This was part of a centuries long tradition of political independence through an active share in local and national government meaning that English liberty did not result from a revolt against an aristocratic power but its gradual extension.
There was then an analysis of two borough seats that were politically managed by the Treasury – Harwich and Orford and finally a set of biographical of MPs who drew secret service pensions aiming to underscore that these payments were unimportant in terms of influence.
[2] A number of Namier's students published similar works using structural analysis to analyse eighteenth century English politics, such as John Brooke's biography of Charles Townshend.
Also after Namier retired he intensified work on the History of Parliament series, concentrating on the same mid eighteenth century period, although that volume had to be completed after his death by his student and co-editor John Brooke.
His obsession with collecting facts such as club membership of various MPs and then attempting to correlate them with voting patterns led his critics to accuse him of "taking ideas out of history".
[10] His biographer John Cannon concludes: Structure and Politics has been regarded by many as a departure from the previous historiography on George III with one historian saying that Namier's work "mark the beginning of the modern period".