Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke | Autograph letter signed, to George Lyttelton, 1741

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke 

Autograph letter signed, with initials, to George Lyttelton

pouring out "the overflowings of an heart full of unaffected & disinterested concern for our unhappy country", placing the blame of misgovernment on the Hanoverian monarchy and the rise of party politics, and lamenting Britain’s unnecessary involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession, 4 pages, 4to, 4 November 1741, later pencil markings, browned along fold lines

“…two principal and fatal errors have prevailed from the accession of the present royal family […] the foreign interests of Britain must be conducted in a certain Subordination to those of Hanover, and that the domestick interest must be submitted to those of a party, even when it dwindles, and degenerates, as we have seen it do, into a ministerial faction. The first of these has corrupted our Politicks […] the second formed a Jacobite party, strong enough, or rather mad enough, to rebel six & twenty years ago, and helps to up dissatisfaction […] tho the embers of jacobitism are scarce alive in any corner of the Nation…”

Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751) was a leader of the Tory opposition to Walpole and one of the most articulate politicians of his generation. He had himself been implicated in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion that he here condemns as “mad”. Although he is here careful to dismiss continued support for the Stuarts in Britain, his warning of widespread discontent with the Hanoverian settlement was prescient as it came just four years before the ’45.

PROVENANCE:

George, first Baron Lyttelton (1709-1773); thence by descent; The Lyttelton Papers: The Property of the Viscount Cobham, Sotheby's, London, 12 December 1978, lot 92