Francis Atterbury - Jacobitism

Jacobitism

Her sudden death confounded the projects of these conspirators, and, whatever Atterbury's previous views may have been, he acquiesced in what he could not prevent, took the oaths to the House of Hanover, and did his best to ingratiate himself with the royal family. But his servility was requited with cold contempt; he became the most factious and pertinacious of all the opponents of the government. In the House of Lords his oratory, of old, pointed, lively and set off with every grace of pronunciation and of gesture, extorted the attention and admiration even of a hostile majority. Some of the most remarkable protests which appear in the journals of the peers were drawn up by him; and, some of the bitterest of those pamphlets which called on the English to stand up for their country against the aliens who had come from beyond the seas to oppress and plunder her, critics have detected his style. When the rebellion of 1715 broke out, he refused to sign the paper in which the bishops of the province of Canterbury declared their attachment to the Protestant accession, and in 1717, after having been long in indirect communication with the exiled family, he began to correspond directly with James Francis Edward Stuart.