With a sharp eye for detail, Joseph Hone fixes his gaze on the controversies surrounding the accession of Queen Anne in 1702 to the English throne. The result is a comprehensively titled but deceptively slim book that certainly packs intellectual punch and erudite insights for scholars of the period. Far from having a smooth succession compared to her joint predecessors William and Mary and her successor George I, so argues Hone, the last Stuart monarch's “right to the throne was a hotly contested topic” (2). Covering the first nine months following Anne's accession on 8 March 1702, the book revolves around three different but interlinked factors complicating the succession and the associated debates: Anne was English and native born. She was a Stuart. Did she succeed by hereditary right or by parliamentary statute?

Methodologically speaking, Hone has two aims for his study: “firstly, to demonstrate to literary scholars how thorough contextualization can illuminate the sophistication of neglected and supposedly minor texts, and, secondly, to reinterpret some important texts by major writers in their original political contexts” (4). Both these aims are to be applauded, as they expand the field and bring new texts to the attention of scholars. Moreover, analyzing such texts to contextualize them as well as “major” works is always a worthwhile endeavor, although the arguments for the intrinsic value of the “minor” texts are sometimes difficult to sustain. Nevertheless, the example of Defoe's The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702) shows the abiding merits of this approach, as do the comments on Henry Sacheverell's writings. The treatment of these important texts is subtle and revealing.

At the same time, there is much to be discovered here for other historians as well, and the study adds significantly to the historical understanding of the interchange between politics, culture, and literature during the late Stuart period. Following the example of the late Kevin Sharpe, Hone champions a “cultural turn” (3) within the history of political thought—a methodological call that many historians within that field would do well to heed. By examining poetry and cultural products for their politics, ideological leanings, and theoretical contexts, Hone shows that in spite of the religious overtones of the coronation and the prominence of religion in royal propaganda and representation, the legitimacy of Anne's succession was not routinely based on divine providence but on constitution, dynasty, and national allegiance. Notwithstanding this, the continued use of religious arguments to defend Anne's succession should serve to remind historians of political ideas—and other historians as well—that the concept of divine right was not yet dead and buried but remained for some defenders of monarchy a viable political theory at the turn of the eighteenth century.

This tension between the remaining embers of divine right rhetoric and theory, dynastic legitimacy, and the post-1688 constitutional foundations of monarchy runs as a thread through the book as it charts the different stages of Anne's first months on the throne. Organized on a largely chronological basis, the five successive chapters discuss in turn William III's death and Anne's succession; the new queen's coronation; the planned arrangements for her first royal progress to Oxford, Bath, and Bristol and the responses thereto; and the literary and pamphlet reactions to the first victorious and disastrous actions of the War of the Spanish Succession. Only the fifth chapter breaks with the chronology, as it looks at the first election campaign of the new reign, which took place in the summer of 1702 and was dominated by debates about the monarch's role as head of the established church and occasional conformity.

Given the centrality of the aforementioned tension, it is not surprising that the Jacobites are given a sizeable role in the events, arguments, and debates of Anne's first months as queen. Indeed, it is Hone's contention that “Anne's succession suggests that Jacobitism was more widespread and more potent at the start of the eighteenth century than either literary scholars or historians have generally assumed” (9). The evidence provided certainly bears this out, although in some cases the reader is left wondering where the Whigs are in all this. Regarding the poetic responses to the coronation, for example, it appears that the Jacobite and Tory poems overwhelmingly outnumbered those coming from the Whigs. The same could be said for the poems discussed in the chapter on the royal progress. Yet no attempt is made to account for this imbalance. It could of course simply be a consequence of the brief period covered by the study, a period in which the accession of an English-born Stuart monarch was cause for the Jacobites and Tories to exult in panegyric while the Whigs remained more quiescent. Yet with the significant exceptions of Addison and Defoe, the political one-sidedness in the book is often notable and could have done with more explanation.

Nevertheless, this is only a minor quibble and overall, Hone has produced a valuable study that deserves to be read widely by historians of all fields. Its most important contribution is to place the monarchy and the monarch back into the center of early eighteenth-century political culture and literature, public sphere, and constitutional and party politics. Much good work has been done on the politics and political power and representation of monarchy in seventeenth-century England, and this study is a welcome rejoinder to this field that reminds historians of the importance of monarchy to eighteenth-century English men and women. Too often historians judge the monarchy to be overshadowed by the growth of parliamentary politics and antimonarchical political theory, but Hone shows us that this was certainly not the case in 1702. Rather, monarchy and dynastic politics ruled the day.