Sacheverell's famous sermon was one he had delivered as long ago as 1705 at St Mary's, Oxford, at the height of the High Church revanche. There were, however, important differences. For one thing, this was at the height of the Whig revanche; for another, he was not now addressing a sympathetic flock of parsons and pedagogues in a university noted for its old-fashioned orthodoxy, but the governing body of the nation's capital. It is still not established whether the Lord Mayor invited him to print it, but whether or not, it sold in alarming numbers.

The body of the sermon was commonplace enough: the usual studied rant against the Toleration Act, against occasional conformity and against the Dissenters in general, pictured as the heirs of the regicides. It was more serious that he took up, or simply repeated, the outcry of 1705, and accused the government of being infiltrated by the professed enemies of the church, forming a kind of Presbyterian fifth column. The reference to these men as ‘wily Volpones’ is supposed to have swayed the judgment of Lord Treasurer Godolphin, but this would be strange in a man often likened in the public prints to Judas, ‘the apostle who carried the purse’.

In fact, though Sacheverell's attitude to Dissent was taken up in the subsequent impeachment, there was never any doubt that the gravamen of the charge against him rested on his interpretation of the Revolution of 1688; and here it was important that his words were uttered on the solemn anniversary of William III's landing at Torbay.