One of the biggest financial problems faced by government in the early Hanoverian period was the escalating size of the national debt. Britain’s wars with France in the late seventeenth century had cost upwards of £130 million.
The introduction of the cider tax in 1763 provoked a minor political row, particularly in the West Country, which was suggestive of significant future changes. The furore was not on the scale of the excise crisis of 1733, but it foreshadowed developments in the expanding scope of popular,...
