Since the rise of the modern nation state in Europe, political leaders have had to cope with the problems of conspiracy and internal security. The English Ministers and Jacobitism between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 is a study of the response made to these twin problems by the British central government, under Stanhope, Sunderland, and Walpole. Faced with the prospect of assassination, internal rebellion, and conspiracy, the ministers naturally took all necessary measures to protect the security of the state. Nor did their worries end with the successful defeat of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715; an examination of the anti-Jacobite campaign after this date clearly demonstrates a continuing dread of Jacobitism. At the same time, their action in the years 1715-45 against Jacobite plots for a restoration betrays an acute awareness on their part of the political advantages to be reaped through careful exploitation of those fears. Professor Fritz's study is a valuable addition to the existing literature on Jacobitism. It uncovers new documents revealing the workings of the conspirators, and it illuminates how the threat of conspiracy was used successfully by imaginative politicians to retain power.

This book is a frontal attack on an entrenched orthodoxy. Our official, public vision of the early eighteenth century demonises Louis XIV and France and marginalises the Scots Jacobites. Louis is seen as an incorrigibly imperialistic monster and the enemy of liberty and all that is good and progressive. The Jacobite Scots are presented as so foolishly reactionary and dumbly loyal that they were (sadly) incapable of recognising their manifest destiny as the cannon fodder of the first British empire. But what if Louis acted in defence of a nation’s liberties and (for whatever reason) sought to right a historic injustice? What if the Scots Jacobites turn out to be the most radical, revolutionary party in early eighteenth-century British politics? Using newly discovered sources from the French and Scottish archives this exciting new book challenges our fundamental assumptions regarding the emergence of the fully British state in the early eighteenth century.

This is the first study to assess the entire career of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) in relation to the political issues of his time.

In this book Linda Colley explores the fate of the tory party which has dominated both Parliament and the constituencies throughout of the reigns of William III and Anne.

`The War of Jenkins Ear' examined for the first time in a full-length study, looking at the vitality of popular politics and the inner workings of Parliament during the time.

The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain examines the involvement of Italian opera in British partisan politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, which saw Sir Robert Walpole's rise to power and George Frideric Handel's greatest period of opera production. McGeary argues that the conventional way of applying Italian opera to contemporary political events and persons by means of allegory and allusion in individual operas is mistaken; nor did partisan politics intrude into the management of the Royal Academy of Music and the Opera of the Nobility. This book shows instead how Senesino, Faustina, Cuzzoni and events at the Haymarket Theatre were used in political allegories in satirical essays directed against the Walpole ministry. Since most operas were based on ancient historical events, the librettos - like traditional histories - could be sources of examples of vice, virtue, and political precepts and wisdom that could be applied to contemporary politics.