Bolingbroke, Henry St John, 1st Viscount 1678-1751
English statesman and writer

He was born in Battersea, London, and became the Tory MP for Wootton Bassett in 1701. He was successively Secretary for War (1704-08) and Foreign Secretary (1710), and he shared the leadership of the party with Robert Harley. He was made a peer and in 1713 he negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht. After engineering Harley's downfall, he was plotting a Jacobite restoration when Queen Anne died, and George I succeeded. He fled to France, where he served James Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender as Secretary of State and wrote Reflections on Exile. In 1723 he obtained permission to return to England, where he became the associate of Pope, Jonathan Swift, and other men of letters. A series of letters attacking Robert Walpole in the Craftsman were reprinted as A Dissertation of Parties. Unable to return to political life, he went back to France, where he remained from 1735 to 1742 and wrote his Letters on the Study and Use of History (1752). His last years were spent in Battersea, where he wrote his Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism and Idea of a Patriot King (1749), which had a profound political influence. He also wrote Reflections Concerning Innate Moral Principles (1752), and he was much admired as an orator.

Bibliography: Jeffrey Hart, Bolingbroke: Tory Humanist (1965)