Bolingbroke

Bolingbroke, Viscount of (Harry St. John), English statesman and political writer (1678-1751). His first appearance in Parliament was in 1700, when he ranged himself upon the Tory side. In 1704 he became Secretary of State, and was a minister for four years, until Horace Walpole and the Whigs came into power. The two years' interval that now followed was of the greatest service to him, as giving him leisure for perfecting by study and reflection his political and his philosophical principles. Queen Anne regretted her Tory Government, and intrigued with Harley and Bolingbroke for the return to power of the party. This was accomplished in 1710, and as Foreign Secretary, and fully convinced of the evils of continuing the war, Bolingbroke did not rest till he brought about the peace of Utrecht, in spite of opposition abroad, the weakness of the queen, and even the envy of his own colleagues. He went to France to negotiate this treaty - the crowning act of his political life - and was most flatteringly received by Louis XIV. The accession of George I. drove the Tories again out into the cold, and it is at this period that Bolingbroke entered upon the questionable course of joining the exiled Stuarts, and then turning them into ridicule. Allowed to come back from exile, and restored to his property, he descended again into the political arena so far as was in his power, and attacked Walpole in the famous letters which upheld the rights of the country against the oppressions of a ministry at once corrupting and corrupted. Death found him writing his Reflections on the Present State of the Nation. As a philosopher, though classed by many as an atheist, he was rather the exponent of that vague and indeterminate theism which was known later in France as "Voltaireism," and it is from the arsenal of Bolingbroke's writings that the writers of this school drew their most pointed and telling weapons. As a man of letters Bolingbroke held his own with Swift, and he gave his intimate friend Pope the idea of his Essay on Man, and is said to have aided him to carry it out.