Atwood had presided at the treason trial of mayor Nicholas Bayard (c.1644–1707) of the anti-Leislerian party, at the time of governor Richard Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont.
When Bellomont died in 1701, the change of governor when Cornbury took over meant a complete about-turn for the local factions, and undermined Atwood's position.
His later attack on the poet Matthew Prior, in A Modern Inscription to the Duke of Marlborough's Fame,[7] was not only a Whig taking issue with a Tory, but had a peripheral connection with the business of his removal as Justice.
[11] He wrote also on Scotland, causing the Scottish Parliament to order his works to be burned, by the common hangman: the objectionable The Superiority and Direct Dominion of the Imperial Crown of England (1704), and The Scots Patriot Unmasked.
[12][13][14] The sentence was carried out in August 1705 at the Market Cross in Edinburgh, a month after James Drake's Historia Anglo-Scotica suffered the same fate.