DEATH OF ATTERBURY.
‘February 15, 1732.—The Revd. Dr. Francis Atterbury, late Bishop of Rochester, died at Paris, justly esteemed for his great learning and polite conversation.’ In what sense the Jacobites esteemed him may be seen in an expression in one of Salkeld’s letters, wherein the writer laments the loss of ‘that anchor of our hopes, that pillar of our cause.’
Pope, in a letter to Lord Oxford, referred to Atterbury’s death in these terms: ‘The trouble which I have received from abroad, on the news of the death of that much-injured man, could only be mitigated by the reflection your Lordship suggests to me—his own happiness, and return into his best country, where only honesty and virtue were sure of their reward.’ Pope could not have thought the ex-bishop innocent of the treason, of which he was undoubtedly guilty; for the poet had knowledge of the treachery before the Jacobite prelate’s death. Samuel Wesley must have known it too, but he ignored all but his patron’s virtues in a very long elegy on Atterbury’s decease, written in very strong language, of which these lines are a sample:—
Should miscreants base their impious malice shed,
To insult the great, the venerable, dead;
Let truth resistless blast their guilty eyes!
—which is a sort of malediction that is now quite discarded by moral and by fashionable poets.
The ‘Craftsman’ of May 6th announces the arrival of Mr. Morrice, the High Bailiff of Westminster, at Deal. On landing he was taken into custody and sent up prisoner to London, where, after being rigorously examined by one of the Secretaries of State, he was admitted to bail. The corpse of the ex-bishop was arrested as it came up the river. It was taken to the Custom House, where, the coffin being examined for papers, and nothing compromising being found, the body, according to the facetious ‘Craftsman,’ was discharged without bail. Great opposition was made to a request for burial in the Abbey; and when this was granted, the ‘Craftsman’ was ‘not certain as to the usual Church ceremony being read over the corpse.’
BURIAL OF ATTERBURY.
The public were, at all events, kept in the dark, lest Jacobite mobs should make riotous demonstrations at the ceremony. ‘On Friday, May 12th,’ says Sylvanus Urban, ‘the Corpse of Bishop Atterbury was privately interred in his Vault in Westminster Abbey. On the Urn which contained his Bowels, &c., was inscribed: “In hac Urnâ depositi sunt cineres Francisci Atterburi Episcopi Roffensis.” Among his papers brought over by Mr. Morrice was “Harmonia Evangelica,” in a new and clearer Method than any yet publish’d. ’Tis also said he translated Virgil’s “Georgics,” which he sent to a friend with the following Lines prefix’d,