In the midst of Westminster Hall, Henry Sacheverell knelt at the bar before the peers. The Lords bade him rise; the preacher stood face to face with the accusations of the Commons, his counsel beside him, and two sermons at the heart of the proceedings. Since December, his utterances concerning resistance to civil authority, religious toleration, and the perils threatening the Church had taken the shape of articles of parliamentary impeachment. The question, on the 27th of February 1710, was whether a sermon delivered from the pulpit might be judged an assault upon the state.
The complaint of the Commons had commenced on the 13th of December 1709. The members had directed passages to be read from two sermons printed under Sacheverell’s name: the one preached at the Derby assizes, the other in St. Paul’s Cathedral before the Lord Mayor and the citizens. The former had been delivered in August 1709; the latter on the 5th of November of the same year. The Commons resolved that these sermons were malicious, scandalous, and seditious libels, tending to traduce the memory of King William, impugn the Revolution of 1688, and subvert the Protestant succession.
Called to the bar, Sacheverell acknowledged that he had preached and ordered the sermons to be printed. He declared he had never imagined that certain expressions could be construed into so harsh a censure, and lamented that the House had not heard his explanations before proceeding to a vote. He was nevertheless impeached. His bookseller, Henry Clements, was likewise taken into the custody of the Serjeant-at-Arms. To the preacher’s petition for bail, the House of Commons returned a refusal by 114 votes to 79.
This refusal opened a debate touching the very authority of the Commons to grant provisional release. Certain members contended that they possessed no power to admit to bail; others maintained that the authority was theirs, or that any bailable offense ought to be so treated. Meanwhile, the Lords declined to take Sacheverell into custody before receiving specific articles: they would not commit him upon a general charge. From December until the 12th of January, he remained under the ward of the Commons. When the articles were at last exhibited, the Lords granted his prayer for bail, assigned him counsel, and allowed him a copy of the accusation.
The proceedings then assumed a grander scale. The Commons answered the preacher’s written plea and appointed their managers. As they desired to attend the trial as a committee of the whole House, the Lords directed a spacious court to be erected in Westminster Hall. When the day came, the Serjeant-at-Arms summoned Sacheverell to appear and answer to his bail. He knelt at the bar, rising upon the command of Lord Chancellor Cowper, who reminded him that the Lords had granted him counsel, subpœnaed his witnesses, and allowed him full time to prepare his defense.
The four articles reduced pages of pulpit eloquence to grave constitutional questions. The first maintained that Sacheverell had condemned the resistance that brought about the Revolution, thereby casting black and ungenerous reflections upon King William. The prosecution did not confine itself to an isolated phrase: it set his assertions of unconditional non-resistance alongside his strictures upon William’s expedition. In the managers’ view, if all resistance to the supreme power were unlawful, the preacher necessarily branded the Revolution as entirely unjustifiable.
Counsel for the Commons laid great stress, moreover, upon the date and place of the St. Paul’s sermon. Preached upon the solemn anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot and King William’s arrival, it had diverted a day of public thanksgiving toward ecclesiastical rancor. For the accusers, Sacheverell’s declamations against false brethren, against those who defended toleration, and upon the dangers encompassing the Church constituted an attack upon Queen Anne’s administration. The sermon named no minister directly; the Commons insisted that its dark insinuations were aimed at the very men who governed.
Sacheverell replied that his articles of religion and the homilies of the Church of England explicitly taught non-resistance. He denied having applied that doctrine to the Revolution, or having impeached the conduct of the Queen and her ministers. His argument was that the prosecution had culled detached sentences and imperfect clauses, torturing them into a sense he had never intended. The Commons retorted that an innuendo might work mischief quite as potent as an open charge, even when the preacher forbore to set down his accusation in plain words.
The second article touched upon the toleration granted to Protestant Dissenters. The Commons cited passages in which Sacheverell described as false brethren those who defended liberty of conscience, and wherein he assailed Archbishop Grindal, accused of having favored concessions to the Puritans under Elizabeth. The preacher denied having condemned the legal exemption accorded to tender consciences; he asserted that he had aimed solely at the abuses sheltered beneath its mantle, and not at those who genuinely scrupled conformity.
The third article turned upon the image of the Church in danger. Sacheverell had affirmed that the Church was wounded by her false friends, asking how she could slumber while encompassed by adversaries. The Commons saw therein a seditious reflection upon the Queen and her ministry, directly contradicting the solemn vote of Parliament which had declared the Church to be in a safe and flourishing condition. The defense replied that the preacher spoke of vice, irreligion, and doctrinal error, not of Queen Anne’s civil administration. The scriptural analogy of Elisha, which the prosecutors charged him with distorting, became a salient illustration of this dispute over interpretation.
The fourth article combined the concept of false brethren within the Church with the charge of fomenting civil discord. The Commons drew together the sermons, their dedications, and several scattered passages to argue that Sacheverell had denounced the ministers as traitors to the constitution and incited his hearers to fury. He answered that he had ever inculcated obedience to the Queen, had taken the oaths of allegiance and abjuration, and had never urged any man to take up arms. In his extensive defense, he prayed that his words might be weighed in their entire context, insisting that a forced and strained construction could never supply the place of an express and positive charge.
The debate extended over numerous sittings, the managers for the Commons opening each article in succession before the preacher’s counsel were heard in reply. On the 7th of March, Sacheverell addressed the court in his own person. He represented the trial as a cause extending far beyond his own humble fortune: could a minister of the Gospel be condemned for doctrines drawn from the very homilies of his Church? He disclaimed the seditious intentions imputed to him, while vindicating the sacred right to sound the alarm against moral peril. His closing words were a solemn prayer for the Queen, his judges, and his accusers.
The Lords at length proceeded to vote upon the articles, and thereafter upon the question of guilt. On the 20th of March, a majority pronounced Sacheverell guilty of the high crimes and misdemeanors laid to his charge. He then moved in arrest of judgment, but the Lords overruled his exceptions. They subsequently pronounced sentence, suspending him from the exercise of his preaching function for three years, and commanding that the two sermons be burnt by the hands of the common hangman before the Royal Exchange in London.
The text depicts the penalty as a lenient one, but the response of his partisans was tumultuous: illuminations and bonfires blazed in several streets, where passers-by were compelled to drink the Doctor’s health. The Lord Mayor refused to attend the burning of the sermons, leaving the execution of the order to the sheriffs. When the term of his suspension expired, the Queen preferred him to the valuable rectory of St. Andrew’s, Holborn. On the 29th of May 1713, Sacheverell preached before the House of Commons at St. Margaret’s, Westminster.