Sacheverell, HENRY, D.D., was born in 1672 at Marlborough, the son of the High Church rector of St Peter's, and from the grammar-school there was sent by charity in 1689 to Magdalen College, Oxford. He shared rooms with Addison, who dedicated to his 'dearest Henry' An Account of the Greatest English Poets (1694); and, gaining successively a demyship and a fellowship, he took the degrees of B.A. (1693), M.A. (1696), B.D. (1707), and D.D. (1708). He had held the small Staffordshire vicarage of Cannock, when in 1705 he became preacher of St Saviour's, Southwark, and soon made his mark as a pulpit orator. In 1709 he delivered the two sermons—one at Derby assizes, the other on the 5th of November at St Paul's—which have given him a place in history. The rancour with which he assailed the principles of the Revolution Settlement and the Act of Toleration, whilst glancing at Godolphin as 'Volpone,' and asserting the doctrine of non-resistance, roused the wrath of the Whig government of the hour, and led to his impeachment before the House of Lords of high crimes and misdemeanours (1710). Ardent crowds, shouting 'High Church and Sacheverell!' and now and then wrecking a meeting-house, attended him to Westminster; he defended himself ably (Burnet ascribes the defence to Atterbury), but by a majority of seventeen he was found guilty, and suspended for three years from preaching, his two sermons also being burned by the common hangman. The ministry fell that same summer, and in 1713, on the expiry of his suspension, Sacheverell was selected by the House of Commons to preach the Restoration sermon before them, and specially thanked on the occasion. A more substantial token of favour was his presentation to the rectory of St Andrew's, Holborn, after which little more is heard of him save that he squabbled with his parishioners, and was suspected of complicity in a Jacobite plot. He died at the Grove, Highgate, 5th June 1724, and was buried in St Andrew's, Holborn, whence his lead coffin was stolen in 1747.
See vol. ii. of Hill Burton's History of the Reign of Queen Anne (Edin. 1880); and F. Madan's 'Bibliography of Dr Sacheverell' in the Bibliographer for 1883-84.