The publisher’s summary of this book does not really explain Lord Bolingbroke’s significance, but his role was a central one in the subversive games London publishers and authors were playing as it touched on radical-leaning politics in the eighteenth century. Here is how the publisher puts it: “Published in 1967: Accuracy and impartiality have been studied in the following Biography, more than elegance and that labored eulogy, which so often defeats its purpose. The quick genius and diversified attainments of the author and the statesman, have not been allowed to cast a glare over the vices of the man and the specious hollowness of the pretended philosopher.” Why is this editor calling Lord Bolingbroke a “pretend” philosopher: can anybody pretend to philosophize unless it can be proven that their philosophies were ghostwritten; is the editor suggesting the Lord did not write the works included here that are attributed to him? All this is very cryptic.
An explanation as to who Lord Bolingbroke is appears in an autobiographic section called “The Life of Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke”, which details the role he played in the 1715 Jacobite rising:
he brought me word that Scotland was not only ready to take arms, but under some sort of dissatisfaction to be withheld from beginning; that in England the people were exasperated against the government to such a degree, that far from wanting to be encouraged, they could not be restrained from insulting it on every occasion; that the whole tory party was become avowedly Jacobites; that many officers of the army, and the majority of the soldiers, were well affected to the cause; that the city of London was ready to rise, and that the enterprises for seizing of several places, were ripe for execution…
There were not too many other signed accounts describing participation in the Jacobite risings, so this type of evidence is of great historic significance. He returns to this subject in other chapters including “Remarks on the History of England”, “A Letter to Sir William Windham” and “A Final Answer to the Remarks”. The publication history is explained in the front matter; the first edition of this collection was published in 1844 (long after the involved personages were dead), and this book represents the 1967 reprint of it in four volumes. Other philosophizing in this collection includes a few numbers of a series called “The Occasional Writer” and several pamphlets that support social causes including “On the Power of the Prince and the Freedom of the People” and “On Good an Bad Ministers”. The only “pretended” philosophizing here might reflect the 1967 editor’s anti-radical or anti-communist or anti-revolutionary biases, rather than the clear talent and positive social convictions expressed in these pages.
This collection deserves more scholarly attention than it has received so far, perhaps now that it is digitized it will be easier for scholars to locate relevant scholarly evidence inside of it.