The Epistolary Canon of the “Man of Mercury”

Henry St. John (1678–1751)—elevated to Viscount Bolingbroke in July 1712—was a major political player in the first half of the eighteenth century, a statesman, a diplomat, a writer, a philosopher, a close personal friend of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Voltaire. Between 1704 and 1708, he was secretary at war; at age thirty-two, shortly after his return to Parliament in 1710, he was appointed secretary of state for the Northern Department. Bolingbroke and Robert Harley, Queen Anne’s last lord treasurer and prime minister, were the principal engineers of the controversial Treaty of Utrecht that ended the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13). When Anne died in August 1714, the Whig-friendly Hanoverian regime that took over branded her last ministry traitorous—on the basis of this treaty and of their dealings with France more broadly. Harley was sent to the Tower, but eventually released; Bolingbroke fled to the Continent and rashly became the secretary of state for the Pretender. Bolingbroke spent nearly a decade negotiating with the Whig ministers for his return to England, which did not occur until 1725. The rest of his life he divided between England—leading the unsuccessful but potent Opposition against Sir Robert Walpole’s ministry—and France, in voluntary exile, enjoying the life of the mind, reflecting, writing, and mixing with the French literati and aristocracy. Bolingbroke’s philosophical, political, and historical works are substantial and impressive in themselves. His contributions to The Craftsman, which date from 1727 to 1736 and number almost a hundred, are powerful exemplars of Opposition journalism; The Idea of a Patriot King (written by 1738) is among his best-known works, but arguably richer political analysis is to be found in his Dissertation upon Parties (written 1733–34), Remarks on the History of England (written 1730–31), and Letters on the Study and Use of History (written in the mid 1730s).¹

Bolingbroke has never been a popular figure. As Anne’s impetuous High Tory secretary of state, he appalled the moderates, and even his allies worried about his behavior; in his later years, he was a Jacobite sympathizer distrusted by Hanoverians and other supporters of the Protestant succession, though he was increasingly frustrated by and alienated from the ineffectual Jacobite groups. After his death, as H. T. Dickinson observes, he was “widely condemned as an unprincipled political charlatan” and disparaged for his attacks on religion.² Samuel Johnson considered him an immoral coward, and many of Bolingbroke’s contemporaries would have agreed. But Bolingbroke was too important a man to be dismissed. He was, as Dickinson says, “a substantial, if flawed, political figure in Anne’s reign,” and “a brilliant, if eventually unsuccessful, political writer in the age of Walpole.” Dickinson’s summation of the viscount’s significance is worth quoting at length:

Although he supported a losing political cause, his career tells us much about the vicissitudes of the Tory party and the divisions over fundamental issues of principle that cast them, a potential majority of the political nation, into the political wilderness after 1714. Although he failed to dislodge Walpole from office, he did write some of the most sophisticated and effective attacks on that great minister and his political methods. Bolingbroke’s writings tell us much about the ideological divisions that persisted under the first two Hanoverian monarchs. Although he lacked good sense and political judgement, Bolingbroke was widely read, wrote well, and did make a sincere effort to provide the disparate elements of the parliamentary Opposition with a coherent political ideology and a moral platform. All his life he supported the claims of the landed gentry to be the natural rulers of society and he defended the rights of Parliament and the traditional features of England’s ancient constitution.

Bolingbroke deserves more attention (especially from historically minded literary...