Henry Bolingbroke

“ His own account of his policy will be found in this letter to his friend Sir William Windham, in which the only weak feature is the bitterness of Bolingbroke’s resentment against Harley.
When he went in exile to France, Bolingbroke remained only a few days in Paris before retiring to St. Clair, near Vienne, in Dauphiny. His Letter to Windham tells how he became Secretary of State to the Pretender, and how little influence he could obtain over the Jacobite counsels. The hopeless Rebellion of 1715, in Scotland, Bolingbroke laboured in vain to delay until there might be some chance of success. ”

“ Viscount Bolingbroke (Henry St. John) , 1678-1751: as an erratic statesman, a notorious free-thinker, a dissipated lord, a clever political writer, and an eloquent speaker, Lord Bolingbroke was a centre of attraction in his day, and demands observation in literary history. During the reign of Queen Anne he was a plotter in favor of the pretender, and when she died, he fled the realm to avoid impeachment for treason. In France he joined the pretender as Secretary of State, but was dismissed for intrigue; and on being pardoned by the English king, he returned to England. ”

“ In estimating the character of public men, the biographer or critic, if he descend from the sublimity of unbounded panegyric, is often apt to elevate himself at the expense of the person of whom he speaks; and to treat with artificial severity any dereliction from that perfection of conduct which he sees nowhere attained. Thanks to this affected severity or paltry envy, we have hardly a great man left to us. Bolingbroke is nothing but a quack; the elder Pitt only a charlatan; Burke himself a declaimer and a renegade; Fox an ambitious politician out of place ”

“ The character of Bolingbroke, afterwards Henry IV. is drawn with a masterly hand:—patient for occasion, and then steadily availing himself of it, seeing his advantage afar off, but only seizing on it when he has it within his reach, humble, crafty, bold, and aspiring, encroaching by regular but slow degrees, building power on opinion, and cementing opinion by power. His disposition is first unfolded by Richard himself, who however is too self-willed and secure to make a proper use of his knowledge. ”

“ In surveying a number of such objects, beginning at the least and proceeding to greater and greater, the mind swells gradually with the successive objects, and in its progress has a very sensible pleasure. Precisely for the same reason, the words expressive of such objects ought to be placed in the same order. The beauty of this figure, which may be termed a climax in sense, has escaped Lord Bolingbroke in the first member of the following period.
Let but one great, brave, disinterested, active man arise, and he will be received, followed, and almost adored. ”

“ While Bolingbroke acts as a king, and his adherents behave towards him as if he really were so, he still continues to give out that he has come with an armed band merely to demand his birthright and the removal of abuses. The usurpation has been long completed, before the word is pronounced and the thing publicly avowed. The old John of Gaunt is a model of chivalrous honour: he stands there like a pillar of the olden time which he has outlived. His son, Henry IV., was altogether unlike him: his character is admirably sustained throughout the three pieces in which he appears. ”

“ These sentiments, indeed, are so much out of fashion that a man who avows them is in danger of passing for a bubble in the world; yet they were, in the conjuncture I speak of, the true motives of my conduct, and you saw me go on as cheerfully in the troublesome and dangerous work assigned me as if I had been under the utmost satisfaction. I began, indeed, in my heart to renounce the friendship which till that time I had preserved inviolable for Oxford. ”

“ On the other hand, how few were there on whose assistance I could depend, or to whom I would, even in those circumstances, be obliged? The ferment in the nation was wrought up to a considerable height; but there was at that time no reason to expect that it could influence the proceedings in Parliament in favour of those who should be accused. Left to its own movement, it was much more proper to quicken than slacken the prosecutions; and who was there to guide its motions? The Tories who had been true to one another to the last were a handful, and no great vigour could be expected from them. ”

“ On the 26th of March, 1715, he escaped to France, in disguise of a valet to the French messenger La Vigne. A Secret Committee of the House of Commons was, a few days afterwards, appointed to examine papers, and the result was Walpole’s impeachment of Bolingbroke. He was, in September, 1715, in default of surrender, attainted of high treason, and his name was erased from the roll of peers. ”

“ Windham was a young Tory politician of good family and great wealth, who had married a daughter of the Duke of Somerset, and had been accepted by the Tories in the House of Commons as a leader, after Henry St. John had been sent to the House of Lords. Windham was “Dear Willie” to Bolingbroke, a constant friend, and in 1715 he was sent to the Tower as a Jacobite. But he had powerful connections, was kindly and not dangerous, and was soon back in his place in the House fighting the Whigs. The Letter to Windham was finished in the summer of 1717. ”

“ As soon as they discovered this, they took the only course which was left them—that of poisoning the minds of the Tories, and of creating such prejudices against me whilst I remained in a condition of not speaking for myself, as will they hope prevent the effect of whatever I may say when I am in a condition of pleading my own cause. The bare apprehension that I shall show the world that I have been guilty of no crime renders me criminal among these men ”

“ The sum of all his policy had been to amuse the Whigs, the Tories, and the Jacobites as long as he could, and to keep his power as long as he amused them. When it became impossible to amuse mankind any longer, he appeared plainly at the end of his line.
By a secret correspondence with the late Earl of Halifax, and by the intrigues of his brother and other fanatical relations, he had endeavoured to keep some hold on the Whigs. ”

“ I dare not promise that the sections or members of these essays will bear that nice proportion to one another and to the whole which a severe critic would require. All I dare promise you is that my thoughts, in what order soever they flow, shall be communicated to you just as they pass through my mind, just as they use to be when we converse together on these or any other subjects when we saunter alone, or, as we have often done with good Arbuthnot and the jocose Dean of St. Patrick’s, among the multiplied scenes of your little garden. That theatre is large enough for my ambition. ”

“ His double-trimming character prevailed on him to talk with the Duke of Ormond, but it carried him no farther. I question not but he did, on this occasion, what you must have observed many men to do: we not only endeavour to impose on the world, but even on ourselves; we disguise our weakness, and work up in our minds an opinion that the measure which we fall into by the natural or habitual imperfection of our character is the effect of a principle of prudence or of some other virtue. ”

“ His own notions were always good; but he was a man of great expence.
I have seen a woman’s face break out in heats, as she has been talking against a great lord, whom she had never seen in her life; and indeed never knew a party-woman that kept her beauty for a twelvemonth.
Spectator, No 57.
Lord Bolingbroke, speaking of Strada:
I single him out among the moderns, because he had the foolish presumption to censure Tacitus, and to write history himself: and your Lordship will forgive this short excursion in honour of a favourite author.
Letters on history, vol. 1. let. 5. ”

“ Be not deceived: there is not a man on this side of the water who acts in any other manner. The Church of England Jacobite and the Irish Papist seem in every respect to have the same cause. Those on your side of the water who correspond with these are to be comprehended in the same class; and from hence it is that the clamour raised against me has been kept up with so much industry, and is redoubled on the least appearance of my return home, and of my being in a situation to justify myself. ”

“ I had not in those days so much merit as was ascribed to me, nor since that time have I had so little as the same persons allowed me. I committed, without dispute, many faults, and a greater man than I can pretend to be, constituted in the same circumstances, would not have kept clear of all; but with respect to the Tories I committed none. I carried the point of party honour to the height, and specified everything to my attachment to them during this period of time. ”

“ Though I seem to prepare an apology for prolixity even in writing essays, I will endeavour not to be tedious, and this endeavour may succeed the better perhaps by declining any over-strict observation of method. There are certain points of that which I esteem the first philosophy whereof I shall never lose sight, but this will be very consistent with a sort of epistolary licence. To digress and to ramble are different things, and he who knows the country through which he travels may venture out of the highroad, because he is sure of finding his way back to it again. ”

“ Others there were among the Tories who had flattered themselves with much greater expectations than these, and who had depended, not on such imaginary favour and dangerous advancement as was offered them afterwards, but on real credit and substantial power under the new government. Such impressions on the minds of men had rendered the two Houses of Parliament, which were then sitting, as good courtiers to King George as ever they had been to Queen Anne. ”

“ At the same time Gloucester’s two chief confederates of 1387, the earls of Arundel and Warwick, were tried and sentenced to death: the former was actually executed, the latter imprisoned for life. The other two lords appellant, Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, [2] and Henry of Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt, were dealt with a year later. Richard pretended to hold them among his best friends, but in 1398 induced Bolingbroke to accuse Norfolk of treasonable language. Mowbray denied it, and challenged his accuser to a judicial duel. ”

“ Thus were the Tories at that time amused; and since my exile I have had the opportunity of knowing certainly and circumstantially that the Jacobites were treated in the same manner, and that the Pretender was made, through the French Minister, to expect that measures should be taken for his restoration as soon as the peace had rendered them practicable. He was to attempt nothing, his partisans were to lie still, Oxford undertook for all. ”

“ By the first, men set out in the search of truth under the conduct of error, and work up their heated imaginations often to such a delirium that the more genius, and the more learning they have, the madder they grow. ”

“ His religion is not founded on the love of virtue and the detestation of vice; on a sense of that obedience which is due to the will of the Supreme Being, and a sense of those obligations which creatures formed to live in a mutual dependence on one another lie under. The spring of his whole conduct is fear. Fear of the horns of the devil and of the flames of hell. ”

“ As it would be disingenuous to sacrifice truth to popularity, so it is trifling to appeal to the reason and experience of mankind, as every philosophical writer does, or must be understood to do, and then to talk, like Plato and his ancient and modern disciples, to the imagination only. ”

“ The Council of Regency which began to sit as soon as the Queen died, acted like a council of the Holy Office. Whoever looked on the face of the nation saw everything quiet; not one of those symptoms appearing which must have shown themselves more or less at that moment if in reality there had been any measures taken during the former reign to defeat the Protestant succession. His Majesty ascended the throne with as little contradiction and as little trouble as ever a son succeeded a father in the possession of a private patrimony. ”

“ It is with genius as it is with beauty; there are a thousand pretty things that charm alike; but superior genius, like superior beauty, has always something particular, something that belongs to itself alone. It is always distinguishable, not only from those who have no claim to excellence, but even from those who excel, when any such there are. ”

“ The philosophy of one has forced its way into general approbation, that of the other has carried no conviction and scarce any information to those who have misspent their time about it. To speak the truth, though it may seem a paradox, our knowledge on many subjects, and particularly on those which we intend here, must be superficial to be real. This is the condition of humanity. We are placed, as it were, in an intellectual twilight, where we discover but few things clearly, and none entirely, and yet see just enough to tempt us with the hope of making better and more discoveries. ”

“ You may expect some contradiction and some obloquy on the part of these men, though you will have less to apprehend from their malice and resentment than a writer in prose on the same subjects would have. You will be safer in the generalities of poetry; and I know your precaution enough to know that you will screen yourself in them against any direct charge of heterodoxy. But the great clamour of all will be raised when you descend lower, and let your Muse loose among the herd of mankind. ”

“ My answer shall be that the Fathers, ancient and modern, in Councils and out of them, have raised that immense system of artificial theology by which genuine Christianity is perverted and in which it is lost. ”