2 - Early Hanoverian Political Journalism, 1714–1720

Summary

Political journalism in the half dozen years after Anne's death (1 August 1714) has received little extended commentary from scholars, who have usually been more interested in the transformative 1695–1714 period or in the period of anti-Walpole opposition and The Craftsman (1726–1752). Most critics observe that the rage of party so pronounced in late Stuart England quieted down after 1715: ‘The party struggle of Anne's reign was over. The issues which had divided the political nation had disappeared or were subsiding’. The Tories ceased to exert meaningful influence on the state, and the new king had little patience for opposition. In the tumultuous years following George's accession, ‘the opposition periodic press was faced with an unprecedented campaign of official suppression’. Tory and Jacobite periodicals were frequently squelched by the authorities within a year of their commencement; the disaffected had less freedom to voice their disaffection. More generally, so the story goes, the political landscape was calmer. The replacement of the Triennial Act with the Septennial Act (1716) meant fewer elections and therefore ‘reduced political activity, and lessened popular participation’. Kathleen Wilson's treatment of popular politics in this period is an exception: The Sense of the People (1995) acknowledges the continued role of the press in politicising the people, though it is broader based and necessarily less detailed in its discussion of newspapers.

This chapter seeks to answer a basic question: how does political journalism function between the summer of 1714 and circa 1720, before the bursting of the South Sea Bubble and the start of a new phase in English politics? Though historians have highlighted both acute Whig paranoia and strong Tory opposition to the new regime, literary critics have made little attempt to read the cultural production of this period in those terms. The assumption has been that Tory papers were suppressed and ineffectual, and that Whig papers reflect triumphalism – that, in other words, there was no meaningful opposition press and that the Whigs could contentedly endorse and disseminate George's policies. This is not the case. What we find, on the contrary, is a succession of short-lived but quickly replaced Jacobite papers that taken together do represent a significant form of opposition, often fairly radical in its aims and evidently widely enjoyed.