John Hoadly

John Hoadly (1711–1776) was an English cleric, known as a poet and dramatist.

Life Born in Broad Street, London, on 8 October 1711, he was the youngest son of Bishop Benjamin Hoadly and his wife the painter Sarah Hoadly. After attending Newcome's school at Hackney, where he played the part of Phocyas in John Hughes's Siege of Damascus,’ he was sent in 1730 to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. At about the same time he entered the Middle Temple in order to qualify for the bar.

Having graduated LL.B. in 1735 Hoadly decided to become a clergyman, a career in which his father had patronage. On 29 November 1735 he was appointed chancellor of the diocese of Winchester, and was ordained deacon by his father on the following 7 December, and priest the 21st of the same month. He was immediately received into Frederick, Prince of Wales's household as his chaplain, as he afterwards was in that of the Princess Dowager, on 6 May 1751. Hoadly wrote the verses for A Rake's Progress, the printed set of engraving by Hogarth. He was also a friend of Sarah Fielding.

Other works by Hoadly were:

Love's Revenge: a dramatic pastoral (anon.), 1734 ( and 1745); set to music by Maurice Greene. Jephtha, an oratorio (anon.), 1737; music by Greene. Phoebe, a pastoral opera (anon.), 1748; music by Greene. The Force of Truth, an oratorio (anon.), 1764.

He wrote the fifth act of James Miller's tragedy Mahomet the Imposter (1744), and completed and revised George Lillo's adaptation of Arden of Feversham (1762). He is said to have assisted his brother Benjamin in the composition of The Suspicious Husband.’ He left several dramas in manuscript: among others The Housekeeper, a Farce, on the plan of James Townley's High Life Below Stairs (in favour of which it was rejected by Garrick); and a tragedy on the life of Thomas Cromwell. Some of his poems are in James Dodsley's Collection; they include a translation of Edward Holdsworth's Muscipula. He also edited his father's works (three volumes, 1773), to which he prefixed a short Life originally in the Biographia Britannica.