On a simple surmise that the owner is dead.
That Atterbury was actively engaged this year on behalf of the Chevalier is now well attested. In April, the bishop in London wrote to James:—‘Sir, the time is now come when with a very little assistance from your friends abroad, your way to your friends at home is become safe and easy.’ Of this there is earnest iteration. Late in December, James wrote to the bishop a letter which Atterbury received the next month at the Deanery by a messenger. Atterbury’s king thanked him for past service, and allured him with a prospect of ‘a rank superior to all the rest.’ The eventful year was supposed to be at hand.
ARREST OF JACOBITES.
The year was a critical one. The Jacobite press was more audacious than ever—sure symptom that some peril was at hand. In what it consisted was notified to the king by the Regent Duke of Orleans,—namely, a design to seize the king himself, and to restore the Stuarts. Angry Nonjurors, and still more angry Ultramontanists, accused the Earl of Mar, and cursed his folly, for having sent, through the ordinary post, a letter, which was opened in London as a matter of course, and which contained unmistakable treason. Walpole, with his intricate agencies, probably knew as much of the design as the Regent and Mar themselves, and the circle around his intended victims was gradually closing. The danger was real. It led to the formation of great camps, to various arrests in the course of the year, and to severe measures against the Papists. Among those arrested on suspicion of being guilty of treason were the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Orrery, and Lord North and Grey, with a Captain Kelly, a Nonjuring priest of the same name, and a prelate who was, in August, innocently engaged in a correspondence with Potter, Bishop of Oxford, as to the exact time at which the several Gospels were written. But it was for less innocent matter that Atterbury was arrested. There was not a more active agent of James III. in the kingdom than he, and Kelly, the Nonjuror, was his daring, crafty, and reckless aide-de-camp.
ATTERBURY’S CORRESPONDENCE.
In the Stuart papers there is a letter, dated April, 1722, in which Atterbury writes to Mar, expressing his willingness to enter into a long-interrupted correspondence with Lord Oxford, and ‘upon a better foot than it has ever yet stood, being convinced that my doing so may be of no small consequence to the service. I have already taken the first step towards it, that is proper in our situation, and will pursue that by others as fast as I can have opportunity, hoping the secret will be as inviolably kept on your side, as it shall be on this, so far as the nature of such a transaction between two persons who must see one another sometimes can pass unobserved. I hope it will not be expected I should write by post, having many reasons to think it not advisable for me so to do.’
Outwardly there was a peaceful look, and peaceful thoughts and words, just where the storm and the thunderbolt were preparing. Atterbury, the most active Jacobite agent of the time, wrote pious and philosophical and pharisaical letters, from the Deanery at Westminster, to Pope. ‘I know not,’ he writes (April 6), ‘how I have fallen into this train of thinking;—when I sat down to write I intended only to excuse myself for not writing, and to tell you that the time drew nearer and nearer to dislodge; I am preparing for it: for I am at this moment building a vault in the Abbey for me and mine. ’Twas to be in the Abbey, because of my relation to the place; but ’tis at the West door of it; as far from Kings and Cæsars as the space would admit of.’ The prophet knew not the sense of his own prophecy. The despiser of kings and Cæsars was then plotting to overthrow a king to whom he had sworn allegiance, and to bring in a Cæsar hot from Rome, and ready to be Rome’s humble vassal!
JACOBITE TRYSTING PLACES.
In May, when the peril was made known, there was great stir in London among the adherents of the royal family. The early Jacobites gathered together in the morning at the Exchange. At noon, groups of them collected about Temple Bar. The ‘Malignants’ in finer clothes walked and talked in front of the Cocoa Tree (St. James’s Street) between two and three. The Temple Garden was the chosen spot of all of them at night. Hyde Park, and their old Walnut Tree walk there, were deserted by them as soon as preparations for pitching the camp in that spot were commenced. A few, however, were to be found there mingling with Whigs and discussing the aspects of the time. Amid it all, the king, by Lord Townshend, announced to the Lord Mayor that the Pretender was projecting an invasion of the kingdom. Mayor and municipality replied that they were ready to lay down their lives to prevent it. Then followed a seizure of seditious printers and their apprentices. Papists and Nonjurors were ordered to withdraw to a distance of ten miles from London; and these measures having been adopted, the ministers deemed that the country was in safety. But timid men quoted Steele’s expression, first made in 1715,—‘Ministers employ a flute when they should blow a trumpet.’ The louder alarum was soon given. The country was dotted with camps. The most important of these was pitched in Hyde Park. It consisted of about one thousand cavalry, of whom more than half comprised the ‘gentlemen of the Horse Guards.’ The infantry amounted to about four thousand. There was a reasonable amount of artillery, and a creditable supply of chaplains, the king having peremptorily ordered that Divine service should be celebrated every day at 11 o’clock.
THE OFFICERS IN CAMP.