ABSTRACT
The debate on the nature of representation was revived in an even more bitter exchange during the last years of Robert Walpole and immediately after his fall. The occasion for Walpole's statements on the nature of the representative function was the full-blown debate between his press and Bolingbroke's Opposition in 1732 over the Government's excise bill. Bolingbroke, whose partisan interests were well served by the people's claim to instruct their representatives against the Excise, adhered to the delegate theory. Fanned by Bolingbroke's weekly Craftsman and William Pulteney's agitation in the City, the opposition to the rather mild tax measure was powerful enough to bring about one of the most dramatic Parliamentary setbacks dealt to Walpole in his long administration. Only when the constitution itself was threatened by the legislature could the government be dissolved, it suggested, and only then, when dissolved, did the people regain their power and authority.
