Pope and the Ends of History: Faction, Atterbury, and Clarendon's History of the Rebellion

This article assesses Alexander Pope's sense of history and proposes further grounds for his turn from celebratory to cautionary modes of historical writing. Having surveyed Pope's reading in history, and considered his poetry as a form of historical writing, the article focuses on the question of faction as a cause of historical change, and studies Pope's relationship with Francis Atterbury, the bishop of Rochester who was exiled for his part in a Jacobite plot, in this light. Pope admired Atterbury but also felt anxiety about his relationship to him. That anxiety is evident in an episode in Pope's reading, when he annotates a printed copy of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion with variant readings from a currently unidentifiable manuscript. The comparison of printed and manuscript texts was undertaken in the light of the Whig historian John Oldmixon's accusations that Atterbury tampered with Clarendon's manuscript for political (Jacobite) purposes. The article concludes by suggesting that the long recognized ambivalence of Pope's attitudes in The Dunciad might be connected to his own later doubts about the claims of his early political allies to occupy a patriotic position beyond faction.