Cloth binding. Black lettering with gilt title on front cover.

A crafted rendition.

The first edition of the Letters (to use a short title) was published by Bolingbroke’s literary executor David Mallet in 1752, one year after the author’s death and two years before Mallet’s publication of the big dual edition of Bolingbroke’s Works and Philosophical Works

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (16 September 1678 – 12 December 1751) was an English politician, government official and political philosopher. He was a leader of the Tories, and supported the Church of England politically despite his antireligious views and opposition to theology. He supported the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 which sought to overthrow the new king George I. Escaping to France he became foreign minister for the Pretender. He was attainted for treason, but reversed course and was allowed to return to England in 1723. According to Ruth Mack, “Bolingbroke is best known for his party politics, including the ideological history he disseminated in The Craftsman (1726–1735) by adopting the formerly Whig theory of the Ancient Constitution and giving it new life as an anti-Walpole Tory principle.”

Bolingbroke, Georgia, was named after him.

Republicanism in America

In the late 20th century, Bolingbroke was rediscovered by historians as a major influence on Voltaire, and on the American patriots John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Adams said that he had read all of Bolingbroke’s works at least five times; indeed, Bolingbroke’s works were widely read in the American colonies, where they helped provide the foundation for the emerging nation’s devotion to republicanism. His vision of history as cycles of birth, growth, decline and death of a republic was influential in the colonies, as was his contention on liberty: that one is “free not from the law, but by the law”.

Influence in Britain

Bute and George III derived their political ideas from The Patriot King. Edmund Burke wrote his Vindication of Natural Society in imitation of Bolingbroke’s style, but in refutation of his principles; and in the Reflections on the French Revolution he exclaims, “Who now reads Bolingbroke, who ever read him through?” Burke denied that Bolingbroke’s words left “any permanent impression on his mind”. Benjamin Disraeli lionized Bolingbroke as the “Founder of Modern Toryism”, eradicating its “absurd and odious doctrines”, and establishing its mission to subvert “Whig attempts to transform the English Constitution into an oligarchy”.

The loss of Bolingbroke’s great speeches was regretted by William Pitt more than that of the missing books of Livy and Tacitus. By the early 20th century, the writings and career of Bolingbroke would make a weaker impression than they made on contemporaries. He was thought by the author in his biography in A Short Biographical Dictionary of English (1910) to be a man of brilliant and versatile talents, but selfish, insincere and intriguing, defects of character which arguably led to his political ruin; and his writings were described as glittering, artificial and lacking philosophical merit. Philip Chesney Yorke, his biographer in the Encyclopædia Britannica 11th Edition, commented that his abilities were exercised upon ephemeral objects, and not inspired by lasting or universal ideas.

Enlightenment philosophy

Bolingbroke held certain views of opposition to church and theological teachings that may have had influence during the Age of Enlightenment. The atheist antireligious French-German philosopher Baron d’Holbach quotes Bolingbroke in his political work Good Sense, in reference to Bolingbroke’s statements against religion.