Age of Walpole Part 2: Opposing the Trend of the Fiscal Military State

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Was Walpole in power for the purpose of holding on to power or was he holding on to power to enact his preferred policies?  Was he self consciously developing a stable example of parliamentary monarchy?  What were his policies?

There is yet another difference between Britain and the continent in the relatively decentralized British administration versus the strong trend on the continent towards the Fiscal Military State.  

We finally have our long awaited discussion on Corruption and Patronage.  It's scope is laid out, we have an analysis from the French government performed in the 1730's that lays out the meaning of it pretty well.  We also  go into a lot of the details of how the largest form of corruption was so hard to uproot because it was embedded in English society, and would be so expensive to fix and would harm so many sympathetic government employees.  There's quite a bit of discussion of the reform movement and why they could not succeed until the time of Pitt the Younger.  My most contentious argument is that its primary effect was to build a political and social consensus for corruption's elimination.



We continue the 3 part Robert Walpole arc.