Property and politeness in the early eighteenth-century Whig moralists

In early 1711, Parliament passed a bill establishing substantial requirements of land ownership for both county and borough members. The passage of such requirements, which had not previously been written in law, was a measure of the success of the Tory Party, in 1710 and 1711, in supplanting the Whigs in the queen’s ministry and in Parliament. ¹ The bill was also a measure of the anxiety felt by landed gentlemen in a changing historical landscape, an anxiety that they formulated in the distinction between the landed and the moneyed interests.