He was soon removed to the bishopric of Rochester, which was then always united with the deanery of Westminster.Still higher dignities seemed to be before him.For, though there were many able men on the episcopal bench, there was none who equalled or approached him in parliamentary talents.Had his party continued in power, it is not improbable that he would have been raised to the archbishopric of Canterbury.The more splendid his prospects, the more reason he had to dread the accession of a family which was well-known to be partial to the Whigs.There is every reason to believe that he was one of those politicians who hoped that they might be able, during the life of Anne, to prepare matters in such a way that at her decease there might be little difficulty in setting aside the Act of Settlement and placing the Pretender on the throne.Her sudden death confounded the projects of these conspirators.Atterbury, who wanted no kind of courage, implored his confederates to proclaim James III., and offered to accompany the heralds in lawn sleeves.But he found even the bravest soldiers of his party irresolute, and exclaimed, not, it is said, without interjections which ill became the mouth of a father of the church, that the best of all causes and the most precious of all moments had been pusillanimously thrown away.He acquiesced in what he could not prevent, took the oaths to the House of Hanover, and at the coronation officiated with the outward show of zeal, and did his best to ingratiate himself with the royal family.But his servility was requited with cold contempt.No creature is so revengeful as a proud man who has humbled himself in vain.
Atterbury became the most factious and pertinacious of all the opponents of the government.In the House of Lords his oratory, lucid, 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 in 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 easily 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 succession.He busied himself in electioneering, especially at Westminster, where, as dean, he possessed great influence; and was, indeed, strongly suspected of having once set on a riotous mob to prevent his Whig fellow-citizens from polling.
After having been long in indirect communication with the exiled family, he, in 1717, began to correspond directly with the Pretender.The first letter of the correspondence is extant.In that letter Atterbury boasts of having, during many years past, neglected no opportunity of serving the Jacobite cause."My daily prayer," he says, "is that you may have success.May Ilive to see that day, and live no longer than I do what is in my power to forward it." It is to be remembered that he who wrote thus was a man bound to set to the church of which he was overseer an example of strict probity; that he had repeatedly sworn allegiance to the House of Brunswick; that he had assisted in placing the crown on the head of George I., and that he had abjured James III., "without equivocation or mental reservation, on the true faith of a Christian."It is agreeable to turn from his public to his private life.His turbulent spirit, wearied with faction and treason, now and then required repose, and found it in domestic endearments, and in the society of the most illustrious of the living and of the dead.
Of his wife little is known: but between him and his daughter there was an affection singularly close and tender.The gentleness of his manners when he was in the company of a few friends was such as seemed hardly credible to those who knew him only by his writings and speeches.The charm of his "softer hour" has been commemorated by one of those friends in imperishable verse.Though Atterbury's classical attainments were not great, his taste in English literature was excellent;and his admiration of genius was so strong that it overpowered even his political and religious antipathies.His fondness for Milton, the mortal enemy of the Stuarts and of the church, was such as to many Tories seemed a crime.On the sad night on which Addison was laid in the chapel of Henry VII., the Westminster boys remarked that Atterbury read the funeral service with a peculiar tenderness and solemnity.The favourite companions, however, of the great Tory prelate were, as might have been expected, men whose politics had at least a tinge of Toryism.He lived on friendly terms with Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay.With Prior he had a close intimacy, which some misunderstanding about public affairs at last dissolved.Pope found in Atterbury, not only a warm admirer, but a most faithful, fearless, and judicious adviser.The poet was a frequent guest at the episcopal palace among the elms of Bromley, and entertained not the slightest suspicion that his host, now declining in years, confined to an easy chair by gout, and apparently devoted to literature, was deeply concerned in criminal and perilous designs against the government.
The spirit of the Jacobites had been cowed by the events of 1715.