Whilst the last decade has seen a spate of eighteenth-century writers posthumously ‘outed’ as closet Jacobites, Thomson's staunchly Whig credentials have never been in doubt, the Thomson family's politics being firmly located within an established Scottish Whig tradition that inculcated vehement support for the Union and the Hanoverian cause. Yet within the Whig camp, it is now accepted that major divisions can be identified between Walpole and his supporters and the so-called ‘Patriot Opposition’ who had come to regard Frederick, Prince of Wales as an embodiment of their present exclusion from power and their hoped-for future greatness. Thomson's Whiggism must accordingly be qualified and he has recently emerged convincingly as a Patriot in both the general and specific uses of the term. Given that all of this is accepted, it is extraordinary that Patriot readings of Thomson's poetry are to date sporadic. The text which has been most extensively explained in terms of known Patriot symbols is Liberty. Where reference is made to a framework of Patriot Whig allusion in The Seasons it is to a handful of predictable passages that are cited so frequently that they must as a consequence sit uncomfortably with the surrounding text. This paper attempts a systematic examination of Patriot Whig references within The Seasons: returning to consideration of the most commonly cited instances of Thomson's Patriotism, but seeing these passages in the wider context of the complete text which, it will be argued, builds a systematic Patriot critique of Walpole's domestic and foreign policy, a critique in which the natural seasonal cycle may be seen to be integral, not accidental, to an understanding of Thomson's political allusions.