an a dead Body; and advertise you of every Incident that
may have the least tendency to destroy or diminish them...[3]

[3] Journal of House of Burgesses, 5 August 1736.

Robinson never flagged in his devotion to protecting and advancing the
privileges of the house.

Robinson correctly understood the times. By the 1730's the number of
affluent families numbered well over 100 and could no longer be
effectively represented by the 12-member council. Many burgesses not
only were as wealthy as councilors, they were their social equals.
Quite commonly they were their brothers or nephews. As the burgesses
gained the ascendancy over the council, the house became, in the words
of Carl Bridenbaugh, "the tobacco gentry club". There sat the new
generation of Randolphs, Harrisons, Nelsons, Robinsons, and Lees.

There developed around Robinson and his cousin, Attorney-General Peyton
Randolph, a group of like-minded gentry known in Virginia politics as
the "Robinson-Randolph Clique." Mostly planters and burgesses from the
James and York river basins, they included a few of their heirs who had
built substantial plantations on the Piedmont. Their principal rivals
had been northern Tidewater and Northern Neck planters led by Councilor
Thomas Lee and then by Richard Henry Lee. Although these rival gentry
groups might compete for choice lands in western Virginia and the Ohio
Valley and for royal offices and positions of influence, they did not
differ in political philosophy. Nor did they deny house leadership to
men with talent. Unlike their counterparts in the House of Commons they
did not differ on matters of English policy--political and economic
decisions were to be made in Virginia by Virginians and not by royal
governors, the Board of Trade, the crown, or the English Parliament.
Above all it was not to be made by parliament. They were the parliament
for Virginia.

In the 1760's three new groups joined the prevailing Robinson-Randolph
leadership. The first was the generation born in the 1730's and 1740's
which would reach maturity in the 1760's and be waiting to enter the
"tobacco club" as a matter of birth. The second was a generation of men
who had achieved wealth and influence, mainly in the Piedmont, whose
fathers and brothers had not been in the first rank of planter gentry.
The third was a new element--burgesses from recently established
frontier counties who had the ambition, drive, and determination to
make good