This chapter builds on the framework and context established in Chapter 1, which in many ways shaped the political experience of Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751). It provides a revisionist interpretation by demonstrating that, rather than an anti-party writer, Bolingbroke is best understood as the promoter of a very specific party, a systematic parliamentary opposition in resistance to what he perceived to be a Court Whig faction in power. Drawing on all of Bolingbroke’s well-known works, as well as his lesser-known journalism and unpublished sources, the chapter shows how most of his writings were calculated to legitimise opposition in the shape of a specific kind of political party: the Country party.

The most significant figure in the opposition to Walpole, besides Bolingbroke, was the Whig William Pulteney. However, Pulteney’s involvement with Bolingbroke’s Country party platform, whose raison d’être was to unite Tories and Whigs, ended upon the fall of Walpole in 1742. After Walpole’s resignation, Pulteney abandoned the Tories when he resisted attempts to prosecute Walpole and accepted a seat in the Lords as the Earl of Bath. John Perceval wrote a notorious pamphlet defending Pulteney/Bath, entitled Faction Detected by the Evidence of Fact (1743). In Faction Detected, Perceval distinguished between legitimate and factious opposition, associating the former with Whigs and the latter with Tories and Jacobites. This chapter also discusses various reversionary oppositions and the transitory broad-bottom administration in the mid-1740s.

Few, if any, political thinkers of the eighteenth century dealt as thoroughly and extensively with party as David Hume (1711–76). This chapter considers Hume’s first batch of essays on British politics, published in 1741–2. Hume analysed how the Whig–Tory and Court–Country alignments were integral to British party politics, with the former dividing the political nation along dynastic and religious lines and the latter being a natural expression of the workings of the mixed constitution and interparliamentary conflict. His analysis can be read as a compromise between Bolingbroke and Walpole. Yet it was something more than that – and arguably the most ambitious attempt to make sense of party in British politics to date.