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