On the 15th of January, 1723, the House of Commons resolved that a committee, consisting of such members of the House as were also Privy Councillors, should examine Layer and his papers, in the Tower, in order to get to a deeper knowledge of the plot to dispose of the king, than they yet possessed. In the subsequent report of this committee, it was stated that the horrible and execrable design had long been entertained by ‘persons of figure and distinction’ at home as well as by traitors abroad. Of those at home were Lord Orrery, Lord North and Grey, Lord Kinoul, Lord Strafford, Sir Henry Goring, and, with these, Bishop Atterbury, Captain Kelly, Kelly alias Johnson, and one John Plunkett. Actively or passively, these were all concerned in a conspiracy for an invasion of the kingdom by a force that was to leave Spain under the Duke of Ormond, to be joined by a Jacobite force on the coast and in the capital, and by their united power to destroy the existing state of things, the royal family included.
The committee complained that Layer would give them no assistance, but that by prevarications, contradictions, and downright lying, as they called it, he threw every sort of obstacle in their way. This threw them back on such papers as they had seized; but these papers, being partly or wholly in cypher, they had first to construct a key, and they then assumed that it solved every difficulty. They were indeed not far wrong, as the Stuart papers have since proved; but all the interpretations of initial letters, fictitious names, numbers for words, things or animals for persons, whereby Atterbury, Kelly, and Plunkett were chiefly implicated, were stoutly denied as being applicable, and such circumstantial evidence was not only denounced by the accused, but at a later period was derided by the great satirist of the day.
SATIRE ON THE PLOT.
Swift, in the sixth chapter of Gulliver’s account of Laputa, gives the captain’s report, as it was delivered to him by a distinguished Laputan professor, how to detect the difference between a man who intended to murder a king, and one who only designed to burn a metropolis. The captain explained to him the method taken in Tribnia (or Britain), in matters of high treason. ‘I told him that in the kingdom of Tribnia, by the natives called Langden, where I had sojourned some time in my travels, the bulk of the people consisted in a manner wholly of discoverers, witnesses, informers, accusers, prosecutors, evidencers, swearers, together with their several subservient instruments, all under the colours, the conduct, and the pay of ministers of state and their deputies. The plots in that kingdom are usually the workmanship of those persons who desire to raise their own characters of profound politicians; to restore new vigour to a crazy administration; to stifle, or divert general discontents; to fill their pockets with forfeitures, and raise or sink the opinion of public credit as either shall best answer their private advantage. It is first agreed and settled among them what suspected persons shall be accused of a plot; then effectual care is taken to secure all their letters and papers, and put the owners in chains. DECYPHERING. These papers are delivered to a set of artists very dexterous in finding out the mysterious meanings of words, syllables, and letters; for instance, they can discover … a flock of geese to signify a senate; a lame dog, an invader; the plague, a standing army; a buzzard, the prime minister; the gout, a high priest; a gibbet, a secretary of state; … a sieve, a court lady; a broom, a revolution; a mouse-trap, an employment; a bottomless pit, a treasury; a sink, a court; a cap and bells, a favourite; a broken reed, a court of justice; an empty ton, a general; a running sore, the administration. When this method fails, they have two others more effectual, which the learned among them call crotchets and anagrams. First, they can decipher all initial letters into political meanings; thus N shall signify a plot; B, a regiment of horse; I, a fleet at sea; or, secondly, by transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper, they can lay open the deepest designs of a discontented party. So, for example, if I should say, ‘Our brother Tom has got the piles,’ a skilful decipherer would discover that the same letters which compose that sentence may be analysed into the following words:—“Resist—a plot—is brought home—the tour;” and that is the anagrammatic method.’
Under this rich satire there is a world of truth. But, as already said, the committee were not far wrong in interpreting at least some of the papers in cypher; and the legislature was not unjustified in bringing in separate Bills of Pains and Penalties against Plunkett, Kelly (Nonjuror, Jesuit, perhaps both), and Atterbury.
PROCEEDINGS AGAINST ATTERBURY.
When the proceedings against Plunkett, Kelly, and Atterbury were preliminarily begun in the Commons by motions to the effect that a devilish conspiracy existed, the Jacobite members were boldly outspoken. Shippen and Dr. Freind were especially so. They had, indeed, no shadow of doubt as to the existence of the conspiracy, seeing there had been one ‘carrying on against the present Settlement ever since the Revolution;’ but they did not believe in any particular Plot, such as the alleged one on which the Ministry hoped to obtain Bills of Pains and Penalties against the above three persons. Against the first two, the object of the Ministry was attained; and then came the stormy day, on which the attack was opened against the Bishop of Rochester.
On March 11th, Mr. Yonge, on moving a resolution which laid the crime of high treason on Atterbury, concluded a violently rabid speech with a text from Acts i. 20, ‘Let his habitation be desolate, and let no man dwell therein: and his bishoprick let another take.’ After Sir John Cope had seconded the motion, all the Jacobites in the House, one after the other, led by Wyndham, denounced the proceeding. Bromley, Shippen, Hutcheson, Hungerford, Strangeways, Lutwyche, and Dr. Freind, ridiculed the idea of prosecuting a man against whom there was no evidence that was legal or trustworthy. The motion was carried; but the opposition officered by the Jacobite physician was so fierce and outspoken, that hardly unexpected consequences speedily followed.
DEBATE IN THE COMMONS.
On March 13th, Sir Robert Walpole informed the House that the king (empowered by the suspension of Habeas Corpus) had ordered Dr. Freind to be arrested and detained on a charge of high treason, and the minister asked the House to sanction the act. Shippen and Bromley opposed this request and the act also, on the ground that nothing was specified, and that Dr. Freind was committed on accusation unsupported by oath.