One of Thomas Bradbury's claims to fame is that he was one of the first publicly to proclaim George I in August 1714; he was in the middle of a sermon when he was alerted to the fact of Queen Anne's death by a prearranged signal. It would be easy at this point to emphasise the triumph of Bradbury over Milbourne, the eclipse of the Tories, and the decline of the traditional political theology of the cult, and to present a picture of ‘the long eighteenth century’ as an age fundamentally antipathetic to the cult. But recent work on the century and the Church of England has shown that this is too glib a reading of the period. The work of J. C. D. Clark and others has demonstrated that eighteenth-century society was far more traditional then the ‘Whig’ view allowed. Political and social attitudes were not transformed overnight in 1714 into something recognisably modern and utilitarian.