King William III. died on the 8th of March, 1702, and was succeeded by James II.’s daughter Anne, who was then thirty-eight years old, and had been married when in her nineteenth year to Prince George of Denmark.  She was a good wife and a good, simple-minded woman; a much-troubled mother, who had lost five children in their 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.”