Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The politics of virtue in Augustan England
- 3 A religious politics of virtue: Low Church Anglicanism and the Societies for Reformation of Manners
- 4 A republican politics of virtue: The selfish citizen in Cato's Letters
- 5 Bolingbroke's politics of virtue
- 6 The Court Whig conception of civic virtue
- 7 A world without virtue: Mandeville's social and political thought
- 8 Virtue transformed
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Bolingbroke's politics of virtue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The politics of virtue in Augustan England
- 3 A religious politics of virtue: Low Church Anglicanism and the Societies for Reformation of Manners
- 4 A republican politics of virtue: The selfish citizen in Cato's Letters
- 5 Bolingbroke's politics of virtue
- 6 The Court Whig conception of civic virtue
- 7 A world without virtue: Mandeville's social and political thought
- 8 Virtue transformed
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
From 1726 to 1736, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke occupied center stage in the English political drama we have come to call “Court versus Country.” On one side was ranged the Court Whig oligarchy, increasingly confident of its hold on power and led by the brilliant politician, England's first prime minister, Robert Walpole. On the other was the Country opposition, an unstable coalition of Jacobites, Country Tories and dissident Whigs claiming to speak for the country at large against the presumed political excesses of the Court or government. A gifted, wealthy and ambitious young Tory statesman, Bolingbroke became a member of parliament in 1700, secretary of war in 1704 and secretary of state in 1710. His political maneuvering around the death of Queen Anne raised sufficient suspicion of his Jacobitism for him to flee to France on the accession of George I; he briefly served as private secretary to the pretender James Stuart (1715–16). He returned to England a decade later after winning a pardon and the return of his substantial estates – but not, at Walpole's insistence, his seat in the House of Lords. For the next ten years, until he again gave up the political struggle and returned to France, Bolingbroke worked with the Country opposition to unseat Robert Walpole or at least derail his increasingly effective centralization of power.
Unable to use his considerable rhetorical gifts in parliament, Bolingbroke breathed life into the Country case against Walpole through the pages of his phenomenally successful weekly, The Craftsman, launched in the autumn of 1726.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Virtue TransformedPolitical Argument in England, 1688–1740, pp. 87 - 109Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992