5 - Legislation in the Early Eighteenth Century: Anonymity and the Press

Summary

A letter written by Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) to Robert Harley provides revealing insight into the changing religious and political atmosphere of the early eighteenth century. Pointing to the instability of the country, Defoe lamented to his patron and employer, not only that we are divided ‘into parties and factions’ but also that their members constantly seek to ‘supplant the other’. He traced England's afflictions back to the reign of Queen Mary in the sixteenth century, for ‘the Papist, the Church of England, and the Dissenter, have all had their turns in the public administration; and whenever any one of them endeavoured their own settlement by the ruin of the parties dissenting, the consequence was supplanting themselves’. According to Defoe, since the Reformation, all monarchs and governments had ruled by and been beholden to the machinations of party interest. And yet early eighteenth-century factional infighting marked a new stage in the history of division. Where previously parties had been primarily religious, sometimes having political effect, the Glorious Revolution had irreparably connected religion to politics and hardened party identity until it was solidified by 1702. It is hardly credible, Defoe told Harley, how opponents ignored their shared values and instead emphasised differences for polemical purposes.

Defoe's concerns were being shared in government before the rise to power of Robert Harley. On 1 September 1701, James Vernon wrote to the duke of Shrewsbury outlining the political situation in London. A largely undistinguished secretary of state, Vernon's sympathies for the court Whigs and diplomatic skills ensured he was well informed of political affairs. Situated within a discussion of the rights of the Commons and Harley's status as speaker, Vernon suggested that politics had not been so divisive since James II had attempted to introduce popery. ‘The partys are every day writing and printing against one another with great bitterness’, he commented, and the ‘chiefs seem to have a hand in it’. Vernon's concerns were not confined to politics. Scribblers from both sides seemed to take great delight in slurring the piety and religious positions of their opponents. Lord Somers had recently been libelled as a Socinian, whilst Lord Rochester, the great political hope of the High Church party, had been subject to false and scandalous reports.