When the four Pittite loyalists William Gifford, John Murray, Walter Scott and George Ellis combined to found the Quarterly Review, their purpose was entirely political. Although Scott thought it inadvisable ‘that the work should in its outset assume exclusively a political character’ (QR Letter 4), and Ellis was afraid that the insertion of articles on both Denmark and Spain in the first number would ‘render our undertaking too obviously political’ (QR Letter 11), privately Murray made it clear that the ‘merely literary’ articles would be so many spoonfuls of sugar to disguise the taste of the medicine. ‘If we can once fix ourselves upon public attention, honnied drops of party sentiment may be delicately insinuated into the unsuspecting ear’ (QR Letter 8). Their purpose was political because they were alarmed – at times almost hysterically so – by the success of the Edinburgh Review, which was founded in 1802 and had come to be recognized as the mouthpiece of the opposition Whigs in Parliament. ‘It is as a political engine that their work is seriously formidable’, wrote Ellis of the Edinburgh reviewers (QR Letter 40). In going in to battle against such brilliant ‘northern’ wits, Gifford sometimes felt that his own ‘troops’ were mere ‘amateurs’ and ‘volunteers’ by comparison.

It might seem odd in retrospect that the Whig Party of Grey and Grenville should have been seen as such a serious threat, since (apart from thirteen months during 1806–7) it had been out of office since 1783 and would remain so until 1830. However, the situation looked rather different to Pittite loyalists in 1808. Pitt himself had died in 1806 and had begun to be invested with the mythical qualities of a national saviour, a type of conservative nostalgia that was actually rather frightening, since the more Pitt was lauded the more his loss seemed catastrophic. Fox had also died, in 1807, but since he was thought to have been a liability to the opposition Whigs, his departure brought no comfort to Pittite conservatives.