The treasons he committed were of ‘the most flagrant and dangerous nature’; they were ‘fully confessed by his flight from the justice of Parliament,’ and they were indisputably demonstrated by his new treasons when he ‘entered publicly into the counsels and services of the Pretender, who was then fomenting and carrying on a rebellion within these kingdoms for the dethroning his Majesty, into which Rebellion many subjects of his Majesty, Peers and Commoners, were drawn, as we believe, by the example or influence of the late Lord Bolingbroke, and for which reason many Peers and Commoners have since been attainted and some of them executed, and their estates become forfeited by their attainder.’ [Sidenote: _DENUNCIATIONS AGAINST HIM._] What services Bolingbroke had rendered to King George, since he was a convicted traitor, were not publicly known, but might justly be suspected. He had never expressed the slightest sorrow for his treason; and there was no security that he might not again betray the king and country, for no trust could be placed in his most solemn assurances. Supposing recent services justified reward, it was not such reward as could not be recalled. Persons who had rendered similar services had been rendered dependent on the Government for the continuance of those rewards, and so it should be, they thought, with Bolingbroke. The five peers further remarked that no pardon under the Great Seal could be pleadable to an impeachment by the Commons, and that Bolingbroke had, in fact, no right or title to the benefits conferred upon him by a Bill which restored him to his estates, in spite of the Act of the Attainder. The public discussed these matters with interest, and (except a few Jacobites) thought nothing of plots and pretenders. Atterbury, however, was as pertinaciously working as ever, to see his royal master James crowned at Westminster. In one of the numerous letters written by him this year, Atterbury suggests that James shall express his hopes to the Duke of Bourbon, then at the head of the French Government, that if the juncture at present will not suffer the Duke to do anything directly for him, yet at least that he will not so far act against him as to endeavour to draw off others from their designs and determinations to serve him――the King, James III. [Sidenote: _AN EPIGRAM._] Among the ex-bishop’s friends in London was the Rev. Samuel Wesley, brother of John. The Tory journal ‘Mist’ had said of him that Mr. Wesley had refused to write against Pope, on the ground that ‘his best patron’ had a friendship for the poet. Thence arose the question, ‘Who _was_ his best patron?’――a question which was answered by an epigrammatist (by some said to be Pope himself), who suggested that the patron was either the exiled Jacobite Bishop Atterbury, or the Earl of Oxford. Wesley, if Wesley ’tis they mean, They say, on Pope would fall, Would his best patron let his pen Discharge his inward gall.