The death of Queen Anne and the accession of the first Hanoverian king of Great Britain, George I, signalled a radical political reorientation. Contemporaries were certain that the new king would bring with him Whig advisors, Whig courtiers, and above all, Whig politics. A fictional Tory in Bernard Mandeville’s lively dialogue written on the occasion of the Hanoverian succession complained that after George I succeeded to the throne the Tories were thrown out and the Whig ‘party carries it swimmingly’. The former Tory secretary of state, Viscount Bolingbroke who agreed with Mandeville about little else in this period, lamented the sudden growth ‘of Whig malice and power’ after the Hanoverian Succession. ‘I see clearly that the Tory party is gone’, Bolingbroke informed his political ally Francis Atterbury, bishop of Rochester.

The early eighteenth-century ‘rage of party’ has long been understood in binary terms. Scholars, when they have accepted the existence of party, have by and large followed the Whig journalist and Secretary of State Joseph Addison in asserting that ‘the general division of the British nation is into Whigs and Tories, there being very few, if any, who stand neuters in the dispute’. Nevertheless by the 1720s and 1730s a new political category had emerged: the Patriots. Again and again, the contributors to the new popular opposition paper The Craftsman praised the ‘the true Patriot’ who deserved ‘popularity’. In the later 1730s the contributors to another opposition journal Common Sense deployed the term. In Scotland, one group of journalists simply called their production The Patriot. Opponents of the Whig ministry's excise scheme appropriated Joseph Addison's play Cato to liken their political stance to that of the ‘Roman Patriot’. Defenders of the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole, by contrast, mocked those who prided themselves on their patriotism.

Why, after decades of political strife between Whigs and Tories, did a new opposition group, the Patriots emerge? What did the Patriots stand for? What did they achieve in the wake of the Hanoverian Succession?

Historians have long debated the structure and vibrancy of party politics during the administration of Britain's first prime minister Robert Walpole. The longdominant interpretation put forward by J.H. Plumb holds that Walpole and the Whig party he controlled enjoyed almost total power over the British state.