Following the prorogation of Parliament at the end of Mary 1775, the situation changed for the worse, as news of the armed confrontation at Lexington and Concord in April reached Britain. Following that, reports of Britain’s bloody pyrrhic victory in June at Bunker Hill (Charlestown) arrived in London on 25 July. Almost immediately the government of Lord North decided on sterner measures against the unruly colonists. The principal minister co-ordinating the deployment of troops was North’s step-brother, William Legge, 2nd earl of Dartmouth, secretary of state for America. The office had only existed since 1768 and Dartmouth, who came from a family that had long contributed officials, had held it since August 1772.

Dartmouth’s papers suggest that he was efficient in preparing for an increased military presence in America. As someone who had always sought conciliation, more troublesome to him were plans for a Royal Proclamation declaring the American colonies ‘in rebellion’ and thus that a state of war existed between Britain and America. On 1 February 1775, he had refused ‘to pronounce any certain opinion’ regarding the earl of Chatham’s conciliation bill, and even admitted he ‘had no objection to the bill being received’. [Almon, Parl. Reg., ii. 23] Similarly, in August, Dartmouth had feared that a formal declaration of war would jeopardize negotiations. He held off on agreeing to the Proclamation for as long as he could on the news that the Continental Congress was sending new proposals for a settlement: the so-called ‘Olive Branch Petition’. By late summer, however, the government was in belligerent mood, and on 23 August the Proclamation of Rebellion was promulgated.

Thus, when Parliament resumed on 26 October, Britain and the colonies were formally at war. Even Lord North ‘had changed his pacific language and was now for vigorous measures’. [H. Walpole, Last Journals, i. 490] One result was a ministerial reshuffle over 9-10 November. This gave the government a radically new complexion, and Dartmouth was moved from the American office, apparently unwillingly.

To soften the blow, the king offered Dartmouth his choice of being appointed groom of the stole, secretary of state for the southern department, or taking a pension. Dartmouth turned them all down and instead insisted on taking over as lord privy seal. The king had intended the place for Thomas Thynne, 3rd Viscount Weymouth, but made him secretary of state for the southern province instead. Dartmouth, George III complained, was not ‘in the least accommodating’ by ‘carrying obstinacy greatly too far’. [Fortescue, iii. 282-88]

The man who Replaced Dartmouth as secretary of state for America was Lord George Germain, a younger son of the duke of Dorset. Horace Walpole described him as ‘of very sound parts, of distinguished bravery, and of an honourable eloquence, but hot, haughty, ambitious, obstinate’. [Walpole, Mems. of George II (Yale), i. 190]

In 1758 Germain (at that point known as Sackville) had been sent to Germany as second-in-command of the British forces and was later promoted commander-in-chief. At the battle of Minden on 1 August 1759, though, he failed to obey orders given by his superior, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, commander-in-chief of the Allied army, to lead the British cavalry against the shattered French forces. The prince charged him with disobedience, while Sackville held that he had received conflicting orders, often delivered in German, and had been stationed on difficult terrain. He was castigated as a coward, even a traitor, by the enemies he had gained by his high-handed behaviour. Ever self-confident, Sackville insisted on convening a court martial so he could justify himself. According to Walpole, ‘Nothing was timid, nothing humble, in his behaviour’ [Mems. of George II, iii. 101-105], but the court declared him ‘unfit to serve… in any military capacity whatsoever’.

The shame of Minden always hung over Sackville, and for the next decade and a half he worked to rehabilitate his reputation. His chances were improved by the death of George II, who had developed a violent personal dislike of him. Sackville looked forward to better treatment from George III, but even he was unwilling to take a disgraced soldier back into favour immediately. Sackville relied for his slow recovery on his service in the Commons, where he advocated a firm line against the colonists, arguing at one point that ‘The ministers… must perceive how ill they are requited for that extraordinary lenity and indulgence with which they treated… these undutiful children’.[HMC Stopford-Sackville, i. 119]

In 1769 Sackville took the surname Germain, after inheriting property from Lady Elizabeth Germain. He continued speaking against the colonists throughout the first half of the 1770s and on 7 February 1775 he was the Commons’ messenger to the Lords requesting a conference on the address declaring Massachusetts in rebellion. He seemed, thus, an obvious choice as North looked for a new direction in the morass of the American crisis. Walpole summarized the effect that the change had on the war and the ultimate loss in America: ‘Till Lord George came into place, there had been no spirit or sense in the conduct of the war… [He was] indefatigable in laying plans for raising and hiring troops’. [Walpole, Last Journals i. 511, ii. 49]  Some contemporaries went so far as to suggest that Germain’s belligerence towards the Americans was an attempt to put to rest the shame of Minden. As Edward Gibbon put it, Germain hoped to ‘reconquer Germany in America’.

CGDL

Further reading:

P.D.G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution, 1773-1776 (Oxford, 1991)

Andrew O’Shaughnessy, The Men who Lost America (Yale, 2013), esp. ch. 5

Alan Valentine, Lord George Germain (Oxford, 1962)

HMC Dartmouth

HMC Stopford Sackville, vols. I and II

On 7 Feb. 1775 the House of Lords considered an address from the Commons claiming for the first time that ‘a Rebellion at this time actually exists’ in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The inflammatory language was accepted, and in consequence a bill to restrain the trade of the Massachusetts Bay colony was introduced. Both its committal at second reading on 16 March and its eventual passage five days later led to violent debate. Another bill to extend trading restrictions to the colonies south of Massachusetts was debated at third reading on 12 April.

Inevitably, events on the ground in America overtook many of these discussions, as on 19 April American militiamen and British troops exchanged gunfire at Lexington and Concord. Crucially, news of their confrontation did not reach Britain until the end of May, and the House continued unaware that armed conflict had already begun. On 17 May Charles Pratt, Baron Camden, brought in a bill to repeal the Quebec Act, one of the so-called Coercive Acts of 1774. The government’s motion to reject the repeal bill occasioned yet another debate.

In all, these matters occasioned eight divisions in the Lords between 7 February and 17 May 1775. The government won every one handily, with the numbers in the minority ranging between 21 and twenty-nine. In other words, there was a core of about 22 lords who consistently opposed the government’s bellicose policies towards the colonies during the tense spring of 1775. Both then and in the years following, the opposition’s main concern was domestic, as they fought against what they saw as the corruption, ‘secret influence’, and tendency to arbitrary rule of George III’s government.

The opposition used the ministry’s mismanagement of the American crisis as a means to attack the Crown and seek for ‘new measures and men’ in government. With a few exceptions, however, they did not apply themselves to addressing the substantive constitutional questions raised by the colonists.

There were some within the opposition who came close to an actively pro-American stance, or at least made an attempt to understand the colonists’ complaints, such as Willoughby Bertie, 4th earl of Abingdon. Charles Lennox, 3rd duke of Richmond, also took a ‘radical’ Whig stance both in 1775 and for the following 30 years, and remained one of the most frequent, and forceful, speakers for the opposition.

A third, was Thomas Howard, 3rd earl of Effingham, who was summed up by Horace Walpole as ‘a rough soldier, of no sound sense [Walpole’s Last Journals, i. 439]. As a captain in the 22nd Foot Regiment, Effingham had adopted a pro-American stance as early as 1774. On his estates near Rotherham, he built a hunting lodge which he dubbed Boston Castle, where he forbade the drinking of tea, in honour of the Boston Tea Party.

Throughout the spring of 1775 Effingham acted with the opposition, acting as a teller for the minority in three of the eight divisions. On 18 May the government sought to block an opposition motion that a memorial from the New York Assembly should be read out. Effingham intervened, but quickly turned away from the technical procedural issues with which the House was embroiled. He made clear his sympathy with the colonists, declaring ‘Whatever has been done by the Americans I must deem the mere consequence of our unjust demands’. He predicted imminent bloodshed (which, of course, had already occurred), for all it would take was ‘a nothing to cause the sword to be drawn and to plunge the whole country into all the horrors of blood, flames and parricide’. He then turned to himself. Speaking of his love for the military life, he confessed that he now found himself bound to resign his commission in the Army, as:

‘the only method of avoiding the guilt of enslaving my country and embruing my hands in the blood of her sons. When the duties of a soldier and a citizen become inconsistent, I shall always think myself obliged to sink the character of the solider in that of the citizen, till such time as those duties shall again, by the malice of our real enemies, become united’. [John Almon, Parliamentary Register, vol. 2 (1774-5). 154-56].

Effingham was briefly the toast of the country for his act of self-sacrifice. Walpole was asked, ‘Was there ever anything ancient or modern better either in sentiment or language than [Effingham’s] late speech?’. [Walpole Corresp., xxviii. 208-9] Although Walpole thought that Effingham ‘was a wild sort of head’, he admitted the intervention had been ‘very sensible’. [Walpole’s Last Journals, i. 466] Effingham was apparently a bit of a showman. It was widely reported that in a dramatic conclusion, he flung his sword clattering down on to the floor of the House.

Effingham’s speech was the last in this particular debate, and at 8.30 at night the House rejected hearing the memorial from New York. Parliament was prorogued a week later, about the time news of the armed confrontation at Lexington reached Britain. That changed everything, and although the Second Continental Congress made one last-ditch effort at peace with its ‘Olive Branch Petition’ of 8 July, the king rejected it out of hand. On 1 August he issued a royal proclamation declaring that the colonists were ‘engaged in open and avowed rebellion’. The declaration left Britain and the American colonists formally at war.

CGDL

Further reading:
John Almon, The Parliamentary Register, vol. 2, (1775)
Frank O’Gorman, ‘The Parliamentary Opposition to the Government’s American Policy, 1760-1782’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the American Revolution (1998), pp. 97-123
Alison Olson, The Radical Duke: The Career and Correspondence of Charles Lennox, 3rd duke of Richmond (1961)

Burns first published his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in Kilmarnock in 1786 and, encouraged by his local supporters, arrived in Edinburgh in January 1787 to arrange a second edition. He quickly found a patron there in James Cunningham, 14th earl of Glencairn making an introduction through common Ayrshire connections. Both the earl and his mother, the dowager countess, strove to ensure that his poems would appear in a new edition from an Edinburgh publisher, with Glencairn putting Burns in touch with bookseller William Creech, Glencairn’s tutor during his Grand Tour, who agreed to produce it.

Glencairn encouraged Burns to dedicate the new volume to the Royal Caledonian Hunt, an elite social and sporting club. At a meeting on 10 January Glencairn persuaded the members of the Hunt to pledge to purchase 100 copies, bringing Burns £25 in advance. Glencairn also sent blank subscription forms to James Graham, marquess of Graham, in order to have them filled up by the ‘first Scottish names about Court’. He also enlisted William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, 3rd duke of Portland, to solicit subscriptions from other peers in London [Letters, i. 73]. Few English subscribers signed up, apart from the duchess of Devonshire and countess of Derby. When Burns’s revised Poems appeared in April, it was dedicated to the Caledonian Hunt, which headed the list of subscribers. Between them Glencairn and his mother pledged to purchase 24 copies, the countess dowager alone subscribing for sixteen.

Glencairn had succeeded to his peerage in 1775, and three years later was commissioned a captain of the Western Fencible Regiment, a temporary outfit raised to defend the Scottish west coast. Like many Scots, he was angered by Westminster’s unwillingness to trust the Scots with a more established domestic military force, on the lines of the English militia.

Elected one of the 16 representative peers in 1780, Glencairn quickly joined the patriot movement for an independent Scottish militia. In spring 1782 he witnessed the unsuccessful attempts of Lord Graham to promote a Scottish militia bill in the Commons. Glencairn took up the cause himself and was its main driver from the summer. He was in Westminster in June 1783 when Graham once again brought the Scots’ desire for their own militia before the Commons. However, the session was prorogued a month later without the militia bill having been introduced.

Glencairn supported the Fox-North coalition and voted for its East India Company bill in December 1783. He failed to be included on the Court’s list of representative peers for the general election, and was heavily defeated when standing as an independent. For the rest of his life he opposed William Pitt and his Scottish manager Henry Dundas. On 6 Dec. 1785 he was named to an Ayrshire committee tasked with countering Dundas’s planned diminution of the number of judges on the Court of Session. [Public Advertiser, 26 Dec. 1785] He was also a member of the Independent Friends, a society of Scottish Whigs. As he had done in 1784, Glencairn threw his interest behind the Opposition candidate in Ayrshire elections in 1789 and 1790, but without success.

Thus, when Glencairn met Burns in late 1786 he already had extensive credentials as a Scottish patriot and quickly became an enthusiastic supporter of Burns’s wish to project a genuine Scottish voice. Burns was solicitous of Glencairn’s opinion on his poems, especially those with political content. He submitted his piece on the American war, When Guilford Good, for Glencairn’s approval, worried that ‘my political tenets… may be rather heretical in the opinion of some of my best friends’ [Letters, i. 77]. Glencairn countenanced its inclusion in the Edinburgh edition, and would have agreed with Burns’s positive view of the Americans’ cause.

Burns and Glencairn also found common cause on the issue of the Scottish militia. Burns’s 1784 poem The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer urged the 45 Scottish MPs to fight back against an Act that had increased the excise on whisky. He felt that if the measure were allowed to continue, Scotland, already on edge because ‘Her lost Militia fir’d her bluid’ [blood], would be ready to resort to violence.

Burns did not have many years to enjoy his friendship with Glencairn and the earl’s death on 30 Jan. 1791 while returning from a trip abroad distressed Burns greatly. He composed a Lament, which concluded: ‘The mother may forget the child / That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;/ But I’ll remember thee Glencairn / And a’ that thou hast done for me!’. In 1794, Burns even named his newborn son James Glencairn Burns.

Another Ayrshire native and peer who encouraged Burns’s poetry in 1787 was Archibald Montgomerie, 11th earl of Eglinton, a fiercely proud Highlander. He had commanded a regiment in America during the Seven Years War and served as a representative peer for 20 years. James Boswell described him to Dr. Johnson as ‘a person who was as violent a Scotsman as he [Johnson] was an Englishman’ [Life of Johnson, iii. 170, 503]. In January 1787 Eglinton provided Burns with an unsolicited donation of 10 guineas [Letters i. 79, 84], and subscribed to 42 copies of his Poems, one of the largest individual subscriptions.

In 1796 all these connections were abruptly severed, beginning with Burns’s own death on 21 July, aged just thirty-seven. On 24 September Glencairn’s younger brother, John, the 15th earl, died childless, and the title became extinct. Eglinton died without a male heir on 31 October, and his distant cousin Hugh Montgomerie of Coilsfield (mentioned in The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer) succeeded him in the peerage.

CGDL

Further reading:
Ian McIntyre, Robert Burns: A Life (1995)
The Letters of Robert Burns, Vol. 1: 1780-89, ed. G. Ross Roy (1985)
J. Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (1985)
Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill (6 vols., 1934-1950)

Last month saw the 280th anniversary of the death of an intriguing and, in his time, prominent 18th-century aristocrat. Intriguing, because there was little in James Brydges’ origins to suggest that he would ever rise to be a duke. True, from 1676 he was heir to a barony, when his father succeeded a distant cousin as the 8th Baron Chandos. But, although landed gentry, the Brydges family did not earn enough revenue to support adequately their new noble status.

Without expectation of a substantial landed inheritance, James Brydges had to make his own way in the world. As a young man in London from 1698 he was a hard-working and shameless networker, and his years of attendance on ministers paid off when in 1705 he was appointed paymaster-general of the Allied forces abroad. Between 1705 and 1713 he managed close to £24 million of public funds for the armies. He was permitted to do with this money much as he liked as long as he met his responsibilities.

In the meantime, he ‘borrowed’ surplus funds and put them out for investment, skimming off the profits for himself. He watched the exchange rates so he could play the currency markets to his private advantage, again using public funds. As a result, he made a staggering fortune. Arthur Onslow thought it ‘the most surprising instance of a change of fortune raised by a man himself, that has happened in any age’, and calculated that in little more than a decade Brydges had accumulated a fortune of about £7,000 [Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, ed. Routh, vi. 41-42]. This would make him a millionaire several times over today. Many contemporaries were uncomfortable with this fortune amassed from public funds on the back of a costly war.

Brydges retired in 1713, as both the war ended and Parliament ordered an audit of his accounts. The audit hung over him for several years and was not wrapped up until 1718. Ultimately, he was not charged with any malfeasance.

Brydges hardly kept himself away from public notice during the audit. In 1714 he used his contacts with the incoming Hanoverian ministers to obtain a higher title than the barony he was destined to inherit. He succeeded as 9th Baron Chandos on 16 October 1714, but only three days later was promoted earl of Carnarvon among the coronation honours. He continued to court the ministers over the following years until on 29 April 1719 he was promoted duke of Chandos.

In the same period Chandos was also developing his estate at Cannons (as he spelled it), near Edgware, which he had bought from his duchess’s uncle in 1710. Chandos intended his house to be a monument to his arrival among the upper nobility. He tore down the existing Elizabethan house and began work constructing a baroque palace in its stead. It was built remarkably quickly and was finished in 1725, at a total of over £160,000. He used it as a showcase for his wealth and artistic patronage, by exhibiting his many paintings by Italian artists. Cannons also had its own orchestra and choir, led between 1716 and 1718 by George Frideric Handel, Chandos’ resident composer. Handel’s ‘Chandos Anthems’ were composed there, and Cannons also saw the premieres of Esther and Acis and Galatea.

Even as a duke Chandos continued to draw most of his income from speculation and investment, rather than from land. He invested in the development of Cavendish Square in Marylebone, where he intended to build another palace for himself. He also invested heavily in many of the speculative joint-stock ventures of 1719-20. Onslow considered him ‘a dupe to men that nobody else almost would keep company with’. Chandos was heavily involved in both John Law’s Mississippi Company and the South Sea Company. In October 1720, after the bursting of the Bubble, he calculated that he had lost close to £700,000. He was still £40,000 in debt in 1729. To recover, he sold his London townhouse, on St James’s Square, and abandoned his grand building projects on Cavendish Square. However, he always maintained his palace of Cannons, his pride and joy and symbol of his success.

By the time of his death on 9 August 1744 Chandos was ‘reduced to the difficulties of indigence’, as Onslow expressed it. He left debts amounting to £83,000 on an estate which brought in only about £8,500 p.a. His heir Henry Brydges, 2nd duke of Chandos, was even more indebted, and in 1747-8 found himself forced to dismantle Cannons and auction off its contents and materials. Its central marble staircase was transported to the Mayfair townhouse of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of Chesterfield. An equestrian statue of George I, which had adorned the park, stood in Leicester Square until 1872. Unfortunately, almost no depictions of Cannons in its setting exist, and we must build our image of this celebrated building from its many written contemporary descriptions. As a final blow, the dukedom which Chandos had worked so hard to attain became extinct in 1789 at his grandson’s death.

Some contemporaries were quick to ridicule the extravagance and baroque tastes of this nouveau riche duke, with his vast fortune derived from suspect financial practices. Alexander Pope targeted Cannons as ‘Timon’s villa’ in his ‘Epistle to Lord Burlington’, where he mocked its grandiose size and expense:

At Timon’s Villa let us pass a Day
Where all cry out, “What Sums are thrown away!”
…
To compass this, his Building is a Town
His Pond an Ocean, his Parterre a Down;
[Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to Lord Burlington’, ll. 83-92 passim]

To Onslow, on the other hand, Chandos ‘had parts of understanding and knowledge, experience of men and business… which more qualified him for a wise man, than what the wisest men have generally been possessed with’ [Burnet’s History of His Own Time, vi. 41-42].

CGDL

Further reading:
C. H. Collins Baker and Muriel Baker, The Life and Circumstances of James Brydges, first duke of Chandos (1949)
Joan Johnson, Princely Chandos (1984)
Aaron Graham, Corruption, Party, and Government in Britain, 1702-1713 (Oxford, 2015)

The Post Office Act of 1711 had established a single Post Office for the United Kingdom and set the postage rates and delivery times for letters and packets. The Act further confirmed that the Post Office was a branch of the Treasury, whose primary goal was to raise state revenue through postal charges. The income had been used since the Restoration to provide pensions to Court favourites, and in the years after the Revolution pensions to peers and statesmen derived from Post Office receipts became common. By 1699 it was estimated that payments for pensions consumed about a third of the Post Office’s receipts.

There were other ways in which the postal system benefitted the nobility and the political elite. From the Restoration it was commonly accepted, although nowhere officially codified, that peers and Members of Parliament could send and receive letters free of postage charges. This privilege of ‘franking’ was widely abused in the 18th century, as peers and MPs made their signed ‘covers’ available to enclose correspondence conducted by other parties.

By 1754 the amount of franked material, representing lost revenue, amounted to £23,600. The privilege of franking, and its abuse, came before the Commons on 26 February 1735, when opposition Members raised a complaint that their privileged correspondence was being opened in the Post Office on behalf of the ministry. A Committee of the Whole House convened two days later, where evidence was produced showing that the right to frank letters had never been established by statute, but had long been maintained by successive royal warrants. The Committee interrogated Edward Cave, who had served as ‘inspector of franks’ since 1723, and had from 1731 used the newsletters and gazettes passing through the Post Office to gather, often illicitly, much of the copy for his popular serial, The Gentleman’s Magazine. Cave described his techniques for determining both the sender and intended recipient of letters, and only confirmed the MPs’ suspicions that the search for fraudulent franks gave Post Office officials licence to open and read their correspondence.

The Commons adopted resolutions confirming their privilege of franking letters and decrying the abuse of this privilege, both by those outside Parliament and by the ministry using it as a justification for monitoring private correspondence. [Cobbett, Parliamentary History, ix. 839-48]. That was hardly the end of the matter, and franking remained a live issue for the remainder of the century. In 1764 the Postage Act established the privilege of franking for peers and MPs by statute for the first time, and set out the harsh penalties for those trying to defraud the Post Office, including transportation to the colonies. Further Acts regarding franking were passed in 1784 and 1795.

Throughout the 18th century the Post Office was led by two joint postmasters-general, and in the second half of the century all of them were peers, or sons of noble families. Those appointed tended to be either ministers at the end of their careers or party followers with little desire for higher office. One postmaster-general, Thomas Villiers, Baron Hyde of Hindon (later earl of Clarendon), commented that the office was ‘a very good bed for old courtiers to rest in’. [TNA, PRO 30/8/64].

Hyde’s own career is representative of the political nature of the office. In 1759, on the advice of his prime minister Thomas Pelham Holles, duke of Newcastle, the king filled both the vacant postmasterships with Robert Hampden, a former ambassador to the United Provinces and heir to the barony of Trevor, and William Ponsonby, 2nd earl of Bessborough [I], brother-in-law of William Cavendish, 4th duke of Devonshire. Bessborough resigned in November 1762 in solidarity with Devonshire, in opposition to the peace terms ending the Seven Years’ War. Bessborough’s place was then filled by John Perceval, 2nd earl of Egmont [I], well known to the new premier John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, through their connections to Leicester House.

In September 1763, during the premiership of George Grenville, Egmont was promoted to first lord of the Admiralty and was replaced at the Post Office by Lord Hyde. Hyde had already served as a diplomat during the War of the Austrian Succession, and as an MP and lord of the Admiralty. In July 1765 both Hyde and Lord Trevor (the former Hampden), were replaced by followers of the new Whig ministry – Thomas Robinson, Baron Grantham, long one of Newcastle’s closest friends and a not particularly successful member of his 1754-6 administration, and Bessborough, returning for his second stint in the post after his 1762 demonstration of Whig loyalty. These two had barely taken their places when the Rockingham administration fell in July 1766, replaced by one led nominally by William Pitt, earl of Chatham.

Grantham and Bessborough were both elderly and unwilling to vacate their comfortable posts. They remained until November 1766, when they took part in the Rockingham Whigs’ engineered mass resignation in protest against Chatham’s dismissal of one of their colleagues. They were replaced by the dilettante and rake, Sir Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron Le Despenser, and Wills Hill, earl of Hillsborough [I], a politician clearly on the way up, ‘laid up in lavender at the Post Office till he shall be wanted elsewhere‘. [Chatham Correspondence, iii. 139] Hillsborough left in 1768 to serve as secretary of state for the colonies, where he played a principal part in the descent to war.

The rapid turnover of postmasters-general in the 1760s points to the office’s political nature and its importance as a lucrative, and relatively comfortable, reward for incoming ministries to bestow on loyal followers. That there were two positions available made the opportunities for partisan patronage more extensive.

CGDL

Further reading
Kenneth Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford UP, 1958)
Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton UP, 1948)

Perhaps the most famous display was held in Green Park on 27 April 1749 to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. It remains most celebrated for the music composed by Handel to precede the spectacle, the ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’. [Parliament, patriotism and the Last Night of the Proms] Its organizer, Charles Frederick, was ambitious and hoped to end the display with ‘so many hundred thousand crackers all set to music, that all the men killed in the war are to be wakened with the crash’. [Walpole Correspondence, xxxvii. 297]. The London Evening Post for 15-17 April enumerated at least 162,000 separate pieces of at least 13 different types of pyrotechnical device that were to be set alight.

The display, however, did not go quite according to plan and, according to Horace Walpole, ‘by no means answered the expense, the length of preparation, and the expectation which had been raised’. He admitted that the rockets ‘succeeded mighty well’, but thought the fire wheels ‘pitiful’. [Walpole Correspondence, xx. 47-8] Worse still, the right pavilion of the large wooden structure from which the fireworks were launched caught fire, and a number of people were killed or injured by stray fireworks or the press of the crowd.

There is, however, a positive coda to this tale of near incendiary disaster. The unused fireworks were purchased by Charles Lennox, 2nd duke of Richmond. [‘Kind patron of the mirthful fray’: the English aristocracy and cricket in the 18th century] His London townhouse, Richmond House, was sited in the Privy Garden of the old Whitehall Palace and fronted the riverside. On 15 May 1749 he staged his own fireworks celebration, clearly visible to all from the river. This attempt was more successful, and even Walpole admitted ‘I really never passed a more agreeable evening: everything succeeded, all the wheels played in time’ [Walpole Correspondence, ix. 80-81]. Walpole saw the event as ‘a codicil to the peace’ celebrations of the previous month and continued with an elaborate description:

The garden lies with a slope down to the Thames, on which were lighters, from whence were thrown up, after a concert of water music, a great number of rockets. Then from boats on every side were discharged water rockets and fires of that kind; and then the wheels which were ranged along the rails of the terrace were played off; and the whole concluded with the illumination of a pavilion on the top of the slope, of two pyramids on each side, and of the whole length of the balustrade to the water. You can’t conceive a prettier sight; the garden filled with everybody of fashion…. the river was covered with boats and the shores and adjacent houses with crowds’.

Walpole Correspondence, xx. 56

The newspapers reported that at Richmond’s entertainment ‘there were upwards of 400 persons of distinction, and the fireworks consisted of 200 water mines, 200 air balloons, 200 fire trees, 5000 water rockets, 5000 sky rockets, 100 fire showers, 20 suns, 100 stars, and the whole concluded with a grand illumination which lasted till two o’clock’. [Old England, 20 May 1749]

The ostensible reason for Richmond’s festivities was his hosting a visit of the duke of Modena. Richmond, though, had other reasons to feel in a celebratory mood at this time. His second daughter Emily and her husband James Fitzgerald, 20th earl of Kildare (later duke of Leinster), were over from Ireland with their newborn son, Richmond’s grandson.

The duke was also joined by his eldest daughter Caroline, who in May 1744 had eloped with Henry Fox. Richmond and the duchess had disapproved of this match and banished the couple from their presence for several years. Fox, however, was a rapidly rising politician, a lord of the Treasury and an effective speaker in the Commons. He attained an important cabinet position when he was made secretary-at-war in 1746, during the War of the Austrian Succession.

Richmond, closely tied to the Whig ministry, could not shun such an important ministerial colleague for long, and Fox steadily rose in his estimation. Gradually Richmond was convinced that ‘by his merits and talents he is bound to make a name for himself in this country’.

In March 1748 Richmond sent a letter to his daughter and son-in-law seeking to reconcile with them and reintegrate them in the family. Caroline, Henry and their infant sons Stephen and Charles James now joined the Lennox clan as it gathered together to watch the fireworks from Richmond House.

That triumphal night, hosting foreign dukes and dignitaries, British royalty and peers at Richmond House, and exulting in his own united and growing family, was Richmond’s swansong. A little more than a year later he was dead, on 8 August 1750, aged only 49, followed a year later by the duchess. His successor, another Charles, took after him in his adherence to the Whigs and his displays of social extravagance. Thus Richmond House under the 3rd duke was the scene on 6 June 1763 of yet another ‘magnificent entertainment’, which caused Walpole to enthuse in much the same terms as he had done 14 years previously:

The ground rooms lighted… the houses covered and filled with people, the bridge, the garden full of masks, Whitehall crowded with spectators to see the dresses pass, and the multitude of heads on the river, who came to light by the splendour of the fire-wheels, composed the gayest, richest scene imaginable.

Walpole Correspondence, xxii. 148-9

CGDL

Additional reading:
Stella Tilyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832 (1994), esp. pp. 7-75
The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, esp. vols. 20, 22 (letters to Horace Mann)
Earl of March, A Duke and his Friends: The Life and Letters of the Second Duke of Richmond (1911), vol. 2

Foremost among cricket’s early patrons (according to rank) was the heir to the throne, Frederick, Prince of Wales. Within three years of his arrival in England in 1728 he attended a match between Surrey and London, and soon after he was playing himself. Cricket may even have determined the very dynastic fate of Britain. Frederick was said to have been struck by a cricket ball while playing with his children and it was assumed that this led to his early death from a ruptured abscess on 20 March 1751. Even if the autopsy revealed other health problems, it was important to contemporaries that this German-born heir prince died in the service of the quintessentially English game.

Frederick’s death came shortly after that of a nobleman who could claim even greater importance in the game’s establishment. Charles Lennox, 2nd duke of Richmond, had almost as exalted a lineage as Frederick himself. Richmond’s paternal grandparents were Charles II and his French mistress Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth. Through her, a favourite of Louis XIV, he also succeeded as duc d’Aubigny in the French nobility in 1734. Richmond’s father had been well established with estates in West Sussex around Goodwood House near Chichester, where the 2nd duke lived a comfortable and active life.

Besides his career as an army officer and role as a prominent politician, Richmond’s principal enthusiasm was for sport. Next to hunting, his greatest love was cricket for which he has a number of ‘firsts’ to his name. He was involved in what may have been the first attempt to codify the laws of the game. On 11 July 1727 Richmond’s squad played a team fielded by Alan Brodrick, later 2nd Viscount Midleton [I]. Before the competition started Richmond and Brodrick drew up 16 ‘Articles of Agreement’ on the game’s conduct in order to avoid disputes. These are seen as the earliest codification of the game’s laws, and many of them still pertain, with modifications. For instance, Richmond’s and Brodrick’s teams consisted of 12 players each, contrasted with today’s eleven.

These articles formed the basis for another set of laws agreed in 1744, another important date in cricket’s history. Further ‘firsts’ are associated with two matches played at the Artillery Ground in London that summer. The earliest surviving scorecards came from these matches and were collected by Richmond and are still among his papers. The climactic Kent versus ‘all England’ match on 18 June 1744 gave rise to the first known poem about cricket. James Dance dedicated his Cricket: An Heroic Poem to John Montagu, 4th earl of Sandwich, a ‘kind patron of the mirthful fray’. Another aristocrat also featured, as he played for the Kent side that ultimately won. Lord John Philip Sackville was the second son of Lionel Cranfield Sackville, duke of Dorset. Sackville did not notch up many runs, but he made a sensational catch, immortalized by Dance:

And now Illustrious Sackville, where he stood
Th’approaching Ball with cautious Pleasure view’d.
At once he sees the Chief’s impending Doom
And pants for mighty Honours, yet to come.
Swift as the Falcon, darting on its Prey
He springs elastic o’er the verdant Way.
Sure of Success, flies upward with a Bound
Derides the slow Approach and spurns the Ground.

Significantly, Sackville, a scion of a great noble family, played on a side whose other members were commoners. Nor was deference made to his birth by making him captain, which position was filled by the family’s gardener.

Sackville’s elder brother Charles Sackville, earl of Middlesex (later 2nd duke of Dorset), was also a keen player and patron. Their mutual enthusiasm may have led Richmond to look to Middlesex as a candidate for the Sussex by-election in late 1741, which merged Richmond’s two great loves of electioneering and cricket. While Richmond and the Whigs turned to Middlesex, Thomas Sergison put himself forward as the opposition candidate. Victory came through winning the votes of the county’s freeholders, who would be certain to gather at cricket matches. Sergison and Richmond canvassed hard at a match on 15 June between Slindon and Portsmouth. As Richmond described it:

Sergison was at the cricket match attended by…. two or three more of the Chichester Torys. He did not venture to ask a vote, nor could he have got one I do really believe. Tanky [Charles Bennet, 2nd earl of Tankerville,] was there ready to puff his cheeks at him, but he never appeared…. All our friends … were in great spirits especially as Slindon beat Portsmouth, and had nine men to go in. [Richmond-Newcastle Correspondence, 63]

This was a comprehensive triumph for Richmond, both in politics and sport. Matters, however, did not always run quite so smoothly. Sergison and his supporters were more aggressive at a match on 28 July, this time between Slindon and Portslade. The Tories taunted Middlesex with allegations that his father harboured republican sympathies. Blows were exchanged and, at first, the Whigs had the worst of it. As Sir William Gage reported, though, the Slindon cricketers ‘returned with their cricket bats and dealt some heavy blows which carried the victory on our side’. [BL, Add. 32,697, f. 338] Middlesex won the by-election in January 1742. His fellow MP was the duke of Newcastle’s brother Henry Pelham. A little over a year later, he became prime minister, though he does not seem to have needed the assistance of cricket bats to attain his office.

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Further reading:
Robin Eagles, ‘ “No more to be said?” Reactions to the death of Frederick Lewis, prince of Wales’, Historical Research, lxxx (2007)
David Underdown, Start of Play: Cricket and Culture in 18th-century England (2000)
John Marshall, The Duke who was Cricket (1961)
Timothy McCann, The Correspondence of the Dukes of Richmond and Newcastle, 1724-50 (Sussex Record Society 73) (1983)

For the Swiss traveller César de Saussure the coronation of 1727 was ’the most solemn, magnificent, and sumptuous ceremony it is anyone’s lot in life to witness’. [Saussure, 239]. John Hervey, Lord Hervey, remembered that:

The Coronation was performed with all the pomp and magnificence that could be contrived; the present King differing so much from the last, that all the pageantry and splendour, badges and trappings of royalty, were as pleasing to the son as they were irksome to the father.

Hervey, Memoirs, i. 66

Saussure noted that English observers agreed that ‘the magnificence of the present coronation has far surpassed that of the preceding’. Indeed, while George I’s coronation in 1714 had cost £7,287, his son’s was budgeted at £9,430.

What impressed these observers most was the procession of the peers and the royal retinue from Westminster Hall to the Abbey that preceded the coronation. Saussure provided an account, cribbed from a printed list of the order of its participants. The peers and peeresses could be easily observed by the crowd, as an elevated walkway had been built between the Hall and the Abbey, and Saussure’s description of the details of their robes of state is rapturous. He was particularly impressed by the jewels – ‘the peeresses were covered with them’ – and Queen Caroline exhausted herself trying to march in a jewel-bedecked skirt.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu viewed the show with more cynicism. She thought that the goal of the participants was ‘to conceal vanity and gain admiration…. a visible satisfaction was diffused over every countenance as soon as the coronet was clapped on the head.’ [Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Letters, ed. Halsband, ii. 85-6] One person who, surprisingly, on this occasion did not stand on ceremony was Sarah Churchill, dowager duchess of Marlborough. Saussure recounted how:

When the duchesses were in front of our seats the procession was for a time brought to a stop. The Dowager Duchess of Marlborough took a drum from a drummer and seated herself on it. The crowd laughed and shouted at seeing the wife of the great and celebrated General Duke of Marlborough, more than seventy years of age, seated on a drum in her robes of state in such a solemn procession.

Saussure, 249-50

A number of lords of Parliament were involved in the planning, management and conduct of the ceremony. Peregrine Bertie, 2nd duke of Ancaster, was the hereditary lord great chamberlain, responsible for managing Westminster Hall. As such he enjoyed a number of unusual perquisites. He dressed the king for the coronation, for which he received enough crimson velvet for a robe of state, the clothes the king had worn the previous day and the furnishings of the room where he had slept.

The earl marshal was also an hereditary office, held by the dukes of Norfolk since 1672. Thomas Howard, 8th duke of Norfolk, however, was a Catholic so deputized his duties to Talbot Yelverton, earl of Sussex. The earl marshal handled the arrangements for the coronation itself at Westminster Abbey, where he had authority over the area from the choir screen to the altar. Scaffolding was erected here to hold over 1,750 notables, including 140 foreigners, invited under the king’s authority to attend the consecration and coronation. The Dean and Chapter of Westminster for their part charged for gallery seating in the abbey’s nave. For his duties, the earl marshal was rewarded with a goblet with a lid of pure gold.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, not only conducted the coronation ceremony, but also planned the entire order of service, and his ‘Form and Order’ for the ceremony has served as the template for all later coronations. Another durable contribution from 1727 came from the king’s choice of composer, George Frederick Handel. His ‘Zadok the Priest’ has proved enduring, and has featured in every subsequent coronation. Its premiere may have been shaky, as Wake annotated his own copy of the order of service with the comment ‘The Anthem in confusion: all irregular in the Music’. [David Baldwin, The Chapel Royal, 224]. Wake may have been the most richly rewarded of those involved in the coronation. He received the throne, cushion, and stool on which the king was crowned, and even the pall used to cover his head during the anointing.

Absent from the coronation itself, Saussure was in the spectator galleries at the lavish banquet held afterwards in Westminster Hall. He described with admiration the technique used to ensure that the candles in the forty chandeliers were all lighted almost simultaneously upon the king’s entry, and the mock chivalry of the king’s Champion entering the Hall on horseback. He was also impressed by the tables groaning under the mountains of food, but was not among the guests who could partake. He and his neighbours were eventually able to share in the feast after some unnamed peers sitting at the tables below tied their excess food to lines lowered by the spectators from the galleries and then hoisted them back up. Once the royal party and peers had left, the doors were thrown open and the populace rushed in to ransack the Hall of the remaining food and furnishings. It was cleared in half an hour.

Despite the disorder that marked the end of the day, Saussure concluded his account in wonder:

I know I cannot possibly give you any correct idea of the magnificence and beauty of all these sights; the spectators on the stands and at the windows were likewise charming to contemplate. I am certain that at least two thousand people had left off wearing the late King’s mourning for that day, and were dressed with taste in bright colours. … As to the populace it was innumerable.

Saussure, 265

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Further reading:
César de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II: The Letters of Monsieur César de Saussure to his Family, ed. Madame van Muyden (1902)
Andrew C. Thompson, George II (2011)
Roy Strong, Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century (2005).
The Form of the Proceeding to the Royal Coronation of Their Majesties King George II and Queen Caroline (1727)
The Form and Order of the Service that is to be performed and of the Ceremonies that are to be observed in the Coronation of Their Majesties King George II and Queen Caroline (1727)

‘Privileges’ is an important term that appears throughout parliamentary history, though its meaning and scope change over time. At its creation in 1995 the remit of the Commons Committee of Standards and Privileges was widened to include investigation of potential ‘contempts’ of Parliament from its own members. Previous conceptions of parliamentary privilege have not always concerned what Members did, but rather what was done to them, and to the institution, by those outside Parliament.

While the full chamber of the Commons often considered perceived threats to the House’s privilege such as the reporting of its proceedings (until they effectively gave up the fight after 1771), from the early 17th century a separate Committee of Privileges and Elections was established at the beginning of each session to deal with individual complaints of breaches of privilege. As its name suggests, this Committee was concerned primarily with the numerous petitions regarding controverted elections that usually took up a significant amount of the House’s attention. The Committee also heard complaints of breaches of privilege when Members found themselves sued, or in some cases arrested, in civil legal suits. The original privilege of freedom from arrest during time of Parliament had by the late 18th century been expanded to include a right to evade all adversarial civil suits while sitting as an MP.

Each session in the House of Lords also began with the nomination of a Committee of Privileges, which generally included the entire membership of the House. Its scope was larger than that of the Commons, as it was to consider ‘the Privileges of Parliament, and of the Peers of Great Britain and Lords of Parliament’: that is, both privilege of Parliament and the separate privilege of the peerage. It was primarily concerned with commoners taking members of the Lords to law, which was seen as infringing both types of privilege. Members of the peerage also had the right to exempt their personal servants from legal proceedings through signed ‘protections’. The Committee occasionally reported abuses of this system, as valuable forged protections were sometimes traded like currency.

Under its assignment to deal with privilege of peerage, the Lords’ Committee also considered controverted title claims and, occasionally, cases of scandalum magnatum, libellous words derogatory to individual peers. The Lords guarded their privileges jealously, perhaps more so than the lower house did. When the Commons expelled John Wilkes in 1764, after resolving that the privilege of freedom from arrest did not extend to charges of seditious libel [How to expel an MP from Parliament: The ejection of John Wilkes in 1764], members of the House of Lords objected to this extenuation of their vaunted privilege. Seventeen peers submitted a strongly worded protest against the Commons’ resolution, which portrayed this diminution of parliamentary privilege as heralding the eventual destruction of Parliament:

We cannot hear, without the utmost Concern and Astonishment, a Doctrine advanced now for the First Time in this House, which we apprehend to be new, dangerous, and unwarrantable… [and] by which, all the Records of Parliament, all History, all the Authorities of the gravest and soberest Judges, are entirely rescinded; and the fundamental Principles of the Constitution, with regard to the Independence of Parliament, torn up, and buried under the Ruins of our most established Rights

Lords Journal, 29 November 1763

Worse was to come, for in 1770 an Act was pushed through Parliament which put an end to the privilege of immunity from civil suits during time of Parliament, for both commoners and lords… and their servants.

The Committee of Privileges in the 18th century was primarily concerned with protecting Parliament and its members from external opposition. Both Houses, however, could establish a ‘Committee of Secrecy’, whose proceedings remained closed, to investigate allegations of malfeasance and ‘contempts’ by its own members. In 1715 the Commons established such a body to investigate the previous Tory administration of 1710-14 and the Commons subsequently impeached some of the principal former ministers. The principal target, Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, languished in the Tower for two years until he was ultimately acquitted in 1717. [Acquitted with three huzzas: the impeachment of Robert Harley, earl of Oxford.]

It is ironic that Sir Robert Walpole, the driving force of the 1715 Committee, was himself the subject of a later secret investigation. In February 1742 Walpole resigned from the premiership after narrowly losing a vote of confidence involving the contested election for Chippenham. Within days he was conveyed to the safety of the Lords through creation as earl of Orford. His many enemies in the Commons were nevertheless determined to expose his alleged crimes of corruption and misuse of patronage, and extract punishment. A Committee of Secrecy was established to investigate his activities, but its remit was limited to the last ten years of his premiership. Furthermore, the House of Lords rejected a bill to indemnify witnesses who could provide evidence of Orford’s malfeasance in office. Without this protection important witnesses such as Nicholas Paxton, solicitor of the Treasury, were unwilling to testify.

When the Committee submitted its reports, the Commons, engaged in a war with Spain and one with France looming, were not inclined to embark on a time-consuming vindictive impeachment. Orford remained unscathed and was able to live his remaining few years in the Lords under privilege of peerage, untroubled by the Committee of Secrecy’s censures.

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Further readings:
Erskine May, Treatise on the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament (25th ed., 2019), Part 2, ‘Powers and Privileges of Parliament’
J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister (1960)
Paul Seaward, ‘Parliamentary Privilege and Libel, Part II: from Wilkes to 1835‘
A.S. Turberville, ‘The Protection of Servants of Members of Parliament’, English Historical Review, 42 (1927), 590-600

As its name suggests, the direction of the ‘Plot’ was attributed to the notoriously aggressive Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester. From 1716 he was the Pretender’s principal agent in England (not that he was necessarily entirely happy with the role). He was joined in its direction by a number of Jacobite peers sitting in the House of Lords. Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, William North, 6th Baron North (and 2nd Baron Grey), and the Irish peers Charles Butler, earl of Arran, and Charles Boyle, 4th earl of Orrery, had all been military officers, diplomats or statesmen during the reign of Queen Anne, but by 1720 were dedicated servants of the Pretender.

In the last days of 1721 Atterbury, Strafford, North, Arran and Sir Henry Goring pledged themselves to proceed with plans for a Stuart restoration formulated at the Jacobite court at St Germain-en-Laye. They would raise domestic uprisings in England during the general election scheduled for spring 1722, while St Germain would send over a small band of troops from Spain in support. The conspirators quickly became disunited, though. Orrery (who did not sign the letter to St Germain) insisted on the need for a more sizeable foreign invasion force, while North, Strafford and Arran were confident they could personally lead a domestic popular revolt. The plot, or what soon became separate individual plots, began to unravel and its timing had to be postponed to the late summer.

The situation grew worse for the plotters from 19 April 1722, after the death of Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland. As first lord of the Treasury in 1720-21, Sunderland had been deeply implicated in the bribery that allowed the South Sea Company to inflate its ‘Bubble’ and, after it had burst, he had negotiated with Atterbury and the Tories for their support during the parliamentary investigations.

As long as Sunderland had influence Atterbury could be relatively confident of being ‘screened’ from government interference. With him gone, though, Robert Walpole was likely to take the reins of government. Virulently anti-Jacobite, Walpole took action quickly when he learned from the French court, then in alliance with Britain, that the Jacobites were making military preparations on the continent. The correspondence between the English Jacobites and St Germain was intercepted, opened and read. One of the decipherers working on these coded letters was a clerical colleague of Atterbury, Edward Willes, who, after his codebreaking days were over, served as bishop of Bath and Wells. Couriers were taken up and interrogated. One suspect inadvertently revealed Atterbury as the principal addressee of the letters when she blithely chatted away about a little ‘spotted dog’ named Harlequin, which had been sent to Atterbury as a present for the bishop’s dying wife [HMC Portland, vii. 326].

The net was tightening on the Jacobite plotters, and after Goring successfully fled England on 23 August 1722, Atterbury was arrested the following day and sent to the Tower. There he proved ‘very boisterous’, and in one notorious incident scuffled with his gaoler, Colonel Williamson, ‘collared him, struck him, and threw him down’. A commentator thought it ‘pretty odd’ that Williamson would make public that he had been ‘beaten by a gouty bishop’ [HMC Portland, vii. 344].

Walpole’s government was selective in its targets when rounding up the Jacobites and investigating the conspiracy, owing in part to a lack of evidence to prove charges of treason. The principal victims were commoners, such as George Kelly and John Plunkett, both deprived of their estates. Christopher Layer, North’s lawyer and agent, was the only plotter executed, and even his sentence was continuously reprieved in the hope that he would turn king’s evidence. Orrery and North were arrested and imprisoned at about the same time as Atterbury, but proceedings against them were never commenced and they were both eventually discharged. Strafford was never even arrested and continued agitating against the government throughout 1722-23, while his colleagues languished in the Tower.

The government’s principal target was Atterbury, who already had a reputation as a disruptive troublemaker. Despite Atterbury’s forceful two-hour speech in his defence on 11 May, the House passed a bill of ‘pains and penalties’ against him four days later. While Layer, no longer useful as a potential witness, was executed shortly afterwards, Atterbury was allowed to go into exile. He died on the continent in 1732. Orrery, the nominal and ineffectual leader of a weakened Tory party, had died the previous year and North died in Spain in 1734, having converted to Catholicism and been commissioned an officer in the Spanish army. Strafford lasted until 1739, a Tory opponent to Walpole’s Whig ministry to the end. As he described himself in 1737, ‘he was bad with the last ministry, worse with this, and he did not doubt but he should be worse with the next’ [HMC Carlisle, 179]. By the end of the 1730s the Jacobite wing of the Tory party was hollowed out, and the party itself was left adrift until its next reshaping in the 1760s.

While the parliamentary proceedings of 1722-23 destroyed the Jacobites, and seriously damaged the larger Tory party by association, it only strengthened Walpole in his early years as prime minister. Arthur Onslow, the long-serving Speaker of the Commons, thought that the discovery and prosecution of the Jacobite plot was ‘the most fortunate and the greatest circumstance of Mr Walpole’s life. It fixed him with the King, and united for a time the whole body of Whigs to him, and gave him the universal credit of an able and vigilant Minister’ [HMC Onslow, 513].

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Further reading:

E. Cruickshanks and H. Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot (2004)

G. V. Bennet, The Tory Crisis in Church and State, 1688-1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (1976)

E. Cruickshanks, ‘Lord North, Christopher Layer and the Atterbury Plot, 1720-3’, in The Jacobite Challenge, ed. E. Cruickshanks and J. Black (1988)