which, he declaimed against the dissenters, and in favour of nonresistance, with great intemperance, declaring all who favoured the one or opposed the other false brethren, from whose hollow friendship the most fatal dangers were to be apprehended.

These hollow harangues, of which it would be difficult to determine whether imbecility or absurdity were the predominating qualities, met with the entire approbation of the tories, and were with all convenient speed issued from the press, the first, under the title of The Communion of Sin, with a seditious dedication to George Sacheveral, a relation of his own, and at the time high sheriff of Derbyshire, through whose influence he had obtained the honour of preaching it before the assize at Derby; the latter, under the title of The Perils of False Brethren, dedicated to Sir Samuel Garrard, at that time lord mayor of London. Like many other trifles favoured by circumstances, they obtained, especially the last, a prodigious circulation, upwards of forty thousand copies being called for in the space of a few days, and, inane and foolish as they were, as if they had contained the essence of theological and political wisdom, literally absorbed, for a time, the attention of the whole British nation.

Though dignified with the appellation of sermons, these compositions were neither more nor less than paltry libels upon the constitution and the existing government of the country-were probably intended as such by their author, and, as such, were understood and patronised by their myriad host of admirers, and could not, perhaps, with propriety have been entirely overlooked by the guardians of the public tranquillity-but the manner in which they were noticed was imprudent and impolitic, tending to magnify that which folly and frenzy had already invested with extraordinary dimensions, and which, left to itself, had speedily shrunk into its native insignificancy. They were unfortunately complained of in the house of commons, where they were declared to be scandalous and seditious libels, and the author ordered to be brought to the bar of the house.

When brought before the house, the doctor boldly avowed

himself author of the publications complained of, without offering either apology or recantation. He was immediately ordered into custody, and it was resolved to impeach him at the bar of the house of lords, in the name of the commons of England. This unlucky determination at once converted, in the estimation of the vulgar who were opposed to him, an ignorant, railing, fanatic--who, if noticed at all, ought to have been sent to St. Luke's, or for a few weeks to the house of correction-into an offender of the highest rank and character, whose crimes it required the concentrated wisdom of the nation to appreciate, and all its authority, put forth in the most imposing form, to punish; but, in the estimation of his own party, which included papists and semipapists, Jacobites, and tories of every description, it exalted him into a saint of the first magnitude, whose martyrdom, effected by this parade of authority without law, was to be only precursory to the downfal of the church, and the subversion of all that had hitherto been accounted regular or legal authority. Sacheveral and the church became at once convertible terms, and prayers for the deliverance of the one, in public and in private, were unblushingly offered up, as including the prosperity and the perpetuity of the other.*

Many of the leading tories had sense enough secretly to despise this puerile species of blasphemy, for they knew the man, and his morals were not more exalted than his genius,† but they prompted it by every possible mean, expecting that in the issue the profit would be all their own, and for this purpose, the long interval that necessarily elapsed before his trial could be brought on afforded them peculiar facilities.

The doctor was impeached and taken into custody on the fourteenth of December, and the christmas holidays intervening, the articles of impeachment were postponed till the ninth of January following. The commons having voted that a committee of the whole house should attend the trial, a new delay became necessary till Westminster hall should be fitted

* Sommerville's History of Great Britain during the reign of queen Anne. + That Sacheveral was held in great contempt by the tory ministers, notwithstanding the services he had done them, we learn from Swift's Journal. "He hates,” says this caustic observer," the new ministers mortally, and they hate him, and pretend to despise him too."

up for their reception, so that the trial did not commence till the end of February 1710, and by that time the faction had so well employed their time, and so completely perverted public feeling, that it was perfectly evident no salutary effect could follow the trial, whatever way it might be determined. That gluttonous festivity, at all times characteristic of those days, which, in England, by an abuse of language, are denominated holy, was on this occasion more than ordinarily conspicuous, and was artfully employed as fuel to the fires of faction and fanatic zeal, the glare and heat of which had already blinded the understandings and hardened the hearts of many who were otherwise neither unreasonable nor unfeeling. It was at the tables of the great, under the pretence of honouring him whose whole life on earth was one continued example of meekness, and patience, and love, where the zealots of superstition, amid the shameful spewing of riotous excess, were imboldened still farther to disgrace the sacred office with which they had been invested, and to degrade their pulpits, by continuing to be the almost undisguised advocates of lawless riot, of robbery, and murder. The doctor's answer to the charges of impeachment, sophistical and false, but at the same time subtile and insinuating, evidently the work of much abler pens than his own, were also handed about in manuscript, read and received in such a manner in all circles, long before the commencement of the trial, as scarcely to leave the issue doubtful.

The preparations being at last completed, the trial commenced on the twenty-seventh of February, and occupied no less than three weeks. The managers on the part of the prosecution were Sir John Holland, comptroller of her majesty's household, Mr. Secretary Boyle, Mr. Smith, chancellor of the exchequer, Sir James Montague, attorney-general, Robert Eyre, solicitor-general, Robert Walpole, treasurer of the navy, Sir Joseph Jekyl, Mr. Lechmore, Mr. Dolben, Sir Thomas Parker, Sir Peter King, recorder of the city of London, Sir John Hollis, lord William Powlet, lord Coningsby, Mr. Cowper, Mr.

• "The leaders of opposition courted the company of the zealots, invited them to their tables, and by their attention and hospitality during the season of festivity, too much fomented that effrontery of licentiousness which disgraced the nation." Cunningham's History, &c. vol ii. p. 285.

Thomson, lieutenant-general Mordaunt, Mr. Compton, and Sir David Dalrymple. Dr. Sacheveral had for his counsel Sir Simon Harcourt, Mr. Dodd, Mr. Phipps, Mr. Dee, and Mr. Henchman; and he was assisted by Dr. Atterbury, Dr. Moss, and Dr. Smallridge, to whose superior abilities his speech was undoubtedly indebted for much of its effect." His really effective defence, however, lay in the mighty mob of England, which attended him every day to and from Westminster hall, where the trial took place, striving, as if he had been a sovereign prince, who should have the honour of kissing his hands, and, as if he had been a martyr and confessor, praying for his deliverance. The queen herself attended every day, and her sedan was beset by the mob, with cries of "God bless your majesty and the church, we hope your majesty is for Dr. Sacheveral." They compelled all persons to uncover their heads as the doctor passed, and such members of the house as they supposed to be most inimical to him, they insulted with characteristic barbarity. In their intervals of leisure, when not employed around the person of their idol, they amused themselves by pulling down chapels, and plundering the dwelling houses of eminent dissenters. They even threatened those of the lord chancellor, the earl of Wharton, and the bishop of Sarum. In order to protect the bank, the directors were under the necessity of applying for a military force, and the second day of the trial the guards at Whitehall were doubled, and the train-bands of Westminster continued under arms till it was concluded.+

The commons addressed the queen, praying her to take effectual means to suppress these tumults, "set on foot by papists, nonjurors, and other enemies to her majesty's title and government." She, in return, issued a proclamation, expressing

66

a deep sense of their care and concern, as well as a just resentment at these violent proceedings." In an address of thanks to her majesty for her gracious answer to their first proremonstrance, they took occasion to declare that their " secution of Dr. Henry Sacheveral proceeded solely from the

* Sommerville's History of Great Britain during the reign of queen Anne,

p. 337. Supplement to the History of queen Anne, p. 69.

+ Smollet's History of Great Britain. Sommerville's History, &c.

indispensable obligation they lay under to vindicate the late happy revolution, the glory of their royal deliverer, her own title and administration, the present establishment and protestant succession, together with toleration and the quiet of the government." These plain truths, however, were evidently much less palatable to her majesty than the undefined and dangerous dogmas of Dr. Sacheveral, who was all the time of his trial surrounded by her own chaplains, who encouraged and extolled him as the champion of the church, and when two of the leading rioters were convicted and condemned for high treason, she reprieved them both. The advocates of these degrading doctrines are, indeed, the worst enemies of royalty; but the doctrines themselves are so congenial to the darkened understanding and the corrupted heart of man, when clothed with a little brief authority, that there is always danger of their being acceptable to him in such circumstances, especially when we consider that to perceive their native tendency requires so much good sense and such a degree of reflection, as can scarcely be at all times exercised amid the blandishments of a court, and beneath the distracting cares of a crown.

The charges against the doctor were comprised in four articles, namely:-maintaining that the means used for bringing about the revolution were unjustifiable-that the toleration of dissenters was unwarrantable-that under the queen's administration the church of England was in great peril—that there were persons in office whose aim was the destruction of the constitution, while, through the whole system of affairs, there was a general male-administration and corruption. These charges were supported with great eloquence and much force of argument, in which the liberal principles of the constitution were luminously unfolded and applied to the defence of the revolution and the Hanoverian succession. Into this field, however, the doctor and his defenders did not choose to enter. They admitted, though at the expense of consistency and truth, most explicitly all the propositions advanced by his accusers relative to the constitution, together with the necessity and justice of the revolution, confining their replies, which were of the most thin and sophistical character, merely to disproving the application of the sermons to the articles charged in the