Atterbury had, however, among his many gifts a dangerous gift of political intrigue. Like Swift and Dubois and Alberoni, he was at least as much statesman as churchman. {215} He had mixed himself up in various intrigues—some of them could hardly be called conspiracies—for the restoration of the Stuarts, and when at last something like a new conspiracy was planned, it was not likely that he would be left out of it. He had courage enough for any such scheme. There was no great difficulty in finding out the new plot which King George mentioned in his speech to Parliament; for James Stuart had revealed it himself by a proclamation which he caused to be circulated among his supposed adherents in England, renewing in the boldest terms his claim to the crown of England. A sort of junto of Jacobites appears to have been established in England to make arrangements for a new attempt on the part of James; the noblemen whom King George had arrested were understood to be among its leading members. Atterbury was charged with having taken a prominent if not, indeed, a foremost part in the conspiracy. The Duke of Norfolk, Lord North and Grey, and Lord Orrery were afterwards discharged for want of evidence to convict them. The arrest of a number of humbler conspirators led to the discovery of a correspondence asserted to have been carried on between Atterbury and the adherents of James Stuart in France and Italy.
Both Houses of Parliament began by voting addresses of loyalty and gratitude to the King, and by resolving that the proclamation entitled "Declaration of James the Third, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, to all his loving subjects of the three nations," and signed "James Rex," was "a false, insolent, and traitorous libel," and should be burned by the hands of the common hangman, under the direction of the sheriffs of London. This important ceremonial was duly carried out at the Royal Exchange. Then the House of Commons voted, "that towards raising the supply, and reimbursing to the public the great expenses occasioned by the late rebellions and disorders, the sum of one hundred thousand pounds be raised and levied upon the real and personal estates of {216} all Papists, Popish recusants, or persons educated in the Popish religion, or whose parents are Papists, or who shall profess the Popish religion, in lieu of all forfeitures already incurred for or upon account of their recusancy." This singular method of infusing loyalty into the Roman Catholics of England was not allowed to be adopted without serious and powerful resistance in the House of Commons. The idea was not to devise a new penalty for the Catholics, but to put in actual operation the terms of a former penalty pronounced against them in Elizabeth's time, and not then pressed into execution. This fact was dwelt upon with much emphasis by the advocates of the penal motion. Why talk of religious persecution? they asked. This is not religious persecution; it is only putting in force an edict passed in a former reign to punish Roman Catholics for political rebellion. This way of putting the case seems only to make the character of the policy more clear and less justifiable. The Catholics of King George's time were to be mulcted indiscriminately because the Catholics of Queen Elizabeth's time had been declared liable to such a penalty. The Master of the Rolls, to his great credit, strongly opposed the resolution. Walpole supported it with all the weight of his argument and his influence. The plot was evidently a Popish plot, he contended, and although he was not prepared to accuse any English Catholic in particular of taking part in it, yet there could be no doubt that Papists in general were well-wishers to it, and that some of them had contributed large sums towards it. Why, then, should they not be made to reimburse some part of the expense to which they and the friends of the Pretender had put the nation? The resolution, after it had been reported from committee, was only carried in the whole House by 188 votes against 172. [Sidenote: 1723—Lord Cowper's opposition] The resolution was embodied in a bill, and the Bill, when it went up to the House of Lords, was opposed there by several of the Peers, and especially by Lord Cowper, the "silver-tongued Cowper," who had {217} been so distinguished a Lord Chancellor under Anne, and under George himself. Lord Cowper's was an eloquent and a powerful speech. It tore to pieces the wretched web of flimsy sophistry by which the supporters of the Bill endeavored to make out that it was not a measure of religious persecution. Indeed, there were some of these who insisted that, so far from being a measure of persecution, it was a measure of relief. Our readers will, no doubt, be curious to know how this bold position was sustained. In this wise: the penalties prescribed for the Catholics in Elizabeth's reign were much greater in amount than those which the Bill proposed to inflict on the Catholics of King George's time; therefore the Bill was an indulgence and not a persecution—a mitigation of penalty, not a punishment. Let us reduce the argument to plain figures. A Catholic in the reign of Elizabeth is declared liable to a penalty of twenty pounds, but out of considerations of humanity or justice the penalty is not enforced. The descendant and heir of that same Catholic in the reign of George the First is fined fifteen pounds, and the fine is exacted. He complains, and he is told, "You have no right to complain; you ought to be grateful; the original fine ordained was twenty pounds; you have been let off five pounds—you have been favored by an act of indulgence, not victimized by an act of persecution." Lord Cowper had not much trouble in disposing of arguments of this kind, but his speech took a wider range, and is indeed a masterly exposure of the whole principle on which the measure was founded. On May 22, 1723, sixty-nine peers voted for the third reading of the Bill, and fifty-five opposed it. Lord Cowper, with twenty other peers, entered a protest against the decision of the House, according to a practice then common in the House of Lords, and which has lately fallen into complete disuse. The recorded protests of dissentient peers form, we may observe, very important historical documents, and deserve, some of them, {218} a careful study. Lord Cowper's protest was the last public act of his useful and honorable career. He died on the 10th of October in the same year, 1723. Some of his enemies explained his action on the anti-Papist Bill by the assertion that he was a Jacobite at heart. Even if he had been, the fact would hardly have made his conduct less creditable and spirited. Many a man who was a Jacobite at heart would have supported a measure for the punishment of Roman Catholics if only to save himself from the suspicion of sympathy with the lost cause.
[Sidenote: 1723—Charges against Atterbury]
This, however, was but an episode in the story of the Jacobite plot and the measures taken to punish those who were engaged in it. Committees of secrecy were appointed by Parliament to inquire into the evidence and examine witnesses.
Meantime both Houses of Parliament kept voting address after address to the Crown at each new stage of the proceedings, and as each fresh evidence of the conspiracy was laid before them. The King must have grown rather weary of finding new words of gratitude, and the Houses of Parliament, one would think, must have grown tired of inventing new phrases of loyalty and fresh expressions of horror at the wickedness of the Jacobites. The horror was not quite genuine on the part of some who thus proclaimed it. Many of those who voted the addresses would gladly have welcomed a restoration of the Stuarts. Not the most devoted adherent of King George could really have felt any surprise at the persistent efforts of the Jacobite partisans. Eight years before this it was a mere toss-up whether Stuart or Hanover should succeed, and even still it was not quite certain whether, if the machinery of the modern plebiscite could have been put into operation in England, the majority would not have been found in sympathy with Atterbury. It is almost certain that if the plebiscite could have been taken in Ireland and Scotland also, a majority of voices would have voted James Stuart to the throne.
{219}
It was resolved to proceed against Atterbury by a Bill of Pains and Penalties to be brought into Parliament. The evidence against him was certainly not such as any criminal court would have held to justify a conviction. A young barrister named Christopher Layer was arrested and examined, so were a nonjuring minister named Kelly, an Irish Catholic priest called Neynoe, and a man named Plunkett, also from Ireland. The charge against Atterbury was founded on the statements obtained or extorted from these men. It should be said that Layer gave evidence which actually seemed to impugn Lord Cowper himself as a member of a club of disaffected persons; and when Lord Cowper indignantly repudiated the charge and demanded an inquiry, the Government declared inquiry absolutely unnecessary, as everybody was well assured of his innocence. The Government, however, declined to follow Lord Cowper in his not unreasonable assumption that the whole story was unworthy of explicit credence when it included such a false statement. The case against Atterbury rested on the declaration of some of the arrested men that the bishop had carried on a correspondence with James Stuart, Lord Mar, and General Dillon (an Irish Catholic soldier, who after the capitulation of Limerick, had entered the French service), through the instrumentality of Kelly, who acted as his secretary and amanuensis for that purpose. It was a case of circumstantial evidence altogether. The impartial reader of history now will feel well satisfied on two points: first, that Atterbury was engaged in the plot; and second, that the evidence brought against him was not nearly strong enough to sustain a conviction. It was the case of Bolingbroke and Harley over again. We know now that the men had done the things charged against them, but the evidence then relied upon was utterly inadequate to sustain the charge.
A "Dialogue in Verse between a Whig and a Tory" was written by Swift in the year 1723, "concerning the horrid plot discovered by Harlequin, the Bishop of {220} Rochester's French Dog." The Whig tells the Tory that the dog—
"His name is Harlequin, I wot,
And that's a name in every plot"—
was generously