XVII.

CHAP. numerous lampoons of the time. Mist's weekly journal published attacks on the king and his mistresses, on Marlborough, and on the ministry. Mist was committed to Newgate by the house of commons for seditious libel in May, 1721. Sunderland's retention of the treasury was impossible. On April 3, 1721, Walpole was appointed chancellor of the exchequer and first lord of the treasury. His brother-in-law, Townshend, had on February 10 taken the place of Stanhope as secretary of state. Carteret, who at the age of thirty-one had already achieved diplomatic fame, followed the younger Craggs as secretary for the southern department. His promotion was due to the friendship of Sunderland who, notwithstanding his loss of office, still retained place and influence at court. During the brief remainder of his life Sunderland, chafing at exclusion from power, and jealous of Walpole's growing ascendancy, was engaged in constant intrigues against the ministry, with the hope of placing himself at the head of a coalition party. It is probable that his sudden death on April 19, 1722, prevented a fresh schism in the ranks of the whigs. He was followed on June 16 by his father-in-law, the Duke of Marlborough. Marlborough's combative duchess survived him till 1744.

The Will of George I. See p. 290.

George I. conceived a plan of alienating the Electorate by will to his cousin, the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. This will was in triplicate, one copy being lodged with Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, one in the chancellery of the duke, the third in the hands of some person unknown. The archbishop produced his copy at the first council meeting after the king's death, when it was taken possession of by George II. without being read and was never heard of again by the public. Horace Walpole imputed its suppression to reluctance on the part of George II. to pay legacies bequeathed by it to the Queen of Prussia and the Duchess of Kendal's daughter, afterwards Lady Chesterfield, of whom George I. was believed to be the father. It appears, however, from the Newcastle Papers that the will was at once submitted to the electoral ministers at Hanover, and was pronounced by them to be "illegal and invalid," and likely to lead to the intervention of the imperial court. The duke's copy of the will was, in effect, bought from him in December, 1727, by a subsidy treaty of which a condition was that it should be returned unopened. See Horace Walpole's Letters (ed. 1904), x., 336-37; Newcastle Papers, Brit. Mus., Add. MSS., 32,751, ff. 24, 59, 121, 153, and 32,753, ff. 267, 269, and a letter to the Times of January 21, 1909, by the Hon. Evan Charteris.

XVIII.

THE public irritation excited by the collapse of the South Sea CHAP. speculation did not come to an end with the passing of remedial statutes. "If," wrote Speaker Onslow, "some bold men had taken advantage of the general disorder men's minds were in to provoke them to insurrection, the rage against the government was such for having, as they thought, drawn them into this ruin that I am almost persuaded, the king being at that time abroad, that could the pretender then have landed at the Tower, he might have rode to St. James's with very few hands held up against him." The Jacobites generally entertained the same anticipations. Their hopes had been raised by the birth of a son to the pretender on December 31, 1720. Correspondence with the exiled court revived. The principal agents in this were John Plunkett, the inventor of the imaginary conspiracy of March, 1712, George Kelly, a non-juring clergyman, and Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster. In a general way their correspondence went by the regular mails upon which the government maintained a vigilant eye. From the letters ministers learnt that a conspiracy was being organised. They were, however, in some doubt about the identity of the London agents, to whom reference was always made under fictitious names. The persons abroad with whom the conspirators were in correspondence were General Dillon, an Irish Jacobite in the French service, Ormonde, then in Spain, and the pretender himself, correspondence with whom was high treason by statute. The 1 Onslow MSS., p. 504, Hist. MSS. Comm., 1895. VOL. IX.

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XVIII.

CHAP. first blow struck by the ministry was the arrest of Kelly on May 19, 1722. Keeping the messenger at bay with a drawn sword, he burnt some documents and, no sufficient evidence being forthcoming against him, he was released on bail on June 7. Emboldened by his impunity, he at once resumed his correspondence with Dillon and by a change of pseudonyms enabled the government to complete the chain of identifications. Atterbury as a theologian and a scholar stood at this time at the head of the tory high churchmen. For his services to high orthodoxy he had been promoted by the presbyterian Harley to the see of Rochester, with which, as being worth no more than £500 a year, he was allowed to hold the deanery of Westminster. Whether or not he had at the queen's death offered to Bolingbroke to proclaim the pretender in his lawn sleeves at Charing Cross, a more than doubtful story, his disaffection to the new dynasty had been made notorious by his refusal to sign the loyal declaration of the bishops after the rebellion of 1715, on the pretext that it contained reflexions on the High Church party. At the same time he was in close relations with the Jacobites, and was recognised by the pretender as a friend of such importance that, by an instrument dated September 23, 1716, he constituted the bishop his "resident" or principal agent in England.1 While it was well known to the government that he was intimate with Kelly, his name never appeared in the correspondence, nor were any letters intercepted in his handwriting, but three intercepted letters, in that of Kelly, were suspected to be his. On August 24, 1722, Atterbury was arrested and sent to the Tower.2 A number of arrests followed in September. Lord North and Grey was seized in attempting to escape from the Isle of Wight. Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery, and a disreputable barrister named Christopher Layer, were taken in London, and a young Irish priest named Philip Neynoe at Deal. The new parliament, which had a large whig majority, was called together on October 9. The king's speech acquainted the houses with the discovery of a con

1 Stuart Papers, ii., 466.

2 The assignment of August 22 to a letter in the Portland MSS., vii., 332, giving an account of his arrest is evidently a mistake, since the original warrant, dated August 24, is in the R. O., MS., State Papers, Dom., G. I., bundle 38.

1722

ATTERBURY'S CONSPIRACY.

307

spiracy and a bill was brought into the house of lords by CHAP. the Duke of Grafton, lord-lieutenant of Ireland, to suspend the XVIII. Habeas Corpus act for a year. Since no precedent could be shown for a suspension extending over six months, considerable opposition, headed by Cowper, was made to this proposal and was renewed in the commons. The bill only passed the commons by a majority of fifty-three on the 16th.

The first prisoner put on his trial was Layer, who was brought before the court of king's bench on November 21. He had visited the pretender at Rome in the company of Plunkett, and returned with credentials to the leading Jacobites at home. Among his papers was found one which, under the name of "The Scheme," revealed the details of the plot. The Tower, the Bank, the persons of the king, the Prince of Wales, and Earl Cadogan, the commander-in-chief, were to be seized; Lord North and Grey, a lieutenant-general under Marlborough, who had lost a hand at Blenheim, was to take command of the disaffected soldiers; Ormonde and Dillon were to bring over arms and, if possible, troops; General Webb, who since the affair of Wynendaele had cherished an implacable resentment against Cadogan, and in 1715 had been forced to sell out, was also to hold a command, as was another dismissed general officer, Atterbury's old pupil, the Earl of Orrery. In the case of the bishop, Kelly, and Plunkett, the evidence was insufficient to obtain a conviction in a court of law. It was determined, therefore, in the interest of public safety, to banish them from the kingdom by a bill of pains and penalties. The bishop delivered impassioned protestations of innocence, which at the time failed to carry credit, and are now conclusively proved by the Stuart Papers to have been false. He was defended by Sir Constantine Phipps and other counsel, but the bill against him passed the lords by eighty-three to forty-three, depriving him of all preferments and banishing him the realm on pain of death. Similar bills passed against Kelly and Plunkett. As for the other leaders of the conspiracy, Neynoe was drowned in the Thames in an attempt at escape, and Layer, respited from time to time with the object of extracting

1 Cf. Stuart Papers, ii., 67-69, Ap. 7, 1716. Webb and others thought 6,000 regular troops sufficient. R. O., MS., State Papers, Dom., G. I., bundle 53, no. 14, February 12, 1721-22.

CHAP. information, was executed at Tyburn on May 17, 1723, and XVIII. his head set on Temple Bar. But the characteristic clemency of George I. asserted itself. Orrery was released from the Tower on bail, after a six months' confinement, on a certificate from the celebrated physician Dr. Mead that his life was endangered. No proceedings were taken against Webb, who, as the Stuart Papers shew, had plunged deep in treason in 1716, for his valour at Oudenarde had not been forgotten by the king, who witnessed it. Even Lord North and Grey, who was most deeply involved, was admitted to bail on the king's departure for Hanover in June, 1723, and suffered to retire abroad. An absurd declaration by the pretender which had been put into circulation, inviting George to retire to Hanover with the title of king, was ordered by the lords to be burnt by the common hangman. A secret letter from him to the Archbishop of Canterbury, with the usual assurances as to the Church of England, fell into the hands of the government.1

While Townshend controlled foreign affairs, Walpole was left sole master of domestic policy. His earliest action after resuming office was to revolutionise the traditional official attitude towards international commerce. He saw that the removal and reduction of export duties on manufactures and of import duties on raw material was a natural course by which to encourage exports. This was the policy announced in the speech from the throne of October 19, 1721. The attention of the statesmen of Anne had been attracted to the danger of remaining dependent on the Baltic trade for naval supplies, and premiums had been put upon tar, pitch, masts, etc., imported from the American colonies and from Scotland. These were now continued and export duties on colonial naval stores abolished. In 1722 a less judicious measure, since it carried with it a semblance of religious persecution, was a consequence of the discovery of the recent conspiracy. This was a proposal suggested by Walpole for raising £100,000 by an extraordinary tax of 5s. in the pound on the estates of Roman catholics and non-jurors. This ill-advised measure created dissatisfaction among classes not directly aimed at. In order to establish who were non-jurors and who were not, it was necessary to impose an oath upon all.

1 R. O., MS., State Papers, Dom., G. I., bundle 51, no. 36, Rome, December 27, 1722.