The year was a critical one. The Jacobite press was more audacious than ever――sure symptom that some peril was at hand. In what it consisted was notified to the king by the Regent Duke of Orleans,――namely, a design to seize the king himself, and to restore the Stuarts. Angry Nonjurors, and still more angry Ultramontanists, accused the Earl of Mar, and cursed his folly, for having sent, through the ordinary post, a letter, which was opened in London as a matter of course, and which contained unmistakable treason. Walpole, with his intricate agencies, probably knew as much of the design as the Regent and Mar themselves, and the circle around his intended victims was gradually closing. The danger was real. It led to the formation of great camps, to various arrests in the course of the year, and to severe measures against the Papists. Among those arrested on suspicion of being guilty of treason were the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Orrery, and Lord North and Grey, with a Captain Kelly, a Nonjuring priest of the same name, and a prelate who was, in August, innocently engaged in a correspondence with Potter, Bishop of Oxford, as to the exact time at which the several Gospels were written. But it was for less innocent matter that Atterbury was arrested. There was not a more active agent of James III. in the kingdom than he, and Kelly, the Nonjuror, was his daring, crafty, and reckless aide-de-camp. [Sidenote: _ATTERBURY’S CORRESPONDENCE._] In the Stuart papers there is a letter, dated April, 1722, in which Atterbury writes to Mar, expressing his willingness to enter into a long-interrupted correspondence with Lord Oxford, and ‘upon a better foot than it has ever yet stood, being convinced that my doing so may be of no small consequence to the service. I have already taken the first step towards it, that is proper in our situation, and will pursue that by others as fast as I can have opportunity, hoping the secret will be as inviolably kept on your side, as it shall be on this, so far as the nature of such a transaction between two persons who must see one another sometimes can pass unobserved. I hope it will not be expected I should write by post, having many reasons to think it not advisable for me so to do.’