Hoadley early threw in his lot with the Whig party, and in Queen Anne’s reign was looked upon as the leader of the Low Church divines, and a staunch upholder of Whig principles. He did not obtain any considerable preferment until George the First came to the throne, when he was made a royal chaplain, and soon after advanced to the bishopric of Bangor. He did not once visit his bishopric during the whole of his six years tenure of the see, but remained in London, as the leader of the extreme latitudinarian party, which, since the Princess of Wales’s patronage, had become the fashionable one, and offered the best prospects of promotion. He therefore broke with the orthodox section of the Low Church party, who came to regard him with little less dislike than High Churchmen. Hoadley’s love of polemics soon brought him into conflict with Convocation, and led to what was known as the “Bangorian controversy”. The bishop had preached a sermon before King George the First on “The nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ,” in which he denied that there was any such thing as a visible Church of Christ, or Church authority. Convocation censured the sermon, and would have proceeded to further measures against the recalcitrant bishop had not the Government, by an arbitrary exercise of power, suspended it altogether. Convocation thus prorogued was not summoned again until the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria. It would weary and not edify to enter into the details of this dreary Bangorian controversy; the tracts and pamphlets written upon it numbered nearly two hundred, and the heat and bitterness were such as only a religious dispute could engender. Hoadley did not heed his ecclesiastical enemies, for he had staunch friends at court; he enjoyed not only the favour of the King and the Princess of Wales, but had the ear of Mrs. Clayton, soon to become a dispenser of patronage. His letters to her are some of the most fulsome preserved in her correspondence. “I compare you in my thoughts,” he writes, “with others of the same kind, and I see with pleasure, so great a superiority to the many, that I think I can hardly express my sense of it strongly enough. Compared with them therefore, I may justly speak of you as one of the superior species, and you will supply the comparison if I do not always express it, and not think me capable of offering incense, which I know you are not capable of receiving.”[102] In 1721 Hoadley was translated from Bangor to the richer see of Hereford, and two years later to Salisbury, which was wealthier still. At Salisbury he so far remembered his episcopal duties as to deliver a primary charge to his clergy, a poor composition. He was not content with Salisbury, and cast envious eyes upon the rich see of Durham, which then maintained a prince-bishop. Walpole, who disliked him as being a _protégé_ of Mrs. Clayton’s, passed him over in favour of Dr. Talbot, Bishop of Oxford.