and eventually, in 1713, rewrote the European balance of power.

Sheltered
by the wooden walls of her navy, confident in the prowess of her generals
and armies, Britain was by the 1750s fighting France and Spain on four
continents and on the high seas.
But success and refinement are not the whole story. Again and again we
are brought up with a jolt when we encounter the animosities and bigotry,
the bizarre beliefs and casual cruelties just beneath the surface of
Augustan life. No century should be glibly summarized, but for all its
glitter and its advance toward civility, this was also an ugly, violent age.
Ugly in its systematic brutality toward the poor and the criminal - the
eighteenth century saw a huge increase in the penalties for offenses against
property - and ugly in its political uses of terror - from the executions
during the Popish Plot to the massacre at Glencoe and the campaign after
Culloden. The masses were easily stirred to violence against those who
seemed alien - whether it was Catholics or Nonconformists, the Irish or
the Jews, or evangelicals like John Wesley. In their portraits of Britain in
the 173os and 1740s, William Hogarth, John Gay, and Alexander Pope
have left powerful images of a corrupt and vicious society.1 Perhaps this is
the dark underbelly of any age, and more historically significant are the
deep political and religious animosities which ran through English life
during this period. Every town and every city, almost every parish, was
divided. The strife of Dissenter against churchman, Protestant against
Catholic, and Whig against Tory suggests that English enmities ran deep.
It is true, of course, that the English people had never been as one, but the
sixteenth-century Reformation and its repercussions, followed by the crisis
of Stuart kingship in the 1630s, engendered antagonisms which the
ensuing civil war and military rule could only deepen and embitter. After
the restoration of the monarchy each subsequent decade seemed to bring
another confrontation or crisis which was incorporated into a complicated
legacy of hatreds, confirming the old in their feuds and poisoning the next
generation.
Augustan England seems then to have been divided, ill at ease with itself,
and yet successful and stable. And it is this paradox which fascinates
historians and sets them hunting for the process by which England tamed
sectarian hatreds. How were these differences contained so that political
and social life could continue? A variety of answers have been offered to
this question by historians taking a variety of approaches. In 1967 J. H.
Plumb traced the growth of political stability in England between 1675 a nd
1725; he defined this stability as government by a single party, the control
of the legislature by the executive and the creation of a sense of common
identity in those who wielded social, economic, and political power, in