This eBook was produced by Les Bowler.
CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY
Letters
TO
Sir William Windham
AND
Mr. Pope
BY
LORD BOLINGBROKE
CASSELL AND COMPANY, Limited
LONDON, PARIS &MELBOURNE
1894
INTRODUCTION.
Henry St. John, who became ViscountBolingbroke in 1712, was born on the 1st of October, 1678, at thefamily manor of Battersea, then a country village. Hisgrandfather, Sir Walter St. John, lived there with his wifeJohanna,—daughter to Cromwell’s Chief Justice, OliverSt. John,—in one home with the child’s father, HenrySt. John, who was married to the second daughter of Robert Rich,Earl of Warwick. The child’s grandfather, a man ofhigh character, lived to the age of eighty-seven; and his father,more a man of what is miscalled pleasure, to the age ofninety. It was chiefly by his grandfather and grandmotherthat the education of young Henry St. John was cared for. Simon Patrick, afterwards Bishop of Ely, was for some years achaplain in their home. By his grandfather and grandmotherthe child’s religious education may have been too formallycared for. A passage in Bolingbroke’s letter to Popeshows that he was required as a child to read works of a divinewho “made a hundred and nineteen sermons on the hundred andnineteenth Psalm.”
After education at Eton and Christchurch, Henry St. Johntravelled abroad, and in the year 1700 he married, at the age oftwenty-two, Frances, daughter and co-heiress of Sir HenryWinchescomb, a Berkshire baronet. She had much property,and more in prospect.
In the year 1701, Henry St. John entered Parliament as memberfor Wotton Bassett, the family borough. He acted with theTories, and became intimate with their leader, RobertHarley. He soon became distinguished as the ablest and mostvigorous of the young supporters of the Tory party. He wasa handsome man and a brilliant speaker, delighted in bypoliticians who, according to his own image in the Letter toWindham, “grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows themgame.” He was active in the impeachment of Somers,Montague, the Duke of Portland, and the Earl of Oxford for theirnegotiation of the Partition Treaties. In later years hesaid he had acted here in ignorance, and justified thosetreaties.
James II. died at St. Germains, a pensioner of France, agedsixty-eight, on the 6th of September, 1701.
His pretensions to the English throne passed to the son, whohad been born on the 10th of June, 1688, and whose birth hadhastened on the Revolution. That son, James Francis EdwardStuart, who was only thirteen years old at his father’sdeath, is known sometimes in history as the Old Pretender; theYoung Pretender being his son Charles Edward, whose defeat atCulloden in 1746 destroyed the last faint hope of a restorationof the Stuarts. It is with the young heir to thepretensions of James II. that the story of the life ofBolingbroke becomes concerned.
King William III. died on the 8th of March, 1702, and