Robinocracy

English

Etymology

From Robin (Robert Walpole’s nickname) +‎ -ocracy.

Noun

Robinocracy (uncountable)

1. (chiefly with the) Rule by British statesman Robert Walpole (1676–1745), especially between 1721 and 1742 when he is regarded as the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
   • 2001, Christine Gerrard, “Political passions”, in John Sitter, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, pages 50–51:

     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.

   • 2004, Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain, London, New York, N.Y.: Hambledon and London, →ISBN, page 248:

     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.

   • 2013, Joseph F. Kett, Merit: The History of a Founding Ideal from the American Revolution to the Twenty-First Century, Ithaca, N.Y., London: Cornell University Press, →ISBN, page 18:

     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.

References

• “Robinocracy”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.