The failure of Robert Walcott's attempted ‘Namierisation’ of Queen Anne's house of commons in the 1950s is now an accepted historiographical fact. Scholars working on late Stuart politics inevitably dismiss Walcott's work as misguided and misleading, and instead take as a given the existence of a two‐party structure as delineated by the standard authority on the subject, Geoffrey Holmes. This article returns to the controversy over ‘party’ in the 1960s, which reached a climax in 1967 with the publication of Holmes's magnum opus and J.H. Plumb's Ford Lectures. The purpose is not to revisit the debate, which was decided conclusively at the time, but to explore the context in which Walcott and his critics were writing; more specifically the connection between Walcott's work and the approach to 18th‐century political history pioneered by Sir Lewis Namier. Using private correspondence between the principals, it argues that Walcott did not properly follow Namier's methods, and was identified as a Namierite largely because Namier was unwilling, for personal reasons, to disown him. In the long run, this reluctance proved damaging, accelerating the decline in Namier's reputation in the 1960s and the shift towards different forms of political history.

中文翻译：

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18世纪议会中的政党：罗伯特·沃尔科特的拆除及其后果*

罗伯特·沃尔科特（Robert Walcott）在1950年代尝试对安妮女王下议院进行“数字化”的失败，现已成为历史学公认的事实。研究斯图尔特后期政治的学者不可避免地认为沃尔科特的工作是误导和误导性的，而是假定存在两党结构，这是该主题的标准权威杰弗里·霍尔姆斯（Geoffrey Holmes）所描绘的。本文回到了1960年代有关“政党”的争议，该争议在1967年随着福尔摩斯的巨著发表而达到了高潮。和JH Plumb的福特演讲。这样做的目的不是要重新审视当时是最终决定的辩论，而是要探讨沃尔科特和他的评论家写作的背景。更具体地说，沃尔科特的作品与刘易斯·纳米尔爵士开创的18世纪政治历史方法之间的联系。它利用校长之间的私人往来，认为沃尔科特没有正确地遵循纳米尔的方法，并被确定为纳米尔人，主要是因为纳米尔出于个人原因不愿将他解雇。从长远来看，这种不情愿被证明具有破坏性，加剧了纳米尔（Namier）在1960年代的声誉下降，并转向了不同形式的政治历史。