Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr Pope | Page 3

and Baron St. John. His father's congratulation on the
peerage glanced at the perils of Jacobitism: "Well, Harry, I said you
would be hanged, but now I see you'll be beheaded."
The Treaty of Utrecht, that closed the War of the Spanish Succession,
was signed on the 11th of April (new style), 1713. Queen Anne died on
the 1st of August, 1714, when time was not ripe for the reaction that
Bolingbroke had hoped to see. His Letter to Windham frankly leaves us
to understand that in Queen Anne's reign the possible succession of
James II.'s son, the Chevalier de St. George, had never been out of his
mind.
The death of the Electress Sophia brought her son George to the throne.
The Whigs triumphed, and Lord Bolingbroke was politically ruined. He
was dismissed from office before the end of the month. On the 26th of
March, 1715, he escaped to France, in disguise of a valet to the French

messenger La Vigne. A Secret Committee of the House of Commons
was, a few days afterwards, appointed to examine papers, and the result
was Walpole's impeachment of Bolingbroke. He was, in September,
1715, in default of surrender, attainted of high treason, and his name
was erased from the roll of peers. His own account of his policy will be
found in this letter to his friend Sir William Windham, in which the
only weak feature is the bitterness of Bolingbroke's resentment against
Harley.
When he went in exile to France, Bolingbroke remained only a few
days in Paris before retiring to St. Clair, near Vienne, in Dauphiny. His
Letter to Windham tells how he became Secretary of State to the
Pretender, and how little influence he could obtain over the Jacobite
counsels. The hopeless Rebellion of 1715, in Scotland, Bolingbroke
laboured in vain to delay until there might be some chance of success.
The death of Louis XIV., on the 1st of September in that year, had
removed the last prop of a falling cause.
Some part of Bolingbroke's forfeited property was returned to his wife,
who pleaded in vain for the reversal of his attainder. Bolingbroke was
ill-used by the Pretender and abused by the Jacobites. He had been
writing philosophical "Reflections upon Exile," but when he found
himself thus attacked on both sides Bolingbroke resolved to cast
Jacobitism to the winds, speak out like a man, and vindicate himself in
a way that might possibly restore him to the service of his country. So
in April, 1717, at the age of thirty-nine, he began work upon what is
justly considered the best of his writings, his Letter to Sir William
Windham.
Windham was a young Tory politician of good family and great wealth,
who had married a daughter of the Duke of Somerset, and had been
accepted by the Tories in the House of Commons as a leader, after
Henry St. John had been sent to the House of Lords. Windham was
"Dear Willie" to Bolingbroke, a constant friend, and in 1715 he was
sent to the Tower as a Jacobite. But he had powerful connections, was
kindly and not dangerous, and was soon back in his place in the House
fighting the Whigs. The Letter to Windham was finished in the summer
of 1717. Its frankness was only suited to the prospect of a pardon. It
was found that there was no such prospect, and the Letter was not
published until 1753, a year or two after its writer's death.

Bolingbroke's first wife died in November, 1718. He married in 1720 a
Marquise de Villette, with whom he lived on an estate called La Source,
near Orleans, at the source of the small river Loiret. There he talked
and wrote philosophy. His pardon was obtained in May, 1723. In 1725
he was allowed by Act of Parliament the possession of his family
inheritance; but as the attainder was not reversed he could never again
sit in Parliament. So he came home in 1725, and bought an estate at
Dawley, near Uxbridge. There he philosophised in his own way and
played at farming, discoursed with Pope and plied his pen against the
Whigs. In his letter to Pope, Bolingbroke writes of ministers of religion
as if they had no other function than to maintain theological dogmas,
and draws a false conclusion from false premisses. He died on the 12th
of December, 1751.
H.M.

A LETTER TO SIR WILLIAM WINDHAM

I was well enough acquainted with the general character of mankind,
and in particular with that of my own countrymen, to expect to be as
much out of the minds of the Tories during my exile as if we had never
lived and acted together. I depended on being forgot by them, and was
far from imagining it possible