Few, if any, political thinkers of the eighteenth century dealt as thoroughly and extensively with the concept of political party as David Hume. This chapter considers Hume’s various essays that treated the phenomenon of party between 1741 and 1758. In his first essays on party, he showed how both the Whig-Tory and Court-Country alignments were integral to British party politics, with the former dividing the political nation along dynastic and religious lines and the latter being a natural expression of the workings of the mixed constitution and inter-parliamentary conflict. In this way, he sought to transcend the arguments of the Court Whig ministry and the Country party opposition alike. Writing a new set of essays in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745, Hume turned to the parties’ ideological systems, as he tried to show that neither the Whig system of the ‘original contract’ nor the Tory system of passive obedience held water if philosophically probed, but that they could both have salutary consequences. While critical, Hume continued to give a fair hearing to both parties in his final essay on the subject, ‘Of the Coalition of Parties’ (1758). Though he ultimately wrote in favour of the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian Succession, this chapter concludes that Hume may have approximated the ideal of non-partisanship as far as was possible in a divided society.

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.

It is a commonplace in discussions of Anne Lister to identify her as a self-proclaimed Tory, and eventually a Tory landowner. But the Lister of the diaries also fancied herself a Rousseauvian individualist and something of a Byronic hero, a champion of Romantic individualism that sits somewhat oddly with her sense of social entitlement. I have argued elsewhere that Lister’s conservatism may have been compensatory, a form of normalisation and possibly of protection. In this chapter I complicate those arguments by looking more closely and more broadly at Lister’s politics - and politics with both a capital and a small ’p’. Lister lived during an age of revolution and reaction, of Napoleonic wars, of abolitionist agitation, of the first major Reform Act, of colonial expansion, of early industrialisation and rail travel. What were her attitudes to these major phenomena that do not necessarily line up neatly with a single party? What issues did she care about, and what did being a (non-voting, because female) Tory mean to her? Were there chinks in her conservative political philosophy? Did her views change over time? And is it possible that Lister’s conservatism was not compensatory at all, but rather part and parcel of her self-fashioning as a lesbian?

This chapter contributes to the debates about Samuel Johnson’s politics by considering the inadequacy of “Tory” as a label as balanced by Johnson’s unique contribution to the British public sphere in light of his determination to oppose aggressive forms of cultural nationalism. Considering Johnson’s journalism, his critical biographies, and Rasselas, Hawes explores Johnson’s deliberate cultivation of an anti-colonial perspective that burst through the usual framework for public discussions of the Seven Years War. In opposing the “Whig interpretation of history,” Johnson set himself against the principal vector of expansionist ideology. In his ability to combine anti-slavery and anti-colonial positions, Hawes argues, Johnson is uniquely prescient – and sometimes politically quite radical. His politics need to be understood as specifically anti-colonial, often reframing discussions of supposedly national affairs as manifestations of a colonial agenda.

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.

The nature of empire is that it is always at heart contradictory, suggesting a totalising unity but not homogeneity or equality. This chapter focuses on three very different Irish men of letters, Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Moore and Charles Lever, exploring the contradictions at the heart of their engagement with the British Empire and the imperial project generally, and its influence on their writing. It also suggests ways in which these contradictions are later to be found in one of the great imperial novels – Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). Charles Gavan Duffy was an Irish nationalist and a prime minister of a British colony, who saw Thomas Moore’s poetry as the product of an ‘imperial mind’. Moore, in his turn, can be seen as the colonised figure incarnate, beholden to imperial patronage for his livelihood and yet able to find ways to express subversive feeling in his poetry and prose. Charles Lever was perhaps the Empire’s favourite Irish novelist in this period, and yet he seldom wrote about the Empire, and when he did, it was almost always negative in tone. Although he was a moderate Tory in politics, Lever’s work suggested that the Irish could never be good Britons, or successful colonists. In contrast, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, who in so many ways represents the anomalous position of the Irish in imperial terms, is presented as succeeding precisely because of his Irishness, even though he does not know what that is. The contradictions in Kim reflect the ironic relationship between the Irish and the Empire as a whole, and as such the novel can claim to be the greatest ‘Irish’ imperial novel, a term which is itself a contradiction in terms.