"Namier, as a careful student of the Newcastle Papers, seems to have realised that transitions were occurring in the 1750s which transformed the Whig v. Tory alignment of the early eighteenth century into the multi-factional pattern which characterised the 1760s... A possible charge against Namier is that despite this youthful insight he did not afterwards object when his pupils and colleagues suggested that a Namierite analysis in terms of factions applied to much larger areas of the eighteenth century than that which it was devised to fit."