Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich

by Thomas Levenson

On November 5, 1709, Henry Sacheverell, a clergyman with a loathing for any lapse in orthodoxy, climbed the curving stair leading to the pulpit in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Brimstone showered down, a vicious condemnation of lapses within the Church of England. The sermon was later printed under the title The Perils of False Brethren in Church and State and was immediately understood as an attack on the doctrinally squishy Whigs. Following a second, even more incendiary sermon three weeks later, Godolphin’s Whigs brought him to trial in the House of Commons, convicted him, ordered his sermons burnt at the Royal Exchange, and barred him from the clergy for three years. These were profoundly stupid moves. Sacheverell became an instant martyr and, given the affiliation of those who’d opposed him, a hero to the Tory cause.