Parliament. None of the merchants, industrialists, gentry, or
aristocracy allied with William of Orange and then with the
Hanoverian monarchs, who succeeded Queen Anne in
1714, were strong enough to impose their will unilaterally.
Attempts at restoring the Stuart monarchy continued
throughout much of the eighteenth century. After James II’s
death in 1701, his son, James Francis Edward Stuart, the
“Old Pretender,” was recognized as the lawful heir to the
English Crown by France, Spain, the pope, and supporters
of the Stuart monarchy in England and Scotland, the so-
called Jacobites. In 1708 the Old Pretender attempted to
take back the throne with support of French troops, but was
unsuccessful. In the ensuing decades there would be
several Jacobite revolts, including major ones in 1715 and
1719. In 1745–46, the Old Pretender’s son, Charles
Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender,” made an attempt to
take back the throne, but his forces were defeated by the
British army.
The Whig political party, which as we saw (this page–this
page) was founded in the 1670s to represent the new
mercantile and economic interests, was the main
organization behind the Glorious Revolution, and the Whigs
dominated Parliament from 1714 to 1760. Once in power,
they were tempted to use their newly found position to prey
on the rights of others, to have their cake and eat it, too.
They were no different from the Stuart kings, but their power
was far from absolute. It was constrained both by
competing groups in Parliament, particularly the Tory Party
which had formed to oppose the Whigs, and by the very
institutions that they had fought to introduce to strengthen
Parliament and to prevent the emergence of a new
absolutism and the return of the Stuarts. The pluralistic
nature of society that emerged from the Glorious Revolution
also meant that the population at large, even those without
formal representation in Parliament, had been empowered,
and “blacking” was precisely a response by the common
people to perceptions that the Whigs were exploiting their
position.
The case of William Cadogan, a successful general in
the War of the Spanish Succession between 1701 and
1714 and in the suppression of the Jacobite revolts,
illustrates the sort of encroachment of common people’s