ABSTRACT
An extract of two cantos from a fifteen-book Hudibrastic satire on coffee-house politics during the Sacheverell Crisis of 1710. Written by the Tory satirist Ned Ward (see above, pp. 259–60), the poem satirises the close allegiance between the culture of print, the coffee-houses and the Whig political interest. The crisis began when the Church of England clergyman Henry Sacheverell (1674–724) preached and published two sermons in November 1709 attacking the Whig ministry for neglecting the interests of the Anglican church. When he was prosecuted for ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’, Tory politicians detected that political mileage could be gained. His trial, between 27 February and 23 March 1710, was a grand spectacle in Westminster Hall, and although he was found guilty, his sentence was very slight (he was banned from preaching for three years, and the two sermons were burned by the hangman). Throughout the crisis and trial, celebrations by the mob were enthusiastic and destructive, particularly of Dissenting chapels and residences. The Sacheverell Riots were unusual in that the mob was rioting against Parliament and the Whigs in defence of ideals defined and elaborated by High-Church Tories. The irony of such a church mob was that it reversed the conventional Whig rhetoric that their political authority came from the people. Coffee-houses, in Ward’s estimation, are the natural home of Low-Church Whigs, whom he portrays as plotting over books by Benjamin Hoadley, Daniel Defoe and others. The best account of the Sacheverell crisis is Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London, Eyre Methuen, 1973).
