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The Restoration had heralded its coming, and the tone of Halifax has more in common with Bolingbroke and Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the eighteenth century an historical profundity to compare with that of the zealous pamphleteers in the seventeenth.
Gladstone was recognized as one of the great historic orators of the English Parliament a man to rank with Bolingbroke and Chatham and Pitt and Fox. With that speech began the long parliamentary duel between these two great masters of debate, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, which was carried on for four and twenty years.
The Confederacy would not have held together for a single year. His great political adversary, Bolingbroke, does him ample justice here.
There is a common impression that Walpole's speech hunted Bolingbroke out of the country; that it drove him into exile and obscurity again, as Cicero's invective drove Catiline into open rebellion. This, however, is not the fact. A comparison of dates settles the question. The debate on the Septennial Bill took place in March, 1734; Bolingbroke did not leave England until the early part of 1735.
His Letter to Windham frankly leaves us to understand that in Queen Anne's reign the possible succession of James II.'s son, the Chevalier de St. George, had never been out of his mind. The death of the Electress Sophia brought her son George to the throne. The Whigs triumphed, and Lord Bolingbroke was politically ruined. He was dismissed from office before the end of the month.
"I remember the day when his resignation was so promptly accepted by the Admiralty. He walked up to the Admiral Farquhar it was, on the Bolingbroke and said: 'Admiral, if I'd been in your place I'd have done the same. I ought to resign, and I have. Yet if I had to do it over again, I'd be the same. I don't repent.
But look to the box at the right: do you see the beautiful Lady Mary?" "Yes," said Mr. Trefusis, who was with us, "she has only just come to town. 'Tis said she and Ned Montagu live like doves." "How!" said Lord Bolingbroke; "that quick, restless eye seems to have very little of the dove in it." "But how beautiful she is!" said Trefusis, admiringly.
On the 26th of March, 1715, he escaped to France, in disguise of a valet to the French messenger La Vigne. A Secret Committee of the House of Commons was, a few days afterwards, appointed to examine papers, and the result was Walpole's impeachment of Bolingbroke. He was, in September, 1715, in default of surrender, attainted of high treason, and his name was erased from the roll of peers.
"I congratulate you; you have been more fortunate than I, for you have made more progress in one year than I have made in ten." "Then you did not begin by reading the writings of Lord Bolingbroke?
His own Letters of the period are dated now and then from 'Wandsworth. Allusions there are to Bolingbroke; but the Wandsworth is not Bolingbroke's mansion, which stood in Battersea; the Wandsworth was one Edward Fawkener's; a man somewhat admirable to young Voltaire, but extinct now, or nearly so, in human memory.
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