Meanings
- uncountableRule by British statesman Robert Walpole (1676–1745), especially between 1721 and 1742 when he is regarded as the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
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.
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 182 more examples
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.
2001, Christine Gerrard, “Political passions”, in John Sitter, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, pages 50–51The 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.
2004, Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain, London; New York, N.Y.: Hambledon and London, →ISBN, page 248
Origin
From Robin (Robert Walpole’s nickname) + -ocracy.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
Robinocracy. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Robinocracy
“Robinocracy.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Robinocracy. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Robinocracy,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Robinocracy.
Source: Robinocracy on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.