In the last twenty years we have seen a revolution in the study of later Stuart and early Georgian England. Spurred in great part by Robert Walcott's brave attempt to apply Namierian methods and assumptions to the early eighteenth century, a squadron of able historians has attacked the sociopolitical history of the period, and has given us what might be called a neo-Whig interpretation. Such scholars as Geoffrey Holmes, William Speck, John Western, and recently B.W. Hill and J.P. Kenyon have sifted through the historiographical detritus and discovered that there is much to be saved from the older interpretations.
Most importantly, the new scholarship on the period 1660-1760 has reemphasized a vital political factionalism, whether it be called party strife or merely shifting ideological alliances. English social and political groups apparently stood in a fragile equilibrium at best, rather than in a solid Namierian consensus. Even J.H. Plumb has noted the pressures brought to bear on relatively weak post-Revolution central governments by influential sociopolitical interest groups, pressures that restricted severely the available options for policy and power. E.P Thompson would go farther to claim that factionalism (mainly that of an elite against the rest of society) was so ingrained that only by using repressive means was Sir Robert Walpole's government able to stay in the saddle. Even if some would disagree with Hill's contention that there was always an effective Tory opposition, few deny that debate on issues that were deemed basic—including the form of government, of social organization, and of thought—continued far beyond 1688 or even 1714.