Sunderland, known as the Junto.

The opposition sniped from the backbenches

at the Land Tax, the Bank, the influence of William's Dutch
favorites, and led by Paul Foley and Edward Harley they scored some
significant victories. In 1698 William was forced to accept a peace-time
army of 7,000 English-born troops, rather than the 20,000 he wanted. In
1701 the Act of Settlement, which laid down the succession of the
Hanoverians should Princess Anne die without children, included a great
catalog of protest at William's perversion of the constitution. The Act
imposed a series of statutory limitations on the monarch, who henceforth
had to be a conforming Anglican; it stipulated that parliamentary consent
was necessary for foreign wars; and it freed the judiciary from royal
interference. The Act of Settlement was perhaps the most notable of the
constitutional victories achieved over the crown during William's reign.
Queen Anne's reign coincided with England's second great bout against
Louis XIV. While the Duke of Marlborough defeated the French, his ally
the Earl of Godolphin took care of the home front. The two men served
Anne as pragmatic political managers, working with politicians across the
spectrum. However, their commitment to punitive peace terms became an
obstacle to peace, and so by 1708 they had given way to Somers and
Wharton, the great Whig ministers of the 1690s. War or peace became the
great issue, not just in politics, but in social terms too. Contemporaries
perceived English society as divided between the rival "monied" and
"landed interests." Henry St. John claimed in 1709 that "the whole
burden" of twenty years of war had fallen on "the landed interest," men
who had "neither served in the fleets nor armies, not meddled in the public
funds and management of treasure." Meanwhile the new monied interest
had arisen on the back of "a sort of property which was not known twenty
years ago." The monied interest was thought to "ruin those that have only
land to depend on, to enrich Dutch, Jews, French and other foreigners,
scoundrel stock-jobbers and tally-jobbers, who have been sucking our
vitals for many years."13 In part these interests were literary constructs: the
landed interest gained a voice in Jonathan Swift's Examiner (1710-11), or
less flatteringly in the figure of Sir Roger de Coverley, the archetypal squire
who crossed swords with the merchant Sir Andrew Freeport in the pages of
The Spectator and Tatler.14 But in general the perception of social change
was justified. Before 1688 the English were undertaxed and possibly undergoverne
d
by an amateur bureaucracy of gentlemen landowners; by the
1690s they paid a swingeing Land Tax, supported a huge National Debt,
and found professional administrators interfering ceaselessly in their
affairs. A society based on the ownership of land was giving way to a more
complex society which included new professional and administrative