time with a fellow clergyman. On 8 March 1709, the anniversary of Queen Anne's accession, Blackall preached a sermon before the queen in St James's Chapel, on the text Romans 13:4. It was later published, with the title The Divine Institution of Magistracy (1709). Its themes echoed those of a sermon which Blackall had preached on the same occasion in 1705, at St Dunstan's, and which had also been published. It was a strong attack on the doctrines of popular sovereignty and the right of resistance, in which Blackall maintained that the magistrate's authority was a 'Portion of the Divine Authority ... entrusted with him by God' (p. 3). It also maintained the independent jure divino basis of clerical authority in spiritual matters. Benjamin Hoadly, in Some Considerations Humbly Offered to the … Bishop of Exeter (1709), took offence to both sermons, which, he alleged, condemned the revolution of 1688–9. Hoadly claimed that the revolution had involved resistance to James II, but that such resistance was justified by the necessity of self-preservation. Blackall, in The Lord Bishop of Exeter's Answer to Mr Hoadly's Letter, dismissed Hoadly's premise that civil authority derived from an original contract. He undertook to reply again to Hoadly only if he kept to issues of scriptural interpretation, and avoided speculations concerning matters such as an alleged 'State of Nature' about which the scriptures were silent. Hoadly's subsequent Humble Reply failed to comply with Blackall's conditions, and he did not therefore respond to it. The numerous pamphlets which were published on either side during the ensuing controversy included an anonymous work in support of Blackall, entitled The Best Answer Ever was Made (1709), by the Irish nonjuror and formidable controversialist Charles Leslie. As Blackall was by now a bishop, Hoadly's attack on him was later cited to justify the forthright treatment Hoadly received in the Bangorian controversy, after he himself had been elevated to the episcopal bench. Ironically Blackall's same accession-day sermon of 1705, The Subjects Duty, had been attacked on its first publication by tory patriarchalist writers, who accused him of being a republican. The anonymous work An essay upon government: wherein the republican schemes reviv'd by Mr. Lock, Dr. Blackal &c. are fairly consider'd and refuted (1705), as well as linking Blackall's name with that of John Locke, took Blackall to task for contending that the precise form of government in any nation was a