Lord Bolingbroke 1678 – 1751

Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke, was an English Tory statesman, political philosopher, and one of the most influential public writers of his generation. Secretary of State during the last years of Queen Anne, he negotiated the Peace of Utrecht and was implicated in the Jacobite intrigues that surrounded the Hanoverian succession, which forced him into many years of French exile. On his return he led the patriot opposition to Walpole and produced the Letters on the Study and Use of History, the Idea of a Patriot King, and his posthumously published deistic philosophical essays. His vision of a free constitution checked by a virtuous patriot king shaped Anglo-American republican thought.