Hoadly the high and Sacheverell the low: religious and political celebrity in post-revolutionary England

Henry Sacheverell and Benjamin Hoadly were contemporaries whose lives and reputations were curiously intertwined throughout the early eighteenth century. Both became well-known clergymen in Queen Anne’s reign as vociferous defenders of the Tory and Whig parties respectively, and both became celebrities as a result of their public partisanship and particularly through the practice of preaching. Sacheverell’s sermon in St Paul’s cathedral on 5 November 1709 provoked a parliamentary trial for impeachment that dominated the political scene in 1710 and resulted in the collapse of the Whig government later in that year. Similarly, Hoadly’s court sermon in 1717 on ‘The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ’ provoked a massive debate in the press and the pulpits that brought about the cancellation of convocations of the clergy by the Hanoverian Crown. The public personalities and the preaching of both Sacheverell and Hoadly shaped the politics of early eighteenth-century England. This chapter compares the public images of Sacheverell and Hoadly in order to develop an understanding of the history of celebrity, understood as the status product of particular practices of partisan publicity, including preaching. Partisanship shaped the early history of celebrity in England after the Glorious Revolution, and this can be seen most clearly through studying the ways in which partisan clergymen such as Sacheverell and Hoadly used the new politics of the public sphere to generate interest in their personalities as well as their causes. Modern celebrity was in large part the product of practices of publicity in early modern England.