No More Learning

The above description cannot be applied to
the Letters addressed from London to Sir Joseph Williamson,
while Plenipotentiary at the Congress of Cologne in the years
1673 and 1674; but, as somewhat nondescript in kind, and as
actually dating from an earlier age, they may be mentioned here
rather than in a later chapter? While the official despatches of
1 For Collier's chief pamphlets against Burnet and Kennett, and as to the non-
jurors' controversy on the usages, see bibliography.
They were edited by Christie, W. D. , for the Camden Society, 2 vols. 1874.


## p. 213 (#237) ############################################

213
;
Williamson. Memoirs of James II
Sir Leoline Jenkins and of Williamson, the representatives of
England at the congress under the nominal headship of Sunderland
(who remained at Paris), are to be read elsewhere, the gossiping
letters written to the junior plenipotentiary by his friends and
dependants in the secretary of state's office (of whose names
the majority appeared in Marvell’s Black List of Government
Pensioners, printed in Holland in 1677) form a valuable and very
amusing addition to the familiar letters of the age. There is not
a place in the world so fruitfull in liing storyes as London,' thus
writes one of the correspondents of Williamson ; and they all did
their best to suit the varied tastes of the great man, who besides
being a prominent statesman and making a great marriage,
became president of the Royal Society and was a collector of
heraldic manuscripts. He lived till 1701, having been a trusted
diplomatic agent of William III after serving Charles II as
secretary of state.
A composite character, midway between history and memoirs,
belongs to the Memoirs of James II writ of his own hand, in so
far as they admit of separation from the editorial matter in which
they are embedded. Of the original material the substantial
portion, saved by king James at the time of his catastrophe, is
said, after undergoing a long series of strange adventures, to have
been ultimately committed to the flames at St Omer, in the days
of the great French revolution. A biographical work based on
them was however put together in the days and with the sanction
of the Old Pretender, and elaborated for publication by order of
the Prince Regent (afterwards king George IV)? To this Life
of James II the great historian Ranke's masterhand applied the
process of analysis ; but the particular conclusions reached by
him cannot be summarised here? Suffice it to say that while a
French translation of part 1 (to 1660), approved by the royal author,
had been incorporated into Ramsay's Vie de Turenne (2 vols.
Paris, 1735), parts II, to 1685, and III, to 1688, (the latter in a sense
supplementary to Burnet, who was out of England during the reign
of James), were compiled from the king's original memoranda,
though only revised by him so far as 1678. Part IV contains
passages from his memoranda, more especially with regard to
the war in Ireland. James II was a prince whose own notions
1 The Life of James the Second, King of England, etc. , by Clarke, J. 8. , 2 vols.
1816.
? See the excursus. On the Autobiographical Memoranda of James II'in vol. vi of
Ranke's English History.


## p. 214 (#238) ############################################

214
Historical and Political Writers
concerning his life and actions deserve study. Except in part 1, his
devotion to the church of his adoption may be said to colour the
whole narrative and to absorb all political principles and moral
convictions he brings into play; an example of this may be found
in his judgment of Clarendon, to whose religious policy he attri-
butes a large share in his later troubles. The Memoirs, with the
same restriction, can hardly at any time have amounted to a
connected narrative, or have risen to the level of a history intended
to serve the cause of objective truth.
A place of his own among the political writers of the close of
the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century must
be assigned to Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. Though his public
life was entirely associated with Scotland and its affairs, his
political speculations took a wider range, and exhibit that cos-
mopolitanism which has for centuries been a distinctive mark of
his nationality. Of his training, in his early years, at the hand of
Burnet, mention has already been made; after this he travelled
and acquired a knowledge of French, as well as of Italian so far
as to compose and publish a treatise in that tongue. In 1678, he
was sent as one of the members for his native Haddingtonshire to
the convention of estates summoned for the purpose of supplying
money for the maintenance of the soldiery employed for the
suppression of presbyterian conventicles; but he joined the
opposition to this and other ecclesiastical measures of the govern-
ment, incurring thereby the implacable enmity of James duke of
York. In the end he made his way to Holland, and, though he
accompanied Monmouth to England in 1685, did not return to
Scotland till the time of the revolution. The second chapter in
his political career culminated in the Darien expedition, of which
he was a primary promoter; and it was about this time (1698)
that he first appeared as a political writer. A Discourse of
Government with relation to Militias, published at Edinburgh in
1698", is thoroughly characteristic of the writer, who, plunging
into the midst of the war of pamphlets on the question of standing
armies which raged after the peace of Ryswyk, was ready with a
complete plan for rendering unnecessary the dangerous expedient
of a standing mercenary force. The people must be trained to
the use of arms on a carefully planned system but for the purpose
of defence only; for the sea is the only empire naturally belonging
to Britain. In the same year-clearly in the autumn-Fletcher
1 Reprinted in 1755, as well as in the several editions of The Political Works of
Andrew Fletcher, 1732 eto.


## p. 215 (#239) ############################################

Fletcher of Saltoun
215
wrote Two Discourses on the afairs of Scotland, shortly after
(2nd of July) the Darien expedition had failed. On the fostering
of the new colony, the writer declares, depended the whole future
of Scotland, cruelly impoverished partly through her own fault,
and partly because of the removal of the seat of her government
to London. After provision has been made for the colony, thought
must be taken of the stricken country at home; and it is in the
second of these Discourses that Fletcher prescribes the drastic
remedy of domestic slavery–especially for the population of the
Highlands, for which, it must be observed, he entertained great
contempt. A little earlier in the same year was written his Italian
discourse on Spanish affairs, apparently suggested by the first
Partition Treaty? The Speech upon the State of the Nation
(1701)which was probably never delivered—deals with the
second of these treatises, as completing the establishment of
Bourbon ascendancy-it 'is like an alarum bell rung over all
Europe. Pray God it may not prove to you a passing-bell. ' In
the heated debates of the Scottish parliament of 1703 Fletcher
took a leading part, preparing a bill of Security which would have
very narrowly limited the royal authority in Scotland, and, when
this was dropped, joining in the refusal of supplies. At least one
speech and one pamphlet of this period attributed to him are
spurious ; but he completed, at the end of 1703, a short piece
called An Account of a Conversation concerning a Right Regu-
lation of Government for the Common Good of Mankind, which
reports, with much vivacity and aptness, 'from London' to the
marquis of Montrose and other Scots lords a dialogue on the
relations between England and Scotland, held in the earl of Cro-
martie's lodgings at Whitehall. Scene, personalities and subject
are treated very attractively; the conclusion is that, not an in-
corporating union, but a federal union is the desideratum for
keeping the three kingdoms together. The style of this letter is
admirable, and approaches the best English prose style of the
age at a time when there was little of performance or even of
pretension in Scottish prose? Here is to be found the famous
saying,' attributed to 'a very wise man,' that, 'if a man were per-
mitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make
the laws of a nation. '
1 Discorso delle cose di Spagna, scritto nel mese de Luglio 1698, Naples, 1698.
9 As to the Scottish prose literature of the age, see chap. xin post and its
bibliography.


## p. 216 (#240) ############################################

CHAPTER VIII
HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL WRITERS
II
BOLINGBROKE
The historical and political writings of Henry St John, from
1712 Viscount Bolingbroke, to which we must mainly confine
ourselves in the present chapter, were, nearly all of them, com-
posed in the latter, and slightly longer, half of his life which
followed on the great collapse of his party at the close of the reign
of queen Anne. As to his contributions to philosophical literature,
something will be said in the next volume of the present work; in
the chief collections of his letters, the public and pragmatic
element, for the most part, is so copiously mixed up with the
private and personal, that they can hardly be subjected to a
literary judgment. This is especially the case with Parke's
edition of his Letters and Correspondence, which extends over
the last four years of the reign of queen Anne and ends with a
despondent reference to her death. These letters, on Boling-
broke's sudden flight to France, were secured by the exertions
of his under-secretary Thomas Hare, and thus escaped being
brought before the House of Commons at his trial in 1715, like
some extracts from his correspondence. They are addressed to
a large variety of correspondents, of whom lords Strafford (Raby),
Orrery, Dartmouth and Shrewsbury, and Matthew Prior, are among
the most frequent recipients of letters written in English, and the
marquis de Torcy of the much smaller number written in French.
They are, of course, invaluable to a student of the peace negotiations
and of Bolingbroke's direct share in them; and in those which adopt
a more intimate tone, like the 'long scrawl which is only from


## p. 217 (#241) ############################################

Bolingbroke's Earlier Life. The Examiner 217
Harry to Matt. , not from the Secretary to the Minister",' there is
often a fair amount of malicious wit. Of Bolingbroke's private
letters, however, the most pleasing are to be found in the series
addressed to his half-sister Henrietta, which are generally written
in a natural vein, without a superfluity of the epigrammatic infusion
in which the letters of this age abound. Even these, however, on
?
occasion, exhibit Bolingbroke's fatal propensity, when telling the
truth, to conceal part of it.
St John's earliest withdrawal from public life to the consolations
of philosophy and literature belongs to the early part of 1708,
when he followed Harley out of office. His retirement was carried
out with so much pompousness, and so little interfered with his
habits of self-indulgence, that it exposed him to much ridicule on
the part of his friends, including brutal sarcasm from Swift ; and it
is not known to have been productive of any compositions in prose
or in verse. After his return to public life in 1710, not many
weeks before he received the seals as secretary of state (September
1710), he had, not for the last time in his career, inspired the
foundation by the tories of a journal to support them in a vigorous
campaign against the whig government. Among the early con-
tributors were Swift, Prior and Robert Freind.
This was The Examiner (to be distinguished from other
periodicals of that name), of which between thirty and forty
numbers appear to have been published up to the spring of 1712.
According to the general account? , Bolingbroke's first and most
important contribution to this journal appeared in no. x, and
contained an attack on Marlborough's conduct of the war, with
a fierce attack on the duchess. This description, however, does
not apply to the number in question ; but elsewhere* is reprinted
what is called 'St John's Letter to The Examiner,' which in-
veighs against the whigs, their clubs, their journals, and their
literary champions such as 'the Hector of Sarum' (Burnet), and
speaks of the subjection of the queen 'to an arbitrary junto, and
1 Vol. 11, p. 41. The replies of Prior (Henrico colendissimo Matthaeus) are at least
equally vivacious.
2 See the correspondence, chiefly from manuscript originals, appended to Sichel, W. ,
Bolingbroke and his Times. The Sequel, 1902. (Henrietta St John married Robert
Knight, member for Sudbury, afterwards Lord Luxborough. She is also known as the
friend and correspondent of Shenstone. ) There is no need for referring here to
Grimoard's collection, which consists of letters in French, partly originals, partly
translations.
3 See Macknight, T. , The Life of Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, pp. 158—9.
* In Somers' Tracts, vol. XIII, p. 71; also in The History of His Own Time, by
Matthew Prior (ed. Drift, A. ), 1740, pp. 306 ff. This letter was answered by A Letter
to Isaac Bickerstaffe, Esq. , by earl Cooper,' 1710.
6


## p. 218 (#242) ############################################

218
Historical and Political Writers
to the caprice of an insolent woman. ' No. XVII of this Examiner,
'
it may be added, contains a letter which attacks the duke under
the thin disguise of 'Crassus,' but makes no special attack upon
the duchess.
But the five years of office which ensued, the labours, including
a journey to France, which resulted in the conclusion of the peace
of Utrecht, and the intrigues by which Bolingbroke in vain en-
deavoured to turn the approaching crisis of the succession to the
advantage of the tories left him little time for composition ; by
the close of March 1715, he found himself an exile, and, in the
following July, in the service of the pretender. It was not till
this fatal phase of his career was at an end that he made his first
elaborate contribution to political literature. A few months,
however, before he wrote the celebrated Letter to Sir William
Wyndham—the disciple whom he had left at home behind him-
he had composed his Reflections on Exile, published before the
close of 1716, when his hopes of pardon and return had again
receded. This effort, founded on Seneca's Consolatio ad Helviam,
is stuffed with additional quotations from classical and one or
two modern sources, and reads almost like a parody of the
classicising essay of the period. Although its style has been
held to be Ciceronian rather than Senecan', the writer inveighs
against ‘Tully' for unphilosophically lamenting his exile, though,
with a characteristic sneer, it is allowed that his separation from
Terentia, whom he repudiated not long afterwards, was perhaps an
affliction to him at the time. '
A Letter to Sir William Wyndham seems to have been
directly provoked by a Jacobite pamphlet entitled A Letter from
Avignon? , which, in its turn, was a product of the rupture between
Bolingbroke and the pretender early in 1716, and was written in
the following year. Its main purpose was to demonstrate, for
the benefit of the tories and from the writer's own experience, the
suicidal folly of an alliance between them and the Jacobites.
But, though the logic of this demonstration is incontrovertible, the
historical process by which the experience on which it rests was
gained is audaciously misrepresented, and the circumstances in
which Bolingbroke offered his services to the pretender are
falsified, as are his relations to the tory party and its policy after
bis fall. It was, not improbably, his knowledge, not only of the
truth, but of what others knew of the truth, which prevented him
1 Sichel, W. , 1. 8. , p. 82.
2 See Collins, J. Churton, Bolingbroke etc. p. 132.


## p. 219 (#243) ############################################

6
A Letter to Sir William Wyndham 219
from publishing this famous Letter in his lifetime. For few, if any,
.
among his writings equal it in force and effectiveness. Its tone is
one of a candour half cynical, half truly English in its straight-
forwardness. He goes back to the days, in 1710, when the tories
returned to power, and when he was himself fain to let Harl
have his way, and not to take advantage of his own ascendancy
in the Commons—who 'grow, like hounds, fond of the man who
shows them game. The whole account of his rival, though
inspired by bitter personal hatred, has the ring of truth. Then
follows the skilful analysis of the baffled tory party after queen
Anne's death, and the defiant defence of his own conduct-could he
resolve 'to be obliged to the whimsicals, or to suffer with Oxford ? '
So he threw in his lot with the Jacobites, and became a member
of a court and government which he describes with inimitable
contemptuousness, Fanny Oglethorpe whom you must have seen in
England, kept her corner in it, and Olive Trant was the great
wheel of our machine. His account of the failure of the contribu-
tions made by the pretender's government, and by the pretender
himself, to the failure of the 1715 is convincing ; less so is that of
his own consistency face to face with an inconsistent tory party;
while his explanation of the pretender's attitude towards the
religious question is transparently ungenerous, however effectively
it may clinch his demonstration of the cleavage between tories
and Jacobites. But the attention of the reader is held throughout
the tract, which excels in both direct invective and insidious
sarcasm, and, apart from a few apparent gallicisms near the outset,
may be regarded as a masterpiece of lighter English controversial
prose.
A decade had nearly passed before Bolingbroke’s pen was once
more at work as a weapon of political warfare. In 1725, he had
returned two-thirds restored'-safe, that is, in person and estate,
but with his attainder still hanging over him and debarring him
from participation as a peer in the counsels of the nation. He
had found the whig ministry under Walpole and Townshend in
the plenitude of power, and the tory party reduced to what
seemed hopeless impotence. It was not long before, in alliance
with Pulteney, the leader of the discontented whigs, Bolingbroke
engaged in a long-sustained and, ultimately, to some extent,
successful endeavour to put an end to this condition of things.
The assault may be said to have opened, on 5 December 1726, with
the appearance of the first number of The Craftsman; although,
as a matter of fact, already, on 15 July of that year, Bolingbroke,


## p. 220 (#244) ############################################

220
Historical and Political Writers
2
under the pseudonym ‘Will Johnson,' had contributed to a sheet
called The Country Gentleman a homely apologue in derision of
Walpole. The minister here appears as coachman to the worthy
Caleb D'Anvers at his little country place near the town (in The
Craftsman, of which D'Anvers was the figurehead, he is usually
designated as of Gray's inn); he proves untrustworthy, and ends by
breaking his neck when his horses have been scared by an angry
rustic populace
The Craftsman had a much longer, as well as a merrier, life
than was reached by most of the political periodicals proper of
the early Hanoverian period—The Englishman, The Examiner
and the rest (it is unnecessary to go back upon earlier sheets of a
more mixed kind); for, in one way or another, it lasted for nine or
ten years, and, according to Goldsmith? , sold much more rapidly
than of old had The Spectator itself. It was edited by Nicholas
Amhurst, a light-hearted Oxonian, who, a few years earlier, had
been invited to leave his university for his university's good, and
was published by him in conjunction with an enterprising London
printer, Richard Francklin. The signatures of the contributors
were intentionally chosen and interchanged so as to mystify the
ill- and defy the well-informed (including Walpole, who employed
more than one doughty pen on the preparation of retorts). Among
these contributors were, in addition to Amhurst (who started the
paper under the name Caleb D'Anvers), Bolingbroke, Pulteney
and Pulteney's cousin David; also, the chief of the opposition wits
(in truth, there were not many wits on the other side), Arbuthnot
and Swift, and, probably, Gay and Pope. Amhurst was, in 1741,
succeeded in the editorship by Thomas Cooke (commonly called
*Hesiod Cooke' from his translation of Hesiod, 1728); and among
the later writers in the journal were Lyttelton and Akenside.
Eustace Budgell, formerly a follower of Addison and a writer in
The Spectator, as well as a whig official, had, after (according to
his own account) losing a fortune in the South Sea, turned against
Walpole and became a contributor to The Craftsman.
Of Bolingbroke's contributions, with which we are here chiefly
concerned, the bulk is held to belong to the years 1727—31. The
1 Printed in vol. 1 of the 1731 edition of The Craftsman. See, also, Sichel, W. , . s. ,
pp. 246 ff. , where will be found the most recent account of The Craftsman and its con-
tributory forces.
2 See Life in Works, vol. 1, pp. lix-x. The circulation of The Craftsman is said,
at one time, to have exceeded 10,000 copies a week (it was only for a time a bi-weekly
publication); but it is not easy to verify such statements. So early as 1737, it was
reprinted in an edition which reached 14 volumes.
>


## p. 221 (#245) ############################################

The Craftsman
221
first of these, as it seems, appeared in no. 16 of The Craftsman
(27 January 1727), with the title The First Vision of Camelicki.
Under the thin disguise of an eastern allegory, this piece is a
virulent attack on the arbitrary rule of Walpole, who is denounced,
with extreme malignity, as a vizier of 'blunt, ruffianly malignity. . .
his face bronzed over with a glare of confidence. ' He tramples on
the backs of the parliament men on his way to the throne; nor is it
till his collapse that the radiant volume of the constitution re-
appears, while heaven and earth resound with the cry of liberty,
and 'the Heart of the King is glad within him. ' Among other
acknowledged papers by Bolingbroke in the earlier numbers of
The Craftsman are two out of three bearing the signature 'John
Trot' (afterwards qualified as 'yeoman'), of which the earlier con-
troverts, not very frankly, the arguments of The London Journal,
then supposed to be under the direction of Benjamin Hoadly
(bishop of Salisbury, and, afterwards, of Winchester%), on the subject
of the unwillingness of Walpole's government to declare war
against Spain. A later paper, which forms one of a supplementary
a
set printed by Francklin“, as The Craftsman Extraordinary,
discusses the alleged failure of the ministry to obtain anything
from that power in the preliminaries of the congress of Cambray,
and ends with an adjuration to the bishop to feed 'the Flock
committed to his Charge,' in obedience to the Apostolical Con-
stitutions, lib. II. C. 6, cited for his benefit in both Latin and
English.
But the most elaborate of Bolingbroke's invective, though
coupled, in this instance, with some historical comments not
devoid of interest, is to be found in Remarks upon the History of
England, which appeared between 5 September 17305 and 22 May
1731%, with the signature 'Humphry Oldcastle. ' The argument
of these letters is carried on in the conversational framework
familiar to both Clarendon and Burnet, the main part in the
discussion being taken by 'an old gentleman,' whose views, of
course, are Bolingbroke's and who, equally of course, is moved by
the true old English spirit,' the direct reverse of 'the blind and
furious spirit of party. Assuming the existence of a great danger
'
6
6
1 Reprinted in Works, vol. 11.
? In no. 129, 4 January 1729.
3 The family of the Publicolas are very numerous. . . . I do not presume to say,
for instance, that such a piece was written by Ben, or such a one by Robin. '
- Various pamphlets published about this time by Francklin, in which Bolingbroke
may have had a band, cannot be noticed here.
5 No. 218.
6 No. 255. Both are in vol. VII of the 14 volume edition.
8


## p. 222 (#246) ############################################

222
Historical and Political Writers
to liberty, and insisting on the need of keeping up that ‘spirit of
liberty' by losing which the Romans lost their freedom itself, the
demonstration in the fourth letter reaches English ground. But,
though the printer of The Craftsman-one can hardly see why
is said to have been arrested on account of the remarks on the
later Plantagenets, it was only when dealing with the Lancastrian
kings that the writer discovers his purpose by openly attacking
those who advocate the dependence of parliament upon government.
He has now found his footing. In Letter VIII, where he solemnly
recalls the revival of the spirit of liberty as exemplified in the
parliamentary call of Edward II to the throne, he also insinuates
a comparison between queen Caroline and queen Elizabeth
Woodville! His account of Henry VII (Letter 1x) may not un-
charitably be surmised to have been intended to reflect on George I;
and Wolsey, who could not sustain his power save by force and
corruption (Letter x), is, quite manifestly, put forward as the
prototype of Walpole. Thus, Humphry Oldcastle's public is
gradually brought nearer to its own times, and, after being treated
to an outburst of wrath against the wicked minister, is instructed
how, under Elizabeth, the check on absolutism was the will of
the people itself; how her encouragement of commerce and her
prudent policy in the earlier part of her reign, together with her
abstinence, throughout its course, from the conclusion of un-
necessary treaties or unsafe alliances, brought the nation safe
through a great crisis of its history (Letters XII—XVI). In all
this there is some point-and a great deal of sting.
Then, however, there set in the lamentable change. Govern-
ment itself may be turned into faction, James I, who has been
wrongly blamed for not entangling himself more than he did, 'and
as is done now,' in European (German) affairs, yet, being 'afraid
where no fear was,' allowed the British flag, which had waved
proudly in the days of queen Elizabeth (queen Anne), to be
insulted with impunity. In the reign of Charles I, who came as a
party man to the throne, the faction of the court tainted the nation.
The claim of James I (like the pretender's) to hereditary right was
untenable ; the corruption by means of which he tried to govern
was unEnglish ; and his patronage of popery did nobody good but
the puritans (Letters XVII—XXII). Under James I, and, still
more, under his son and the universally hated minister Buckingham,
>
1 Except that the reign of Richard II had long before proved itself a dangerous
subject for modern treatment.


## p. 223 (#247) ############################################

Bolingbroke v. Walpole
223
the policy of the crown was confronted by the spirit of liberty and
broken by an unremitting struggle of almost twoscore years. If
we look around us now, we see the whole posse of ministerial
scribblers assembled in augmented numbers-perhaps with aug.
mented pensions—and the insects, albeit they have been dispersed
by every flap of The Craftsman's pen, gathered again, after their
kind, and renewing their din. But the objects of their attack-the
gentleman who conscientiously left his friends and party (Pulteney),
and another gentleman, who has been accused of ingratitude and
of treachery (Bolingbroke)-need not fear the charges heaped upon
their heads; and, with a spirited apologia for the political conduct
of this 'other gentleman,' this unique breviarium of English
history comes to a close (Letters XXIII—XXIV).
In the autumn of 1732, Bolingbroke’s Remarks upon the
History of England were followed by three papers of similar
purport, discussing the policy of the Athenians with a view to
the lessons to be drawn thence by a student of English history and
politics. In the previous year (1731), in A Final Answer to the
Remarks on The Craftsman's Vindication? –a pamphlet which
may be regarded as the climax of the weekly efforts of the scribes
in Walpole’s pay, though neither it nor Bolingbroke's retort put
an end to the inky war of which they formed part-he renewed
his self-defence, on the lines followed in the last of his letters in
the Remarks. So far as his own conduct is concerned, everything
really turns on his far from ingenuous assertion, advanced already
in the Letter to Sir William Wyndham, that neither before nor
after his service with the pretender was he a Jacobite. But, as
an exercise in the art of invective, delivered as from a high
pinnacle of virtue, this diatribe against the ‘noble pair of brothers'
(Robert and Horace Walpole), professing to come from one whose
'ambition, whatever may have been said or thought about it, hath
been long since dead,' must be allowed to have few superiors.
Before adverting to what Goldsmith describes as Bolingbroke's
'parting blow' against the object of his concentrated political and
personal hatred, it may be convenient to notice the important
additions made by Bolingbroke to the political writing by him
actually contributed to The Craftsman, in the form of certain
papers put forth, from January 1727 onwards, under the title
The Occasional Writer. Of these, which seem to be four in
I See vol. vini of 14 vol. odn. , nos. 324—6 (16—30 September). Reprinted in
A Collection of Political Tracts, printed anonymously in 1748.
* Reprinted in Works, vol. VI.


## p. 224 (#248) ############################################

224
Historical and Political Writers
number, the first, written in a style of mock humility, is inscribed
'to the PERSON, to whom alone it can belong,' and in whose service,
inasmuch as great statesmen set no value upon high literary ability,
its composition is professed to have been undertaken. In reality,
it is an indictment of Walpole's conduct of foreign affairs, and,
more especially, of his alleged subservience to France? Against
his wont, Walpole gratified his adversary by inspiring an angrily
contemptuous reply, spurning “the Occasional Writer's' 'proffered
services’; and this ministerial answer, already noted in a brief
postscript to his second paper, is, in the third, disputed 'with strict
impartiality. In a postscript to a fourth paper, which may or
'
may not be by Bolingbroke, and which is addressed to ‘his Imperial
Majesty' (to whom the writer tenders counsel in a very superior
way), the author of the first paper pretends to disclaim the author-
ship of the third.
The last and most important of the series belonging to this
group of Bolingbroke's writings is the celebrated Dissertation
upon Parties, which appeared in The Craftsman in the autumn
of 1733? In April of this year, Walpole's virtual abandonment
of the Excise bill had severely shaken his authority and encouraged
the opposition to fresh efforts. A general election was at hand
in 1734; but the prospect of accomplishing the overthrow of the
minister was impeded by divisions among his adversaries. In
particular, Pulteney and the malcontent whigs disliked the pro-
posed repeal of the Septennial act-a measure on which Boling-
broke was intent and which, fully aware of his authorship of it,
Walpole induced the expiring parliament to throw out, in March
17343. Thus, it was in order to bring the long struggle against
Walpole to a successful issue, and, with this end, to conciliate the
dissatisfied element in the opposition, that A Dissertation was
1 The second letter, though with a different turn of irony, carries on the same
theme, inveighing against the fatuous pursuit of the ideal of a balance of power.
A reference must suffice to Bolingbroke's remarkably luminous pamphlet The Case of
Dunkirk consider'd (1730), which is commended, and from which ample quotations are
made, in The Craftsman, no. 207 (20 June 1730). Cf. , as to this, Collins, J. Churton,
U. 8. , p. 179.
2 The series extends from no. 382 (with breaks) to no. 443, from 27 October 1733
onwards. See vols. XII and xil of the 14 vol. edition, where many of the letters are
signed. O. ' and the reprint in Works, vol. III.
8 This is the debate, with Walpole's attack upon Bolingbroke, and its supposed
consequence, his retirement to France, imaginatively reproduced in the Opposition
Scene in the last century' in Smythe, George A. F. P. Sydney (Lord Strangford), Historic
Fancies (1844). Bolingbroke comments on the debate in a pathetic speech, in which
he apostrophises Liberty as the heritage of the people of the future.


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A Dissertation upon Parties
225
composed. Although, beyond a doubt, one of the most notable
of its author's polemical efforts, it failed in its immediate purpose;
and, instead of Walpole being overthrown, it was Bolingbroke who,
early in 1735—the state of his private affairs helping to disconcert
him once more returned to France.
The nineteen letters to Caleb D'Anvers entitled A Dissertation
upon Parties are preceded by a dedication to Walpole, which
denounces the foremost councillor of the reigning sovereign (and
of his predecessor) as having gained that position ‘by wriggling,
intriguing, whispering, and bargaining himself into this dangerous
post, to which he was not called by the general suffrage, nor per-
haps '—here we find just the grain of truth without which no
malicious insinuation is complete—' by the deliberate choice of
his master himself. ' Yet, with all the vehemence of the attack,
and the wit that enlivens it, its audacity is cheap; for Bolingbroke
knew that he was not running any serious personal risk. The interest
of the letters into which the Dissertation is broken up, therefore, is
substantially that of a brilliant dialectical and rhetorical display.
The general argument in favour of the maintenance, by all the
parties that agreed to it, of the constitution, as finally settled by
the revolution of 1688', is skilfully brought home, so to speak,
to the consciences of tories and whigs alike; "the chimæra of a
prerogative has been removed, and there is no danger of the
House of Commons assuming a preponderance of power? , unless
the constituent nation cooperates in its own undoing *. But
liberty, as Machiavelli says, needs a constant renewal of safe-
guards; and there are new agencies of corruption at work, in
the manipulation of the civil list and of the public funds; and
it is the duty of all parties to work together against this abuse,
directed as it is by the guiltiest of ministers.
Quite apart from the admirable skill with which these letters
handle their text, from their lively personal digressions against
Walpoles and from the historical insight of which, in particular
passages, they give proof, the Dissertation has the great merit
of inner veracity. Whatever we may think of the motive of its
composition, or of the effect which it produced or which it failed
to produce, Bolingbroke had come to know, by means of an
>
1 Letter III.
2 Letter IX.
3 Letter XVI.
4 Letter XVIII.
5 Under aliases such as the bell-wether,' and 'Pallas the favourite of Agrippina. '
6 Such as that commenting on the effects of the opposition to the Exclusion bill
(Letter IV) and, more especially, the character of Charles II, probably based upon
Temple (Letter vi).
E. L. IX. CH. VIII.
15


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experience the reverse of deceptive, how much was rotten in the
party system, in which his own political life had its being. This
system he was afterwards, though without any real success, to
seek to remedy; but his present diagnosis was not devoid of an
essential element of truth, and a sense of this pervades the fervour
and the flow of his hortatory eloquence.
In the ten or eleven years in which, from his fine and costly
estate at Dawley-Dawley Farm’he, characteristically, preferred
to call it-Bolingbroke was influencing the political life of England,
his thoughts were also occupied with ambitious literary projects.
One of these was a history of his own times, which was to have
extended from the peace of the Pyrenees to that of Utrecht, but
of which only fragments survive. In the autumn of 1735, by which
time he had established himself at Chanteloup, in Touraine,
having now for some time alternated between philosophical and
historical themes, he not unnaturally bethought himself of apply.
ing philosophical treatment to historical labours. The result was
a series of Letters on the Study and Use of History, addressed
by him, in the winter of this year, to Lord Cornbury, Clarendon's
great-grandson, afterwards Lord Hyde, a young nobleman of literary
tastes and Jacobite leanings, who played a prominent part in
Bolingbroke's later literary life. It cannot be doubted that these
Letters, which are stated to have been of all their author's writings
“the most read", exercised an important influence upon the pro-
gress
of historical studies and historical literature both in England
and in France, where they inspired Voltaire. Bolingbroke, it has
been said? , was the first to divert English historical enquiry from
the dead to the living; perhaps it might be asserted, more broadly,
that he was the first English writer to recognise and illustrate
the cardinal principle of the continuity of history. But, here
again, the muse of history ends as the apologist of a particular
chapter of political action. After the first of these eight Letters
has discussed the motives from which different classes of men engage
in the study of history-amusement, desire of display, the love of
accumulation for accumulation's sake-the second lays down the
time-honoured maxim that history, rightly understood, is philo-
sophy teaching by examples. Although Boling broke fails to
perceive the radical futility of this theory as applied to a science
which has its own work to perform, he is too shrewd not to guard
1 Macknight, T. , u. s. , p. 625.
By Schlosser, cited by Brosch, M. , Lord Bolingbroke und die Whigs und Tories
seiner Zeit, p. 296.
2
3


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6
Letters on the Study and Use of History 227
himself, as he does in his third Letter, against an exaggerated use
of his principle. Thus, when he reviews extant historical literature,
it is in a sceptical spirit that he treats not only ancient history
at large, but Jewish history and Scriptural chronology in par-
ticular! "The lying spirit,' he says in his fourth Letter, ‘has gone
forth from ecclesiastical to other historians. ' But the historical
student is not, on that account, to despair; it is folly to endeavour
'to establish universal Pyrrhonism in matters of history, because
there are few histories without lies, and none without some mis-
takes. ' A critical sifting will leave us still in possession of materials
for historical study; the only difficulty, since life is short for
the old, and busy for the young, is not to lose time by groping
in the dark among them. Abridgments and mere compilations
should be eschewed—the ancients are to be read, but modern
history, beginning with the era in which a great change was
wrought by the concurrence of extraordinary events, is to be
studied. From this shallow generalisation, the writer proceeds to
a severe judgment as to what English writers have done towards
illustrating the division of modern history with which they are
more particularly concerned.
'Our nation,' he says, 'has furnished as ample and as important matter,
good and bad, for history, as any nation under the sun; and yet we must yield
the palm in writing history most certainly to the Italians and to the French,
and I fear even to the Germans. The only two pieces of history we have, in
any respect to be compared with the ancient, are the reign of Henry VII, by
my Lord Bacon, and the history of our civil wars by your noble ancestor, my
Lord Chancellor Clarendon. But we have no general history to be compared
with some of other countries; neither have we, which I lament much more,
particular histories, except the two I have mentioned, nor writers of memorials,
nor collectors of monuments and anecdotes, to vie in number or in merit with
those that eign nations can boast. '. . .
Bolingbroke knew very little about the memorials which were
either at the disposal of students of the national history or await-
ing resuscitation; but the truth of his remarks as to the slow
progress of English historical literature to a conception of its
highest and comprehensive purposes is made sufficiently clear by
any consecutive survey of it, such as has been attempted in these
volumes. By way of exemplifying his meaning, Bolingbroke, in
his sixth Letter, gives a brief view of the ecclesiastical and of the
civil government in Europe in the beginning of the sixteenth
6
1 This was the portion of the Letters which Lord Hyde in vain sought to prevent
Mallet, Bolingbroke's literary executor, from publishing after his death. See
Macknight, u. s. , pp. 694-7.
15-2


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228
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century, and in his two remaining Letters carries on this survey,
with far greater fulness, from the treaty of the Pyrenees to his
own day. This portion of the series may be reckoned among the
most effective and enjoyable of Boling broke's writings. He alludes,
in one of these Letters? , to his intention of writing a history of
the latter part of the reign of William III and of the reign of
Anne-of which he says more in a separate Letter, apparently
addressed to Lord Bathurst? The two concluding Letters of the
series are admirably clear and concise; nor could anything be
better, in its way, than the account of the growth of the power
of France from Richelieu onwards, and the preservation of her
preponderance notwithstanding the Triple Alliance. The last
Letter is instinct with strong personal feeling, though it maintains
a polished calm and, unlike much of Bolingbroke's political writing,
seeks to convince by argument rather than by eloquence and wit.
He is fair to William III's unsuccessful endeavours to settle the
Spanish succession by peace, and allows that the war was really
unavoidable. The pivot of his argument is that England did not
enter into the war to dispossess Philip, but that the English govern-
ment adopted this point of view in 1706 and persisted in it even
after the death of the emperor Joseph I. For economic reasons, it
had then become the duty of the British government to make peace,
,
and those who opposed it—the emperor and the arrogant whigs-
were responsible for England's not obtaining better terms at Utrecht.
The pessimistic conclusion of the Letter is more in the author's
usual vein, lamenting the condition of the state, composed of a king
without monarchical splendour, a senate of nobles without aristo-
cratic independency, and a senate of commons without democratic
freedom,' and a general decay of society to match.
About the time when Bolingbroke sketched a plan of European
history forLord Bathurst, a tory peer who was the friend of Congreve,
Pope and Sterne, he also composed, for the edification of the same
recipient, A Letter on the True Use of Retirement and Study (1736).
This effort has been very diversely judged; but it can hardly be
denied to be a very readable essay on what may be called the
· Letter vin, p. 91 (edn. of 1870).
; A Plan for a General History of Europe, reprinted in Works, vol. iv, which is of the
nature of a quite brief introduction to such a survey, during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, but, of course, extending to the treaties of Utrecht and Baden and their
effects—subjects on which 'I think I could speak with some knowledge. ' The History
was to have been a sequence of a sort of political maps, which Bolingbroke confesses he
might not have possessed the ability of constructing ; though, characteristically, he
has no doubt as to the impartiality with which he would have performed the task.


## p. 229 (#253) ############################################

9
A Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism 229
philosophy of life, part of which it sees very justly. Though the
author nowhere probes human nature very deeply, his diagnosis
is keen and his statement of its results forcible without cynicism.
Of greater importance among Bolingbroke's writings is A Letter
on the Spirit of Patriotism, written by him in 1736, and subse-
quently addressed to Lord Lyttelton, a rising hope of the opposition.
Its theme is one which was to occupy Bolingbroke's mind during
the remainder of his political life, and may be regarded as the
final position which he had come to occupy, in consequence
of the divisions between those with whom he had cooperated, and
the failure of the adversaries of Walpole, among whom he was
chief, to effect the minister's overthrow. To merge factions in a
great national or patriotic party, and, while steadfastly opposing the
corrupt existing government, to reform the English system of
government itself, was the object to which he now directed the
endeavours of public men, and of the rising generation of them in
particular. But, while the breadth of this plan gives a certain
dignity to the pamphlet in which it is advanced, the praise which
has been lavished on its execution has been overdone. If an
example of Bolingbroke's best manner is to be found in the last
two of the Letters on the Study and Use of History, then A Letter
on the Spirit of Patriotism must surely be regarded as exhibiting
only his second-best, a compound of violent invective with more or
less turgid declamation. The essay begins with a tirade against
Walpole and the whigs, who had at last found out that they had
prepared the sway not of a party but of a person, while the tories
continued sour, waiting for a messiah that would never come.
Then follows a tirade about the true spirit in which opposition
should be conducted—the spirit of a patriotism in which there is
a satisfaction comparable to that attending on the discoveries
of a Newton or a Descartes. That spirit has, in England, been
exchanged for a servility more abject than that to be found in
France; yet, to check the growing evils in our public life was
a task really so easy that it could have been accomplished but for
the eagerness of the hunters, intent, lest they should miss their
own reward, upon dividing the skin almost before they had taken
the beast, and thus postponing the evil day. It is the next
generation on whom it remains to set our hopes a generation
which must learn to despise the old differences between Big Endians
and Little Endians, the dangers of the church and those of the
protestant succession. Neither Demosthenes nor Cicero was an
orator only; a definite plan of action has become the sacred duty


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230
Historical and Political Writers
of a patriotic opposition. All this is clever and acute; but who
could describe it as the distilled wisdom of a life nobly devoted to
the patriotic action which it approves ?
In 1738, by which time Bolingbroke had recognised the futility
of hoping for a personal return to power—whatever means he
might employ for the attainment of this object-he composed
what (with the exception of two smaller pieces) was the last, as
it was one of the most notable, of his contributions to political
literature-The Idea of a Patriot King. It was not published
till 17491, when the public situation had greatly changed, when
Pelham was at the head of the government, and Lyttelton, to
whom, as private secretary of Frederick prince of Wales, this
treatise and the Spirit of Patriotism had been addressed, was
not in opposition, but in office. But it seemed entirely opportune
to the public which read and admired it, and it continued to be
a sort of symbolic book to the party which set its hopes on Frederick
prince of Wales, and, after his death in 1751, with perhaps more
show of reason, on his son, afterwards king George III. That
monarch himself has been justly describedas having 'derived
the articles of his political creed' from Bolingbroke's treatise,
which supplied the materials for the political programme of the
King's Friends. Thus, it was not wonderful that The Patriot
King should continue to be read with an interest never aroused
by its predecessor. Nor does the splendour of its eloquence show
any falling off from that exemplar. The patriot king, who begins
to govern so soon as he begins to reign, and his ministers,
selected by him at once as men sure to serve on the same
principles as those on which he is prepared to govern—what
blessings may not be reckoned upon to flow from these miraculous
assumptions !
Of course, the argument has its ironical side or aspect, and,
viewed as a satire upon the non-patriot king, and his non-patriotic
followers, the essay retained its force so long as it was worth find-
ing fault with George II and the epigoni of Walpole. But the
historical comment upon the positive value of Bolingbroke's sove-
reign cure was furnished, not so much by the career of Frederick
prince of Wales (of which there is no more to be said '), as by the
history of the earlier years of the reign of George III and of the
1 As to the private impression of 1744, surreptitiously increased by Pope from five
or six to fifteen hundred copies, afterwards destroyed by Bolingbroke's orders, see
Macknight, ú. 8. , pp. 666—7.
· By Churton Collins, u. 8. , p. 206.


## p. 231 (#255) ############################################

Bolingbroke's Last Political Pamphlets 231
part played by his 'Friends' in English constitutional life. The
idea of The Patriot King was a fabric of sand, and became a
heritage of the winds1.
The letter or paper Of the State of Parties at the Accession
of George I, which, apparently put together to satisfy Lyttelton,
was published with the two 'patriotic' treatises in 1749, may be
unreservedly dismissed as a piece of special pleading neither
effective nor adequate. Bolingbroke here takes it upon himself
to deny that, during the last four years of queen Anne's reign,
there existed any plan for bringing the pretender to the throne.
Clearly, he expected the fact of his own correspondence with
James, at a time when he was secretary of state under his sister,
to be ignored by the reader as it was by the writer. Thus, the
charge against George I of having let loose the fury of revenge
upon the tories, and goaded men into the rebellion of 1715, instead
of accomplishing his succession quietly, as he might have done, falls
to the ground, or recoils upon its author.
Finally, in 1749, Bolingbroke put forth Some Reflections on
the Present State of the Nation, principally with regard to her
Trade and her Debts, and on the Causes and Consequences of
them. Although this pamphlet remains a fragment, it would
seem as if the main points of the argument were put in the
completed portion. After a most unsuccessful and costly war,
and after we have participated, 'like principal actors,' in con-
tinental wars and negotiations covering a period of threescore
years, it becomes time that public attention should be turned
homeward, and especially to the question of national taxes and
debts
Since the revolution of 1688, and, more particularly,
during the Spanish Succession war, in which the whole weight
of expenditure fell on England and Holland, the chief way of
meeting it has been that of funding debt (whence the beginning
of an era of stockjobbing), in order to make the fortunes of great
numbers depend on the preservation of the new government. The
increase of the public debt has been enormous, and has risen
since the Hanoverian acquisition of Bremen and Verden became the
first link in a chain which has dragged England into new and
expensive broils. When, of late, war with Spain became un-
avoidable, the part we took in it could only end to the advantage
of France. We have no Sullys among us; but the public debt
1 Sichel has directed attention to the reference to Bolingbroke's speculations in
the Historic Fancies, already cited, of Lord Strangford, at one time a remarkable figure
in the Young England' movement.


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232
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must be diminished, and the interest on it reduced ; and, though
it is necessary to foster the rivalry between Austria and France,
and to support the former against the latter, this should be done
in accordance with the present interest of England only.
The tone of this pamphlet, though some of the old fire still
burns beneath the surface, is, on the whole, calmer and more
temperate than is usual with the writer.
It does not form part of our present task to estimate the influence
of Bolingbroke upon his contemporaries or upon posterity, except
in so far as it was due to his literary qualities. We have not to
examine here what there was of intrinsic force in his statesman-
ship, whether in office or in opposition, or even what there was
of inner veracity in his arguments as a political and historical
writer-for he knew the value of truth, though he did not love it
as much as he hated Walpole. If he is now read, he is read (except
by professed historical students) for his style ; and, supposing
Burke to have had some reason for terming him a ' presumptuous
and superficial writer? ,' his style must bear part of the blame.
It is Bolingbroke's style as a writer-not as an orator-of which
alone posterity is capable of forming an estimate. As a matter
of course, the oratorical element in his writings, almost from first to
last, is considerable ; but though, during his brief public career
under queen Anne, he was, beyond a doubt, the most effective
speaker in the House of Commons, not a single one of his great
speeches has come down to us.
Bolingbroke's style as a writer has the supreme merit—the
merit without which all others are, or ought to be, vain-of perfect
lucidity. His readers are never left in the slightest doubt as
to what he means, or at least as to what he desires them to
understand him to mean. And this result he obtains without
effort, without any assumption of severe superiority, or any display
of overwhelming exuberance. Indeed, his style might almost be
called the normal style of English prose, after which even the
1 See Sichel, W. , u. s. , pp. 441 ff. It seems unnecessary to examine here the state-
ment that Burke's style was founded on Bolingbroke's; but it may, perhaps, be observed
that the clever imitation of Bolingbroke's manner to be found in Burke's first printed
work, A Vindication of Natural Society (which took in the critics) does not furnish any
proof of the assertion. Barke, in his imitation, forgot neither the wide basis from
which the argument started, nor the rapid, though varied, treatment of the theme, nor,
again, the final touch of personal pathos, and even the ornaments of occasional
quotation and illustrative anecdote. The imitation, of course, was intentional,
while the higher qualities of Burke's style are not to be sought for in such a
composition. But, apart from this, it would not be difficult to point out touches in
A Vindication which have more in them of Burke than of Bolingbroke.
>


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Bolingbroke's Style
233
style of Burke seems to be, in some respects, transnormal.