Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr Pope | Page 2

infancy,
besides one who survived to be a boy of eleven and had died in the year
1700. As his death left the succession to the Crown unsettled, an Act of
Settlement, passed on the 12th of June, 1701, had provided that, in case
of failure of direct heirs to the throne, the Crown should pass to the
next Protestant in succession, who was Sophia, wife of the Elector of

Hanover. The Electress Sophia was daughter of the Princess Elizabeth
who had married the Elector Palatine in 1613, granddaughter, therefore,
of James I. She was more than seventy years old when Queen Anne
began her reign. For ardent young Tories, who had no great interest in
the limitation of authority or enthusiasm for a Protestant succession, it
was no treason to think, though it would be treason to say, that the old
Electress and her more than forty-year-old German son George,
gross-minded and clumsy, did not altogether shut out hope for the
succession of a more direct heir to the Crown.
In 1704 St. John was Secretary at War when Harley was Secretary of
State, and he remained in office till 1708, when the Whigs came in
under Marlborough and Godolphin, and St. John's successor was his
rival Robert Walpole. St. John retired then for two year from public life
to his country seat at Bucklersbury in Berkshire, which had come to
him, through his wife, by the death of his wife's father the year before.
He was thirty years old, the most brilliant of the rising statesmen;
impatient of Harley as a leader and of Walpole as his younger rival
from the other side, both of them men who, in his eyes, were dull and
slow. St. John's quick intellect, though eager and impatient of
successful rivalry, had its philosophic turn. During these two years of
retirement he indulged the calmer love of study and thought, whose
genius he said once, in a letter to Lord Bathurst "On the True use of
Retirement and Study," "unlike the dream of Socrates, whispered so
softly, that very often I heard him not, in the hurry of those passions by
which I was transported. Some calmer hours there were; in them I
hearkened to him. Reflection had often its turn, and the love of study
and the desire of knowledge have never quite abandoned me."
In 1710 the Whigs were out and Harley in again, with St. John in his
ministry as Secretary of State. "I am thinking," wrote Swift to Stella,
"what a veneration we used to have for Sir William Temple because he
might have been Secretary of State at fifty; and here is a young fellow
hardly thirty in that employment."
It was the policy of the Tories to put an end to the war with France, that
was against all their political interests. The Whigs wished to maintain it
as a safeguard against reaction in favour of the Pretender. In the peace
negotiations nobody was so active as Secretary St. John. On one
occasion, without consulting his colleagues, he wrote to the Duke of

Ormond, who commanded the English army in the Netherlands: "Her
Majesty, my lord, has reason to believe that we shall come to an
agreement on the great article of the union of the two monarchies as
soon as a courier sent from Versailles to Madrid can return; it is,
therefore, the Queen's positive command to your grace, that you avoid
engaging in any siege or hazarding a battle till you have further orders
from her Majesty. I am at the same time directed to let your grace know
that the Queen would have you disguise the receipt of this order; and
that her Majesty thinks you cannot want pretences for conducting
yourself so as to answer her ends without owning that which might at
present have an ill effect if publicly known." He added as a postscript:
"I had almost forgot to tell your grace that communication is given of
this order to the Court of France." The peace was right, but the way of
making it was mean in more ways than one, and the friction between
Harley and St. John steadily increased. St. John used his majority in the
House for the expulsion of his rival Walpole and Walpole's
imprisonment in the Tower upon charges of corruption. In 1712, when
Harley had obtained for himself the Earldom of Oxford, St. John
wanted an earldom too; and the Earldom of Bolingbroke, in the elder
branch of his family, had lately become extinct. His ill- will to Harley
was embittered by the fact that only the lower rank of Viscount was
conceded to him, and he was sent from the House of Commons, where
his influence was great, at the age of thirty-four, as Viscount
Bolingbroke