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Henry Saint-John, Viscount Bolingbroke was born on September 16, 1678
in London, England and died on December 12, 1751. He schooled at Eton and may
have gone to Oxford. He entered parliament at a young age and began his life as
an English statesman and writer of letters, prose, essays, and nonfiction. He
was exiled from England to France, but his political voice remained in the form
of William Windham. Bolingbroke had the fortune to circle with the major
literary minds of his time, including Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and
Voltaire, and in fact inspired some of their most famous works (Stephen 618-29).
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During Bolingbroke's life, the political scene, as well as the societal scene, was changing immensely. The Renaissance had ended a few generations before, and Romanticism was on the verge of taking hold. This time period, known as Neo-Classicism as well as the Age of Reason, was what Bolingbroke seemed to cling onto; he held the inherited cultural traditions and values derived from the Renaissance and Classical heritage, and felt he had to attack back when Whigs attacked his Tory humanist views. He felt that the Whigs looked no farther than immediate monetary gain, and Bolingbroke "was one of the first to recognize clearly the nature of the new forces that were ascendant in politics (Hart x)." This opposition was a controlling factor for much of his life, and classicism was his main "weapon" (xi) against "those complex forces which in retrospect we may view as marking the advent of 'modernity'" (ix). 5
In his book Viscount Bolingbroke: Tory Humanist, Jeffrey Hart begins
the introductory sentence, "Bolingbroke's reputation suffered a sharp decline
after his death in 1751..."(vii). Later, Hart furthers that his "subsequent
disrepute owes much to his religious skepticism, but still more to the fact that
he was on the losing side politically" (viii.) Bolingbroke's reputation was
scathed by the then-writers of history, the Whigs.
But as the century's tick-tocked by and "the Whig certitude has faded, however, our understanding of the Tory position has deepened, as has our sympathy for those who wrote from a Tory point of view. And sympathy has led to knowledge" (viii). It is written that Bolingbroke's morals were nowhere near proper, and perhaps they were improper, but apparently exaggeration by the inflamed history writers blurs what truth may have occurred on any front.
Hart makes a sincere, rational statement when he says, "by re-examining Bolingbroke and his work in the context of his time, we may come to share something of the high regard his contemporaries had for him," and perhaps even discard the century and a half of Whig slashes for a version by T.S. Eliot in The Literature of Politics (1995, p. 12): "Bolingbroke was 'a master of prose, whose work can no more be ignored by the student of English literature than by the student of politics'" (ix). 5
Sir William Windham (Wyndham)(1687-1740) was a baronet and politician born at Orchard-Wyndham, Somerset in 1687. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, which he enrolled on June 1, 1704. After graduating he journeyed abroad and when he returned he was chosen at a by-election to be Somerset's representative in parliament on April 28, 1710. Windham's mentor in both morals and politics was Lord Bolingbroke, who fled to France in the spring of 1715 and committed himself to the Jacobite cause. Windham became Bolingbroke's mouthpiece to England. Bolingbroke addressed some of his most famous letters from exile to Windham, which are published in this volume. Windham "belonged to the gay political and literary circles" (including Swift and Pope), which intertwined (MacDonald 1167-69). 6
