Warrior Bishop
The Atterbury Plot by Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill
The Atterbury Plot
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004
(323 pages, $68.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Anne Barbeau Gardiner
The eighteenth-century Anglican bishop Francis Atterbury was not the first bishop to plan a revolution in England. Archbishop Stephen Langton had sided with the barons against King John and been the guiding force behind the Magna Carta in 1215, and Archbishop Cranmer had tried to make Lady Jane Grey queen of England instead of Mary Tudor.
In those days religion and politics were one. The seven high-church Tory bishops who—led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft—went to the Tower in 1688 and triggered the revolution that overthrew King James II and replaced him with William of Orange were convinced that James, a Catholic, was going to harm their church by letting non-Anglicans take public office.
Yet they were conservatives who did not intend to start a revolution. They trusted William of Orange to be regent, not king, and having helped bring him to power refused to take the oath of allegiance to him, for which they were deposed and replaced by bishops of the Whig party (Whigs were, roughly speaking, the political and theological liberals of the day). When George I came to the throne in 1714, he drove all high-church Tories out of national and local office and out of the armed forces and also put in more Whig bishops. Alarmed for their church and state, British conservatives were deeply disaffected.
The Atterbury Plot is the first fully documented account of the conspiracy in 1720–1722 to overthrow that government. The authors are both eminent scholars of the eighteenth century: Eveline Cruickshanks of Cambridge University recently published a monumental history of parliament from 1690 to 1715, and Howard Erskine-Hill is a noted literary scholar who has published much on Dryden and Pope.
Jacobite Rebels
Atterbury, the bishop of Rochester, was by 1716 the leader of the Jacobites in England. ( Jacob is Hebrew for James, the name of the Stuart heir James III, who had been nicknamed “the Pretender” for his claim to the throne).
Every plan to overthrow King George had to have Atterbury’s approval. He persuaded the popular Duke of Ormonde—Chancellor of Oxford and the only Protestant duke in Ireland—to go abroad to facilitate the revolution. Ormonde became Captain-General of the Spanish armies, provided commissions for Jacobite officers, and got ready to invade Britain.
The year 1720 was an auspicious one for beginning a rebellion because of the widespread anger at George I over the crash of the South Sea Company. Large numbers of formerly well-to-do stockholders were suddenly destitute and blamed the king, who had been the governor of the failed scheme. Londoners were greeting the king with ominous silence, and aristocrats who had been hostile to “the Pretender” were suddenly trying to get his picture.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
33.2—March/April 2020
Lewis, Chesterton, et al. Against the Frauds, Experts & Revisionists by Vigen Guroian
30.3—May/June 2017
Insider Attempts to Disorient the Orthodox by Alexander F. C. Webster
32.2—March/April 2019
on Preserving Physical & Spiritual Nourishment by Nathanael Devlin
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
