Chapter 5 - Faction Detected? Pulteney, Perceval, and the Tories

Summary

The most significant figure in the opposition to Walpole, besides Bolingbroke, was the Whig William Pulteney. However, Pulteney’s involvement with Bolingbroke’s Country party platform, whose raison d’être was to unite Tories and Whigs, ended upon the fall of Walpole in 1742. After Walpole’s resignation, Pulteney abandoned the Tories when he resisted attempts to prosecute Walpole and accepted a seat in the Lords as the Earl of Bath. John Perceval wrote a notorious pamphlet defending Pulteney/Bath, entitled Faction Detected by the Evidence of Fact (1743). In Faction Detected, Perceval distinguished between legitimate and factious opposition, associating the former with Whigs and the latter with Tories and Jacobites. This chapter also discusses various reversionary oppositions and the transitory broad-bottom administration in the mid-1740s.