Notes:
For all but a few relatively brief interludes between 1722 and 1760 most of the real political power and decision-making in Britain was concentrated in very few hands, and those hands, apart from the early Hanoverian kings themselves, were predominantly landed and aristocratic as well as partisan.
(Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi:
The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-Industrial Britain 1722-1783.)
Bibliography
Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi: The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-Industrial Britain 1722-1783. Routledge, 2014
Linda Colley: In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-60 . Cambridge University Press, 1785.
Frank O’Gorman: The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History 1688-1832. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016