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