Richard Steele: scandal and sedition

Abstract

When, in her speech to Parliament on 9 April 1713, Queen Anne announced that her government had secured a general peace with France after twenty years of war, there was no prospect that the cessation of ‘so long and burthensome a war’ would produce any ‘calming of men’s minds at home’.1 Throughout her reign the nation had been beset by arguments between the Whigs and Tories not only over the aims and conduct of the war but over religious and political problems that had divided society at least since the Revolution of 1689. Unwittingly, due to her failing health and inability to produce an heir, Anne herself had aggravated what she called these ‘groundless jealousies’ of faction. And, although she attempted to calm her subjects by assuring them of ‘the perfect friendship there is between me and the House of Hanover’, her designated heirs since 1701, few, if any, would have been convinced. The well-known hostility of the Hanoverians towards her Tory ministry’s peace proposals, and the barely concealed delight of those subjects who continued to support the hereditary right of her half-brother the Pretender (still living under French protection) were obvious causes for alarm. Thus, for all her insistence on ‘What I have done for securing the Protestant Succession’, the suspicion that her Tory ministers, with or without her knowledge, were now secretly preparing for a Jacobite restoration which would destroy all the laws and liberties of the post-Revolution constitution, would not be allayed by royal rhetoric. It was a common observation in the spring of 1713 that ‘the nearer we draw to Peace Abroad, the farther we seem to drive from Peace at Home’.2