The English statesman and political writer Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), was head of the Tory opposition to Robert Walpole's Whig government and was also an early conservative political theorist.

Henry St. John was born in London on Oct. 1, 1678. He was educated at Eton and became a member of Parliament in 1701, rising to be secretary of war in 1704 and secretary of state in 1710. He was created Viscount Bolingbroke two years later. His major achievement as minister of Queen Anne's government was his negotiation of the Treaty of Utrecht, which in 1713 brought to an end the longest and last of the great European wars of Louis XIV of France.

Tradition has it that because Queen Anne, a devout churchgoer, considered Bolingbroke deceitful, irreligious, immoral, and conniving (all of which were true) she refused on her deathbed to name him first minister. This rejection, in addition to the arrival...