Much of the London political public probably first got the news of the Hanoverian Succession while they were in church on a Sunday morning, 1 August 1714, or soon after. On that day, at least one clergyman, the Congregational minister Thomas Bradbury received the news as he was delivering his sermon, by means of a falling handkerchief dropped from the gallery balcony of Fetter Lane Chapel. Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury, had arranged the handkerchiefdrop as a sign to Bradbury that Queen Anne, her health long deteriorating, had finally died. In his subsequent prayer, Bradbury invoked God's blessing on George I and the house of Hanover and asked for a reading of the 89th Psalm about the covenanted choice of King David to rule Israel, a psalm which also gave thanks for divine mercy.

The novelty and innovation with which the Hanoverian Succession was defended in the pulpit problematises the conventional vision of the events of 1714–16 as chiefly backwards-facing, a conservative reaffirmation of the so-called ‘revolution principles’ associated with the Glorious Revolution, ratifying and confirming rather than venturing beyond the perceived gains made in 1689. This chapter seeks to explore the ways in which Hanoverian preaching during and immediately following the coming of the house of Brunswick signals the emergence of a new political culture of pro-Georgian loyalism markedly distinct from the rhetoric of allegiance that attended the coming of William and Mary a quarter-century earlier.

In both 1688–90 and 1714–16, revolution in England and Scotland was both explained and mediated by political sermons. In the absence of a coherent top-down state propaganda or audio media in this period, the sermon was one of the only ways for a message to be disseminated on a national level. The civic sermon can even be seen as one of the origins of British political broadcasting.4 Unlike the coffeehouse, which was chiefly a fashionable or at least middlingsort urban phenomenon and required a modicum of money for participation, the church was free, and existed at the level of small towns and isolated rural districts.

In this chapter, I use the surviving corpus of published political sermons from this period, and a prosopography of the preachers, as evidence of massmedia discussion of the Hanoverian Succession of 1714.