Francis Atterbury (6 March 1663 – 22 February 1732) was an English man of letters, politician and bishop. A High Church Tory and Jacobite, he gained patronage under Queen Anne, but was mistrusted by the Hanoverian Whig ministries, and banished for communicating with the Old Pretender in the Atterbury Plot. He was a noted wit and a gifted preacher. Early life He was born at Middleton, Milton Keynes, in Buckinghamshire, where his father was rector. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he became a tutor. In 1682, he published a translation of Absalom and Achitophel into Latin verse with neither the style nor the versification typical of the Augustan age. In English composition he met greater success; in 1687 he published An Answer to some Considerations, the Spirit of Martin Luther and the Original of the Reformation, a reply to Obadiah Walker, who, when elected master of University College, Oxford, in 1676, had printed in a press set up by him there an attack on the Reformation written by Abraham Woodhead. Atterbury's treatise, though highly praised by Bishop Gilbert Burnet, was more distinguished for the vigour of his rhetoric than the soundness of his arguments, and the Papists accused him of treason, and of having, by implication, called King James "Judas". Clerical career After the "Glorious Revolution", Atterbury readily swore fealty to the new government. He had taken holy orders in 1687, preached occasionally in London with an eloquence which raised his reputation, and was soon appointed one of the royal chaplains. He ordinarily lived at Oxford, where he was the chief adviser and assistant of Henry Aldrich, under whom Christ Church was a stronghold of Toryism. He inspired a pupil, Charles Boyle, in the Examination of Dr. Bentley's Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris, an attack (1698) on the Whig scholar Richard Bentley, arising out of Bentley's impugnment of the genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris. He was figured by Swift in the Battle of the Books as the Apollo who directed the fight, and was, no doubt, largely the author of Boyle's essay. Bentley spent two years in preparing his famous reply, which proved not only that the letters ascribed to Phalaris were spurious, but that all Atterbury's wit and eloquence were a cloak for an audacious pretence at scholarship. Atterbury was soon occupied in a dispute about matters still more important and