Watts lived through that great agitation which consigned Francis Atterbury, the Bishop of Rochester, first to the Tower, and then to exile, for his complicity with the Pretender, and attempts to bring back the Stuarts. Atterbury was sworn by many oaths to maintain the Protestant succession, but his guilt was soon manifest beyond any doubt, even to the most lenient and doubtful mind. It was greatly to men of Watts’ order of religious conviction that the reigning family owed the stability of its power; and when the fury of the clergy, especially the High Church clergy, was excited by the arrest of the Bishop, one of their own order, and attempts even made to set him forth in the light of a martyr, it is interesting to notice that it was Bishop Gibson, the friend and correspondent of Watts, who allayed the storm.[36] The intense antipathy to Rome and the Papacy, so manifest in the writings of Watts, and in the wild passions of the times, was not without a cause, and a cause which would make itself especially felt in the City of London. When Watts was ordained over the church in Mark Lane, only fifteen years had elapsed since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; that dreadful act of persecution had poured over many parts of England and of America the noble refugees of freedom and Protestantism; multitudes found their way to the neighbourhood of London; not far from the neighbourhood of Watts’ church, there sprung up a Protestant French colony. They did no harm to this nation by their exile hither,—they brought character, and piety, and invention, and wit; where they rested they reared the unadorned and humble temples of their simple Protestant service. Possessed themselves of the hymns of Clement Marot, they probably suggested a psalmody, sweeter and more elevated than our churches at that time possessed—but in many instances their sufferings in the course of their expatriation had been dreadful. From year to year they still escaped to our shores, and found their way to London; the people and their pastors were aided by the government of William and Mary, and by the succeeding governments. It was not possible but that the dread of honest and quiet thinkers, and the more turbulent passions of the people, should be awakened against that fearful system which seemed so recklessly to strike at all national happiness and prosperity; and in England the Papacy had its agents almost ubiquitous, crafty, cunning, powerful, cruel, and remorseless; it was no time for the indulgence of a mere philosophical calm and dreams of generous toleration. There were frequent wild outbreaks of madness and wrath in heated and excited mobs, and the language indulged by writers, usually so clear and wise, became intense in hatred to Rome; but let the reader transfer his feelings to that time, and interpret his feelings by natural fear, and he will scarcely be able to visit either manifestation with very severe reprehension.