The Secretary of State, Craggs, justly accused of having received a bribe from the directors of the company, died of the small pox; his father, the Postmaster-General, took poison. Aislabie was sent to the Tower, and the greater part of his property was confiscated. All the property of the directors was seized, and they were declared forever incapable of holding any public office or of sitting in Parliament. Lord Sunderland had lost considerable sums: "He is a dupe, but not an accomplice," scornfully said even his enemies. He was acquitted, but nevertheless could not preserve his power. Walpole succeeded him as first Lord of the Treasury. Sunderland died on the 17th of April, 1721, some weeks after the general elections, and two months before his illustrious father-in-law, the Duke of Marlborough.
Robert Walpole had finally attained the power which he was to exercise during twenty years, for the repose, if not always for the honor and moral grandeur of his country. Jealous of his authority, to the extent of removing from the circle about the king all those not his friends, and even those of his friends whom he could not control absolutely, he encountered, at the outset, the intrigues of the Jacobites, re-awakened by the general discontent and by the new aspirations which the birth of a son awakened in the Pretender.
A new expedition was prepared under the orders of the Duke of Ormond, and matured and directed from England by a council of five members who conducted the affairs of "King James III." The soul of this little clique was the Bishop of Rochester, Francis Atterbury, indefatigable in his zeal as well as inexhaustible in his resources; sincerely attached to the Protestant faith, but sacrificing all to his political passions, and more occupied in preparing for the landing of the invaders and in fomenting an insurrection during the absence of the king in Hanover, than in the care of his diocese. When the plot was discovered, the inferior agents were promptly arrested, and the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Orrery, and Lord North, at first imprisoned in the Tower, were soon released: the bishop remained gravely compromised. Walpole resolved to risk a trial. Among the accomplices a young barrister named Layer alone suffered the extreme penalty; the property of some others was confiscated; but public interest concentrated itself upon the bishop, who was kept in close confinement in the Tower.
Atterbury was eloquent and convincing; when he appeared before the House of Lords, all his efforts tended to prove that the testimony against him was forged. Walpole was compelled to defend himself: "A finer passage at arms between two such antagonists was never seen," said Onslow, the speaker of the House of Commons; "one fighting for his reputation, the other for his life." The evidence was overwhelming against the bishop; he had evidently conspired against a sovereign to whom he had sworn allegiance. His address was as eloquent as able. "I have suffered so much," said he, "that the little strength which I enjoyed at the time of my arrest, in the month of August last, has completely disappeared, and I am not in a state to appear before your lordships, still less to defend myself in an affair of so extraordinary a nature. I am accused of having conspired. What could I gain, my lords, by going thus out of my way? No man in my order is less urged by ambition for higher dignities of the Church. I have always scorned money; too much so, perhaps, for I may now need it. Could I have been drawn by a secret attraction towards papacy? My lords, since I have known what papacy is, I have exposed it; and the better I have known it, the stronger I have opposed it. For the last thirty-seven years I have written in favor of Martin Luther. Whatever may happen to me, I am ready to suffer all, and by the grace of God to perish at the stake sooner than depart from the Protestant faith as set forth by the Church of England. I have awaited my sentence these eight months, my lords, separated from my children, who have not been able to write me or even send me a message without express authority. When the illustrious Earl of Clarendon, accused of treason, was compelled to retire into exile, he had passed the greater part of his life abroad, and was well known there; he understood the language, and he enjoyed a large fortune; all these consolations are wanting to me. I resemble him only in my innocence and my punishment. It is not in the power of any man to alter the first resemblance, but it is in the power of your lordships to profoundly modify the second; I hope for it and I expect it from you." Atterbury was condemned; a majority of the prelates voted against him.
The English Catholics had ardently espoused the cause of the house of Stuart, and they were to pay once again for their illusive imprudence and folly. The attempt which had just cost the Bishop of Rochester his episcopal see and the freedom of his country, served as a pretext for Walpole to propose a tax of £100,000, to be collected from the estates of the Catholics. "Many of them are guilty," said the minister. This contempt for justice and liberty, which long pursued the Catholics in England, weighed upon the French Protestants still longer and more heavily. The bill which passed the Houses included all the gentry who had refused to take the oath of allegiance. Many who had resisted, up to this time, in consequence of a sincere repugnance, now hastened to take the oath to the established order of things.
"I have observed well," said the Speaker Onslow, who was opposed to the measure of Walpole, "and it was a strange and ridiculous spectacle to see the crowd which gathered at the quarterly Sessions in order to pledge their allegiance to the government, while, at the same time, cursing it for the trouble which it was giving them and for the fear which it inspired. I am convinced that the attachment for the king and his family has received a severe shock from all that happened at this time."
As the exiled bishop put his foot upon the soil of France, at Calais, he learned that Lord Bolingbroke had been pardoned by the king, and had arrived in that city on his way to England. "I am exchanged, then," said Atterbury, smiling. "Assuredly," wrote Pope, the intimate and faithful friend of the bishop, "this country fears an excess of talent, since it will not regain one genius without losing another."
It was to the venal protection of the Duchess of Kendal that Bolingbroke owed the royal pardon. Walpole had not received favorably the overtures which had been made to him in favor of the exile. "The attainder ought never to be abolished, and crimes ought never to be forgotten," said he, in the Council. The Marquise de Villette, niece of Madame Maintenon, at first the friend and subsequently the wife of Bolingbroke, had succeeded in interesting the favorite in his behalf. Eleven thousand pounds sterling were paid, it was said, for permission to return to England. He had as yet recovered neither his title, his rights, nor his fortune. The offer of his services was refused by Walpole. It was not until 1725, and even then, through the intervention of Madame Villette and the Duchess of Kendal, that Bolingbroke, having returned to France, finally obtained permission to present to Parliament a petition that Walpole consented to support. More clear-sighted than he had often been during his public life, Bolingbroke while in France had served continually and to the utmost, the interests of the English minister, by sustaining his brother Horace and his brother-in-law Lord Townshend, in their rivalry against Lord Carteret, the Secretary of State. The amnesty voted by Parliament restored to Bolingbroke his personal fortune, and his rights to the heritage of his father, but without giving him the right of disposing of it. The king had promised Walpole, it was said, that Bolingbroke should never again hold any political position. "I am restored to two-thirds," wrote he to Swift, from his country house at Uxbridge. He received his friends, occupying or at least pretending to occupy himself exclusively with his estate and in literary pursuits. Voltaire was one of his visitors, when driven from France by his quarrel with the Chevalier Rohan, and passed two years in England. This event had a powerful effect upon Voltaire's mind, and many traces of the same may be found in his writings. The relations of the poet with Bolingbroke were of long standing; they had often met at the Chateau de la Source, near Orleans, where the exile lived for some time. "One thing which interests me," wrote Voltaire, "is the recall of milord Bolingbroke to England. He will be at Paris to-day, and I shall have the grief of bidding him farewell, perhaps forever." When Voltaire, in his turn, again reached his own country, he dedicated to Bolingbroke his tragedy of Brutus: "Permit me to present to you Brutus," wrote he, "although written in another language, docte sermonis utriusque linguœ, to you who have given me lessons in French as well as in English, to you who have taught me at least to give to my language that force and that energy which noble liberty of thought inspires: for vigorous sentiments of the soul always pass into the language, and he who thinks forcibly speaks likewise." Voltaire, on asking permission to visit England, had remarked: "it is a country where they think freely and nobly without being restrained by servile fear."