Atterbury was taken on board a man-of-war, and landed at Calais, where the first person he met was Lord Bolingbroke, who had made CAMEO XXIX. his peace with Government, and been pardoned. "So I am Life abroad. exchanged!" said the Bishop. Bolingbroke was weary of exile and of the impracticable affairs of the Jacobites, but though his person was safe in England, he had not obtained the restoration of his property, and was coldly treated by Walpole. By and by he returned to Paris, where he married the Marquise de Villette, the niece of Madame de Maintenon. Bishop Atterbury went first to Brussels and thence to Paris, where he continued to work for James, though so secretly that his friends in England could protest to the contrary. He was invited to visit the Stuart Court at Rome, but felt it wiser to refrain; so that after being the Chevalier's favourite, he found himself discarded and went off, but was arrested by the Swiss Republic at Geneva, to oblige the English, as they supposed. The correspondence to which this led ended in his pardon, and receiving a pension out of his estates. James's reigning favourite was Colonel John Hay, whom he made Earl of Inverness, with James Murray, called Earl Dunbar, and governor of the young Prince Charles Edward. They ruled him entirely, much to the disgust of his wife Clementina Sobieski, who was shocked that her son should have a Protestant governor, or her husband a Protestant adviser, and demanded "if a man had not true faith towards God, how could he be faithful towards man?" Alberoni was her chief adviser, and she declared that she would not remain with her husband unless he parted with Inverness, and she actually withdrew to the Convent of St. Cecilia, whence she and James exchanged angry letters. There was nothing to do but to wrangle, but the quarrel was finally made up. Another project of invasion, 1728, failed, and James, who had gone to Lorraine to be ready for the attempt, was requested by the Duke to leave it, upon which he retired to the little Papal state of Avignon, but was ordered back to Rome again. Bishop Atterbury at the same time took up his abode at Montpelier. His only child, Mrs. Morice, was dying of decline, and longed to be with him: but there was much delay, as special royal permission, under heavy fees, was required before any English subject could visit an exiled Jacobite. At last she sailed, too ill to go by land. She arrived at Bordeaux, and travelled in a barge up the Garonne, in a sinking state, longing to see her father, who had come to Toulouse to receive her. They met and were together for twenty hours, while she strove to comfort her father and husband. "It was my business to have taught her to die," wrote Atterbury, "instead of it, she taught me !" He lived four years longer, always showing himself a staunch Anglican. His body was sent home for burial in Westminster Abbey, but previously his coffin was searched for Jacobite papers! His 1723. CAMEO XXIX. State of Ireland. 1726. political proceedings, by discrediting the English Church, did harm that was not overcome for at least a century. The better spirit which had come in after the Restoration had become confused with politics by the doctrines of passive obedience and that of hereditary right. The expulsion and deprivation of so many good men had caused much slackness, and orthodoxy was discouraged while latitudinarism was favoured. There was much unbelief and a great deal of immorality among the upper classes: and in the country very rough coarse manners prevailed among the gentry, though with numerous exceptions, and the country clergy were often of a very low stamp, hardly above the farmers with whom they caroused. There were highly cultivated and learned priests, but they generally enjoyed the higher benefices or the town livings, and there were also deeply devout households, both lay and clerical, as for instance that at Epworth, where Mrs. Wesley was bringing up her large family to strict piety and obedience. In Ireland the strong opposition to Rome kept the Church on the most Protestant lines, and the non-Romanists were either a few descendants from the old English lords of the Pale, mostly either descendants from the Cromwellian soldiery, or else from the Scottish settlers in Ulster, and little inclined to the Church or its laws. Indeed, ever since the great war on behalf of James II. the Roman Catholics had been under a yoke which would have been terrible if it had been really enforced. Like the French law against the Huguenots, it had been enacted that, if the child of a Papist avowed himself a Protestant, he was to be removed from his parent's custody, but be still supported by him. Moreover, if a Papist's farm produced more than a third in excess of the rent, his gains should pass over to the first Protestant who should be lucky enough to discover this. A Papist heir might not succeed a Protestant. Romanist schoolmasters were forbidden to teach, and rewards were offered to any informer who would trace one out, or any Romanist priest not licensed by the authorities. These laws were made not by the English Parliament, but by their own Irish Parliament. The favourite toast among the Protestants was: "The glorious and immortal memory of the great and good King William, who delivered us from Popery, slavery, brass money, and wooden shoes "-with a tail of execrations against those who refused the pledge. Dr. Peter Browne, Bishop of Cork, preached against this piece of profanity, and was therefore denounced as hostile to the Revolution. The Irish Protestant gentry were quite as violent and hard to keep in order as the Romanists, against whom they enacted such savage laws that the English Ministry had to advise the Sovereign not to pass them; but in point of fact they never enforced them against their neighbours unless some personal quarrel put their blood up. They led a jovial, rollicking life of sport and revelry, with their houses overrun with followers and dependents of all descriptions, and their quarrels were generally settled by duels. Only a few keen and cunning men led the affairs in their Parliament, and kept these terrible laws ready to be put in force. The Protestant clergy had not enough to do, and were too apt to neglect what they had. Their churches were in a lamentable condition, and there was hardly any teaching. There were, however, two remarkable men among them-Dean Swift, already mentioned, at St. Patrick's, Dublin, where he continued to lead his strange life and write his bitter papers. In 1724, when Lord Carteret had been appointed Lord-Lieutenant, an ironmaster named Wood obtained from the English Government a patent for coining halfpence and farthings for Irish circulation to the value of £108,000. The plan was a useful one, for there was a deficiency of copper money coin in Ireland; but the Irish Council had not been consulted, and no one would believe that there had been every precaution taken to secure the pence being of proper value. Dean Swift wrote a series of letters under the disguise of a Drapier, full of wonderful ability and invective. If one coin had been shown and proved true metal, he declared that one sheep was not a sample of a flock, nor one brick of a house, and there was much more to the same effect. The Irish thought ruin was coming on them, and there was such a storm that the patent was withdrawn, and Swift became the most popular man in Ireland. The Drapier's head figured on the signs of public-houses, on handkerchiefs, and medals! Yet he must have had too much real sense to have raised the tempest except out of hatred to the Whigs, for he did not love "the savage old Irish," and never let them call him their countryman. There was a nobler Irish Dean who made a better use of his talentGeorge Berkeley, a native of Kilkenny, educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He had been chaplain to Lord Peterborough, and had travelled a good deal, using his opportunities of observation to the utmost and thinking deeply. He was revolted by the materialism of the French philosophy, and worked out a remarkable system by which he dwelt on the fleeting unreal nature of substantial worldly objects compared with the reality of thought and spirit. Many admired, though few followed him, and the Duke of Grafton made him Dean of Derry, where he devised in full earnest a scheme for a college in Bermuda, whence to work for the conversion of the Red Indians. He went out himself to Rhode Island to commence the work, but in the dead condition of religious feeling found no helpers, and came home baffled. CAMEO XXIX. Drapier's Letters. 1724. CAMEO XXX. END OF THE REGENCY. 1720-1726. England. 1714. George I. France. 1715. Louis XV. Germany. 1711. Charles VI. PEACE prevailed in Europe, but there is hardly a court that was even respectable in these early years of the eighteenth century. The hollow glory of Louis XIV. had led to terrible demoralisation, which was chiefly counteracted by undercurrents: in England by the remnant of Puritan strictness and non-juring devotion, in France by the Jansenists and the still persecuted Huguenots, in Germany by people called Pietists, or quiet folk, who took refuge in Protestant hermitages. Moreover, the clergy showed the influences that had been brought to bear on them in many remote districts. The Bishop of Marseilles, Henri François Xavier de Belzunce, showed himself a truly Christian hero in the frightful visitation of plague at Marseilles. This fearful disease was brought from Seyde, in the Bay of Tunis, in the winter of 1720. The vessel brought a clean bill of health with her, but concealed that six men had died on the voyage. Soon the plague began to spread in the poorer and more wretched districts, and a panic set in, so that almost all who had means left the city, and the Provost was left with only four councillors, and eleven hundred livres in the treasury. The Bishop and his clergy, however, remained, and made the most selfdevoted exertions. All the Oratorians, eighteen Jesuits, forty-three Capuchins, twenty-six Recollets, besides parish priests, died during their ministrations to the awful mass of misery and contagion. A gentleman called le Chevalier Rose likewise devoted himself to the care of the unhappy place, where famine was soon added to the other miseries, for there was no work, no markets, and a cordon of troops shut in the approaches to prevent the infection from spreading. However, the Duke of Orleans sent 22,000 marks in silver, a quantity of corn, and such doctors as were willing to volunteer. Clement XI. sent indulgences, and likewise three ship-loads of corn; but Dubois fancied this subsidy was an insult to his administration, and ordered the ambassador to stop the ships. However, shame and humanity prevailed, and though the vessels were stopped by a Moorish corsair, as soon as their destination was known, they were allowed to proceed. The disease spread to Arles, Aix and Toulon, and to sixty-three lesser places, so that before the second winter checked the destroyer, there had been 88,000 deaths. Alas! the warning was not taken by the majority. Provence had never been so given up to amusement and licentiousness as during that ensuing winter of 1721, when it was remarked that the places which had suffered most indulged in the wildest dissipation. Bishop Belzunce so heartily loved his flock that he refused to be translated to a see of higher dignity, unlike Dubois, who, when Cardinal de la Tremouille, Fenélon's successor at Cambrai, died, demanded the archbishopric ! "You! Archbishop of Cambrai?” demanded the regent, shocked for once. "Who is the fellow who would consecrate you?" "Oh, if that is all, I know who will do so!" His effrontery gained the point. He was not even a sub-deacon, and the Pope hesitated to grant his license, but actually permitted this disgrace, and, stranger still, Massillon of Clermont, the great preacher of the day, was one of the three prelates who signed his testimonial. It must, however, be said that some historians doubt whether he were really so depraved as has been generally believed. The Cardinal de Noailles absolutely refused to have anything to do with this scandal; but the consecration was performed by Cardinal de Rohan. It was only intended as a step to the cardinalate, and Dubois proceeded to try to purchase this by driving on the acceptance of the Bull Unigenitus against the Jansenists, and by obtaining the intercession of George I. (of all people in the world) by expelling all the Jacobites from France. Clement XI., however, died without committing this enormity, but Cardinal Conti was obliged to give a written promise to give Dubois the hat before the conclave ventured to elect him as Innocent XIII. in 1721. Everything was in Dubois' hands. No one durst oppose him except the Cardinal de Noailles. The Duke of Orleans grew more indolent with years, and had been cut to the heart by the death of his favourite daughter, the Duchess of Berri, the companion of many of his excesses, which she alternated with pious observances. She was only twenty-four, but her life had been such that no one could think of uttering a funeral oration over her. The young king was made happy by the purchase of the deceased princess's park of La Muette. There he dug in the garden, tended a little cow, and made his own soup. These were his pleasures. He was so shy that he cried if he had to speak to the regent, and his tutor, the good-natured Bishop Fleury of Fréjus, could be heard coaxing him САМЕО XXX. Cardinal Dubois. 1722. |