for the punishment of Roman Catholics if only to
save himself from the suspicion of sympathy with the lost cause.
[Sidenote: 1723--Charges against Atterbury]
This, however, was but an episode in the story of the Jacobite plot and
the measures taken to punish those who were engaged in it. Committees of
secrecy were appointed by Parliament to inquire into the evidence and
examine witnesses.
Meantime both Houses of Parliament kept voting address after address to
the Crown at each new stage of the proceedings, and as each fresh
evidence of the conspiracy was laid before them. The King must have
grown rather weary of finding new words of gratitude, and the Houses of
Parliament, one would think, must have grown tired of inventing new
phrases of loyalty and fresh expressions of horror at the wickedness of
the Jacobites. The horror was not quite genuine on the part of some who
thus proclaimed it. Many of those who voted the addresses would gladly
have welcomed a restoration of the Stuarts. Not the most devoted
adherent of King George could really have felt any surprise at the
persistent efforts of the Jacobite partisans. Eight years before this it
was a mere toss-up whether Stuart or Hanover should succeed, and even
still it was not quite certain whether, if the machinery of the modern
_plebiscite_ could have been put into operation in England, the majority
would not have been found in sympathy with Atterbury. It is almost
certain that if the _plebiscite_ could have been taken in Ireland and
Scotland also, a majority of voices would have voted James Stuart to the
throne.
{219}
It was resolved to proceed against Atterbury by a Bill of Pains and
Penalties to be brought into Parliament. The evidence against him was
certainly not such as any criminal court would have held to justify a
conviction. A young barrister named Christopher Layer was arrested and
examined, so were a nonjuring minister named Kelly, an Irish Catholic
priest called Neynoe, and a man named Plunkett, also from Ireland. The
charge against Atterbury was founded on the statements obtained or
extorted from these men. It should be said that Layer gave evidence
which actually seemed to impugn Lord Cowper himself as a member of a club
of disaffected persons; and when Lord Cowper indignantly repudiated the
charge and demanded an inquiry, the Government declared inquiry
absolutely unnecessary, as everybody was well assured of his innocence.
The Government, however, declined to follow Lord Cowper in his not
unreasonable assumption that the whole story was unworthy of explicit
credence when it included such a false statement. The case against
Atterbury rested on the declaration of some of the arrested men that the
bishop had carried on a correspondence with James Stuart, Lord Mar, and
General Dillon (an Irish Catholic soldier, who after the capitulation of
Limerick, had entered the French service), through the instrumentality of
Kelly, who acted as his secretary and amanuensis for that purpose. It
was a case of circumstantial evidence altogether. The impartial reader
of history now will feel well satisfied on two points: first, that
Atterbury was engaged in the plot; and second, that the evidence brought
against him was not nearly strong enough to sustain a conviction. It was
the case of Bolingbroke and Harley over again. We know now that the men
had done the things charged against them, but the evidence then relied
upon was utterly inadequate to sustain the charge.
A "Dialogue in Verse between a Whig and a Tory" was written by Swift in
the year 1723, "concerning the horrid plot discovered by Harlequin, the
Bishop of {220} Rochester's French Dog." The Whig tells the Tory that
the dog--
"His name is Harlequin, I wot,
And that's a name in every plot"--
was generously
"Resolved to save the British nation,
Though French by birth and education;
His correspondence plainly dated
Was all deciphered and translated;
His answers were exceeding pretty,
Before the secret wise committee;
Confessed as plain as he could bark,
Then with his fore-foot set his mark."
[Sidenote: 1723-1731--Atterbury's sentence]
There was more than mere fooling in the lines. The dog Harlequin was
made to bear important evidence against the Bishop of Rochester.
Atterbury had never resigned himself to the Hanoverian dynasty. He did
not believe it would last, and he openly declaimed against it. He did
more than this, however: he engaged in conspiracies for the restoration
of James Stuart. Horace Walpole says of him that he was simply a
Jacobite priest. He was a Jacobite priest who would gladly, if he could,
have been a Jacobite soldier, and had given ample evidence of courage
equal to such a part. He had been engaged in a long correspondence with
Jacobite conspirators at home and abroad. The correspondence was carried
on in cipher, and of course under feigned names. Atterbury appears to
have been described now as Mr. Illington, and now as Mr. Jones.
Atterbury refused to make any defence before the House of Commons, but he
appeared before the House of Lords on May 6, 1723, and defended himself,
and made strong and eloquent protestation of his innocence. One of the
witnesses whom he called in his defence was his friend Pope, who could
only give evidence as to the manner in which the bishop had passed his
time when staying in the poet's house. Christopher Layer, Atterbury's
associate in the general charge of conspiracy, was a young barrister of
good family, a remarkably handsome, {221} graceful, and accomplished man.
One charge against him was that he had formed a plan to murder the King
and carry off the Prince of Wales; but the statements made against Layer
must be taken with liberal allowance for the extravagance of loyal
passion, panic, and exaggeration. Layer had escaped and was recaptured,
was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was hanged at Tyburn
on March 15, 1723; he met his death with calm courage. His body was
quartered and his head was set on Temple Bar, from which it was presently
blown down by the wind. Some one picked up the head and sold it to a
surgeon. Neynoe, another of the accused men, contrived to escape from
custody, got to the river, endeavored to swim across it, and was drowned
in the attempt.
The charges made against Atterbury had therefore sometimes to rest upon
inferences drawn from confessions, or portions of confessions, averred to
have dropped or been drawn from men whose lips were now closed by death.
Those who defended Atterbury dwelt strongly on this fact, as was but
natural. It is curious to notice how often in the debates of the Lords
on the Bill of Pains and Penalties one noble peer accuses another of
secret sympathy with Jacobite schemes. As regards Atterbury, the whole
question was whether he was really the person described in the
correspondence now as Jones and now as Illington. There might have been
no evidence which even a "secret, wise" committee of that day would have
cared to accept but for the fact that the bishop's wife had received, or
was to have received, from France a present of a dog called Harlequin,
and that there was mention in the correspondence about poor Mr. Illington
being in grief for the loss of his dog Harlequin. This allusion put the
committee of secrecy on the track. The bishop's wife had lately died,
and it would seem from the correspondence that Illington's wife had died
about the same time. Clearly, if it were once assumed that Illington and
Atterbury were one and the same person, there was ample ground for
suspicion, and even for a general belief that the story told {222} was
true in the main. The evidence was enough for Parliament at that time,
and the Bill passed the House of Lords on May 16th by a majority of
eighty-three votes to forty-three. Atterbury was deprived of all his
offices and dignities, declared to be forever incapable of holding any
place or exercising any authority within the King's dominions, and
condemned to perpetual banishment. He went to France in the first
instance with his daughter and her husband. It so happened that
Bolingbroke had just at that time obtained a sort of conditional pardon
from the King; obtained it mainly by bribing the Duchess of Kendal. The
two Jacobites crossed each other on the way, one going into exile, the
other returning from it. "I am exchanged," was Atterbury's remark. "The
nation," said Pope afterwards, "is afraid of being overrun with genius,
and cannot regain one great man but at the expense of another." So far
as this history is concerned we part with Atterbury here. He lived
abroad until 1731, and after his death his remains were brought back and
privately laid in Westminster Abbey.
[Sidenote: 1723--Tom Tempest and Jack Sneaker]
We have directed attention to the freedom and frequency of the
accusations of Jacobitism made by one peer against another during the
debates on Atterbury's case. The fact is worthy of note, if only to show
how uncertain, even still, was the foundation of the throne of Brunswick,
and how wide-spread the sympathy with the lost cause was supposed to be.
When Bolingbroke was allowed to return to England, some of Swift's
friends instantly fancied that he must have purchased his permission by
telling some tale against the dean himself, among others, and long after
this time we find Swift defending himself against the rumored accusation
of a share in Jacobite conspiracy. The condition of the public mind is
well pictured in a description of two imaginary politicians in one of the
successors to the _Tatler_. "Tom Tempest" is described as a steady
friend to the House of Stuart. He can recount the prodigies that have
appeared in the sky, and the calamities that have afflicted the {223}
nation every year from the Revolution, and is of opinion that if the
exiled family had continued to reign, there would neither have been worms
in our ships nor caterpillars in our trees. He firmly believes that King
William burned Whitehall that he might steal the furniture, and that
Tillotson died an atheist. Of Queen Anne he speaks with more tenderness;
owns that she meant well, and can tell by whom she was poisoned. Tom has
always some new promise that we shall see in another month the rightful
monarch on the throne. "Jack Sneaker," on the other hand, is a devoted
adherent to the present establishment. He has known those who saw the
bed in which the Pretender was conveyed in a warming-pan. He often
rejoices that this nation was not enslaved by the Irish. He believes
that King William never lost a battle, and that if he had lived one year
longer he would have conquered France. Yet amid all this satisfaction he
is hourly disturbed by dread of Popery; wonders that stricter laws are
not made against the Papists, and is sometimes afraid that they are busy
with French gold among our bishops and judges.
{224}