Henry St John, First Viscount Bolingbroke

English politician, diplomat, and writer

• Born: September 16, 1678
• Birthplace: Wiltshire, England
• Died: December 12, 1751
• Place of death: London, England

As a Tory politician in Parliament during Queen Anne’s reign, Bolingbroke served as secretary of war and later as northern secretary of state. He defended the Church of England and the aristocracy and played a major role in the negotiation of the Treaty of Utrecht. His political writings were both a part of his opposition and an exposition of his political ideas.

Early Life

First Viscount Bolingbroke was born Henry St. John, the only son of Sir Henry St. John and Lady Mary Rich, daughter of the second earl of Warwick. Of Presbyterian and gentry background, his father inherited the manors of Battersea and Wandsworth. The young Bolingbroke was educated at Eton; his attendance at Christ Church College, Oxford, is unconfirmed, but Oxford did confer an honorary degree upon him in 1702. At an early age, Bolingbroke was conspicuous for his public debauchery. Following a tour of the Continent, after the fashion of gentlemen of the age, he married Frances Winchcombe in 1700.

In 1701, Bolingbroke was elected to Parliament for the family borough of Wootton-Bassett in Wiltshire. He prepared the bill to secure the Protestant succession, the Act of Settlement of 1701. As a commissioner of public accounts, he investigated the charges against William’s ministers in the War of the League of Augsburg. Twice he supported bills against occasional conformity, a practice whereby casual performance of Anglican obligation met the requirement of the Test Act for office. From the beginning Bolingbroke distinguished himself as a speaker of ability in Commons, associated with Robert Harley, a moderate of the Tory Party.

Life’s Work

When Harley joined the ministry of the earl of Godolphin and the duke of Marlborough in 1704, Bolingbroke was made secretary of war. At the time, he had confidence in Marlborough’s conduct of the War of the Spanish Succession. That confidence was misplaced, however, in that Marlborough pursued a continental strategy in the war, and Bolingbroke, who conceded the necessity of war with France, favored “more vigorous action at sea, urging that England could humble the enemy most effectively by striking at her colonies and overseas trade.” If the exigencies of war were of principal benefit to the moneyed interest, the Bank of England and the great trading companies, and at the expense of the aristocratic-landed order of the realm, especially the country gentlemen, only Bolingbroke’s concession of the necessity of war with France explains the pursuit of policy (at least as determined by Marlborough) contradictory to both his politics and his principles. Increasingly, it would become the wrong kind of war of benefit to the wrong interest, especially after the French defeat at Ramillies.

Despite earlier support, Bolingbroke contributed substantially to the defeat of a third Occasional Conformity Bill in 1704. The election of 1705, hardly supportive of his kind of Toryism, and the discrepancy in the troop count following the British defeat at Almanza (29,295 authorized; 8,660 counted) both weakened his position in the ministry. He left office with Harley on February 11, 1708, following the revelation of the treason of William Grey, a clerk in Harley’s office. Bolingbroke’s father claimed the family seat in Parliament, and as no other seat could be found, Bolingbroke retired to his wife’s property, Bucklebury, to devote himself to philosophy, reflection, and the reading of history.

The prosecution of the Reverend Henry Sacheverell, the general economic discontent at home, and the continuation of the war with the collapse of peace negotiations at The Hague restored Harley to office in August, 1710. In September, Bolingbroke was appointed northern secretary of state. Peace was the priority of the new ministry. All were convinced, Bolingbroke wrote,

of the unreasonableness and even of the impossibility of continuing the war on the same disproportionate foot. Their universal sense was that we had taken, except the part of the States General, the whole burden of the war upon us . . . while the entire advantage was to accrue to others . . . the first favorable occasion ought to be seized of making peace . . . [to">British-French conflicts the interest of our country . . . as well as . . . of our party.

The new initiative, however, was not inaugurated by Bolingbroke. He was not informed of the preliminaries until they were presented to the entire ministry in April, 1711. He reassured the Dutch that any negotiation would be carried out in concert with the States General and publicly stated that there would be no separate peace. In May, he issued to the duke of Ormonde the order prohibiting any military action against the French without informing the Allies. British duplicity, the ministry’s willingness to parley with the French without including the Allies, became the basis for the Allied identification of England as “Perfidious Albion”—an onus for which Harley and Bolingbroke are both particularly responsible.

In March, 1711, the marquis de Guiscard, charged with supplying British intelligence secrets to the French, attacked and seriously wounded Harley with a penknife. The attack may have been intended for Bolingbroke, but no proof of his culpability in the marquis’s treasonous behavior was established, and in fact Bolingbroke broke his sword in defending Harley. During Harley’s convalescence, Bolingbroke secured the queen’s permission for a military expedition against Quebec, commanded by Jack Hill, brother of the queen’s favorite, Lady Abigail Masham. The expedition failed miserably, though Bolingbroke may have profited personally. As the negotiations continued, Bolingbroke extracted commercial advantage for England from France in exchange for recognition of the claims of Philip Anjou (Philip V) to the Spanish throne. Territorial demands would include Gibraltar and portions of New France in North America; the South Sea Company would receive a monopoly of the Spanish-American slave trade, known as asiento.

The peace preliminaries were signed on September 27, 1711. While peace was popular, a peace that obviously betrayed the Allies was not—at least not with the Whigs. They had demanded that the French be driven from Spain as the price for ending the war: “No peace without Spain.” To discredit the Whigs at home and the Allies abroad, Bolingbroke began a propaganda campaign, using newspapers and pamphlets, including The Examiner, to cultivate public opinion on behalf of the peace. Jonathan Swift would also write his famous The Conduct of the Allies (1711). Marlborough was charged with financial malfeasance, as œ35 million was unaccounted for; he would be censured as gently as possible, according to Swift, but Robert Walpole would be expelled and sent to the Tower of London. Finally, to overcome Whig opposition in the Lords, the queen was forced to create twelve new Tory peers. Bolingbroke confessed that the action was “an unprecedented and invidious measure, to be excused by nothing but necessity, and hardly by that.” The trade provisions with the French, however, would be defeated by nine votes in the Commons. The Treaty of Utrecht was concluded on March 31, 1713, but not before Bolingbroke warned the French that if they did not sign, the queen would ask for new supplies to renew the war.

In support of Tory churchmen, the ministry passed an act in 1711 to build fifty new churches in London and thereabout. Bolingbroke led the Commons in support of the Landed Qualifications Act, which required income of œ600 from landed property for shire members of Parliament and œ300 for borough members of Parliament. The assault on the Whigs continued with the creation of the South Sea Company, a Tory financial institution, which assumed œ9 million of the unsecured national debt. Harley served as its governor, and Bolingbroke was a director. In 1711, Bolingbroke founded the Brothers Club, men of wit, learning, and breeding, which included Swift, Alexander Pope, Dr. John Arbuthnot (the queen’s physician), and, later, John Gay. For thirty years they exposed the folly of humankind, particularly the corruption and venality of the new order of money.

It was in July, 1712, that Bolingbroke was elevated to the peerage as a viscount and as Baron St. John. (He had desired an earldom; the third earl of Bolingbroke, the elder branch of the St. John line, had died without heir in 1711.) He considered the title of viscount less a reward than a punishment. In October, he was passed over in a distribution of the Order of the Garter. He blamed Oxford (Harley had been elevated to earl of Oxford in 1711). The inconstancy of their relationship had long existed and, as Queen Anne’s reign came to a close, Bolingbroke plotted openly against the earl.

Bolingbroke convinced the dying queen to dismiss Oxford on July 27, 1714. His design may have been to achieve control over the ministry to secure his political fortune with a Stuart restoration. Tories of his ilk could not hope for favor with the Hanoverian succession, for, after all, he had betrayed them in the war. If he hoped to alter the Act of Settlement, he was denied; moreover, James III, the Old Pretender, refused to abandon his Roman Catholicism for the Church of England. The duke of Shrewsbury, who replaced Oxford, proceeded to arrange for the Hanoverian succession upon Anne’s death on August 1, 1714.

With the convocation of Parliament in March, 1715, Bolingbroke fled London for France under cover of night. Walpole moved, with unanimous consent, an act of attainder against him. In France, Bolingbroke told the English ambassador that he intended to retire, that he had no Jacobite intention, but by July he had accepted office as secretary of state. He prepared the necessary documents for the 1715 invasion of Scotland and England, making allowance for the security of the Church of England. Apparently, he had little confidence in its prospect for success, or for that matter in the Pretender and his advisers. Within the year, he was dismissed on charges of treachery. He explained his behavior in A Letter to Sir William Wyndham (wr. 1717, pb. 1753), writing that he had acted not out of loyalty to the Stuarts but rather in the belief that a Stuart rule would better serve the interest of the Tory Party. For party, not England, he had sacrificed himself and in so doing had tainted Tories with the odious label of Jacobite. Bolingbroke’s political career was ended.

Confessed loyalty to King George I, however, would not restore him; for ten years Bolingbroke would remain in France. He joined French courtiers at fashionable Parisian salons, attended by the company of Voltaire and Montesquieu and other distinguished and learned men. Even before Lady Bolingbroke died in 1718 (his neglect and infidelity certainly influenced her decision to leave her property to the heirs of her sister), Bolingbroke began an affair with Marie Claire Deschamps de Marcilly, whom he married in May, 1720. He bought a small estate near Orleans, where he renewed his philosophical studies, including an examination of the chronology of the Bible.

Through Lord John Carteret, Bolingbroke secured a pardon from the king in 1723, and two years later Parliament restored his property. Walpole had opposed any restoration, and only George I’s threat of dismissal forced him to compromise: Inherit property Bolingbroke might, but he would not be permitted to sit in the Lords. The result was the renewal of the old animosity between the two, defined by one historian as the source of energy in English political life from 1725 to 1740.

Settled at Dawley, near Uxbridge on what he called a farm, Bolingbroke found politics irresistible. Articles bitterly assaulting Walpole and his policies began appearing in The Craftsman in December, 1726. Bolingbroke hoped to join together opposition Whigs under Sir William Pulteney, earl of Bath, and Tories under Sir William Wyndham. Defections brought on by the Excise Crisis in 1733 raised his hopes that Walpole might be ousted. Bolingbroke used an attack upon the Septennial Act as the vehicle to that end and Wyndham as his mouthpiece. Walpole responded with a virulent counterattack, calling Bolingbroke an “anti-minister” and asking, “Can there be imagined a greater disgrace to human nature than such a wretch as this?” Dismayed and discouraged, Bolingbroke returned to France. There, in 1736, he wrote Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism (1749), which defined and defended opposition politics.

During a brief return to England in 1738, Bolingbroke met Frederick, the prince of Wales, now center of the opposition. The result was The Idea of a Patriot King (1740), which was trusted to Alexander Pope and was not to be published. (His wishes were not honored, as Pope had it printed in 1744.) He inherited Battersea upon his father’s death in 1742. Walpole also resigned his office in 1742, but his departure did not open the door for a belated resumption of Bolingbroke’s political career. His wife died on March 18, 1750, and Bolingbroke followed on December 12, 1751, of cancer, to be buried in the family vault at Battersea. His estate was inherited by the heirs of his father’s second marriage.

Bolingbroke’s most important writings were composed and published during the heat of political battle; other works were not published, at his instructions, until after his death. Fragments: Or, Minutes of Essays (1754) was written in France from 1726 to 1734. The work is primarily concerned with religion and philosophy, which reflect Bolingbroke’s rationalism. He wrote:

It may be truly said, that God, when he gave us reason, left us to our free-will, to make a proper or improper use of it; so that we are obligated to our Creator, for a certain rule, and sufficient means of arriving at happiness, and have none to blame but ourselves when we fail of it. It is not reason, but perverse will, that makes men fall short of attainable happiness. And we are self condemned when we deviate from that rule.

The “philosophical fragments” also included criticism of the social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, one of the early significant critiques of Locke. Political society had its origins in paternal authority, he maintained; therefore, the purpose of government was not the protection of individual rights. The purpose was the same as in natural society, namely, the maintenance of peace and order, the disposition of justice according to natural law, and a paternal pursuit of the good of the people. His hierarchy and duty would be juxtaposed to Locke’s individualism and rights. He defined Locke’s natural order as a “speculative whimsy.”

Bolingbroke defined the king in Parliament and the English constitution as of a mixed nature, that the executive and legislative powers were not rigidly separated. Both, he argued, are constitutionally dependent, in that they share legislative powers; yet at the same time both are constitutionally independent in that each is prevented from the subjugation of the other. A patriot king would achieve that constitutional balance, so that the king would no longer be held in bondage by his minister, or the legislature in bondage to the executive. The patriot king would exemplify honor and virtue. He would of necessity be a great and good man, whose status would enable him to rise above all factions and parties. He would purge his court of self-serving men and would appoint in their places men committed to the general good of the commonwealth. Historian Isaac Kramnick wrote:

Politics for Bolingbroke’s circle was played out in an elaborate theater, where the style of performance was almost more significant than the deeds done. To perform the governmental roles of statecraft properly one had to be properly bred. . . . With theatrical gravity, noble gentlemen should stand before the people and win support by virtue of their eloquence, the compelling aesthetical force of their rhetoric. . . .

The Idea of a Patriot King is an exercise in obscurantism—certainly as it pertained to the world of real politics.

Bolingbroke is one of the best examples of disdain for political parties among eighteenth century political writers (granted he had been an advocate of party government during Anne’s reign). He concluded that the decline of seventeenth century ideological differences between Tory and Whig left only conflict over persons and power. Parties caused “even reasonable men to act on the most absurd, and honest men on the most unjustifiable principles,” he wrote in A Dissertation upon Parties (1735). Instead of party distinction in Parliament, Bolingbroke advocated a division between a government party and an opposition. In his estimate, opposition was a duty and must be undertaken seriously and steadily and systematically. In like manner, he argued, an alternative program to that of the government party must be offered. Opposition must be clarified as not opposing the king, but rather the king’s ministers, an idea that became reality in the eighteenth century as “His Majesty’s (Loyal) Opposition.” Bolingbroke defined the Crown as an essential part of the constitution, whereas the king’s ministers were merely changeable parts of the government. The constitution consisted of the institutions, customs, and laws that “compose the general system, according to which the community hath agreed to be governed,” he wrote. A government is merely the “particular tenor of conduct” by which officers administer public affairs.

Significance

If Edmund Burke is the epitome of conservatism at the end of the eighteenth century, First Viscount Bolingbroke was in many ways the same thing at the century’s beginning. Bolingbroke believed that the position and authority of aristocratic-landed men as well as the Church of England was necessary for the well-being of England.

Burke asked whether anyone read Bolingbroke, or whether anyone ever read him through. John Adams had—five times, as he confessed in 1813. A Dissertation upon Parties, Adams wrote, “is a jewel, there is nothing so profound, correct, and perfect on the subject of government in the English or any other language.” Bolingbroke’s statement “to die the last of British freemen, [rather] than bear to live the first of British slaves” rang true to many Americans during the Revolutionary War. His opposition to political parties took root in American soil, as the revolutionary fathers believed that one of the worst fates to befall the young republic would be the rise of political factionalism. Certainly later British Tories and conservatives would find merit in Bolingbroke’s writings. His pamphleteering, with the help of friends, broadened the base of political awareness of the issues of public affairs in English society. The elegance of his style was widely recognized and highly recommended by Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield. Moreover, the young William Pitt conceded that of all the literature of the past that was lost, he would be most happy to recover a speech of Bolingbroke.

Much of the stigma imposed on Bolingbroke for the Treaty of Utrecht is political bias. His behavior may have been unprincipled, but the treaty served England’s national interest, both at the time and subsequently. In many ways Walpole’s pursuit of trade was consistent with Bolingbroke’s position. His opponents accused him of disingenuousness, but it was a charge of which they were guilty, too, by and large. There was much that both appeared and was contradictory in Bolingbroke, but Kramnick contends that fundamentally a large element of consistency runs through his career and particularly his thought. He was irreverent and a religious skeptic (or a Deist), but his defense of the church was a matter not of personal confession but rather of social necessity.

The judgment of history, especially Whig history, has been unkind to Bolingbroke. In his own time, however, he was regarded with the warmest admiration and affection by some of the most brilliant contemporaries of the Augustan Age.

Bibliography

Biddle, Sheila. Bolingbroke and Harley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. An examination of the politics of Queen Anne’s reign in general, and of the relationship and politics of Bolingbroke and Harley in particular. Biddle contrasts Bolingbroke’s and Harley’s personalities and policies.

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount. The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, with a Life, Prepared Expressly for This Edition, Containing Additional Information Relative to His Personal and Public Character, Selected from the Best Authorities. 4 vols. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1841. An excellent primary resource.

Cottret, Bernard, ed. Bolingbroke’s Political Writings: The Conservative Enlightenment. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Examines Bolingbroke’s writings within the context of contemporary English and French thought. Includes an analysis and full reprinting of A Dissertation upon Parties and The Idea of a Patriot King.

Foord, Archibald S. His Majesty’s Opposition, 1714-1830. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Informative concerning the historical development of political opposition beginning with Bolingbroke’s time. Foord argues that there was no program of organized opposition, and the extent to which the opposition was united was largely determined by political prejudices. The opposition was composed of the “outs”; they were important for what they did and who they were, not for what they proposed.

Holmes, Geoffrey. British Politics in the Age of Anne. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967. An analytical and interpretive work that explains the machinations of Whig and Tory politicians. The book is particularly mindful of the influence of Sir Lewis Namier and other revisionist historians of eighteenth century politics.

James, D. G. The Life of Reason: Hobbes, Locke, Bolingbroke. New York: Longmans, Green, 1949. A discussion of the literary and intellectual dimensions of three “Augustans” of the Age of Reason.

Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. A critical assessment of Bolingbroke’s political writings explained in the context of the social and economic milieu of the time. Bolingbroke should not be dismissed as inconsequential, for what he had to say was of significance, even if, as Kramnick concludes, he was inaccurate.

Pettit, Alexander. Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Response to Walpole, 1730-1737. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Pettit has studied pamphlets, plays, sermons, and newspapers published in the 1730’s to examine the views of Bolingbroke and others who opposed Walpole. The author concludes that most people responded anxiously to Bolingbroke’s concept of a unified opposition.

Stephen, Leslie. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962. In volume 2, chapter 10, part 9, “The Walpole Era,” Stephen offers a scathing denunciation of Bolingbroke.