The study of party in the eighteenth century has been dominated by those concerned to illuminate the process by which Britain acquired the much-praised institution of constitutional monarchy. When, in what way, or by whose agency was the transition effected from mixed to parliamentary government? It was this question that united those as far apart as Namier and Trevelyan, even though they proffered different solutions to the problem.

To pose such a question is, as its historical pedigree implies, a perfectly respectable enterprise, but there are certain pitfalls which such an approach does not easily avoid. Certain, primarily whig historians have shown a propensity to attribute special prescience to certain eighteenth-century politicians whom they regard as having contributed more substantially than others to the development of the ideal party system. Burke, Rockingham and Fox are the names that they usually have in mind. There is a tendency, in other words, to assume that because some, though by no means all, of the political practices advocated by these ‘party’ whigs approximated to nineteenthcentury conventions, therefore such men ‘forecast parliamentary government’. The result is the faintly ludicrous picture of a group of politicians intending to drag eighteenth-century political practice kicking and screaming into the nineteenth century.