Notes For ease of reference, the following abbreviations are used throughout these notes: Gay’s Letters The Letters of John Gay, ed. C. F. Burgess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) Memoirs John, Lord Hervey, Some Materials towards Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 3 vols. (London: King’s Printers, 1932) Percival Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont: Diary of Viscount Percival afterwards First Earl of Egmont, ed. Historical Manuscripts Commission, 3 vols. (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1920) Pope’s Correspondence The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956) Pope’s Poems The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge, 1963) Swift’s Correspondence The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. David Woolley, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999–2007) Swift’s Poems Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (London: Penguin, 1983) Introduction 1. The Nature of the Present Excise, and the Consequences of its Farther Extension, Examined (London: J. Roberts, 1733), p. 43. By contrast, Percival’s father had written in support of the government in the pamphlet wars of the excise crisis. His Thoughts of an Impartial Man upon the Present Temper of the Nation (London: J. Roberts, 1733) is referenced by Paul Langford. See The Excise Crisis: Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 107. 2. Percival, I, p. 378. 3. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 174. 4. Tadmor, Family and Friends, p. 16. 5. Tadmor, Family and Friends, p. 207. 6. For general discussion of the first and most persistent theme – corruption – see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 19–22; J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister (London: Cresset Press, 1960), pp. 325–33; Edward Pearce, The Great Man: The Life and Times of Sir Robert Walpole (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), pp. 1–2, 206–7. The second theme – virtue versus expediency – is implicit in H. T. Dickinson’s summary of the reasons for a schism in early 172 Notes 173 eighteenth-century Whiggism: disagreement over the relative importance of ‘the need to protect individual liberty and the need to preserve public order’. The same idea is expressed by Reed Browning as the willingness of Court Whigs to dispense with ‘silly or wasteful or even harmful strictures’ in government. See H. T. Dickinson, ‘Whiggism in the Eighteenth Century’, in The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England, ed. John Cannon (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), pp. 28–44 (43); Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), p. 11. For the potential perception of political opposition as inherently unlawful or treasonous, see H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), pp. 152, 175; Quentin Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, ed. Neil McKendrick (London: Europa Publications, 1974), pp. 93–128 (110). For the opposition’s particular vulnerability to charges of ideologi- cal variegation or inconsistency, see Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 91, 213; Alexander Pettit, Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Response to Walpole, 1730–1737 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), pp. 15–16. 7. The necessity of defining private virtue alongside public benefit is affirmed within Peter N. Miller’s overview of the dual Ciceronian tradition that influenced attempts to formulate theories of the common good: ‘The clash between honestum [the honest] and utile [the useful] is pin-pointed as the debate most characteristic of the early modern state.’ Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 18. 8. Miller, Defining the Common Good, pp. 37–8. 9. See Romney Sedgwick’s profile of John Percival, first Earl of Egmont in The House of Commons 1715–1754, 2 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970), II, p. 338. 10. For the impossibility of winning the government stronghold of Harwich without Walpole’s support, see Ruth and Albert Saye, ‘John Percival, First Earl of Egmont’, in Georgians in Profile, ed. Horace Montgomery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958), pp. 1–16 (15). See also Percival’s contempt for Ralph Courteville – one of ‘Sir Robert’s creatures’ – in Percival, II, p. 101. 11. Percival was made Earl of Egmont on 6 November 1733. See John Lodge, The Peerage of Ireland: or, A Genealogical History of the Present Nobility of that Kingdom, rev. Mervyn Archdall, 7 vols. (Dublin: James Moore, 1789), II, p. 262. 12. Percival, II, p. 246. 13. Percival, I, p. 388. 14. Percival, I, p. 461. 15. Percival, II, p. 4. 16. Bacon Morris was present at the levee in order to petition on behalf of Captain Hayes, another interested party in the Harwich election saga. For the general difficulty of gaining complete privacy when meeting with Walpole, see the bitter letter of 11 September 1736 by sometime opposi- tion journalist Charles Forman. He vents his frustration not only at being 174 Notes expected to speak of confidential matters in front of the joint Secretary to the Treasury Sir John Scrope, but also at the habitual eavesdroppers who frequent Walpole’s residence: ‘for at my going out of your Closet I found the Corridore [sic] pretty well lined with Listeners’ (see Cholmondeley Corresp. MS 2615). 17. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991; originally published, 1962). 18. Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 51. 19. See T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 12–14; James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 12. 20. For instance, Mark Knights questions Habermas’s ‘stress on the rationality of the early public sphere’ but affirms that ‘there is clearly something of value in the notion of a new force of public opinion emerging in the early modern period’. Brian Cowan sets out to be more critical of Habermas, argu- ing against a historical narrative in which coffeehouse culture is reduced to ‘an indicator of the inexorable progress of British politics away from royalist absolutism and its modern counterpart totalitarian dictatorship and toward a liberal parliamentary democracy’. Yet he also concedes that the coffee- house ‘created a precedent for a recognizably modern type of consumer culture which valorizes fantasy and ephemerality over permanence and the fixing of social boundaries’. Such statements are consistent with, albeit more perspicacious than, Habermas’s paradigms. See Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 51; Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 120, 148. Also Brian Cowan, ‘Geoffrey Holmes and the Public Sphere: Augustan Historiography from Post-Namierite to the Post- Habermasian’, Parliamentary History Yearbook: British Politics in the Age of Holmes (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 166–78. 21. Moyra Haslett, Pope to Burney, 1714–1779 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 112. See also, Nicola Parsons, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth- Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 22. Habermas’s neglect of the subject of friendship might in fact be regarded as a side-effect of his generosity towards the eighteenth-century family, which he unreservedly privileges as a site of emotional truth: ‘the ideas of freedom, love, and cultivation of the person that grew out of the experiences of the conjugal family’s private sphere were surely more than just ideology’. See Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 48. After such a statement one might expect some analysis of what happens to these ‘ideas’ once they are removed from the family’s immediate domain and applied in other contexts, but none follows. 23. He comes nearest to such an account with a description of literary innova- tion taking place due to ‘experiments’ with subjectivity, and with his dis- tinction between ‘privatized individuals’ communicating ‘in their capacity Notes 175 as human beings’ or ‘in their capacity as owners of commodities’. In neither case does he examine the substance of these experiments beyond their gen- eralised – and affected – interiority. See Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 49, 55. 24. Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 52. As noted previously, Blanning, for instance, remarks that ‘all kinds of opinions could be expressed’ within the public sphere. See Blanning, The Culture of Power, p. 12. 25. Cowan, ‘Geoffrey Holmes and the Public Sphere’, p. 168; Philip Lawson, ‘Hanoverian Studies: The Impact of Recent Trends on Parliamentary History’, Parliamentary History 7:1 (1988), 130–8 (132). 26. Sir Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan, 1929; 2nd edition, 1957), xi. 27. Robert Walcott, English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). 28. Dickinson, ‘Whiggism in the Eighteenth Century’, p. 42; B. W. Hill, The Growth of Parliamentary Parties 1689–1742 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), p. 227. See also William Speck, ‘Whigs and Tories Dim their Glories: English Political Parties under the first two Georges’, in Cannon, ed., Whig Ascendancy, pp.