In 1710 the Brits impeached an orange-haired populist — It did not go well

In the spring of 1710, London was roiled by the impeachment trial of Henry Sacheverell, a Tory clergyman in the Church of England. Sacheverell was a large, arrogant man who wore a shoulder-length curly wig of auburn (almost orange?) hues. As a preacher, he was a populist rabble rouser, who drew huge crowds, attracted by his angry tone, his intolerant rhetoric, and his reactionary politics. The trial took place in Westminster Hall, with both houses of Parliament, the Queen, and almost a thousand spectators in attendance. Pamphlets for and against the preacher were printed almost daily, and crowds of Sacheverell’s supporters gathered in the streets, following his coach to and from the trial and generating unrest across the city.

While it was unusual to impeach a clergyman, at this time in British history impeachment could be brought against any citizen except the nation’s monarch. In that sense, impeachment was the opposite of impeachment as designed by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who conceived of it as a check against the nation’s highest executive when they established the presidency in 1787.

For those now considering using this tool against current U.S. President Donald Trump, the British experience of 1710 is informative but not necessarily in the way some opponents of the attempt would assume.

In November 1709, the Whigs in Parliament became incensed over a sermon Sacheverell had delivered in St. Paul’s Cathedral on Guy Fawkes Day, in which he preached against lawful resistance to the monarch and against religious toleration — ideals that had been at the heart of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. When the sermon was printed and sold tens of thousands of copies, the Whigs in the House of Commons voted to bring impeachment proceedings against Sacheverell for preaching against the very principles of the nation’s government. The House of Lords would then determine the verdict, after a trial in the public arena of Westminster Hall.

Although the House of Lords voted to impeach, the entire proceeding was a public relations disaster, generating popular sympathy for the clergyman and stirring up anger towards the Whigs in Parliament who brought the charges against him. Riots erupted in the streets in support of Sacheverell, with the rioters lashing out against religious minorities, including Presbyterians and other Protestants who were not members of the Church of England. The major Presbyterian meeting houses in the City of London were systematically dismantled, their pews and pulpits used to fuel bonfires in the streets. The Queen had to authorize the military to quell the unrest. With the impeachment turning the tide of public opinion against the Whigs, the Queen also dissolved Parliament and called for elections in September. The Whigs suffered a rousing defeat at the polls, with the Tories garnering 329 seats in Parliament to the Whigs’ 168.

In other words, Sacheverell’s impeachment backfired in just the way that Democrats in Congress today fear that impeaching President Trump would backfire. And yet, the differences between that impeachment and any impeachment brought against our U.S. president today are significant enough that we need not view it as a dire warning. 

Impeachment is a process that Americans borrowed from the English but it is a process that no longer exists in the modern U.K. and had largely fallen into disuse by 1787, at the time of the American Constitutional Convention. Rather than aiming the procedure at officials lower than the monarch, the American framers targeted it at the highest office holder in the land, the president. Although they saw it as necessary to preventing a president from abusing the powers of office, they knew it was a flawed tool. Some of the framers of the American Constitution would have known about the disastrous Sacheverell impeachment, since the published account of the trial was one of the best-selling works in the first half of the eighteenth century. They also knew that it was hard to specify exactly what misbehavior should trigger impeachment (other than treason or bribery), resulting in the rather fuzzy category of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

But as much as they struggled to specify the details, the framers certainly recognized the importance of impeachment. As British citizens themselves until the American Revolution, these statesmen remembered that the other options for removing an unsatisfactory or tyrannical monarch in English history had included both legal execution (as when Charles I was executed by Parliament in 1649) and armed invasion with 40,000 troops (as in William of Orange’s invasion of England in 1688, which resulted in he and his wife, Mary, taking the crown from her father, James II).

The American Founding Fathers understood the necessity of impeachment to safeguard the nation both from a president who would be king and from other more violent methods of removal. As Benjamin Franklin observed during the deliberations in 1787, “assassination” was otherwise the option “in cases where the chief Magistrate rendered himself obnoxious.”

Impeachment may seem dangerous to some legislators in Congress today. But despite its inevitable pitfalls, it was considered the safest way to rid the country of a president who overstepped the boundaries of his office and acted more like a monarch than an elected official.

Rachel Carnell is professor of eighteenth-century British literature at Cleveland State University; she is completing a book about libel, impeachment, and populism in the reign of Queen Anne.