Lord Bolingbroke’s history of British foreign policy, 1492–1753

ABSTRACT

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was the mastermind behind the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 that ended the War of the Spanish Succession, and a lifelong rival of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. He is also known for his political use of history based on the saying of Dionysius of Halicarnassus: ‘history is a philosophy teaching by examples’. While much scholarly attention has been paid to Bolingbroke’s historical criticism of Walpole’s Whig oligarchy, his discussion of European international history has been treated as a mere vindication of the Treaty of Utrecht, thus not meriting further investigation. This article reconstructs Bolingbroke’s writings on European politics as a history of British foreign policy. Arguing that his focus was on Britain’s role in maintaining the balance of power, this article demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, Bolingbroke attacked the Hanoverian government not for its involvement in European politics per se but for its abandonment of the Old System of William III against France. Bolingbroke believed history was repeating itself. As the Stuarts had helped France achieve hegemony half a century ago, the Hanoverians enabled France to regain supremacy in their pursuit of private interests, re-disrupting the European balance of power.

KEYWORDS:

• Bolingbroke
• History of British Foreign Policy
• Hanoverian Succession of 1714
• Anglo-French Alliance of 1716-1731
• Treaty of Vienna of 1725
• Balance of Power

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Isaac Kramnick, ‘Augustan Politics and English Historiography: The Debate on the English Past, 1730–1735’, History and Theory 6 (1967): 33–56; J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century: A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge, 1987); The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), 423–505.

2 Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History (New Corrected Edition, London, 1752), 48 (Letter III).

3 Even Isaac Kramnick takes little notice of this aspect in his otherwise excellent introduction to Bolingbroke’s historical works, see his ‘Editor's Introduction’, in Lord Bolingbroke: Historical Writings, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Chicago and London, 1972), xi-lii. This is a partial reprint of Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History (omitting Letter VII and part of Letter VIII) and Remarks on the History of England (omitting the last letter), which was published in 1730–1731. The same goes for his classic Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Ithaca, 1968), 177–81, and Max Skjönsberg, The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2021), 77–110. Simon Varey, in his biography of Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (Boston, 1984), 51–61, 78–94, briefly surveys the international dimension of Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History. However, he, too, fails to contextualise it. No different is Bernard Cottret, Bolingbroke: Exile et Écriture au Siècle des Lumières Angleterre-France (Vers 1715-Vers 1750) (2 Vols., Paris, 1992), i, 370–92. On the historical nature of Bolingbroke’s journalistic writings, see Folke Nibelius, ‘Lord Bolingbroke in The Craftsman: The Technique of Historical Mirror’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 303 (1992): 429–32; Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751) and History: A Comparative Study of Bolingbroke's Politico-Historical Works and a Selection of Contemporary Texts as to the Themes and Vocabulary (Stockholm, 2003);Philip Hicks, 'Bolingbroke, Clarendon, and the Role of Classical Historian', Eighteenth-Century Studies 20 (1987): 445-71.

4 George M. Trevelyan, ‘Introduction’, in Bolingbroke’s Defence of the Treaty of Utrecht: Being Letters VI-VIII of the Study and Use of History (Cambridge, 1932), vii-x.

5 Compare, ‘Mr. Walpole reports the Article of Impeachment against Lord Bolingbroke [4 August 1715]’, William Cobbett, Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, from the Norman Conquest, in 1066 to the Year, 1803 (36 Vols., London, 1806–1820), vii, col. 128. Hereafter, Parliamentary Debates. On the Whig impeachment of Bolingbroke, see Doohwan Ahn, ‘The Anglo-French Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 Revisited: The Politics of Rivalry and Alliance’, in The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century: Balance of Power, Balance of Trade, eds. Antonella Alimento and Koen Stapelbroek (Cham, Switzerland, 2017), 125–49.

6 Horatio Walpole, An Answer to the Latter Part of Lord Bolingbroke’s Letters on the Study and Use of History (London, 1762).

7 Bolingbroke, ‘A Plan for a General History of Europe’, in Letters on the Study and Use of History, 391–99.

8 For instance, see Andrew Lambert, ‘The Tory World View: Sea Power, Strategy and Party Politics, 1815–1914’, in The Tory World: Deep History and the Tory Theme in British Foreign Policy, 1679–2014, ed. Jeremy Black (Farnham, 2015), 121–48; Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (London, 2007), 247–73; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 170–98; Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill and London, 2000), 47–8; Daniel A. Baugh, ‘Great Britain’s “Blue-Water” Policy, 1689–1815’, The International History Review 10 (1988): 33–58.

9 On the former, see J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London, 1967); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York, 1989).

10 For a general introduction of the period, see Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1986), 1–35.

11 For more details, see Doohwan Ahn, ‘The War of Jenkins’ Ear and the Spectre of French Universal Monarchy’, Global Intellectual History (Forthcoming, 2023).

12 Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 163 (Letter VI).

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., 176 (Letter VI). The contrasting fate of the Gothic constitution in England and France (as well as in Spain) was a central topic of Bolingbroke’s Dissertation upon Parties; see ‘A Dissertation upon Parties’, in Political Writings, 132–61 (Letters XIV-XVI, first published in The Craftsman 438–40 (23 and 30 November and 7 December 1734).

15 On the historical evolution of the balance of power concept, see Doohwan Ahn and Richard Whatmore, ‘Peace, Security, and Deterrence’, in A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Enlightenment, eds. Stella Ghervas and David Armitage (London, 2020), 117–32.

16 Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 186 (Letter VI).

17 Ibid., 186–7 (Letter VI).

18 Ibid., 177 (Letter VI).

19 Ibid.

20 See Bolingbroke, ‘The Idea of a Patriot King’, in Political Writings, 277–8 and 287–8. On the Elizabethan notion of empire, see Nicholas A. M. Rodger, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Myth of Sea-Power in English History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (2004): 153–74; David Armitage, ‘The Elizabethan Idea of Empire’, 269–77. On the enduring political influence of the cult of Elizabeth, see Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford, 1994), 150–84; Jack Lynch, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge, 2003).

21 Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England (London, 1743), 112–3 and 125 (Letter X). Bolingbroke also accused Henry VIII of introducing ‘tyranny by law’.

22 Ibid., 152 (Letter XIII).

23 On Bolingbroke’s Realist stance, see Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, 181–7; Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue like Necessity: Realist Tradition in International Relations since Machiavelli (New Haven, 2002), 89–127. However, both Kramnick and Haslam fail to place Bolingbroke’s international thought in context.

24 Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England, 176 (Letter XV).

25 Ibid., 177 (Letter XV) and 187 (Letter XVI).

26 Ibid., 190–1 (Letter XVI).

27 Ibid., 188–9 (Letter XVI).

28 Ibid., 189 (Letter XVI).

29 Ibid., 190 (Letter XVI).

30 Ibid., 192 (Letter XVI).

31 Ibid., 191 (Letter XVI).

32 Ibid., 188 (Letter XIV).

33 Ibid., 283–93 (Letter XXII) and 293–304 (Letter XXIII).

34 Ibid., 227 (Letter XVIII).

35 Anon., Some Observations on the Present State of Affairs, in a Letter to a Member of the House of Commons (London, 1731), 30.

36 Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England, 291 (Letter XXII).

37 Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 265 (Letter VIII).

38 Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England, 292 (Letter XXII). On the political background and context of James I’s decision to go to war with Spain, see Brennan C. Pursell, ‘James I, Gondomar and the Dissolution of the Parliament of 1621’, in History 85 (2000), 428–45; ‘War and Peace? Jacobean Politics and the Parliament of 1621’, in Parliaments, Politics and Elections, 1604–1648, ed. Chris R. Kyle (Camden Fifth Series 17, Cambridge, 2001), 149–78.

39 Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 205–6 (Letter VII).

40 Ibid., 199–200 (Letter VII).

41 Ibid., 200 (Letter VII).

42 Ibid., 202–3 (Letter VII).

43 Ibid., 205 (Letter VII).

44 Ibid., 209 (Letter VII).

45 Ibid., 209–10 (Letter VII) and 295 (Letter VIII).

46 Ibid., 207 (Letter VII).

47 Ibid., 216–7 (Letter VII).

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., 207–8 (Letter VII).

50 Ibid.

51 Bolingbroke would not have disagreed with Alfred Mahan’s observation that ‘This surrender was made for money, and was inexcusable from the maritime point of view. Dunkirk was for the English a bridge-head into France. To France it became a haven for privateers, the bane of England’s commerce in the Channel and the North Sea’. Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History (New York, 1987), 105. For both, it was the timing of the sale that mattered.

52 Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 223 and 226–8 (Letter VII).

53 Ibid., 228 (Letter VII).

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., 234 (Letter VII).

56 Ibid., 236 and 239–42 (Letter VII).

57 Ibid., 244–5 (Letter VII).

58 Ibid., 246 (Letter VII).

59 Ibid., 247 (Letter VII).

60 Ibid., 251 (Letter VII).

61 Ibid., 257 (Letter VIII).

62 Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England, 177 (Letter XV).

63 Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 289 (Letter VIII).

64 Ibid., 290 (Letter VIII).

65 Ibid., 384 (Letter VIII).

66 On 31 May 1725, Bolingbroke was restored in title and estates, but he was disabled from sitting in Parliament or taking office, see Henry L. Snyder, ‘The Pardon of Bolingbroke’, The Historical Journal 14 (1971): 227–40.

67 See William Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford (3 Vols., London, 1978), i, 236–61; Walter Sydney Sichel, Bolingbroke and His Times: The Sequel (2 Vols., London, 1901–1902), ii, 215–315; Harry T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke (London, 1970), 222–46; Cottret, Bolingbroke Exile et Écriture, i, 247–57.

68 On the Alliance of Hanover, see Graham C. Gibbs, ‘Britain and the Alliance of Hanover, April 1725-February 1726’, The English Historical Review 73 (1958): 404–30; James F. Chance, The Alliance of Hanover: A Study of British Foreign Policy in the Last Years of George I (London, 1923).

69 The political context and importance of this hundred pages pamphlet of Hoadley is well discussed in Chance, The Alliance of Hanover, 616–8 See also, Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Louge and London, 1982), 67–88; H. T. Dickinson, ‘Benjamin Hoadley, 1676–1761: Unorthodox Bishop’, History Today 25 (1975): 348–52.

70 Benjamin Hoadly, An Inquiry into the Reasons of the Conduct of Great Britain with Relation to the Present State of Affairs in Europe (London, 1727), 3; Bolingbroke, ‘The Occasional Writer. Number 11’, in A Collection of Political Tracts, 25–6. The same line of debate continued in Benjamin Hoadly, A Defence of the Enquiry into the Reasons of the Conduct of Great Britain, &: Occasioned by the Paper published in the Country-Journal or Craftsman on Saturday, January 4, 1728–1729 (London, 1729); John Trot, Yeoman (Bolingbroke), The Craftsman Extraordinary; Containing an Answer to the Defence of the Enquiry into the Reasons of the Conduct of Great Britain (London, 1729); Bolingbroke, ‘An Answer to The Defence of the Enquiry into the Reasons of the Conduct of Great Britain, &c., In a Letter to Caleb D’Anvers, Esq.’, in A Collection of Political Tracts, 166–7.

71 Bolingbroke, ‘The Occasional Writer. Number 11’, 27.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid., 36.

74 Ibid., 34.

75 Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 258–9 (Letter VIII).

76 Ibid., 252 (Letter VII).

77 Bolingbroke stated that those ‘who got by the war, and made immense fortunes by the necessities of the public, were not so numerous nor so powerful, as they have been since. The moneyed interest was not yet a rival able to cope with the landed interest, either in the nation or in parliament’. Ibid., 267 (Letter VII).

78 Ibid., 288 (Letter VIII).

79 Ibid., 289 (Letter VIII).

80 Ibid., 294–5 (Letter VIII).

81 Ibid., 297 (Letter VIII).

82 Ibid., 300–1 (Letter VIII).

83 Ibid., 302 (Letter VIII).

84 Ibid., 305–6 (Letter VIII).

85 David Hume, ‘Of the Balance of Power’, in Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1994), 159.

86 See, Jonathan Swift, The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry in Beginning and Carrying the Present War (London, 1711).

87 Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 357 (Letter VIII).

88 See John Shovlin, Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order (New Haven, 2021).

89 Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 342 (Letter VIII).

90 Ibid., 310 (Letter VIII).

91 On the difficulty the Whig party faced in defending the Anglo-French Alliance, see Doohwan Ahn, ‘From Hanover to Gibraltar: Cato’s Letters (1720–1723) in International Context’, History of European Ideas 42 (2016): 1042–54.

92 Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, 381–2 (Letter VIII).

93 Ibid., 382–3 (Letter VIII).

94 Ibid.

95 ‘Debate in the Commons on the Address of Thanks, 24 May 1726’, Parliamentary Debates, viii, col. 530.

96 See Edward Knatchbull, The Parliamentary Diary of Sir Edward Knatchbull, 1722–1730, ed. Aubrey N. Newman (Camden Third Series 94, Cambridge, 1963), 51–2 (17 February 1726).

97 Hoadley, An Inquiry into the Reasons of the Conduct of Great Britain, 8–9.

98 Bolingbroke, ‘An Answer to The London Journal’ of Saturday, December 21, 1728’, in A Collection of Political Tracts, 103–4.

99 Bolingbroke, ‘Remarks on a Late Pamphlet, intitled, Observations on the Conduct of Great Britain, &c.’, 143.

100 Bolingbroke, ‘An Answer to The London Journal’, 106.

101 See Jeremy Black, ‘French Foreign Policy in the Age of Fleury Reassessed’, The English Historical Review 103 (1988): 359–84; Arthur M. Wilson, French Foreign Policy during the Administration of Cardinal Fleury, 1726–1743: A Study in Diplomacy and Commercial Development (Cambridge, 1936), 42–90.

102 ‘The King’s Speech on the Opening of the Session, 13 January 1730’, Parliamentary Debates, viii, col. 765.

103 Caleb D’Anvers [William Pulteney], A Short View of the State of Affairs, with Relation to Great-Britain, For Four Years Past; With Some Remarks on the Treaty Lately Publish'd, and a Pamphlet intitled Observations upon It (London, 1730), 304.

104 Anon. [William Pulteney], The Observation on the Treaty of Seville Examined (London, 1730), 18.

105 Lord Bathurst, ‘Debate in the Lords on the Treaty of Seville, 27 January 1730’, Parliamentary Debates, viii, col. 774.

106 ‘Debate in the Commons on the Number of the Land Forces, 31 January 1729’, ‘Debate in the Commons concerning the Hessian Troops, 3 February 1731’, Parliamentary Debates., viii, cols. 677–83, 841–2.

107 John, Lord Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second, from His Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline, ed. John W. Croker (2 Vols., London, 1848), i, 136.

108 Anon. [Robert Walpole], Observations upon the Treaty between the Crowns of Great-Britain, France, and Spain, concluded at Seville on the Ninth of November 1729 (N.S.) (London, 1729), 23.

109 ‘Thomas Pelham to the Earl of Waldegrave, London, 22 January 1730–1731’, Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, iii, 79–80.

110 Ibid.

111 On Hanover’s importance in eighteenth-century British politics, see Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich eds., The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Cultures (London, 2016); Brendan Simms and Torsten Riotte eds., The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837 (Cambridge, 2007); Nick Harding, Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007); Andrew C. Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006).

112 On the concept, see Hamish M. Scott, ‘“The True Principles of the Revolution”: The Duke of Newcastle and the Idea of the Old System’, in Knights and Errant and True Englishmen: British Foreign Policy, 1660–1800, ed. Jeremy Black (Edinburgh, 1989), 55–91.

113 ‘Appendix D. Thomas Tower’s Memoranda’, in The Parliamentary Diary of Sir Edward Knatchbull, 150.

114 John Perceval, First Earl of Egmont, Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont (3 Vols., London, 1920), i, 35–6 (10 February 1730).

115 Ibid., 39–40 (12 February 1730).

116 Bolingbroke, ‘The Case of Dunkirk, Consider’d’, in A Collection of Political Tracts, 347.

117 Ibid., 348–9.

118 See Jeremy Black, The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance, 1727–1731 (Gloucester, 1987).

119 The Craftsman (No 251, 24 April 1731).

120 Ibid.

121 See Jeremy Black, A System of Ambition? British Foreign Policy, 1660–1793 (Harlow, 1991), 159 and 162–3.

122 For example, see ‘Debate in the Commons on Mr. Sandy’s Motion for the Instructions given to the British Minister in Poland, 25 January 1734’, ‘Debate on a Motion for an Address to know, how far the King was engaged, by his Good Offices, in the Causes of the War against the Emperor’, ‘Debate on Mr. Sandy’s Motion for an Account of what Application had been made to his Majesty, by the Parties engaged in the War’, Parliamentary Debates, ix, cols. 213–31, 231–2, and 232–6. For more, see Jeremy Black, ‘Britain’s Neutrality in the War of the Polish Succession, 1733–1735’, The International History Review 8 (1986): 45–366. It has been suggested that the anonymous author of an influential ant-ministerial pamphlet called The Groans of Germany, or the Enquiry of a Protestant German into the Original Cause of the Present Distractions of the Empire (1741), which charged the Walpole ministry with having made secret promises to France concerning the Polish succession, was, in fact, Bolingbroke. Jeremy Black, Debating Foreign Policy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 15–19.

123 More worryingly, it was agreed that after the death of the exiled Polish king, the Duchy of Lorraine was to be handed over to France.

124 The Craftsman (No. 508, 27 March 1736, see Nos. 507 and 510, 20 March and 10 April 1736).

125 Bolingbroke, ‘Some Reflections on the Present State of the Nation, Principally with regard to Her Taxes and Her Debts, and on the Causes and Consequences of Them’, in I. A Letter to Sir William Windham. II. Some Reflections on the Present State of the Nation. III. A Letter to Alexander Pope (London, 1753), 354.

126 Ibid.

127 Ibid., 355.

128 ‘Bolingbroke to Lyttelton, 4 November 1741’, in Robert Phillmore ed., Memoirs and Correspondence of George, Lord Lyttelton from 1734 to 1773 (2 Vols., London, 1845), i, 196.

129 Bolingbroke, ‘Some Reflections on the Present State of the Nation’, 177–8.

130 Bolingbroke, ‘The Idea of a Patriot King’, 293.