One of those lectures was titled ‘The Rage of Party’. Plumb’s ‘rage of party’ became Holmes’ ‘age of party’. Owers negotiates this problem with considerable brio, combining the high politics of court and parliament with a broader-brush history of ideas, religion, and culture. Whigs accused Tories of being agents of French popery; Tories accused Whigs of being schismatic republicans. As Owers puts it, Harley used this ‘mastery of the shady arts’ to carve a ‘calm, moderate path through a thicket of bone-headed partisanship’.