The Patriot Whigs and, later Patriot Party, was a group within the Whig party in the United Kingdom from 1725 to 1803. The group was formed in opposition to the ministry of Robert Walpole in the House of Commons in 1725, when William Pulteney and seventeen other Whigs joined with the Tory party. By the middle of the 1730s, there were over one hundred Whig Patriots in Commons. The Whig Patriots believed that Walpole had grown too powerful, that he was too partisan, too exclusive, and too personally important. Further, they suspected that Walpole was enriching himself from the public purse. Discontent with Walpole among his fellow Whigs had first been brought to a crisis with the South Sea Bubble and his role as a "screen" to the South Sea directors (and his amazing ability to profit in a stock that crashed). The Tories had accused Walpole of misappropriations going back to his time in the Navy, and even radical Whigs such as John Tutchin had publicly accused him of siphoning off money. A focus for the Whig Patriots was The Craftsman, a newspaper founded by Pulteney and Henry St. John, the former Tory minister. Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and Henry Fielding all wrote for The Craftsman, and St. John's The Idea of the Patriot King (1735) incorporated the language of "patriotism" in a critique of the political theory seemingly behind Walpole. Many of the anti-Walpolean satires of the 1730s mixed Tory and Patriot Whig stances, and some figures, such as Henry Carey were simultaneously satirizing Caroline of Ansbach for her backing of Walpole and penning patriotic operas and songs (including, possibly, God Save the King). The Patriot Whigs never achieved majority power while Walpole remained in Commons. However, William Pitt the Elder would gather around himself the "Patriot Party," which would also be the unofficial "party" of William Pitt the Younger. These associations would be effective and would set up their own ministries.
