ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY use by Dissenters led to a further distinction, the Tory and High Church party becoming associated with stricter sacramental teaching and, as they boasted, with closer observance of the rubrics than the Low Church and Whig clergy."^ The Upper and Lower Houses of Convocation were in continual opposition from 1701, when the Dean of Salisbury defeated Beveridge at the election of a prolocutor/" The struggle on lay baptism "^ was followed in 1705 by a request from the Lower House that the bishops would censure Benjamin Hoadly,^*" rector of St. Peter le Poer and the lead- ing Whig clergyman in the City, who had upheld the right of resistance in a sermon preached before the lord mayor at St. Laurence Jewry on 29 Sep- tember. A previous sermon of Hoadly's had been violently attacked '^^ by the High Church party, who replied to his Measure of Submission with the Memorial of the Church of Eng/and^^^ ' declaring the Whigs' designs for the destruction of the Church of England.' It made a great sensation, ^^^ and was presented as a dangerous libel by the grand jury of the City, and ordered to be burnt at the Old Bailey and before the Royal Exchange.^'* Two years later an unattached clergyman named Higgins raised the cry of ' The Church in Danger,' but had not sufficient influence to do more than create a sensation.^" Yet it was evident that church feeling in London was strongly against the government, and this was backed by the general dislike of the war. At a time when party sentiment ran high the churches took the place of the public meeting of the present day. The storm burst on 5 November 1709 when Dr. Henry Sacheverell, fellow of Magdalen and chaplain of St. Sa- viour's Southwark, preached before the lord mayor at St. Paul's a sermon on ' Perils from false Brethren ' ^** which had already created some sensation in Oxford. The violence of the attack led to the aldermen refusing to make the customary request for the publication of the sermon,^" which was, how- ever, printed immediately,^*^ to the dismay of the House of Commons. Disregarding the state of popular opinion the ministers decided to impeach Sacheverell at the bar of the House of Lords. '^' The sentiment of the mob was apparent in the crowds which accompanied Sacheverell daily to trial ; ^^ the views of the clergy were demonstrated by the prayers offered for him by name at St. Bride's ^" and Whitehall, where the reader was dismissed in con- sequence,^ and other London churches ; the trial was the one topic in all conversation. ^^^ Sacheverell's sentence of three years' suspension from preach- ing was treated by the Tories as a victory, and was the signal for the lighting of bonfires ^** and rioting in the City, where Mr. Burgess's meeting-house was ransacked,^'^ the houses of Hoadly, Dolben, Burnet, and other Low Church- '" Drake, Mem. ofCh. oj Engl. 16. '" Calaray, Abridgement of Baxter's Life, &c. (1713), i, 613. '" Calamy, Hist. Acct. of my own Life, ii, 237. '^ Wilkins, Concilia, iv, 633-4. "' Hoadly, The Measure of Submission, 172-3 ; Calamy, Abridgement, &c. i, 691. '" Drake, op. cit. 14, &c. '*' Reliquiae Hearnianae, i, 2. '** Calamy, op. cit. i, 681-2. '" Ibid, i, 709. He preached nine sermons at the New Chapel and St. Margaret's Westminster ; at St. Bride's ; before the Archbishop of Canterbury ; at St. Clement D.mes, St. George's Queen's Square, St. Anne's Westminster, Whitechapel, and Whitehall; see The Ch. of Engl, not in Danger (B.M. Pressmark 4106, aa, 3 no. 1). "^ Reliquiae Hearnianae, i, 1 69. '*' Rec. Corp. Repert. cxiv, fol. i 3. "' Reliquiae Hearnianae, , 178. '*' Lecky, op. cit. i, 52. "° Reliquiae Hearnianae, i, 181, 187. '" Ibid. 185. '" Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi, 553. "' What will it Come to ? (B.M. Pressmark 10350, g, i 2, no. i 5.) '" Reliquiae Hearnianae, , 190. "^ Luttrell, op. cit. vi, 551.
