It is usually assumed that Sir Herbert Butterfield and Sir Lewis Namier, from their different positions, destroyed the ‘Whig interpretation of history’. In fact, the absence of a new synthesis allowed much of the old edifice to survive, its anomalous nature unrecognised, to provide foundations for new misinterpretation. Some of these new accretions, and some of the old survivals, have been challenged in this book. Its results can most conveniently be summarised from three perspectives, and in so far as they revise accepted views of the position and activities of what have been argued to be the elements of the central triad in government: Court, Ministry and Commons. Each of these three was affected by changes in the others; equally, revisions in the historiography of one have affected the other two also.

The received account of the constitutional position of the monarch in the reign of George II, for example, has been largely derived from, and coloured by, historians’ debates on the constitution vis-a-vis the institutions of party and ministry in the 1760s. As Dr Owen has rightly observed,1 ‘Whig’ views of George III supposed that his grandfather, by contrast, behaved with Victorian constitutional propriety in deferring to the will of parliamentary majorities and accepting his ministers’ advice; ‘Tory’ views of George III assumed that George II had been reduced to the position of Doge of Venice by the machinations of Whig oligarchs; that George III merely tried to repair this situation.