Note 789 — Chapter VII · (continued 2)

The ill-feeling which the Church of England generally bore against the government of the two first Georges was openly displayed, and was so pertinaceous as to form a leading fact in the history of England. In 1722, Bishop Atterbury was arrested, because he was known to be engaged in a treasonable conspiracy with the Pretender. As soon as he was seized, the church offered up prayers for him. ‘Under the pretence,’ says Lord Mahon,—‘under the pretence of his being afflicted with the gout, he was publicly prayed for in most of the churches of London and Westminster.’ Mahon's Hist. of England, vol. ii. p. 38. See also Parl. Hist. vol. vii. p. 988, and vol. viii. p. 347.

At Oxford, where the clergy have long been in the ascendant, they made such efforts to instill their principles as to call down the indignation of the elder Pitt, who, in a speech in Parliament in 1754, denounced that university, which he said had for many years ‘been raising a succession of treason—there never was such a seminary!'’Walpole's Mem. of George II. vol. i. p. 413. Compare the Bedford Correspondence, vol. i. pp. 594, 595, with Harris's Life of Hardwicke, vol. ii. p. 383; and on the temper of the clergy generally after the death of Anne, Parl. Hist. vol. vii. pp. 541, 542; Bowles's Life of Ken, vol. ii. pp. 188, 189; Monk's Life of Bentley, vol. i. pp. 370, 426.

The immediate consequence of this was very remarkable. For the government and the dissenters, being both opposed by the church, naturally combined together: the dissenters using all their influence against the Pretender, and the government protecting them against ecclesiastical prosecutions. See evidence of this in Doddridge's Correspond. and Diary, vol. i. p. 30, vol. ii. p. 321, vol. iii. pp. 110, 125, vol. iv. pp. 428, 436, 437; Hutton's Life of Himself, pp. 159, 160; Parl. Hist. vol. xxviii. pp. 11, 393, vol. xxix. pp. 1434, 1463; Memoirs of Priestley, vol. ii. p. 506; Life of Wakefield, vol. i. p. 220.