A History of England27 Kesä 2021

45. Robinocracy

'Robin', or Robert Walpole, Britain's first and longest-serving Prime Minister, came to be known as 'Cock Robin'. Possibly because people around him felt his success had made him cocky. The regime over which he presided was termed the 'Robinocracy'.

It was an era of peace, stability and improving government finances. Not enough to save him ultimately from his adversaries, dissident Whigs such as George Grenville and William Pitt the Elder - in other words, members of his own party. He'd given them peace, but they wanted war. Specifically, they wanted Britain's voice to be heard on the world stage.

We're on the verge of Britain becoming an imperial power, which we'll be finding out more about in coming episodes. But to make that possible we needed to be a lot more warlike than Cock Robin wanted. So the Robinocracy had to end.

Illustration: The Stature of a Great Man or the English Colossus". Satire of Sir Robert Wapole alluding to his "extreme reluctance to engage in war...to resist the aggressions of Spain and France". Caption reads: "Why Man, he doth bestride of narrow World Like a Colossus, and we petty Men – Walk under his huge Legs, & peep about To find ourselves, dishonourable Graves Men at some times are Masters of their fates: The fault, dear P––y is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are Underlings —Shakespear [sic]". Public domain picture, from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3b03411.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

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