page_title: Henry Sacheverell
section_title: The Perils of False Brethren
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Sacheverell / The Perils of False Brethren
caption_attribution_description: Sidney Godolphin, 1st Earl of Godolphin, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt (died 1723). See source website for additional information. This set of images was gathered by User:Dcoetzee from the National Portrait Gallery, London website using a special tool. All images in this batch have been confirmed as author died before 1939 according to the official death date listed by the NPG.
context_page_description: Henry Sacheverell was an English high church Anglican clergyman who achieved nationwide fame in 1709 after preaching an incendiary 5 November sermon. He was subsequently impeached by the House of Commons and though he was found guilty, his light punishment was seen as a vindication and he became a popular figure in the country, contributing to the Tories' landslide victory at the general election of 1710.
context_section_description: The new Lord Mayor of London, Sir Samuel Garrard, 4th Baronet, was a zealous Tory and it was his responsibility to appoint the preacher for the annual 5 November sermon to the City Fathers at St Paul's Cathedral to commemorate the failure of the Gunpowder Plot. Garrard later claimed no acquaintance with Sacheverell, knowing him only by reputation. Whigs later claimed that Sacheverell was hired as a tool of the Tory party to deliver the sermon. The historian Geoffrey Holmes claims there is no evidence for this as Sacheverell's papers were destroyed after his death but that it was in Sacheverell's character to deliver the sermon off his own back.
  Sacheverell's audience included thirty clergymen and a large number of Jacobites and Nonjurors. Prior to the sermon, prayers and hymns were delivered. A witness saw Sacheverell, sitting with the clergy, working himself up into an angry mood, describing "the fiery red that overspread his face...and the goggling wildness of his eyes...he came into the pulpit like a Sybil to the mouth of her cave". The title of his sermon, The Perils of False Brethren, in Church, and State, derived from 2 Corinthians 11:26.
  The 5 November was an important day in the Whig calendar, both the day of the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605 and William of Orange's landing at Torbay on 5 November 1688. Whigs claimed both these days as a double deliverance from "popery". Sacheverell compared the Gunpowder Plot not to 1688 but to the date of the execution of Charles I, 30 January 1649. Sacheverell claimed that these two events demonstrated the "rage and bloodthirstiness of both the popish and fanatick enemies of our Church and Government...These TWO DAYS indeed are but one united proof and visible testimonial of the same dangerous and rebellious principles these confederates in iniquity maintain". The threat to the Church from Catholics was dealt with in three minutes; the rest of the one-and-a-half-hour sermon was an attack on Dissenters and the "false brethren" who aided them in menacing church and state. He claimed that the Church of England resembled the Church of Corinth in St Paul's days: "her holy communion...rent and divided by factious and schismatical impostors; her pure doctrine...corrupted and defiled; her primitive worship and discipline profaned and abused; her sacred orders denied and vilified; her priests and professors (like St Paul) calumniated, misrepresented and ridiculed; her altars and sacraments prostituted to hypocrites, Deists, Socinians and atheists".
  Sacheverell identified the false brethren in the Church as those who promoted heretical views, such as Unitarians and those who would revise the Church's official articles of faith, and those who presumed "to recede the least tittle from the express word of God, or to explain the great credenda of our Faith in new-fangled terms of modern philosophy". Then there those who wanted to change the worship of the Church, the latitudinarians who promoted toleration and denied that schism was sinful, taking "all occasions to comply with the dissenters both in public and private affairs, as persons of tender consciences and piety". The false brethren in state Sacheverell saw as those who denied "the steady belief in the subject's obligation to absolute and unconditional Obedience to the Supreme Power in all things lawful, and the utter illegality of Resistance upon any pretence whatsoever": "Our adversaries think they effectually stop our mouths, and have us sure and unanswerable on this point, when they urge the revolution of this day in their defence. But certainly they are the greatest enemies of that, and his late Majesty, and the most ungrateful for the deliverance, who endeavour to cast such black and odious colours upon both". He attacked Dissenting academies as places where "all the Hellish principles of fanaticism, regicide and anarchy are openly professed and taught" and attacked Occasional Conformity as giving disloyal elements bases of official power.
  These false brethren were working to "weaken, undermine and betray in themselves, and
caption: Sidney Godolphin, whom Sacheverell lampooned as "Volpone".
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