(_Encyclopodia Britannica_, December 1853.)
Francis Atterbury, {112}a man who holds a conspicuous place in the
political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of England, was born in
the year 1662, at Middleton in Buckinghamshire, a parish of which his
father was rector. Francis was educated at Westminster School, and
carried thence to Christ Church a stock of learning which, though really
scanty, he through life exhibited with such judicious ostentation that
superficial observers believed his attainments to be immense. At Oxford,
his parts, his taste, and his bold, contemptuous, and imperious spirit,
soon made him conspicuous. Here he published, at twenty, his first work,
a translation of the noble poem of Absalom and Achitophel into Latin
verse. Neither the style nor the versification of the young scholar
was that of the Augustan age. In English composition he succeeded much
better. In 1687 he distinguished himself among many able men who wrote
in defence of the Church of England, then persecuted by James II., and
calumniated by apostates who had for lucre quitted her communion. Among
these apostates none was more active or malignant than Obadiah Walker,
who was master of University College, and who had set up there, under
the royal patronage, a press for printing tracts {113}against the
established religion. In one of these tracts, written apparently by
Walker himself, many aspersions were thrown on Martin Luther. Atterbury
undertook to defend the great Saxon Reformer, and performed that task
in a manner singularly characteristic. Whoever examines his reply to
Walker will be struck by the contrast between the feebleness of those
parts which are argumentative and defensive, and the vigour of those
parts which are rhetorical and aggressive. The Papists were so much
galled by the sarcasms and invectives of the young polemic that they
raised a cry of treason, and accused him of having, by implication,
called King James a Judas.
After the Revolution, Atterbury, though bred in the doctrines of
non-resistance and passive obedience, readily swore fealty to the
new government. In no long time he took holy orders. He occasionally
preached in London with an eloquence which raised his reputation, and
soon had the honour of being appointed one of the royal chaplains.
But he ordinarily resided at Oxford, where he took an active part
in academical business, directed the classical studies of the
undergraduates of his college, and was the chief adviser and assistant
of Dean Aldrich, a divine now chiefly remembered by his catches,
but renowned among his contemporaries as a scholar, a Tory, and a
high-churchman. It was the practice, not a very judicious practice, of
Aldrich to employ the most promising youths of his college in editing
Greek and Latin books. Among the studious and well-disposed lads who
were, unfortunately for themselves, induced to become teachers of
philology when they should have been content to be learners, was Charles
Boyle, son of the Earl of Orrery, and nephew of Robert Boyle, the great
experimental {114}philosopher. The task assigned to Charles Boyle was to
prepare a new edition of one of the most worthless books in existence.
It was a fashion, amoung those Greeks and Romans who cultivated rhetoric
as an art, to compose epistles and harangues in the names of eminent
men. Some of these counterfeits are fabricated with such exquisite taste
and skill that it is the highest achievement of criticism to distinguish
them from originals.
Others are so feebly and rudely executed that they can hardly impose on
an intelligent school-boy. The best specimen which has come down to
us is perhaps the oration for Marcellus, such an imitation of Tully’s
eloquence as Tally would himself have read with wonder and delight. The
worst specimen is perhaps a collection of letters purporting to have
been written by that Phalaris who governed Agrigentum more than
500 years before the Christian era. The evidence, both internal and
external, against the genuineness of these letters is overwhelming.
When, in the fifteenth century, they emerged, in company with much
that was far more valuable, from their obscurity, they were pronounced
spurious by Politian, the greatest scholar of Italy, and by Erasmus, the
greatest scholar on our side of the Alps. In truth, it would be as easy
to persuade an educated Englishman that one of Johnson’s Ramblers was
the work of William Wallace as to persuade a man like Erasmus that a
pedantic exercise, composed in the trim and artificial Attic of the time
of Julian, was a despatch written by a crafty and ferocious Dorian, who
roasted people alive many years before there existed a volume of prose
in the Greek language. But, though Christ-Church could boast of many
good Latinists, of many good English writers, and of a greater number of
clever and fashionable {115}men of the world than belonged to any other
academic body, there was not then in the college a single man capable of
distinguishing between the infancy and the dotage of Greek literature.
So superficial indeed was the learning; of the rulers of this celebrated
society that they were charmed by an essay which Sir William Temple
published in praise of the ancient writers. It now seems strange that
even the eminent public services, the deserved popularity, and the
graceful style of Temple should have saved so silly a performance from
universal contempt. Of the books which he most vehemently eulogised his
eulogies proved that he knew nothing. In fact, he could not read a line
of the language in which they were written. Among many other foolish
things, he said that the letters of Phalaris were the oldest letters
and also the best in the world. Whatever Temple wrote attracted notice.
People who had never heard of the Epistles of Phalaris began to inquire
about them. Aldrich, who knew very little Greek, took the word of Temple
who knew none, and desired Boyle to prepare a new edition of these
admirable compositions which, having long slept in obscurity, had become
on a sudden objects of general interest.
The edition was prepared with the help of Atterbury, who was Boyle’s
tutor, and of some other members of the college. It was an edition such
as might be expected from people who would stoop to édité such a book.
The notes were worthy of the text; the Latin version worthy of the Greek
original. The volume would have been forgotten in a month, had not a
misunderstanding about a manuscript arisen between the young editor and
the greatest scholar that had appeared in Europe since the revival of
letters, Richard Bentley. {116}The manuscript was in Bentley’s keeping.
Boyle wished it to be collated. A mischief-making bookseller informed
him that Bentley had refused to lend it, which was false and also that
Bentley had spoken contemptuously of the letters attributed to Phalaris,
and of the critics who were taken in by such counterfeits, which was
perfectly true. Boyle, much provoked, paid, in his preface, a bitterly
ironical compliment to Bentley’s courtesy. Bentley revenged himself by a
short dissertation, in which he proved that the epistles were spurious,
and the new edition of them worthless: but he treated Boyle personally
with civility as a young gentleman of great hopes, whose love of
learning was highly commendable, and who deserved to have had better
instructors.
Few things in literary history are more extraordinary than the storm
which this little dissertation raised. Bentley had treated Boyle with
forbearance; but he had treated Christ-Church with contempt; and the
Christ-Church-men, wherever dispersed, were as much attached to their
college as a Scotchman to his country, or a Jesuit to his order. Their
influence was great. They were dominant at Oxford, powerful in the Inns
of Court and in the College of Physicians, conspicuous in Parliament and
in the literary and fashionable circles of London. Their unanimous
cry was, that the honour of the college must be vindicated, that the
insolent Cambridge pedant must be put down. Poor Boyle was unequal to
the task, and disinclined to it. It was, therefore, assigned to his
tutor Atterbury.
The answer to Bentley, which bears the name of Boyle, but which was,
in truth, no more the work of Boyle than the letters to which the
controversy related were the work of Phalaris, is now read only by the
curious, {117}and will in all probability never be reprinted again. But
it had its day of noisy popularity. It was to be found, not only in
the studies of men of letters, but on the tables of the most brilliant
drawing-rooms of Soho Square and Covent Garden. Even the beaus and
coquettes of that age, the Wildairs and the Lady Lurewells, the
Mirabells and the Millamants, congratulated each other on the way in
which the gay young gentleman, whose erudition sate so easily upon him,
and who wrote with so much pleasantry and good breeding about the Attic
dialect and the anapæstic measure, Sicilian talents and Therielean cups,
had bantered the queer prig of a doctor. Nor was the applause of the
multitude undeserved. The book is, indeed, Atterbury’s masterpiece, and
gives a higher notion of his powers than any of those works to which he
put his name. That he was altogether in the wrong on the main question,
and on all the collateral questions springing out of it, that his
knowledge of the language, the literature, and the history of Greece was
not equal to what many freshmen now bring up every year to Cambridge and
Oxford, and that some of his blunders seem rather to deserve a flogging
than a refutation, is true; and therefore it is that his performance is,
in the highest degree, interesting and valuable to a judicious
reader. It is good by reason of its exceeding badness. It is the most
extraordinary instance that exists of the art of making much show with
little substance. There is no difficulty, says the steward of Molière’s
miser, in giving a fine dinner with plenty of money: the really great
cook is he who can set out a banquet with no money at all. That Bentley
should have written excellently on ancient chronology and geography, on
the development of the Greek language, and the origin of the {118}Greek
drama, is not strange. But that Atterbury should, during some years,
have been thought to have treated these subjects much better than
Bentley is strange indeed. It is true that the champion of Christ-Church
had all the help which the most celebrated members of that society could
give him. Smalridge contributed some very good wit; Friend and others
some very bad archaeology and philology. But the greater part of the
volume was entirely Atterbury’s: what was not his own was revised and
retouched by him; and the whole bears the mark of his mind, a mind
inexhaustibly rich in all the resources of controversy, and familiar with
all the artifices which make falsehood look like truth, and ignorance
like knowledge. He had little gold; but he beat that little out to the
very thinnest leaf, and spread it over so vast a surface that to those
who judged by a glance, and who did not resort to balances and tests,
the glittering heap of worthless matter which he produced seemed to be
an inestimable treasure of massy bullion. Such arguments as he had he
placed in the clearest light. Where he had no arguments, he resorted to
personalities, sometimes serious, generally ludicrous, always clever
and cutting. But, whether he was grave or merry, whether he reasoned or
sneered, his style was always pure, polished, and easy.
Party spirit then ran high; yet, though Bentley ranked among Whigs, and
Christ-Church was a stronghold of Toryism, Whigs joined with Tories
in applauding Atterbury’s volume. Garth insulted Bentley, and extolled
Boyle in lines which are now never quoted except to be laughed at.
Swift, in his “Battle of the Books,” introduced with much pleasantry
Boyle, clad in armour, the gift of all the gods, and directed by Apollo
{110}in the form of a human friend, for whose name a blank is left which
may easily be filled up. The youth, so accoutred, and so assisted, gains
an easy victory over his uncourteous and boastful antagonist. Bentley,
meanwhile, was supported by the consciousness of an immeasurable
superiority, and encouraged by the voices of the few who were really
competent to judge the combat. “No man,” he said, justly and nobly, “was
ever written down but by himself.” He spent two years in preparing a
reply, which will never cease to be read and prized while the literature
of ancient Greece is studied in any part of the world. This reply
proved, not only that the letters ascribed to Phalaris were spurious,
but that Atterbury, with all his wit, his eloquence, his skill in
controversial fence, was the most audacious pretender that ever wrote
about what he did not understand. But to Atterbury this exposure was
matter of indifference. He was now engaged in a dispute about matters
far more important and exciting than the laws of Zaleucus and the laws
of Charondas. The rage of religions factions was extreme. High church
and Low church divided the nation. The great majority of the clergy were
on the high-church side; the majority of King William’s bishops were
inclined to latitudinarianism.
A dispute arose between the two parties touching the extent of the
powers of the Lower House of Convocation. Atterbury thrust himself
eagerly into the front rank of the high-churchmen. Those who take
a comprehensive and impartial view of his whole career will not be
disposed to give him credit for religious zeal. But it was his nature to
be vehement and pugnacious in the cause of every fraternity of which he
was a member. He had defended the genuineness of {120}a spurious book
simply because Christ-Church had put forth an edition of that book; he
now stood up for the clergy against the civil power, simply because he
was a clergyman, and for the priests against the episcopal order, simply
because he was as yet only a priest, he asserted the pretensions of the
class to which he belonged in several treatises written with much wit,
ingenuity, audacity, and acrimony. In this, as in his first controversy,
he was opposed to antagonists whose knowledge of the subject in dispute
was far superior to his; but in this, as in his first controversy, he
imposed on the multitude by bold assertion, by sarcasm, by declamation,
and, above all, by his peculiar knack of exhibiting a little erudition
in such a manner as to make it look like a great deal. Having passed
himself off on the world as a greater master of classical learning than
Bentley, he now passed himself off as a greater master of ecclesiastical
learning than Wake or Gibson. By the great body of the clergy he was
regarded as the ablest and most intrepid tribune that had ever defended
their rights against the oligarchy of prelates. The Lower House of
Convocation voted him thanks for his services; the University of Oxford
created him a doctor of divinity; and soon after the accession of Anne,
while the Tories still had the chief weight in the government, he was
promoted to the deanery of Carlisle.
Soon after he had obtained this preferment, the Whig party rose to
ascendency in the state. From that party he could expect no favour. Six
years elapsed before a change of fortune took place. At length, in
the year 1710, the prosecution of Sacheverell produced a formidable
explosion of high-church fanaticism. At such a moment Atterbury could
not fail to {121}be conspicuous. His inordinate zeal for the body to
which he belonged, his turbulent and aspiring temper, his rare talents
for agitation and for controversy, were again signally displayed. He
bore a chief part in framing that artful and eloquent speech which the
accused divine pronounced at the bar of the Lords, and which presents
a singular contrast to the absurd and scurrilous sermon which had very
unwisely been honoured with impeachment. During the troubled and anxious
months which followed the trial, Atterbury was among the most active of
those pamphleteers who inflamed the nation against the Whig ministry
and the Whig parliament. When the ministry had been changed and the
parliament dissolved, rewards were showered upon him. The Lower House
of Convocation elected him prolocutor. The Queen appointed him Dean of
Christ-Church on the death of his old friend and patron Aldrich. The
college would have preferred a gentler ruler. Nevertheless, the new
head was received with every mark of honour. A congratulatory oration in
Latin was addressed to him in the magnificent vestibule of the hall; and
he in reply professed the warmest attachment to the venerable house in
which he had been educated, and paid many gracious compliments to those
over whom he was to preside. But it was not in his nature to be a mild
or an equitable governor. He had left the chapter of Carlisle distracted
by quarrels. He found Christ-Church at peace; but in three months his
despotic and contentious temper did at Christ-Church what it had done
at Carlisle. He was succeeded in both his deaneries by the humane and
accomplished Smalridge, who gently complained of the state in which both
had been left. “Atterbury goes before, and sets everything on fire.
I {122}come after him with a bucket of water.” It was said by
Atterbury’s enemies that he was made a bishop because he was
so bad a dean. Under his administration Christ-Church was in
confusion; scandalous altercations took place, opprobrious words were
exchanged; and there was reason to fear that the great Tory college
would be ruined by the tyranny of the great Tory doctor. He was soon
removed to the bishopric of Rochester, which was then always united with
the deanery of Westminster. Still higher dignities seemed to be before
him. For, though there were many able men on the episcopal bench, there
was none who equalled or approached him in parliamentary talents. Had
his party continued in power, it is not improbable that he would have
been raised to the archbishopric of Canterbury. The more splendid his
prospects, the more reason he had to dread the accession of a family
which was well known to be partial to the Whigs. There is every reason
to believe that he was one of those politicians who hoped that they
might be able, during the life of Anne, to prepare matters in such a way
that at her decease there might be little difficulty in setting aside
the Act of Settlement and placing the Pretender on the throne. Her
sudden death confounded the projects of these conspirators. Atterbury,
who wanted no kind of courage, implored his confederates to proclaim
James III., and offered to accompany the heralds in lawn sleeves. But he
found even the bravest soldiers of his party irresolute, and exclaimed,
not, it is said, without interjections which ill became the mouth of a
father of the church, that the best of all causes and the most precious
of all moments had been pusillanimously thrown away. He acquiesced in
what he could not prevent, took the oaths to the House of {123}Hanover,
and at the coronation officiated with the outward show of zeal, and did
his best to ingratiate himself with the royal family. But his servility
was requited with cold contempt. No creature is so revengeful as a proud
man who has humbled himself in vain. Atterbury became the most factious
and pertinacious of all the opponents of the government. In the House of
Lords his oratory, lucid, pointed, lively, and set off with every grace
of pronunciation and of gesture, extorted the attention and admiration
even of a hostile majority. Some of the most remarkable protests which
appear in the journals of the peers were drawn up by him; and, in some
of the bitterest of those pamphlets which called on the English to
stand up for their country against the aliens who had come from beyond
the seas to oppress and plunder her, critics easily detected his’ style.
When the rebellion of 1715 broke out, he refused to sign the paper
in which the bishops of the province of Canterbury declared their
attachment to the Protestant succession. He busied himself in
electioneering, especially at Westminster, where, as dean, he possessed
great influence; and was, indeed, strongly suspected of having once set
on a riotous mob to prevent his Whig fellow-citizens from polling.
After having been long in indirect communication with the exiled family,
he, in 1717, began to correspond directly with the Pretender. The first
letter of the correspondence is extant. In that letter Atterbury boasts
of having, during many years past, neglected no opportunity of serving
the Jacobite cause. “My daily prayer,” he says, “is that you may have
success. May I live to see that day, and live no longer than I do what
is in my power to forward it.” It is to be remembered that he who wrote
thus was a man bound to set {124}to the church of which he was overseer
an example of strict probity; that he had repeatedly sworn allegiance to
the House of Brunswick; that he had assisted in placing the crown on
the head of George I.; and that he had abjured James III., “without
equivocation or mental reservation, on the true faith of a Christian.”
It is agreeable to turn from his public to his private life. His
turbulent spirit, wearied with faction and treason, now and then
required repose, and found it in domestic endearments, and in the
society of the most illustrious of the living and of the dead. Of his
wife little is known: but between him and his daughter there was an
affection singularly close and tender. The gentleness of his manners
when he was in the company of a few friends was such as seemed hardly
credible to those who knew him only by his writings and speeches. The
charm of his “softer hour” has been commemorated by one of those friends
in imperishable verse. Though Atterbury’s classical attainments were not
great, his taste in English literature was excellent; and his admiration
of genius was so strong that it overpowered even his political and
religions antipathies. His fondness for Milton, the mortal enemy of the
Stuarts and of the church, was such as to many Tories seemed a crime. On
the sad night on which Addison was laid in the chapel of Henry VII., the
Westminster boys remarked that Atterbury read the funeral service with
a peculiar tenderness and solemnity. The favourite companions, however,
of the great Tory prelate were, as might have been expected, men whose
politics had at least a tinge of Toryism. He lived on friendly terms
with Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay. With Prior he had a close intimacy,
{125}which some misunderstanding about public affairs at last dissolved.
Pope found in Atterbury, not only a warm admirer, but a most faithful,
fearless, and judicious adviser. The poet was a frequent guest at the
episcopal palace among the elms of Bromley, and entertained not the
slightest suspicion that his host, now declining in years, confined to
an easy chair by front, and apparently devoted to literature, was deeply
concerned in criminal and perilous designs against the government.
The spirit of the Jacobites had been cowed by the events of 1715. It
revived in 1721. The failure of the South Sea project, the panic in the
money market, the downfall of great commercial houses, the distress
from which no part of the kingdom was exempt, had produced general
discontent. It seemed not improbable that at such a moment an
insurrection might be successful. An insurrection was planned. The
streets, of London were to be barricaded; the Tower and the Bank were
to be surprised; King George, his family, and his chief captains and
councillors, were to be arrested; and King James was to be proclaimed.
The design became known to the Duke of Orleans, regent of France, who
was on terms of friendship with the House of Hanover. He put the English
government on its guard. Some of the chief malcontents were committed to
prison; and among them was Atterbury. No bishop of the Church of England
had been taken into custody since that memorable day when the applauses
and prayers of all London had followed the seven bishops to the gate
of the Tower. The Opposition entertained some hope that it might be
possible to excite among the people an enthusiasm resembling that of
their fathers, who rushed into the waters of the Thames {126}to implore
the blessing of Saneroft. Pictures of the heroic confessor in his cell
were exhibited at the shop windows. Verses in his praise were sung about
the streets. The restraints by which he was prevented from communicating
with his accomplices were represented as cruelties worthy of the
dungeons of the Inquisition. Strong appeals were made to the priesthood.
Would they tamely permit so gross an insult to be offered to their
cloth? Would they suffer the ablest, the most eloquent member of their
profession, the man who had so often stood up for their rights against
the civil power, to be treated like the vilest of mankind? There was
considerable excitement; but it was allayed by a temperate and artful
letter to the clergy, the work, in all probability, of Bishop Gibson,
who stood high in the favour of Walpole, and shortly after became
minister for ecclesiastical affairs.
Atterbury remained in close confinement during some months. He had
carried on his correspondence with the exiled family so cautiously that
the circumstantial proofs of his guilt, though sufficient to produce
entire moral conviction, were not sufficient to justify legal
conviction. He could be reached only by a bill of pains and penalties.
Such a bill the Whig party, then decidedly predominant in both houses,
was quite prepared to support. Many hot-headed members of that party
were eager to follow the precedent which had been set in the case of
Sir John Fenwick, and to pass an act for cutting off the bishop’s head.
Cadogan, who commanded the army, a brave soldier, but a headstrong
politician, is said to have exclaimed with great vehemence: “Fling him
to the lions in the Tower.” But the wiser and more humane Walpole was
always unwilling to shed blood; and his influence prevailed. {127}When
parliament met, the evidence against the bishop was laid before
committees of both houses. Those committees reported that his guilt
was proved. In the Commons a resolution, pronouncing him a traitor, was
carried by nearly two to one. A bill was then introduced which provided
that he should be deprived of his spiritual dignities, that he should
be banished for life, and that no British subject should hold any
intercourse with him except by the royal permission.
This bill passed the Commons with little difficulty. For the bishop,
though invited to defend himself, chose to reserve his defence for the
assembly of which he was a member. In the Lords the contest was
sharp. The young Duke of Wharton, distinguished by his parts, his
dissoluteness, and his versatility, spoke for Atterbury with great
effect; and Atterbury’s own voice was heard for the last time by that
unfriendly audience which had so often listened to him with mingled
aversion and delight. He produced few witnesses; nor did those witnesses
say much that could be of service to him. Among them was Pope. He was
called to prove that, while he was an inmate of the palace at Bromley,
the bishop’s time was completely occupied by literary and domestic
matters, and that no leisure was left for plotting. But Pope, who
was quite unaccustomed to speak in public, lost his head, and, as he
afterwards owned, though he had only ten words to say, made two or three
blunders.
The bill finally passed the Lords by eighty-three votes to forty-three.
The bishops, with a single exception, were in the majority. Their
conduct drew on them a sharp taunt from Lord Bathurst, a warm friend
of Atterbury and a zealous Tory. “The wild Indians,” he said, “give no
quarter, because they believe {128}that they shall inherit the skill and
prowess of every adversary whom they destroy. Perhaps the animosity of
the right reverend prelates to their brother may be explained in the
same way.”
Atterbury took leave of those whom he loved with a dignity and
tenderness worthy of a better man. Three fine lines of his favourite
poet were often in his mouth:
“Some natural tears he dropped, but wiped them soon: