Dr Francis, son of Dr Lewis Atterbury, was born at Milton in Buckinghamshire, in 1662; educated at Westminster; and thereafter elected to Christ Church in Oxford, where he soon distinguished himself by his fine genius and taste for polite literature. In 1687 he was made M.A., when he exerted himself in the controversy with the papists; vindicated Luther in the strongest manner; and showed an uncommon fund of learning, enlivened with great vivacity. In 1690 he married Miss Osborn, a distant relation of the duke of Leeds, and a lady of great beauty, but of small fortune.

In February 1690 and 1691 we find him resolved to "bestir himself in his office in the house," that of censor probably; an officer peculiar to Christ Church, who presides over the classical exercises. At the same time he held the catechetical lecture founded by Dr Busby.

It must have been about this period that he took orders, and entered upon another scene and another sort of conversation; for in 1691 he was elected lecturer of St Bride's Church in London, and preacher at Bridewell Chapel. An academic life, indeed, must have been irksome and insipid to a person of his active and aspiring temper. It was hardly possible that a clergyman of his fine genius, improved by study, and with a spirit to exert his talents, should remain long unnoticed; and accordingly we find that he was soon appointed chaplain to King William and Queen Mary.

The share which he took in the controversy with Bentley, about the genuineness of Phalaris's epistles, is now very clearly ascertained. In one of the letters to his noble pupil, dated Chelsea 1698, he says, the matter had cost him some time and trouble. "In laying the design of the book, in writing above half of it, in reviewing a good part of the rest, in transcribing the whole, and attending the press," he adds, "half a year of my life went away."

In 1700 a still larger field of activity opened, in which Atterbury was engaged four years with Dr Wake (afterwards archbishop of Canterbury) and others concerning the rights, powers, and privileges of convocations; an investigation in which, however the truth of the question may be supposed to lie, he displayed so much learning and ingenuity, as well as zeal for the interests of his order, that the lower house of convocation returned him their thanks, and the university of Oxford complimented him with the degree of D.D. On the 29th January 1700 he was installed archdeacon of Totness, being promoted to that dignity by Sir Jonathan Trelawney, then bishop of Exeter. The same year he was engaged, with some other learned divines, in revising an intended edition of the Greek Testament, with Greek scholia, collected chiefly from the fathers by Mr Archdeacon Gregory. At this period he was very popular as preacher at the Rolls Chapel; an office which had been conferred on him by Sir John Trevor, a great discerner of abilities, in 1698, when he resigned Bridewell, which he had obtained in 1693. Upon the accession of Queen Anne in 1702, Dr Atterbury was appointed one of her majesty's chaplains in ordinary; and in October 1704 he was advanced to the deanery of Carlisle. About two years after this he was engaged in a dispute with Mr Hoadly concerning the advantages of virtue with regard to the present life, occasioned by his sermon preached 30th August 1706, at the funeral of Mr Thomas Bennet, a bookseller. In 1707 Sir Jonathan Trelawney, then bishop of Exeter, appointed him one of the canons residentiaries of that church. In 1709 he engaged in a fresh dispute with Mr Hoadly concerning the doctrine of passive obedience, occasioned by his Latin sermon, entitled Concio ad Clerum Londinensem, habita in Ecclesia S. Elphigi. In 1710 came on the famous trial of Dr Sacheverell, whose remarkable speech on that occasion was generally supposed to have been drawn up by our author, in conjunction with Dr Smalridge and Dr Freind. The same year Dr Atterbury was unanimously chosen prolocutor of the lower house of convocation, and had the chief management of affairs in that house. On the 11th May 1711 he was appointed by the convocation one of the committee for comparing Mr Whiston's doctrines with those of the church of England; and in June following he had the chief hand in drawing up A Representation of the Present State of Religion. In 1712 Dr Atterbury was made dean of Christ Church, notwithstanding the strong interest and warm applications of several great men in behalf of his competitor Dr Smalridge. The next year saw him at the summit of his preferment, as well as of his reputation; for, in the beginning of June 1713, the queen, on the recommendation of Lord Chancellor Harcourt, advanced him to the bishopric of Rochester, with the deanery of Westminster in commendam. He was confirmed on the 4th July, and consecrated at Lambeth the next day.

In the beginning of the succeeding reign his tide of prosperity began to turn; and he received a sensible mortification presently after the coronation of King George I., when, upon his offering to present to his majesty, with a view, no doubt, of standing better in his favour, the chair of state or royal canopy, his own perquisite as dean of Westminster, the tender was rejected, not without some evident marks of dislike to his person.

During the rebellion in Scotland, and after the Pretender's declaration had been widely distributed, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the bishops in or near London, drew up and published a Declaration of their abhorrence of the present Rebellion, and an Exhortation to the Clergy and People to be zealous in the discharge of their Duties to His Majesty King George; but the bishop of Rochester refused to sign it, and engaged Bishop Smalridge to join in the refusal, on account of some reflections it contained against the high church party. In fact he appeared generally among the protesters against the measures of the king's ministers, and for the most part drew up the reasons of the protests with his own hand.

In 1716 we find him advising Dean Swift in the management of a refractory chapter. On the 26th April 1722 he sustained a severe trial in the loss of his lady, by whom he had four children. In this memorable year, also, on a suspicion of his being concerned in a plot in favour of the Pretender, he was apprehended (24th August), and committed prisoner to the Tower. This commitment of a bishop upon suspicion of high treason, as it was a thing rarely practised since the Reformation, so it occasioned various speculations, which amused the nation at that time; and men, as usual, judged of things by the standard of their own affections and prejudices.

On the 23rd March 1723 a bill was brought into the house of commons for inflicting certain pains and penalties on Francis, Lord Bishop of Rochester, a copy of which was sent to him, with notice that he had liberty of counsel and solicitors for making his defence. Under these circumstances the bishop applied by petition to the house of lords for their direction and advice as to his conduct in this conjuncture; and on the 4th April he acquainted the speaker of the house of commons, by letter, that he was determined to give that house no trouble in relation to the bill depending therein, but should be ready to make his defence against it when it should be argued in another house, of which he had the honour to be a member. On the 9th the bill passed the house of commons, and was the same day sent up to the house of lords for their concurrence.

May the 6th being the day appointed by the lords for the first reading of the bill, Bishop Atterbury was brought to Westminster to make his defence. The proceedings continued above a week; and, on May the 11th, he was permitted to plead for himself. This he did in a very eloquent speech, which he feelingly opens by complaining of the uncommon severity he had experienced in the tower, and which had been carried to so great a length that not even his son-in-law Mr Morice was permitted to speak to him in any other way than by standing in an open area, whilst the bishop looked out of a two-pair-of-stairs window. On the 13th he was carried for the last time from the tower in order to hear the reply of the king's counsel to his defence. On the 15th the bill was read a third time, and, after a very long and warm debate, passed on the 16th by a majority of 83 to 43. On the 27th the king came to the house and confirmed it by his royal assent. On the 18th June 1723 this eminent prelate, having the day before taken leave of his friends, who, from the time of the passing of the bill against him till the day of his departure, had free access to him in the tower, embarked on board the Aldborough man-of-war, and landed the Friday following at Calais. When he went on shore, being informed that Lord Bolingbroke (who, after the rising of the parliament, had received the king's pardon), was arrived at the same place on his return to England, he said, with an air of pleasantry, "Then I am exchanged." And it was, in the opinion of Mr Pope expressed on the same occasion, a sign that the nation was afraid of being overrun with too much politeness, when it could not regain one great man but at the expense of another. The severity of the bishop's treatment did not cease with his banishment; the same vindictive spirit pursued him even in foreign climes; and no British subject was permitted to visit him without the king's sign manual, which Mr Morice was always obliged to solicit, not only for himself, but for every one of his family whom he carried abroad with him, for which the fees of office were very high.

When Bishop Atterbury first entered upon his banishment, Brussels was the place destined for his residence; but, by the arts and instigation of the British ministers, he was compelled to leave that city, and retire to Paris. There, being solicited by the friends of the Pretender to Atterbury, enter into their negotiations, he changed his abode for Montpelier in 1728; and after residing in the latter place about two years, returned to Paris, where he died on the 15th February 1732. The affliction which he had sustained by the death of his daughter in 1729 was thought to have hastened his own dissolution.

How far the bishop may have been attached by inclination to the cause of the Stuart family, to which he might have been led by early prejudices of education and the divided opinion of the times, it is not necessary here to inquire; but that he should have been weak enough to engage in a plot so inconsistent with his station, and so clumsily devised, to say nothing of his solemn asseveration of innocence, is utterly inconsistent with that cunning which his enemies ascribed to him. The duke of Wharton, it is well known, was violent against him, till convinced by his unanswerable reasoning.

His body was brought over to England, and interred in Westminster Abbey, in a vault which, in the year 1722, had been prepared by his directions. Some time before his death he published a vindication of himself, Bishop Smaridge, and Dr Aldrich, from a charge brought against them by Mr Oldmixon, of having altered and interpolated the copy of Lord Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. Atterbury's Sermons are extant in four volumes in octavo. Those contained in the first two were published by himself, and dedicated to his great patron Sir Jonathan Trelawney, bishop of Winchester; those contained in the last two were published after his death by Dr Thomas Moore, his lordship's chaplain. Four admirable Visitatio Charges accompany his Epistolary Correspondence, published by Mr Nichols in 5 vols. 8vo.

As to Bishop Atterbury's character, however differently the moral and political part of it may have been represented by the opposite parties, it is universally agreed that he was a man of great learning and uncommon abilities, a fine writer, and a most excellent preacher. His learned friend Smaridge, in the speech he made when he presented him to the upper house of convocation, as prolocutor, styled him Vir in nullo literarum genere hapse, in plerisque artibus et studiis diu et feliciter exercitatus, in maxime perfectis literarum disciplinis perfectissimus. In his controversial writings he was sometimes severe to excess upon his adversary, and dealt rather too much in satire and invective; but this his panegyrist imputes more to the natural fervour of his wit than to any bitterness of temper or inherent malice of disposition. In his sermons, however, he is not only every way unexceptionable, but highly to be commended. The truth is, his talent as a preacher was so excellent and remarkable, that it may not improperly be said that he owed his preferment to the pulpit. "He has," says an author in the Tatler, "so particular a regard to his congregation, that he commits to his memory what he has to say to them; and has so soft and graceful a behaviour, that it must attract your attention. His person, it is to be confessed, is no small recommendation; but he is to be highly commended for not losing that advantage, and adding to propriety of speech (which might pass the criticism of Longinus) an action which would have been approved by Demosthenes. He never attempts your passions till he has convinced your reason. All the objections which you can form are laid open and dispersed before he uses the least vehemence in his sermon; but when he thinks he has your head, he very soon wins your heart, and never pretends to show the beauty of holiness till he has convinced you of the truth of it."