On the 1st March 1710, a furious mob of around 3000 Londoners went on the rampage around the Temple area of the capital. Fuelled by copious amounts of alcohol, much of it extorted out of nervous by-passers eager for the angry rioters to leave them alone, the crowd filled the chilly evening air around Fleet Street and the Strand with stentorian roars of “High Church and Sacheverell!”.
But they had much more than guzzling ale and shouting slogans on their mind. They were heading to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the residence of many wealthy lawyers. Their target was a Presbyterian meeting house which attended to the spiritual needs of many of London’s prosperous professional and commercial elite, who found the services of the Church of England too redolent of Popery for their taste. The minister of this meeting house, Daniel Burgess, was one of London’s most prominent Dissenting preachers.
What was striking about their assault on this unfortunate “conventicle” was its thoroughness. They didn’t just burn it down or smash the windows: they literally deconstructed it, piece by piece. Every stone, floor-board and wooden seat was wrenched out of place and flung onto a huge pile on the street outside, which was then set alight. Soon, this mound of debris had become an enormous bonfire. The meeting-house was not merely a wreck: soon, it had simply ceased to exist at all.
They weren’t done yet. Before the night was out, several other religious meeting places — all associated with prominent Protestant Dissenters — had been treated similarly. Only when Queen Anne allowed her personal guard to intervene, much to the embarrassment of her Whig ministers who were terrified at the prospect of leaving her unprotected, was the disorder bought under control, and just in time: by the point at which the forces of law and order intervened, the mob had begun to head for the headquarters of the Bank of England and the personal residences of various senior government figures. They seemed to be intent on literally burning down the British political and financial establishment. Quelled by the Queen’s forces, however, by 3am, an uneasy quiet had descended.
What had caused such an extraordinary orgy of vandalism and disorder?
The short answer to this was the trial of a Church of England clergyman and fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, for “high crimes and misdemeanours”. His name was Dr Henry Sacheverell.
Sacheverell was the highest of High Churchmen. He was convinced that the Church of England, the true catholic, apostolic church of the nation and the holy guarantor not only of men’s eternal souls but civil order and state legitimacy, was in mortal danger. In a particularly notorious sermon preached on 5 November 1709, entitled “In Perils Among False Brethren”, he had argued that an unholy alliance of dissolute quasi-atheistical Whigs, urbane “broad-church” traitors and wild “schismaticks” was plotting to overturn the church, and with it all government and order.
The “schismaticks” were Protestant Dissenters, the more radical and individualistic wing of English Protestantism who had been finally ejected from the Church of England in the early 1660s. Sacheverell was convinced that the church — as his party, the Tories, had been insisting for some years — was “in danger” from these traitors. The result of the triumph of Dissent and its political allies — the Whigs — would be not only a reign of vice and impiety, but also civil war and anarchy: the Dissenters were the heirs to the Puritan radicals responsible for the “Great Rebellion” of the 1640s and the outrage of the murder of Charles I, and 1641 may come again. Sacheverell was noticeably lukewarm (to say the least) about the event that in his mind had allowed all this to happen: the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
The fact that Sacheverell was a notorious, over-weening bully and preening, self-serving blaggart — one of his political allies described him as “ignorant and wine-soaked”, and an “utterly wicked mountebank” — was, in the event, neither here nor there. The decision by the Whig-dominated government to prosecute him for this sermon ended up back-firing and catapulting the splenetic doctor to the status of national hero and martyr for the Church. It would result in the fall of the government and in time it changed the course of European history: the Tory administration that came to power on the coat-tails of Sacheverell would soon end the War of the Spanish Succession in controversial circumstances.
What the extraordinary incident of the Sacheverell trial and riots also demonstrated, however, was the viciousness of the political partisanship and its associated culture war in the late Stuart period.
So far as the Tories were concerned, the Glorious Revolution, when James II had been kicked out and Dutchman William of Orange had replaced him as William III, had heralded the rule of an unholy alliance of dastardly religious radicals, rascally foreigners, and thieving bankers. The old authoritative guarantors of English national cohesion and morality — the Church, the land-owning squires and the pre-revolutionary monarchy — had been undermined and traduced under the new political order. William’s Dutch cronies; a novel breed of money-men who lent money to the newly founded Bank of England to fund William’s wars against the French; the corrupt military class who fought those wars; and the Dissenters: these were the progressive forces that were undermining the very moral fibre of “Old England”. Their views changed only a little when Queen Anne, who was at least a churchwoman, replaced William as monarch.
Meanwhile, the Whigs saw the Tories as mad reactionary bigots: drunken, fox-hunting ruddy-faced “deplorables” who would take the country back to a benighted era of religious intolerance, under the aegis of the High Church elements of the Church of England, and bone-headed political authoritarianism, under the rule of the spluttering squires and, perhaps, a restored Stuart monarch (they loved to paint the Tories as Jacobites who wanted to collude with the national enemy, France, to install the “Pretender” on the throne).
What might be instructive to recall is that the tensions of this cultural and political war did not last
Dr Sacheverell’s prosecution had raised fears that a broad Whig assault on the Church was nigh, and the Tories and the good doctor himself, who was a genius at PR (he rode to his trial in a transparent carriage made of glass and sat for a new “mezzotint” portrait that was soon distributed around London in its thousands and made him an unlikely High Church sex symbol), exploited this ruthlessly. Sacheverell gave the performance of his life at his trial, presenting himself as an innocent martyr for the holy religion of Christ, smeared and traduced by rakehell Whigs.
Many believed him, and although there were definite elements of the crazed conspiracy theory in his famous sermon, he tapped into some fundamental underlying realities about the politics of the era. The Whigs, keen to protect the Glorious Revolution settlement at any cost and wage war against the French to make a Jacobite restoration by force of Gallic arms impossible, had become increasingly unpopular in the country by 1710. Both the poor and the landed gentlemen groaned under the weight of high taxes, taxes used largely to pay the interest on a mounting national debt that flowed into the pockets of unpopular financiers and even foreign investors. The Dissenters, who had gravitated disproportionately to banking, were as a result particularly hated: they were already an unpopular minority in a still largely rural country in which the parson and squire still enjoyed much prestige and authority, and their involvement in high finance only made things worse.
As a result, once Sacheverell, despite having technically been found guilty at his trial, was widely seen as vindicated (he was given a nugatory sentence), the country exploded in pro-Church, pro-Tory sentiment. Sacheverell toured the country in summer 1710 and was lauded wherever he went. There were further anti-Dissenting riots in the provinces, and when the good Doctor appeared on his almost royal “progress” around England and Wales, crowds cheered him, gunshots were fired in his honour and feasts held to celebrate his triumph. From Wrexham to London, Preston to Shrewsbury, the country rang with cheers for “Sacheverell and the Church!”. In the resulting General Election, the Whigs were all but wiped out in a colossal Tory landslide.
It is perhaps unnecessary to excessively labour the contemporary comparisons that come to mind. It seems obvious that the modern day culture-war divide, between stout provincial patriots and sophisticated urban cosmopolitans — the “Somewheres and Anywheres” of David Goodhart’s characterisation — map rather well, albeit in a more secular register, onto the late Stuart divide between Tory and Whig.
Just as Tories then feared that new, destabilising forces, often from outside, were making the “Old England” they venerated unrecognisable and undermining national cohesion, so too now are many voters turning to Reform due to their fear that something similar is happening under the guise of immigration and multiculturalism. Just as Whigs then yearned for a more polished, “polite” society in which old patriotic and religious prejudices would fade and Britain would take its place in the counsels of Europe, so too now do Guardian-reading (or New York Times-reading) progressives wish that populist reaction would disappear and cosmopolitan rationality and benevolent humanitarianism prevail. In 1709, there was even an anti-immigration scare in which the Whigs supported the economic benefits of waves of refugees coming to England from Germany, and Tories opposed the strains placed on the country by a wave of destitute foreigners coming over on small boats.
In short, although the caricatures have changed — from gouty fox-hunting squire to beer-swilling England flag-waving “gammon”, from urbane (possibly effete) Dissenting banker to pink-haired gender-fluid Palestine flag-waving purveyor of “woke tosh” — the echoes are clearly there.
What might be instructive to recall is that the tensions of this cultural and political war, which reached perhaps their highest pitch of intensity and partisan hatred in the 1710-1714 period, did not last. Partly this was because one side, buttressed by the support of a new royal dynasty — that is, the Whigs — eventually won. But the type of Whiggery that won solidified its position so comprehensively in large part because it compromised.
By 1722, eight years after the accession of George III had heralded a dawning era of Whig supremacy, Robert Walpole had climbed the greasy pole to the top of the new regime and stayed there for 20 years. But Walpole, who had been one of the Whig lawyers at Sacheverell’s trial, never forgot the Sacheverell riots. He never forgot the hatred that expensive wars and perceived assaults on the Church of England had stirred in the country against his political party. As a result, although his premiership was a shop-soiled, ruthlessly pragmatic affair, it went to considerable lengths not to tweak the tail of the Tory tiger, even though the Tories as a governing political force were finished. He stayed out of foreign wars until the end of his reign, he kept taxes low, and he was incredibly cautious about the Church: the last thing he wanted was to provoke Tory Churchmen and popular anti-Whig fury again.
The Tory-Whig culture war, in other words, faded (although it would recur in later periods in mutated forms) because of something of a compromise brokered by a pragmatic and unromantic man who tamed the economic tensions that partly underpinned the culture war while also reining in the more extreme outriders of his own side.
I am no Whig, but wearied by our current discontents I find myself increasingly wondering: is it too much to hope for something similar now?
George Owers’s first book, The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain, is published on 4 September
