Lord Hervey and the Limits of Court Whig Pragmatism

Abstract

The financial catastrophe of the early 1720s cast its shadow over the conceptualisation of friendship throughout Walpole’s regime; the issues of public hysteria and sociable management that it brought to the fore would remain significant in the key crises and discursive shifts characterising the era’s politics. As already proposed in Chapter 1, the violent reaction to Walpole’s Excise Bill of 1733 can be seen as echoing the earlier crisis, aptly demonstrating the lingering problems in conceiving of a particular friendship distinct from public markets of speculation, rumour or political comment. Such problems continued to occupy opposition writers like Pope, and his attempts to reconcile political intervention with friendly moral advice in the Epistle to Bathurst will be explored in the following chapter. However, perhaps more unexpectedly, this peak of public frenzy also posed serious questions of Court Whig writers, for whom friendship’s definition was inevitably dependent on the terms of their engagement with opposition arguments. In attempting to justify Walpole’s political system and their own position within it, the ministry’s apologists needed to rebut the accusation that the government operated principally through mechanisms of brib-ery. Yet, as an alternative explanation for the minister’s networks of power, the principle of disinterested friendship could prove not only unconvincing but positively threatening in its wider ramifications.