The appearance of the Earl of Oxford once more in public was an event to be discussed. As Harley walked from his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, holding Harcourt by the arm, there were men who thought as they gazed that Harley should never have been allowed to leave the Tower. Treason seemed to lurk in the least likely places. Why had the Lord Chamberlain so summarily ordered Lady Wentworth to vacate the lodgings she had been permitted to occupy, at the Cockpit? Simply because she had allowed disaffected persons to meet there. There had been a mysterious vessel lying off the Tower, and a going to and fro between it and Lady Wentworth’s lodgings. The police visited both. They seized treasonable papers aboard the ship, and they swept the lodgings clear of all its inmates, including the servants. The former included the famous Captain Dennis Kelly, his wife, her mother, Lady Bellew (sister of the Earl of Strafford), and some persons of less note. They were all about to ship for France, in furtherance of the conspiracy. The ladies were allowed to go free, but the Captain, with some co-mates in misery, were fast locked up in the Tower. There, reflection so worked upon Kelly, that he became fearfully depressed, and petitioned to have a warder sleep in his room at night, for the company’s sake!
To be going to France was as dangerous as coming from it, for plotting. In the former case, money was carried to the Jacobite chiefs, raised here under guise of subscriptions in aid of poor foreign Protestants. There was a ‘sensation’ in town, when the papers one morning announced that ‘A certain Person of Quality has been seized in the Isle of White, upon Account of the Conspiracy, as he was endeavouring to make his Escape beyond Sea.’ The ‘Person’ was Lord North and Grey of Rolleston. Whigs saw him go from the Lords’ Committee of Council to the Tower with approval. They could not see why Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery, who had been taken at his seat in Buckinghamshire, should be permitted to be under arrest in his London mansion in Glass House Street, though it was garrisoned by thirty soldiers whom he had to keep. This earl’s subsequent removal to the Tower was a gratification to loyal minds.
ATTERBURY TO POPE.
On July 30th, Atterbury, not long before his arrest, was indulging in disquisitions on death, in railing at human greatness, in sneers at the Duke of Marlborough, lately deceased—a man whose loyalty, like that of the bishop who was about to bury him—had been paid to two antagonistic masters. ‘I go to-morrow,’ the prelate tells Pope, ‘to the Deanery; and I believe I shall stay there till I have said Dust to dust, and shut up that last scene of pompous vanity.… I shall often say to myself while expecting the funeral—
O Rus, quando ego te aspiciam! quandoque licebit
Ducere sollicitæ jucunda oblivia vitæ!
This gentle sigher after a quiet life was then ready to welcome James III. to London, and very probably had his eye on the ‘pompous vanity’ of Canterbury.
