Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/409

A.D. 1723.] been convicted, whipped, and pilloried at Dublin for a treasonable pamphlet, yet Walpole himself deemed it necessary to come forward and contradict them. Atterbury seized on this opportunity to perplex and confound the minister by cross-questioning him; but he did not succeed. Walpole stood the encounter with cool firmness and cleverness of reply. "It was," says Onslow, "a greater trial of wits than scarce ever happened between such combatants — the one fighting for his reputation, the other for his acquittal."

Whatever was the private consciousness of Walpole on the occasion, that of Atterbury could be none of the most assuring. He stood there as a dignitary of the church, who had sworn allegiance to the monarch under whom he lived, and yet had undoubtedly been for many years a most industrious plotter against him. He had lived in long and habitual disregard of his own oath, and in endeavours to bring in a family as hostile to the church itself as to the reigning dynasty. His defence, which he made on the 11th of May, was laboured and eloquent, but the worst of it was that it was one string of falsities. He pretended that the treason attributed to him was perfectly out of the question; that it was unnatural and absurd, because he could have no motive to commit it. "What could tempt me," he asked, "thus to step out of my way? Was it ambition, and a desire of climbing into a higher station in the church? . . . Was money my aim?" He went on to show that one was impossible, the other he despised. "Was it any dislike of the established church?" This, too, he answered in the negative. But whilst he paraded the causes which did not move him, he passed over the real ones which did. That he had done all that was charged on him he very well knew, and the house was perfectly satisfied of this in the evidence, and, therefore, the bill was passed by eighty-three votes against forty-three, and it received the royal assent on the 27th of the month.

Atterbury, who could scarcely expect to escape, received the announcement of his condemnation with apparent composure. His friends were admitted to see him before his departure, and he took an affectionate leave of them. To Pope he presented a Bible, who professed to believe that by such a gift he might have cause to remember the bishop of Rochester in the next world as well as this. The next day, the 18th of June, Atterbury was put on board a man-of-war, and conducted to Calais. As he landed there, he was told that Bolingbroke had received the king's pardon, and was just quitting Calais for England; and the bishop said, with a smile, "Then I am exchanged." If there had wanted any proof of Atterbury's complicity with the pretender, he immediately gave it by throwing himself zealously into his service, and acting as his confidential agent, first at Brussels, and afterwards at Paris; still, however, representing to the public at homo that he was living in poverty, bearing his wrongs with resignation, and finding consolation in the sacred pleasures of religion and philosophy.

The pardon of Bolingbroke now granted had been long solicited and under negotiation. Having thrown up the service of the pretender in disgust, it was not in the nature of this proud and restless man to remain long in inaction. He soon began to renew his attempts to recover his standing in England. He made the most solemn professions of attachment to the new dynasty, of repentance of his folly in supporting the claims of the worthless and ungrateful pretender. He declared that he would serve George, the Hanoverian dynasty, and his country, with zeal and affection; that he would never do anything by halves, and would never betray a secret or a friend. Lord Stair was at length instructed to treat with him, and Bolingbroke then wrote a private letter to Sir William Wyndham, exposing the weakness of the pretender's cause, the little chance of his ever succeeding, and advising him to turn his thoughts elsewhere. This letter he sent unsealed to the postmaster-general, to be laid before the government, and forwarded or not to Sir William, as they thought proper. This was a scheme which was very characteristic of the selfish policy of Bolingbroke, who in serving himself endangered others. The stratagem, however, succeeded. The letter was duly forwarded by the government to Sir William; and, as lord Stair represented that there was no man capable of doing so much injury to the Jacobite cause, the ministers listened to his entreaties. But Bolingbroke did not trust to mere earnest and straightforward applications. He had made a large sum of money in the Mississippi speculations, and he took the more effectual means of bribing the duchess of Kendal, the king's mistress. The animosity of the whig party was a serious bar to his return. Walpole, in 1719, had, in speaking of Oxford, said, "His rival in guilt and power even now presumes to expect an act of the legislature to indemnify him, and qualify his villany." Before his gold in the palm of the German mistress, however, all this virtuous sentiment evaporated, and now Walpole himself consented to his return, and his pardon passed the great seal in May of this year.

This act, however, merely gave him the right to come back and live in security in England. Bolingbroke's ambition could only be satisfied by the restoration of his estates and honours, and the German mistress was again well bribed. Unfortunately for him, when he arrived in England, the king had sailed for Hanover, attended by Townshend and Carteret, and his great patroness, the duchess of Kendal. Bolingbroke wrote letters of thanks to the king, the duchess, and Townshend. He set himself to work, meantime, to obtain an accession of his tory friends, if possible, to the ministerial party. Lord Harcourt had already veered round of himself, and with such success, that he had lately been created a viscount and appointed one of the lords justices at the king's departure. He had been, therefore, able to promote Bolingbroke's pardon, and it has been, represented as an act of gratitude in Bolingbroke to endeavour to bring him still more into ministerial favour. The truth is that Bolingbroke was labouring with all his might for his own purpose, the restoration of his rank and estates, and the more of his friends that were in the ministerial party the better for that end. He waited, therefore, on Walpole; and not only endeavoured to raise Harcourt in his good opinion, but represented that Wyndham, who was at the head of the tory party in the house of commons, the lords Bathurst and Gower, were now beginning to be disgusted with the opposition, and might, by a little kind and judicious management, be brought to heartily support the measures of