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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".