The Atterbury Plot

Robert Walpole foiled the Atterbury Plot by preventive arrests and holding those he suspected illegally without bail or trial. When Parliament met and the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, he used show trials, decided by votes along party lines and depending on forged evidence, to curb the Tory party, to reuinted the Whig party and to consolidate his hold on power. Rich in new material, this book unravels for the first time the scale and international dimension of a plot which posed the most serious challenge to the Hanoverian regime before the '45 rebellion. In The Atterbury Plot Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill elucidate the different stages of the attempt to restore the Stuarts from 1720 to 1723 directed by Bishop Atterbury, and look at the reasons why a High Anglican such as Atterbury saw the restoration of the Catholic Stuarts as the means of saving Britain. The burst of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 resulted in widespread public discontent and the hope of a constitutional restoration of the Stuarts. The Tories, who were proscribed from office, were led by Bishop Atterbury, James III's representative in England and Walpole's most feared opponent in Parliament. Together they worked alongside for a restoration brought about through a general rising. Faced with George I's standing army and his Dutch mercenary allies, the Tories looked for support from the Jacobite regiments in French and Spanish service, volunteers raised from the British army and navy, and popular support from several other bodies. Walpole foiled the plot by the preventive arrest of leading conspirators, who were held in prison contrary to common law. Christopher Layer, one of the conspirators, had enough evidence against him to condemn him to death, but Walpole did not have legal proofs to convict Bishop Atterbury, his secretary George Kelly or John Plunkett Layer's associate. By bills of pains and penalties passed in Parliament in divisions along party lines, Atterbury was forced into exile, while Kelly and Plunkett were sentenced to life imprisonment. As a result, Walpole was able to render the Tory party powerless for several years to come. Rich in new material, this book unravels for the first time the scale and international dimension of a plot which posed the most serious challenge to the Hanoverian regime before the '45 rebellion "Using numerous published and unpublished travel journals by middle-class men and women from England, Scotland and Wales who toured the Continent and Britain, this book explores the variety of national identities existing in Victorian Britain. Unlike most scholars who focus on a single national identity in Britain, Morgan's study reveals the subtle way that national identity shifted depending on context, particularly geographic context. In so doing, the book also highlights the specific qualities middle-class victorians had in mind when they used such terms as British, English, Scots and Welsh to identify themselves collectively." "Morgan's book has wide-ranging appeal because it integrates two subject areas of interest to scholars across disciplines - travel and national identity. Furthermore, the book's accessible style and extensive use of the amusing, telling anecdote make it attractive to the non-scholarly reading public as well. In particular, Morgan's work is significant for anyone grappling with geopolitical changes in our time. In that the book analyses multiple national identities in a single state, it illuminates the sort of collective imagining likely to take place among Europeans in a more united Europe and enhances our understanding of why some states are successful at incorporating multiple national identities and others are not."--Jacket Front Matter....Pages i-1 Introduction: Continuous Conspiracy....Pages 2-22 John Law and the First Phase of the Atterbury Plot....Pages 23-55 A Jacobite Opportunity: The South Sea Crisis and the Possibility of a Constitutional Restoration....Pages 56-90 A Call to Arms....Pages 91-123 Walpole and the ‘Horrid Conspiracy’....Pages 124-131 The Military and Naval Resources of the Jacobites....Pages 132-152 The Arrests....Pages 153-170 The Case of Christopher Layer....Pages 171-183 The Trials of John Plunkett and George Kelly....Pages 184-198 The Trial of Bishop Atterbury....Pages 199-223 The Aftermath....Pages 224-237 Conclusion....Pages 238-243 Back Matter....Pages 244-312 This examination of the Whig theory of resistance that emerged from the revolution of 1688 in England presents an important challenge to the received opinion of Whig thought as confused and as inferior to the revolutionary principles set forth by John Locke.; While a wealth of Whig literature is analyzed, Julia Rudolph focuses upon the work of James Tyrrell, presenting a full-length study of this seminal Whig theorist, and friend and colleague of John Locke. This book provides a compelling argument for the importance of Whig political thought for the history of liberalism.