ABSTRACT
Three main features of politics in the reign of William III need to be highlighted here. The fi rst is the predominance of party political rivalries based on principles, not family and personal relationships. In work published between 1940 and 1956, Professor Robert Walcott attempted to establish a new view of the structure of politics from 1689 to 1714, asserting that the political connections were held together less by adherence to a shared set of principles than by family relationships and ties of interest. In reaching this conclusion, Professor Walcott was much infl uenced by the research of Lewis Namier, whose similar analysis of the structure of politics in the middle of the
eighteenth century had already gained the status of historical orthodoxy. In extending Namier’s analysis backwards into the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Walcott fl ew in the face of the accepted view of the politics of that period which had been arrived at and popularized between the two world wars, notably by Keith Feiling and G. M. Trevelyan. Feiling and Trevelyan believed that confl ict between the Whig and Tory parties, though it was not the only one, was the prime feature of politics between 1689 and 1714. It was this belief that Walcott sought to prove wrong. ‘The more one studies the party structure under William and Anne’, he wrote in 1956, ‘the less it resembles the two-party structure described by Trevelyan . . . and the more it seems to have in common with the structure of politics in the Age of Newcastle as explained to us by Namier.’1 Walcott’s version of politics after 1689 had a brief period of acceptance,2 but in his Ford lectures in 1965 Professor J. H. Plumb launched a vitriolic attack on Walcott, followed two years later by Geoffrey Holmes who, in his British Politics in the Age of Anne, also came out fi rmly against what Professor Plumb had called Walcott’s ‘basically very unsound’ book, English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century, which ‘has led to appalling confusion’. Other historians in a long list of learned articles pressed home this attack, and with great vigour and skill – if with too much viciousness and too little humanity. Walcott’s opinions were blasted out of sight and the importance of party political divisions after 1689 reasserted.3
