Atterbury Plot

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.

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.

[2] 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.

[3] 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.

[4] Christopher Layer, a barrister of the Middle Temple and an agent and legal advisor to the "notorious Jacobite" Lord North and Grey,[5] 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 died on 19 April, when the Duke of Orleans, Regent of France, made it known to Carteret, Robert Walpole's Secretary of State for the Southern Department, that the Jacobites had asked him to send three thousand men in support of a coup d'état to take place early in May.

[8] In England, insufficient money had been collected by the Jacobites to provide enough arms to support a rising, leading Mar (writing in March 1722) to comment on hearing this that Goring, "though a honest, stout, man, had not showed himself very fit for things of this kind.

Despite this, Walpole gave orders for several men to be arrested: Arran, Strafford, Orrery, North and Grey, Goring, Atterbury, the Duke of Mar's agent George Kelly, and Christopher Layer.

In his absence, at a trial where he was considered one of the major managers of the plot, his agent stated Goring had attempted to enlist a gang of one thousand brandy smugglers to assist the projected invasion.

The Court was interested to have evidence that the Pretender and his wife had acted as godparents to Layer's daughter, when they were represented at a christening in Chelsea by the proxies Lord North and Grey and the Duchess of Ormonde.

[2][11] The evidence offered to parliament consisted chiefly of a spaniel named Harlequin, a present from the Pretender, and some letters found in a lavatory, leading to suspicions that Atterbury was the victim of a Whig conspiracy.