Introduction

Abstract

To understand both Walpole and Britain in the first half of the eighteenth century it is necessary to appreciate their seventeenth-century background. This was the period when the leading politicians were born and grew up. Of the leading Whigs, Stanhope was born in 1673, Townshend and Sunderland in 1674, Walpole in 1676, Argyll in 1678, Ilay in 1682, Pulteney in 1684 and Newcastle in 1693. Of the leading Tories, Strafford was born in 1672, Shippen in 1673, Bolingbroke in 1678 and Wyndham in 1687. These were years of serious instability and conflict. The main interrelated causes were religious, political and dynastic. Religious conflict was central to the great events of the seventeenth century. The English Civil War can best be appreciated, especially if its Scottish and Irish dimensions are included, as a war of religion. James II (1685–8) was ousted in the so-called Glorious Revolution largely because of the suspicion that he would try to enforce his own Catholicism on his subjects. Religious differences and suspicions corroded the loyalty and obedience to the sovereign that so much contemporary political thought preached. Religion was not only a matter for politicians. People who were in the wrong Church were deprived of a wide variety of what would today be considered rights but were then thought of as privileges, such as the right to vote or to be an MP, to hold political and government office, to establish schools or to go to university. The anti-Catholic hysteria that accompanied the Popish Plot of 1678 and the violence that was directed against Dissenters (the growing denomination of Protestants who were not members of the Church of England) testified to the force of religious passion in the politics of the period and the extent to which it was by no means confined to those who wielded political power.