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Description of  The Excise Crisis - Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Oxford Historical Monographs)

The Excise Crisis Society and Politics in the Age of WalpolIt is one of tire more surprising features of eighteenth-century history that the excise crisis of 1733 should have received relatively little detailed investigation. Comparable episodes in the politics of tire period-the Jew Bill affair, the Wilkesite agitations of the 1760s, the Association movements of the 1770s and 1780s - have been minutely studied. Yet the excise crisis looms at least as large as any of these. It was, for example, one of the most shattering defeats ever suffered by a minister of the crown at the bar of public opinion. Sir Robert Walpole's hack journalist, William Arnall, described it to his master as 'one of those very few measures wherein your Success hath not been equal to your Good Intentions'. Others were less restrained. James Ralph considered that 'Never, in the Memory of Man, was the Nation so alarm'd at tire Design of a Minister, as in the Case of the projected Excise on Wine and Tobacco in 1733. Even before the defeat of the excise bill contemporaries recoguized the importance of the crisis blowing up. The Historical Register called it 'the most material publick Event that has happen'd in our own Country in many Years last past.