The statute known as the Act of Settlement1 was enacted in 1701. As its name suggests, it amended or ‘settled’ the royal succession – the second such amendment in little over a decade. In 1689 the Bill of Rights2 had not only declared Prince William of Orange and his wife Princess Mary to be King William III and Queen Mary II of England, it had also vested the royal succession firstly in the survivor of them, then in Mary’s descendants, next in her younger sister Princess Anne and her descendants, and finally in the descendants of William. At the time this had seemed adequate, but circumstances had proven otherwise. William and Mary were childless, he remained a widower after her death in 1694, and none of Princess Anne’s children thrived. When the last of these died in July 1700 at the age of eleven, it appeared that the childless William III would be succeeded by the childless Anne. The Act of Settlement therefore determined that following the deaths of William and Anne, respectively, and in the absence of descendants, the Crown would pass to Princess Sophia, a granddaughter of King James I of England through her mother, Princess Elizabeth Stuart.

This chapter argues that majoritarian politics was institutionalized in England during the Restoration period and that this institutionalization preceded and was a precondition for the institutionalization of party politics. By 1662 there were already strong signs that majoritarianism had been institutionalized alongside the restoration of the Stuarts. By the early 1670s, at the latest, the institutionalization of majoritarian politics was complete. With this new institution in place, political practice became organized around the securing of majorities. This led in turn to the emergence and eventual institutionalization of party politics in Parliament, because party politics was the form of coordinated political practice best suited to securing those majorities. It is therefore no surprise to see that in England, the elaboration of partisan politics followed somewhat quickly on the first institutionalization of majoritarian practices in a national representative institution. By the end of the Stuart period, majoritarian politics were firmly in the grip of partisan coordination. The partisan structure of politics would of course weaken occasionally over the course of the eighteenth century, but majoritarian decision-making did not. This makes clear in yet another way that it played a more fundamental role in the emergence of modern politics in Britain than the party system itself.

This chapter investigates the grounds upon which we might address the question of Gothic literature before the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in late 1764. In line with much criticism, it begins by identifying traces of the Gothic in a selection of earlier texts, including Shakespearean drama and the Graveyard poetry of the 1740s. Proposing that this question is best thought of in historical terms, however, it considers how late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century critics themselves conceptualised the nation’s ‘Gothick’ literary inheritance, surveying, as it does so, such Whig writers as William Temple, John Dennis, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Joseph Addison and Mark Akenside, as well as works by the Tory John Dryden. Having situated Walpole’s fiction alongside contemporary works by Richard Hurd, Thomas Percy and Samuel Johnson, it argues that a self-conscious spirit of ‘Revival’ is crucial to what would later become known as ‘Gothic fiction’. By way of conclusion, the chapter turns to the case of Thomas Leland’s Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762), assessing the extent to which it might be described as an example of pre-Walpolean Gothic.