The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell's Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Henry Sacheverell's speech in his own defence on the eighth day of his parliamentary trial (9 March 1710) was, by all accounts, a show‐stopping performance. The speech was an effective political performance at a show trial originally designed to condemn the principles he had enunciated in his controversial 1709 sermons at Derby and St Paul's Cathedral. Sacheverell avoided any forthright or elaborate defence of his beliefs with regard to the legitimacy of resistance during the Glorious Revolution in order to appear humble, orthodox, and loyal to the queen and to the protestant succession. As such, he presented himself as a sort of living martyr for the high church cause. While this strategy was itself deeply controversial, it was also rather successful in spinning the debate from one about ‘revolution principles’ to one about the persecution of a loyal clergyman. In order to understand the form, the effectiveness and the purpose of Sacheverell's trial speech, one must take its pathetic form and its widespread distribution, both in print and manuscript reports, into account. The sympathy garnered for Sacheverell due to his speech was a public relations success for the tory cause in the short run, but it also entailed a solid commitment to the Hanoverian succession that remained deeply controversial within high church circles.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".