other words, the system of Sir Robert Walpole, the dominant minister of

the 1720s and 1730s. The possibility of stability, and the raw materials of
stability (such as jobs in the gift of the government), had all existed from
the 1670s, according to Plumb; it was just that the political nous was
lacking, a deficit supplied by the genius of Walpole. Plumb implies that the
political instability of the later Stuart period had much the same causes as
the political stability of Walpole's era: the contest for seats in parliament,
for government sinecures, for spoils, was behind "the rage of party," but
once these spoils were all dispensed by one consummate politician, they
would contribute toward cohesion and political inertia. This picture was
elaborated by Geoffrey Holmes, who took a wider social view and argued
that the new professions were vehicles of social mobility. The expansion in
the numbers of lawyers, doctors, teachers, clergymen, naval and army
officers, and civil servants, and just as importantly the increase in their
social status, meant that those excluded from political life could find
avenues for advancement and outlets for their energies.2 Jonathan Clark,
on the other hand, plays down the pace of social and economic change, and
indeed challenges the economic reductionism of accounts which suggest
that political power inevitably flowed toward a new middle class. He
stresses instead the persistence of pre-industrial forms and mentalities, a
slavish loyalty to monarchy and the Church of England, a deeply aristocratic
society and political system, and the retention of a confessional state,
in which office and power were restricted to conforming Anglicans, until
the 1830s. The main threats to the stability of this ancien regime were
dynastic rivalry until the defeat of Jacobite hopes in the Forty-five and
thereafter religious heterodoxy. In response, many historians have reasserted
that eighteenth-century men and women recognized elements of
aristocratic government in the British system, but saw theirs as "a commercial
society" and themselves in Blackstone's phrase as "a polite and
commercial people."3
Among the many changes afoot in Augustan England two trends
deserve special attention. One is the growth of the state. What under
Charles I had been a classic multiple monarchy - a collection of territories
united by nothing more than the person of their ruler - was becoming a
state. Kingship would never be the same after 1649, and much of the next
century was devoted to finding ways to curb a king and to weld two
kingdoms and several provinces into a single Great Britain. The emergent
state rested on sound finance: the royal debt was replaced by a national
debt based on the state's credit not the king's; local government by
amateurs was reinforced by a professional bureaucracy; and the state's
fiscal demands soared. Entwined with the rising state was the emerging