[1] He immediately gained a prominent position in the party hostile to the Court, and before he had been in the House of Commons for six months, he proposed a resolution that all "popish recusants" should be removed from military commands; the motion, enlarged so as to include civil employment, was carried without a division on 28 February 1672–1673.
When the secret treaty with France became known, confirming Sacheverell's insight, he called for the disbandment of the forces and advocated the refusal of further supplies for military purposes; and in June 1678 he resolutely opposed Lord Danby's proposal to grant £300,000 per annum to Charles II for life.
When Charles offered an alternative scheme (1679) for limiting the powers of a Catholic sovereign, Sacheverell made a great speech in which he pointed out the insufficiency of the king's terms for securing the object desired by the Whigs.
Sacheverell was one of the managers on behalf of the Commons at the trial of Lord Stafford in Westminster Hall; but took no further part in public affairs till after the elections of March 1681, when he was returned unopposed for Derbyshire.
In 1690 Sacheverell moved a famous amendment to the Corporation Bill, proposing the addition of a clause for disqualifying for office for seven years municipal functionaries who had surrendered their charters to the Crown.
He was one of the earliest English parliamentary orators; his speeches greatly impressed his contemporaries, and in a later generation, as Thomas Macaulay observes, they were "a favourite theme of old men who lived to see the conflicts of Robert Walpole and William Pulteney.
Though his fame has become dimmed in comparison with that of Shaftesbury, Russell and Sidney, he was equally conspicuous in the parliamentary proceedings of Charles II's reign, and left a more permanent mark than any of them on the constitutional changes of the period."