Robert Walpole foiled the Atterbury Plot by preventive arrests and holding those he suspected illegally without bail or trial. When Parliament met and the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, he used show trials, decided by votes along party lines and depending on forged evidence, to curb the Tory party, to reuinted the Whig party and to consolidate his hold on power. Rich in new material, this book unravels for the first time the scale and international dimension of a plot which posed the most serious challenge to the Hanoverian regime before the '45 rebellion.

'Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill, who have long been working to rescue Jacobitism from the footnote in popular history to which it was long sonsigned, demonstrate what a serious threat the plot posed...A reader today is left with the all-too-familiar feeling of pessimism about the state's ability to manipulate Parliament and disquiet about the way the national will can be thwarted.' - David Twiston Dabies, The Catholic Herald

Autorentext

EVELINE CRUICKSHANKS has published Political Untouchables: The Tories and the '45 (1979) and edited Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism 1689-1759 (1982), The Jacobite Challenge, with Jeremy Black (1988), By Force or by Default? The Revolution of 1688-89 (1989), The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites, with Edward Corp (1995). Her most recent publications are The Stuart Courts (2000) ed., and for Palgrave Macmillan The Glorious Revolution 1678-1714 (2000). She is a major contributor to the History of Parliament volumes 1660-1754, and has edited most of The House of Commons 1690-1715, published in 2002. HOWARD ERSKINE-HILL was Professor of Literary History, Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. His publications include Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden, Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth and as editor, Alexander Pope: Selected Letters.

Inhalt
Introduction: Continuous Conspiracy John Law and the First Phase of the Atterbury Plot A Jacobite Opportunity: The South Sea Crisis and the Possibility of a Constitutional Restoration A Call to Arms Walpole and the 'Horrid Conspiracy' The Military and Naval Resources of the Jacobites The Arrests The Case of Christopher Layer The Trials of John Plunkett and George Kelly The Trial of Bishop Atterbury The Aftermath Conclusion