Category: History
The year 1721 has many splendours, but there are also thirteen public hanging days a year, drunkenness is endemic and organised crime rampages through the streets. Only a generation earlier James II, suspected of conspiring to enforce Roman Catholicism and subordinate England to France, was driven out b
The year 1721 has many splendours, but there are also thirteen public hanging days a year, drunkenness is endemic and organised crime rampages through the streets. Only a generation earlier James II, suspected of conspiring to enforce Roman Catholicism and subordinate England to France, was driven out by the Whigs. In 1715 his son, the Pretender, failed to take the Crown by armed force. The new King, George I, an intelligent, moderate man, is cursed everywhere as a damned foreigner. James followers, the Jacobites, conspire and are persecuted. In 1720, the South Sea Bubble, an attempt to finance state debt by runaway speculation, collapses. Ruined people mass in Westminster. "The South Sea" directors, says an MP, should be thrown into the sea. The Pretender could take over any day. Robert Walpole, once imprisoned for financial chicanery, assumes political control. When the rage subsides he becomes chief minister - or, a new title, "Prime Minister". He personally detects a Jacobite plot. Digging in, he buys parliamentary seats wholesale with secret service money. In a runaway theatrical success, "The Beggar's Opera", Walpole is compared with the criminal mastermind Jonathan Wild.
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