The remarkable boom in political journalism and newspapers during Queen Anne's reign (1702–1714) is well known. Historians of the press and of late Stuart Britain have done excellent work on the ‘why’ of an emergent daily press, and on the causes and nature of the transformation after 1695. They highlight the lapse of the Licensing Act that year as a signal moment in the history of printing and of public politics. As W. A. Speck concludes, ‘The most spectacular effect of the end of censorship was the rise of the newspaper’. Remarkably little scholarship, however, has been devoted to the content and clashing, evolving ideologies of London's political papers – the focus of the present study.

The growth of political journalism was driven by and contributed to the bitter partisan controversy of the early eighteenth century: party considerations infused every aspect of English society, and the epithet often applied to these years (‘the rage of party’) is richly earned. The rise of a daily press not only ‘greatly facilitated the political education of Londoners’, but also ‘contributed to an ideological polarisation of public opinion along party lines’. The intensity of the conflict was sustained by Triennial elections: between 1679 and 1716, sixteen general elections occurred, an average of one every two and a half years. Add to these factors the passionate debates about the monarch's power versus parliamentary rights, about the expensive and seemingly endless War of the Spanish Succession, about the succession to the English throne, and a whole host of other disputed topics – and the result is a staggering amount of printed polemic. Another clear consequence of this change is the politicisation of the people and the drastic expansion of public politics. Jürgen Habermas's conclusions in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere are admittedly problematic – but late Stuart and early Hanoverian commentators acknowledged that something important had shifted.