Coronation riots

On 20 October, George was crowned at Westminster Abbey, but when his loyalists celebrated the coronation, they were disrupted by rioters in over twenty towns in the south and the west of England.

[1] The Tory aristocrats and gentry absented themselves from the coronation and in some towns they arrived with their supporters to disrupt the Hanoverian proceedings.

A Dissenting meeting-house in Dorchester was "insulted", and there many expressions for local Tories among the rioters; in Canterbury they shouted "Hardress and Lee"; in Norwich, "Bene and Berney"; in Reading, "No Hanover, No Cadogan, but Calvert and Clarges".

In Dorchester, the rioters attempted to rescue an effigy of James Stuart that was to be burnt by Dissenters and asked: "Who dares disowne the Pretender?"

[6][8] The Anglican clergy mainly kept a low profile, but at Newton Abbot, the minister removed the bell-clappers so that the bells could not be rung in celebration of the coronation.

Seven Bristol rioters were to be tried by a Special Commission but it failed by prolonging the riot and was accompanied by an attack upon the Duke of Richmond at Chichester.

Eleven days after the riots, Sacheverell published an open letter: The Dissenters & their Friends have foolishly Endeavour'd to raise a Disturbance throughout the whole Kingdom by Trying in most Great Towns, on the Coronation Day to Burn Me in Effigie, to Inodiate my Person & Cause with the Populace: But if this Silly Stratagem has produc'd a quite Contrary Effect, & turn's upon the First Authors, & aggressors, and the People have Express'd their Resentment in any Culpable way, I hope it is not to be laid to my Charge, whose Name... they make Use of as the Shibboleth of the Party.