Robinocracy

London’s famous opening lines, in which the disenchanted Thales recalls the lost pride of Elizabethan England (“In pleasing Dreams the blissful Age renew / And call Britannia’s Glories back to view,” lines 5–6), combines the heady mood of moral indignation and patriotic nostalgia characteristic of opposition verse in the final years of the Robinocracy.

The patriot opposition within the Whig party to Robert Walpole’s Robinocracy shared common ground with the Tories in looking back to the Saxon constitution as a symbol of the constitutional balance that Walpole’s oligarchy had upset.

Walpole’s Robinocracy undermined the principle of consent dear to radical Whigs by seducing the otherwise independent Country (landed gentry) with the blandishments of Court (ministerial) favors.