Richard Steele, Irishman

Early in October 1713, the essayist, playwright, and political propagandist Richard Steele began a new periodical that he called the Englishman. It was the fifth periodical in seven years for which he acted as editor and principle writer, and it was the most political. It was the immediate successor to his Guardian, and its persona or eidolon claimed to have purchased the Guardian's goodwill from Nestor Ironside, its fictional editor. Ironside dramatically reinforced the need to move from a periodical of manners to a periodical of politics.

More specifically, the Englishman was established to counter the effective propaganda of the Examiner, which the Tory ministry sponsored, and to answer the claims made by non-juring and other clerics on behalf of the Pretender's claim to succeed Queen Anne. Ironside ends his speech to his own successor with the exhortation to ‘Be an ENGLISHMAN’. Of course, the Hanoverians, whom Parliament established as Anne's successors by the Act of Settlement in 1701 and whose succession Steele defended in 1713, were not English. However, James III, who had lived all his life in France, could hardly claim to be English either. A further paradox, which Steele's political opponents quickly noted, was that Steele himself was born in Dublin. The pattern of an Irishman pretending to be an Englishman, they argued, typified the mendacity of Steele's political journalism.