This is a very well-researched, wide-ranging, finely illustrated, and lucidly written work on politics and political culture between the 1670s and 1720s. It is especially strong in its thickly descriptive empirical sections, which deploy a plethora of contemporary printed and manuscript sources to illuminate late Stuart political life. Knights convincingly argues that in the decades after the Restoration the public became involved and invoked in politics on an unprecedented scale and in novel ways. More people voted than ever before. Indeed, by 1715 the number of voters amounted to almost 20 percent of the adult male population—a higher proportion than after the Great Reform Act of 1832. Whigs and Tories competed to enlist the support of the growing electorate, spawning an expanding pamphlet literature and (especially after licensing lapsed in 1679, and again finally in 1695) a great increase in the number of newspapers in circulation. In 1704, some 2.3 million copies of newspapers circulated. Parliamentary elections were just one focus of political activity. Others included coffeehouses (of which there were perhaps five hundred in London by 1700) and clubs. Grand juries functioned as institutions in which men of middling rank participated in political life and could claim to represent the public (the compatibility of participatory and representative political systems is a recurrent theme in this book). The decades after the Restoration were a great age for petitioning and for addressing the monarch and others. Between 1679 and 1716, over five thousand addresses were presented to the crown on public, nonlegislative matters. In 1723 a mass subscription first “routinely involved both men and women across the land,” indicating that by then women “had become citizens whose loyalty was worth being made sure of” (140).

One consequence of the growth of the public's political role, Knights contends, was the spread of a truly national political culture. A second was the intensification of party rivalries that sometimes led writers on both sides to misrepresent the views of their opponents and to resort to fabrications about their lives and characters. Both parties also on occasion misrepresented their own principles as the public's will. While the first part of the book is about such political practices as electioneering and petitioning—the politics of representation, in short—the second examines the culture of political misrepresentation in the period of the rage of party. Knights interestingly links political fabrications with literary fictionalization and with the rise of the novel. He also plausibly connects the political developments of the period with the financial revolution of the late seventeenth century, relating credit to political credibility. As political debate grew increasingly vituperative, he argues, so people of all political stripes came to lament the fact and to advocate polite and rational discussion. The cult of politeness, then, was closely connected to the actual rudeness of party politics. Addresses to the monarch and others reflected and spread the fashion for polite language. Resorting to scrupulously polite terminology was one means of trying to persuade people that you had risen above the animosities of party bickering. Another was to employ political arithmetic of the kind pioneered by Sir William Petty. Of course, such arithmetic and polite language could themselves be used to partisan ends. Both parties came to feel that the public was too easy for their rivals to manipulate. For much of the period, it was the Tories who most feared the populist politics of the clubs and coffeehouses. But the rise of Toryism in the reign of Anne convinced Whigs that the public was too readily swayed by their rivals’ rhetoric. Hence the abolition of the Triennial Act in 1716.

The book's title refers to Britain, but the book itself is overwhelmingly on England. Scotland gets eleven references in the index (seven of these are to the Union), Ireland four, and England and Wales none at all—presumably because the first is so frequently mentioned, and the second so rarely. It is quite a long book and could occasionally have been tightened. There are some repetitions and tensions. We are told that “the first provincial newspaper was printed in Norwich in 1701” (18) and that the “first newspaper to appear outside London was probably published in Norwich in 1701” (227). Again, we learn that there were “about 500” coffeehouses in London in 1700 (17) and that there were “at least 500” there in that year (249). Knights is generally nuanced and circumspect in his claims about how new or revolutionary later Stuart political culture in fact was. He argues, indeed, that there “was a wider, more consistently invoked, public” (4) in the period he discusses, but he rightly portrays this as the culmination of a process that had roots extending back to 1640 or earlier. Occasionally, however, he makes dubious claims for novelty. For instance, he seemingly attributes the coining of the term “public interest” to “later Stuart creativity” (95), but there are much earlier examples, including a reference in Richard Cosin's (An apologie for sundrie proceedings by iurisdiction ecclesiasticall [London: Deputies of Christopher Barker, 1593], 50) to “the publique interest of the Church and Common-weale.” Knights tells us that “according to the OED” “self-interest” (98) was first used in 1649. In these days of Early English Books Online (to which Knights refers at p. v), the Oxford English Dictionary has really ceased to be a satisfactory source on this kind of point. Earlier instances include “benefit without selfe interest” in St. Robert Southwell's The triumphs ouer death ([London: Valentine Simmes for Iohn Busbie, 1595], sig. B4b). Despite occasional problems, though, this is a fine book that makes an important contribution to the history of political culture in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.