The Atterbury Plot was a conspiracy led by Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster, aimed at the restoration of the House of Stuart to the throne of Great Britain. It came some years after the unsuccessful Jacobite rising of 1715 and Jacobite rising of 1719, at a time when the Whig government of the new Hanoverian king was deeply unpopular.
Apart from Atterbury, other conspirators included Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, Lord North and Grey, Sir Henry Goring, Christopher Layer, John Plunket, and George Kelly.
The Plot was later considered the greatest threat to the Hanoverians between the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745. It collapsed in 1722, when some of the conspirators were charged with treason. However, evidence was in short supply, and Atterbury himself escaped with removal from his Church of England positions and exile.
Background
Atterbury was a Tory and a leader of the High Church party in the Church of England. In 1710, the prosecution of Henry Sacheverell led to an explosion of High Church fanaticism, and Atterbury helped Sacheverell with his defence, then became an active pamphleteer against the Whig ministry. When the ministry changed, rewards came to him. Queen Anne chose him as her chief adviser in church matters, and in August 1711 she appointed him Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, a strongly Tory college. In 1713 he was promoted to become Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster Abbey, and if the Tories had remained in power he might have risen much higher, so he dreaded the Hanoverian accession planned by the Act of Settlement of 1701. The death of Queen Anne in 1714 was a setback for him. He took the oath of allegiance to George I, but he became an opponent of the new government. He was in indirect communication with the family of the Pretender, and when the Jacobite rising of 1715 appeared, he refused to sign a declaration in which other bishops attached themselves to the Protestant accession. In 1717 hundreds of Jacobites arrested at the time of the Rising were released from prison by the Act of Grace and Pardon, and Atterbury began to correspond directly with James Francis Edward Stuart. He was later accused of plotting a coup d'état which involved the capture of the Hanoverian royal family and the proclamation of the Pretender as James III.
Events of 1720, notably the Bubble Act and the collapse of the South Sea Company, left the pro-Hanoverian Whig government in disarray and deeply unpopular with the many ruling class investors who had lost heavily. Atterbury seized the moment to conspire with the exiled John Erskine, who at the Jacobite court was the Duke of Mar, and who had been the Pretender's Secretary of State.
Plot of 1721
The aim of the conspirators was a new Jacobite rising, to coincide with the general election expected in 1722, this date being foreseen because by the Septennial Act of 1716 parliament was enabled to sit for seven years after the election of 1715.
Sir Henry Goring, who was himself standing (unsuccessfully as turned out) in the election as MP for his old seat of Steyning in Sussex, wrote to the Pretender on 20 March 1721 a letter in which he put forward a plan for a restoration of the Stuart monarchy with the assistance of an invasion by Irish exile troops commanded by the Duke of Ormonde from Spain and Lieutenant-General Dillon from France.
Christopher Layer, a barrister of the Middle Temple and an agent and legal advisor to the "notorious Jacobite" Lord North and Grey, met some fellow plotters regularly at an inn in Stratford-le-Bow, and by the summer of 1721 had succeeded in recruiting some soldiers at Romford and Leytonstone. He then travelled to Rome, where he met the Pretender to reveal the details of a plot. Layer stated that he represented a large number of influential Jacobites, who proposed to recruit old soldiers to seize the Tower of London, the Bank of England, the Royal Mint, and other government buildings in Westminster and the City of London, to capture the Hanoverian royal family, and to kill other key men. English Tories were to summon their men, secure their counties, and march on London, while volunteers from the Irish Brigade of the French Army were to land in England to join them. Layer returned to London with assurances of royal favour from the Pretender.