When Queen Anne died on the first of August 1714 the general elections brought the Whigs to the government. The Tories had been tied to Queen Anne and had supported the claim of the Stuarts to succession to the British throne. The Whigs, instead, were supporters of the protestant Hanovers and had won.

With George I (reigned from 1714 to 1727) the Whigs became the king’s favourites, whereas almost all the Tories were deprived of their posts and appointments. The Tories were so disgraced that their leaders, Bolingbroke and Ormonde, fled to France and joined the jacobites. They consequently supported the attempt of the Old Pretender in 1715. With the betrayal of the two Tory leaders, the Tories came to be identified with the jacobites for a long period.

Among the Whigs the leadership was assumed by Robert Walpole, who became Prime Minister in 1722. Walpole was remarkably gifted in economics. He healed British economy creating a Sinking Fund with which he proposed to repay the National Debt (54 million pounds) accumulated during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714).

Walpole was the sole controller of the British home and foreign affairs for a whole decade, but stumbled on the excise on tea, wine etc. In 1733 his bill was rejected by the Commons. Walpole didn’t want to increase taxes on the land, that’s why he had thought of this form of taxation on the consumption of tea and other goods.

Walpole’s program had been simple: he didn’t want wars, neither at home nor in Europe; he wanted to lower taxes (in fact he had wiped off both taxes on the import of raw materials from the colonies, and taxes on the export of British products). He wanted a policy of stability, but he was contrasted, after 1733, by the Tories and Whig dissidents who thought that a more aggressive policy would be more appropriate to English aspirations.

Walpole resigned in 1742 and was succeeded by Lord Wilmington, but a new Whig star was rising: William Pitt the Elder, earl of Chatham.