Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/408

394 a prince supported by a vigorous parliament and an affectionate people.

To punish the catholics and nonjurors, who were all regarded as implicated in this conspiracy, Walpole proposed to raise one hundred thousand pounds by a tax on their estates. Stanhope had proposed other, and undoubtedly wiser, because more conciliatory measures. He had seriously contemplated the removal of the penal laws against the catholics; but this liberal project had been interrupted by the bursting out of the South Sea excitement, and finally quashed by his death. Walpole took a much lower policy; and though the plan was vigorously resisted by Onslow, Jekyll, and their party as worthy only of past and persecuting times, and calculated to make those enemies who were not yet so, the bill was passed by two hundred and seventeen against one hundred and sixty-eight. The direct consequence was to produce a frightful amount of perjury. "I saw a great deal of it," says Onslow, the future speaker, and it was a strange as well as a ridiculous sight to see people crowding at the quarter sessions to give a testimony of their allegiance to a government, and cursing it at the same time for giving them the trouble of so doing, and for the flight which they were put to by it; and I am satisfied more real disaffection to the king and his family arose from it than from anything which happened in that time."

Some till the Jacobites consulted the pretender how they should act on this occasion; but he seems to have ventured on no explicit advice, and the bulk of both Jacobites and nonjurors hastened to swear, as the least of two evils. They still retained all their own views and feelings, only the more confirmed by the necessity of perjuring themselves on their behalf.

The year 1723 was introduced by the labours of the secret committee busy in sifting the evidences of the plot, and on the 1st of March the report of the commons, drawn up by Pulteney, the chairman of the committee, was introduced and read. Besides making the treason of Atterbury sufficiently clear, a number of other peers had been named in the depositions—the lords Scarsdale, Strafford, Craven, Gower, Bathurst, Bingley, and Cowper. These, and especially Cowper, indignantly repelled the insinuation of disloyalty. Cowper professed his unbounded astonishment at such an aspersion on him, who on so many occasions had given such undoubted proofs of his attachment to the protestant succession. Yet it must be borne in mind that lord Cowper had for some time been acting strongly in opposition to the whig government, and lord Mahon states that he found, amongst the Stuart papers, letters of solicitation addressed to him both by lord Mar and the pretender himself, whilst no replies to these letters promptly and positively declining any adhesion to their views, have been found. It is probable that Cowper, able and clear-headed man as he was, had allowed himself in the hour of his discontent to be tampered with by the enemy, though he might not even have most distantly dreamed of becoming their partisan. Whatever was the state of the case, it ceased, so far as he was concerned, to be of consequence, for he died on the 10th of October. Undoubtedly Cowper was a great lawyer and able statesman, though there would appear something hard in his nature. He was a man eloquent and accomplished rather than of noble and refined feeling; yet amongst the corruption of the times, he stood an object of high distinction and respect for his services.

Layer, the Templar, was convicted, executed at Tyburn, and his head fixed on Temple Bar. Plunket and Kelly were proceeded against by a bill of pains and penalties, and condemned to imprisonment at pleasure, and confiscation of their property. A bill was also brought into the commons by Mr. Younge, afterwards Sir William, to banish Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, without confiscation, and to make it felony to correspond with him without the king's license, adding also that the king should not have power to pardon him without consent of parliament. The bishop, who was well skilled in all parliamentary forms, on receiving this bill, wrote immediately to the speaker of the house, requesting permission to have the assistance of Sir Constantine Phipps and Mr. Wynne as his counsel, and Mr. Morice as his solicitor, and that they might have free access to him in prison. This being granted, he then applied to the lords, stating that as, by a standing order of the house of January 20th, 1673, no lord might appear by counsel before the commons, he was at a loss how to act, and humbly requested their advice. The lords at once gave him permission to be heard in the commons either by counsel, or in any other manner as best suited him. These ready compliances probably defeated the creation of a grievance, which the cunning bishop was endeavouring to establish; for on the very day on which he was expected to make his defence, he informed the commons that he had concluded to give them no trouble, but to confine his defence to the house of which he had the honour of being a member.

The bill, therefore, passed the commons as a matter of course, without a division, and on the 6th of May the bishop was called to the bar of the lords. The evidence against him was gone through, and that in his defence was then produced. Amongst these was Pope, the poet, who, more accustomed to express himself in his study, out as poor a figure in the witness-box as he made a bold and assailant one in his own chair. He could only stammer out a few words, and these most remarkable for their blunders. The sum of his evidence was to give Atterbury a good character, describing him as so pleasant and amiable a man in social hours, that he could not conceive him as a political plotter; all of which amounted just to nothing, for the most truculent revolutionists have often been very agreeable fellows in society.

Erasmus Lewis, an old associate and correspondent of Swift and Harley, came forward to prove from his official experience how easily handwriting may be counterfeited, and how delusive such evidence might prove. Still more important than the defence set up by Lewis was that of three witnesses, who appeared to neutralise the depositions of Neynoe taken before his escape and death. One of these, a Mr. Skeene, swore that, having asked Neynoe whether there was in reality a plot, he had replied, "Yes, there were two: one of Mr. Walpole against some great men, and another of his own, which was only to get some eighteen or twenty thousand pounds out of Walpole." Though these witnesses were far from respectable, one of them having