Chapter 13

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.

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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.

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