‘[T]hrowing the First Stone’: 1709

In a letter written in the summer of 1714 to Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, Manley ‘most humbly’ asks Harley’s opinion of a plan she has for a pamphlet o ering ‘a true account of the Changes made just Before the Death of the Queen’.1 ese ‘Changes’ would have included Oxford’s own dismissal from o ce two weeks before Anne’s death. Having served since 1710 as Chancellor of the Exchequer and since 1711 as Lord Treasurer, Oxford had been Queen Anne’s chief (or de facto ‘prime’) minister for four years. Moreover, by recruiting ‘some of the most prominent and most e ective pamphleteers of his age’, he had over the previous decade helped create what J. A. Downie has described as a ministerial ‘propaganda machine’.2 Manley herself had been part of that propaganda machine since the spring of 1711, when she was asked by Jonathan Swi to write pamphlets on various topics of interest to the Oxford ministry (including one about the 1711 assassination attempt against Harley) and when she was subsequently asked to take over the Examiner, which Swi had previously authored.