ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the politics of oligarchy in the years of the Whig Supremacy: to identify and examine the main components in the system; to see how they functioned; and to seek to explain why, by and large, they continued to do so smoothly until first, some jarring elements in the 1750s, and then George III, along with John Wilkes and the American colonists, started to toss their various spanners into those well-oiled works. One very distinctive feature of the political system of 1722-60 was a monarchy not merely reconciled to a single-party monopoly of office but active in promoting it, in a way that would have appalled William III and Queen Anne. From 1721, until Sir Thomas Robinson's appointment as Southern Secretary after Henry Pelham's death, even Cabinet membership posts became aristocratic monopolies. The House of Lords as an institution lost considerable ground to the Commons in the thirty years which followed the end of its 'golden period'.
