I

Britain in the Augustan Age was notorious for its party strife. Voltaire observed in his Letters concerning the English nation (1733–4) that the prevalence of the spirit of party in the country meant that ‘[o]ne half of the nation [was] always the enemy of the other’.Footnote ¹ Political parties had yet to become accepted in British political discourse, however, and they were often described as pernicious. This article will investigate the contribution of Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751) to the eighteenth-century debate about the role of parties in the political process, a subject which has not been at the forefront of recent Bolingbroke research, including that of Adrian Lashmore-Davies and David Armitage.Footnote ² In the process, the commonplace caricature of Bolingbroke as the paradigmatic anti-party writer of the eighteenth century will be challenged.

Bolingbroke has influentially been portrayed as the ‘standard anti-party writer’ and the ‘fountain-head of anti-party thought’.Footnote ³ It has also often been suggested that he tried but failed to illustrate an idea of a non-party state.Footnote ⁴ By contrast, the aim of the present article is to demonstrate that Bolingbroke's views on party have been misrepresented, and that, in important respects, it is possible to think of him as an advocate of political parties rather than the anti-party writer he is commonly known as. This article seeks to show that Bolingbroke was in fact the promoter of a very specific party, a systematic parliamentary opposition party in resistance to what he perceived as the Court Whig faction in power. When this political party has been acknowledged in existing literature, it has almost exclusively been construed as ‘a party to end all parties’, as recently by such political theorists as Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead.Footnote ⁵ Moreover, Bolingbroke has been associated with the anti-party catchphrase ‘not men, but measures’.Footnote ⁶ I intend to demonstrate not only that these slogans were never used by Bolingbroke but also that they are arguably incompatible with his political writings.Footnote ⁷

This article will consider Bolingbroke's theory of opposition, which is closely linked to his views on party. It can be argued that his advocacy of organized opposition represents a watershed in the intellectual history of party in the eighteenth century, since no formal opposition party existed at the time and opposition was widely seen as illegitimate.Footnote ⁸ This is not to suggest that Bolingbroke conceived of an organized opposition as something akin to a ‘modern’ opposition party, enshrined in the constitution. It is necessary to bear in mind that Bolingbroke could only have been familiar with eighteenth-century parties, which were less organized and systematic than those of the present day. For similar reasons, it would be anachronistic to investigate whether Bolingbroke anticipated a two-party system or party government.Footnote ⁹

As a caveat, we have to recognize that Bolingbroke was not a consistent political philosopher. He was often imprecise in his employment of terms and concepts, but he nonetheless had a profound impact on writers widely perceived as greater minds than himself, for example David Hume and Montesquieu.Footnote ¹⁰ What this article will seek to reflect is that many scholars and commentators have arguably been too confident when portraying him as an anti-party thinker. They do have strong textual evidence in their favour, not least all the times Bolingbroke said he disliked parties, both in public and private.Footnote ¹¹ This article will demonstrate, however, that there is ample evidence – both textual and contextual – pointing in the opposite direction. It will also reflect that he was read as a party thinker rather than an anti-party thinker by his contemporaries and immediate posterity, and his contribution to the intellectual history of party should therefore not be neglected.

II

Like Machiavelli, one of Bolingbroke's favourite authors, Bolingbroke turned to writing in enforced political exile. Having been a prominent member of the Tory administration of 1710–14 and the chief negotiator of the Treaty of Utrecht, Bolingbroke fled to France shortly after George I, the elector of Hanover, ascended the British throne in 1714, an event which instigated what he would later describe as the millenarian year of Whiggism.Footnote ¹² His decision to take up a position at the court of James III, the Stuart Pretender, whom he served for less than a year, prevented him from returning to Britain until the mid-1720s. When he was eventually allowed to return, he remained barred from taking up his seat in the House of Lords. Deprived of a political voice in parliament, he launched the Craftsman journal with the opposition Whig William Pulteney in 1726. Bolingbroke and the Craftsman were part of a wider intellectual opposition against Walpole and the new political and economic order that emerged in the early Hanoverian era, an opposition comprising such intellectual luminaries as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, Dr Arbuthnot, and Henry Fielding.Footnote ¹³

Almost all of Bolingbroke's political writings are historical to a greater or lesser degree, and vice versa. History for Bolingbroke was ‘philosophy teaching by examples’, and party and faction were always at the heart of his historical enquiries.Footnote ¹⁴ His first ostensibly historical writing, Remarks on the history of England, was serialized in the Craftsman from June 1730 to May the following year. It abounds with references to contemporary political disputes, as when he called ministerial writers who defended the maintenance of a standing army in peacetime as ‘doctors of slavery’.Footnote ¹⁵ Being actively engaged in opposition at a time when such activities were regarded as morally and legally dubious, Bolingbroke's perhaps most important intention in the Remarks was to show that oppositional activity had historically not been factious but had on the contrary been necessary for liberty, which for him meant the survival of the free and mixed constitution.Footnote ¹⁶

Bolingbroke conceived of the history of England as an epic battle between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of faction. Although party and faction were often used interchangeably in the period, faction in this context should not be confused with the concept of party as Bolingbroke made a distinction between the two terms. A distinction between party and faction had been expressed as early as 1717 by William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England, who argued that parties were usually tame and ‘capable of Good, as well as Hurt, of Love as well as Hatred’, unlike factions, which ‘hate, but love not, are hurtful in their Nature, and chiefly produces Enmity’.Footnote ¹⁷ Bolingbroke's own journal, the Craftsman, in 1739, during Bolingbroke's second exile in France, defined party as ‘a national Division of Opinions, concerning the Form and Methods of Government, for the benefit of the whole Community’, and faction as ‘a Set of Men arm'd with Power, and acting upon no one Principle of Party, or any Notion of Publick Good, but to preserve and share the Spoils amongst Themselves, as their only Cement’.Footnote ¹⁸

Bolingbroke's distinction between party and faction runs along similar lines. In his ironic dedication to Sir Robert Walpole prefixed to the publication of his Dissertation upon parties in book form in 1735,Footnote ¹⁹ Bolingbroke said that ‘[t]here may be such a conduct, as no national party will bear, or at least will justify. But faction hath no regard to national interests. Factions therefore will bear any thing, justify any thing.’Footnote ²⁰ Factions struggle for power, not principle, Bolingbroke argued.Footnote ²¹ Numbers are a good benchmark for whether a cause is national or factional: ‘[p]rivate motives can never influence numbers. When a nation revolts, the injury is national.’Footnote ²² Bolingbroke's favourite historical example of a national party that had degenerated into faction were the Whigs under Queen Anne, who, in Bolingbroke's biased rendition, had initially adhered to the Protestant Settlement out of honourable zeal for the nation's liberty and religion, but this ‘national interest became soon a secondary and subservient motive’ and they started to care more about the establishment of their own administration rather than a peaceful settlement of the House of Hanover.Footnote ²³

The message was that Walpole was not the leader of a national party but a court faction – a very different beast. According to Bolingbroke, a national party ‘will always retain some national principles, some regard to the constitution’, which meant that ‘a national party will never be the instruments of completing national ruin’, unlike a faction.Footnote ²⁴ Accordingly, ‘the minister who persists in so villainous a project…will be found really at the head of a faction, not of a party’.Footnote ²⁵ For Bolingbroke, ‘the difference between one and the other is so visible, and the boundaries where party ceases and faction commences, are so strongly marked, that it is sufficient to point at them’,Footnote ²⁶ even though a faction will always seek to hide ‘under the name and appearance of a national party’.Footnote ²⁷

The spirit of faction is thus the prioritizing of private interest at the expense of the public good, whereas the spirit of liberty denotes a willingness to do whatever it takes to put the common good first. The former was a preoccupation for Bolingbroke from his earliest political writings, as he was concerned ‘that private interest [had] become the criterion, by which judgments are formed upon public affairs’.Footnote ²⁸ The two spirits ‘are not only different, but repugnant and incompatible: so that the life of either is the death of the other’.Footnote ²⁹ Bolingbroke was a great admirer of Queen Elizabeth, whose reign he described as a golden age, and he never tired of praising her for uniting the kingdom.Footnote ³⁰ Throughout history, however, the spirit of liberty often found its outlets in opposition to powerful monarchs. This jealous spirit of liberty was something he sought to reinvigorate in his contemporaries, but directed at the chief minister rather than the monarch. In his historical writings, he often drew attention to unpopular ministers and court favourites in the past, e.g. the duke of Buckingham under James I, and James II's Thomas Clifford, who is alleged to have begun the practice of corrupting parliaments.Footnote ³¹

Being in opposition to the Court Whigs, Bolingbroke had to explode the belief that faction was only to be found in opposition to the court and demonstrate that it could equally be found at court. His favourite tactic was to associate the ministerial position against ‘factious opposition’ with absolutist theories, of which he saw James I as an exponent.Footnote ³² ‘[H]e, who confines his notions of faction to oppositions made to the crown, reasons, in an absolute monarchy, in favor of the constitution’, he wrote in the Remarks. Footnote ³³ He sought to show that the reign of James I, and that of his son Charles I, demonstrated how the spirit of faction at court could lead the country wayward. It was not solely the royalist faction that was responsible for pushing the country into civil war at mid-century, but Bolingbroke believed that ‘[t]he faction of the court tainted the nation, and gave life and strength, if it did not give being, to the factions in the state’.Footnote ³⁴ Opposition could thus be a counter-factional measure: ‘If there had not been an early and honest opposition, in defence of national liberty, against King James, his reign would have sufficed to establish him in the seat of arbitrary power.’Footnote ³⁵

The key move made by Bolingbroke was thus that he associated opposition to the court with the spirit of liberty. He began the Remarks by setting out that ‘liberty cannot be long secure, in any country, unless a perpetual jealousy watches over it’.Footnote ³⁶ This jealousy has to be ‘permanent and equal’.Footnote ³⁷ The reason is straightforward: Bolingbroke viewed the love of power as natural and insatiable.Footnote ³⁸ Consequently, liberty was always ‘in some degree of danger under every government’.Footnote ³⁹ The fear of losing liberty is common to all and ‘may become a general principle of union’.Footnote ⁴⁰ This perpetual jealousy, if well grounded, ‘may have the good effect of destroying a wicked minister, of checking a bad, or of reclaiming a misguided prince’.Footnote ⁴¹ James I was an exemplar of the latter and Walpole of the former.

There is little doubt that Bolingbroke's motivation was the destruction of Walpole whom he perceived as a nefarious minister.Footnote ⁴² Bolingbroke has wrongly been associated with the ‘not men, but measures’ opposition slogan, as by Harvey Mansfield.Footnote ⁴³ While Bolingbroke never used this catchphrase in his public writings, it is true that he paid lip service to similar lines of thought, as when he discussed the Wars of the Roses in the Remarks. He described the war between the House of Lancaster and the House of York as a conflict about who should govern rather than how they should be governed, and he argued that the latter was worth contending for, as in the civil war preceding Magna Carta, whereas the former ‘ought always to be looked upon with great indifference’.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, almost certainly with Walpole in mind, Bolingbroke added a crucial qualification: ‘except in cases where [the personnel] has so immediate and necessary a relation to the [measures of government], that securing the first depends, in a great measure, on settling the last’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Bolingbroke understood the controversial potential of his argument about the necessity of a perpetual jealous spirit of liberty, and he felt compelled to add the caveat that ‘I do not mean to recommend your seditious, rebellious spirit, which will create a perpetual scene of tumult and disorder.’Footnote ⁴⁶ It is clear, however, that Bolingbroke believed that we have to accept a degree of tumult and disorder: ‘We must be content…to bear the disorder I apprehend from that ferment’, he argued, ‘which a perpetual jealousy of the governors in the governed will keep up, rather than abandon that spirit, the life of which is the life of liberty.’Footnote ⁴⁷ In the ministerial press, the jealous spirit of liberty was equated with ‘opposition’ and ‘contention’ and was described as a ‘dreadful State’.Footnote ⁴⁸

It is not without significance that Bolingbroke at this point in the Remarks refers to the works of Machiavelli, who had notoriously argued that tumult in the Roman Republic between different orders in the state had been a blessing rather than a curse.Footnote ⁴⁹ Bolingbroke does not draw attention to this controversial strand in Machiavelli, but instead refers to another lesson from Machiavelli's Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (c. 1513–17), namely that the best governments are such ‘which by the natural effect of their original constitutions are frequently renewed or drawn back…to their first principles’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The fact that the state has subsisted is sufficient evidence that its first principles are sound. In other words, the purpose of Bolingbroke's opposition would not be to innovate but to reform the state by drawing it back to its foundation, by which he meant the Revolutionary Settlement of 1688–9, which he, unlike some ministerial writers, viewed as a reassertion of ancient liberties rather than a new beginning.Footnote ⁵¹ His oppositional theory, which will be discussed at greater length below, is thus related to his belief in the myth of the ancient constitution.Footnote ⁵² At this point in time, it was self-evident that opposition had to take the form of ‘zeal for the constitution’ rather than ‘zeal for this or that party’.Footnote ⁵³ This elucidates why he spent so much of his later Dissertation upon parties (1733–4) on attempting to explain the British constitution, which was far from unambiguous. Universally described as a mixed constitution – combining monarchy, aristocracy and democracy – the constitution was uncodified and there was no unanimity as to how the mixture ought to work in practice.Footnote ⁵⁴

Bolingbroke was guarded about associating himself with Machiavelli, and he felt obliged to qualify his reference by saying that he ‘would not advise you to admit the works of MACHIAVEL into your cannon of political writings; yet…in them, as in other apocryphal books, many excellent things are interspersed’.Footnote ⁵⁵ One of those excellent things was Machiavelli's argument about first principles, and it was also considered a safe reference in an age where innovation was widely seen as evil and zeal for the revolutionary settlement – whether conceived as a new beginning or a reassertion of ancient liberties – was mainstream.

In the third letter of the Remarks, Bolingbroke hit out at the ministerial writer James Pitt, who wrote for the London Journal under the pseudonym of Francis Osborne.Footnote ⁵⁶ On 4 July 1730, Pitt had claimed that ‘a Man of Sense…had much rather have liv'd under the Pacific Reign of Augustus, tho’ cloath'd with all Power, than under a Mob Government, always quarrelling at Home, or fighting Abroad’, referring to the ‘perpetual Struggles between the Senate and the People’, which had been defended by Machiavelli.Footnote ⁵⁷ Bolingbroke recommended to Pitt Thomas Gordon's ‘excellent’ discourses, prefixed to his translation of Tacitus, in which he portrayed Augustus as a tyrant.Footnote ⁵⁸ For all Gordon's sneers at parties and factions, he nevertheless held that ‘a free State the worst constituted, as was that of Florence, is, with all its disorders, factions, and tumults, preferable to any absolute Monarchy, however calm’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Gordon was also a careful reader of Machiavelli, and it is the tradition that found tumult and discord preferable to the calmness of absolute states to which the present author would suggest that Bolingbroke belongs, rather than in the anti-party tradition of holism in which he is placed by Nancy Rosenblum.Footnote ⁶⁰

Bolingbroke's next central opposition tract, A dissertation upon parties, serialized in the Craftsman between October 1733 and December 1734, is very historical in nature, as its explicit intention is to make ‘an enquiry into the rise and progress of our late parties; or a short history of Toryism and Whiggism from their cradle to their grave, with an introductory account of their genealogy and descent’.Footnote ⁶¹ The kernel of Bolingbroke's argument is that Tory and Whig had become redundant as national parties as there was no disagreement about the fundamentals of the British constitution, at least not among those he regarded as honest Whigs such as his political ally Pulteney. When they came into being during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, there had been real differences at stake, with the Tories espousing divine right, lineal succession and passive obedience to the monarch whereas the Whigs sought to exclude the Catholic duke of York from the succession to the throne.Footnote ⁶² The Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, which was carried out by a coalition of parties, ‘was a fire, which purged off the dross of both parties; and the dross being purged off, they appeared to be the same metal, and answered the same standard’.Footnote ⁶³ The Whigs and Tories had no need to fear each other after the revolution, as they both had purged themselves of their extreme doctrines, republicanism and divine right theories respectively. While the real essence of the parties had been destroyed, the names had survived for factious purposes and continued to haunt and divide the political nation like ghosts, Bolingbroke argued.Footnote ⁶⁴ More specifically, he accused the Court Whigs in power for having turned into a faction that sought to keep alive artificial party distinctions for their own benefit.Footnote ⁶⁵

The claim that Whig and Tory had become redundant was not new but little more than a repetition of that in Cato's letters more than a decade earlier.Footnote ⁶⁶ It was a powerful tool for Bolingbroke's polemical purposes, however, as it allowed him to portray Walpole as a divider.Footnote ⁶⁷ As mentioned in the introduction, Bolingbroke has often been portrayed as an anti-party writer. This is certainly true if we take it to mean a denial of the relevance of the Whig and Tory labels in the context of the 1730s. Bolingbroke's criticism of Whig and Tory should not, however, be construed as an attack on party per se. For all his scorn of party passion, he is fairly consistently, as we have seen, differentiating between a national party seeking to address a national grievance and a faction interested in maximizing its power. Indeed, his attack on Whig and Tory was reported by ministerial pamphleteers as a partisan rather than an anti-partisan position.Footnote ⁶⁸

As the old parties had long been irrelevant, a national union had become a possibility, Bolingbroke argued. The political nation was still divided, however, and instead of Whig and Tory Bolingbroke believed that ‘new combinations force themselves upon us’, namely the Country and Court parties.Footnote ⁶⁹ It is to these parties that this article must now turn.

III

The Dissertation upon parties abounds with anti-party comments, as when Bolingbroke speaks of the ‘spirit of party’ (not faction, this time) as a spirit that ‘[i]nspires animosity and breeds rancour, which hath so often destroyed our inward peace, weakened our national strength, and sullied our glory abroad’.Footnote ⁷⁰ He also makes a distinction between moral and party justice, with the former being based on reason, while the latter ‘takes its colour from the passions of men, and is but another name for injustice’.Footnote ⁷¹ The historical example of the Whigs following the accession of George I in 1714 is probably the precedent closest to Bolingbroke's heart. Bolingbroke writes that he wants ‘to change the narrow spirit of party into a diffusive spirit of public benevolence’.Footnote ⁷² He is invoking the memory of George Savile, 1st marquis of Halifax, also known as the great Trimmer, as someone who tried to ‘allay this extravagant [party] ferment’.Footnote ⁷³

And, yet, it is clear that Bolingbroke was not simply trying to narrate that Britain was divided into Court and Country parties but that he was trying to promote the latter.Footnote ⁷⁴ He divided the political landscape into three camps: (1) those who were enemies of the government but friends of the constitution, i.e. his own Country party; (2) those who were enemies of both, i.e. the Jacobites; (3) those who were friends of the government but enemies of the constitution, i.e. the Court Whigs.Footnote ⁷⁵ He claimed that he was only interested in the first and the third division since the Jacobites were so few and insignificant.Footnote ⁷⁶ Bolingbroke was far from neutral when he argued that the first division ‘might hope to unite even the bulk of the nation to them, in a weak and oppressive regime’, in opposition to the third, around which ‘our greatest and almost our whole danger centres’.Footnote ⁷⁷

In sharp contrast to the Court party, ‘[a] Country party must be authorized by the voice of the country’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Such a party had the potential to unite Whigs and Tories, as ‘[i]t must be formed on principles of common interest. It cannot be united and maintained on the particular prejudices, and more than it can, or ought to be, directed to the particular interests of any set of men whatsoever.’Footnote ⁷⁹ The Country party was an opposition party whose raison d’être was to defeat what was perceived as Walpole's system of corruption. Bolingbroke used corruption to denote executive influence over the legislature as well as in the Machiavellian sense of degeneration of civic virtù. The Country party had a distinct ideology that emphasized the importance of the independency of parliament from crown influence, support of the landed, and sometimes the traded interest in opposition to the moneyed interest, and a preference for a citizen militia and a strong navy as opposed to the standing army.Footnote ⁸⁰ Both the Whig and Tory parties had had Country elements since the Glorious Revolution, but they had usually only collaborated on specific issues, e.g. the standing army question in 1697–8.Footnote ⁸¹ Bolingbroke wanted to turn this occasional Country coalition into a permanent political force and this was the aspiration of his joint enterprise with Pulteney.Footnote ⁸²

The Court Whigs under Walpole had moved closer to the Church of England, as they felt they could count blindly on the support of the Dissenters, and Walpole had put an end to further favours to Dissenters.Footnote ⁸³ Between 1723 and 1736, Walpole formed a formidable alliance with Edmund Gibson, the bishop of London. Bolingbroke sought to convince Protestant Dissenters, who were the natural enemies of high church Tories and an important ally of the Whigs, that they had nothing to fear from this new Country platform, even if it contained a strong Tory element: ‘The principal articles of your [the Dissenters’] civil faith, published some time ago, or, to speak more properly, the civil faith of the Old Whigs, are assented and consented to by the Country party.’Footnote ⁸⁴ Bolingbroke was here referring to ‘Commonwealthmen’ such as James Harrington, Robert Molesworth, Walter Moyle, John Trenchard, and John Toland, many of whom he had read and quoted in his political writings, especially in his criticism of the maintenance of the standing army in peacetime.Footnote ⁸⁵ Bolingbroke told the Dissenters that there could be no doubt about which side they should espouse, as the principles they believed in were ‘manifestly pursued’ by the Country party whereas the Court party pursued ‘those which they have opposed, or others equivalent to them in their effect’.Footnote ⁸⁶

When it looks as if Bolingbroke is fairly unequivocally defending this particular form of political party, i.e. the Country party, he feels obliged to qualify his case: ‘A party, thus constituted, is improperly called party. It is the nation, speaking and acting in the discourse and conduct of particular men.’Footnote ⁸⁷ Be that as it may, he then continues to call it a party, as when he refers to the episode when the Court–Country polarity was substituted for Tory and Whig under Charles II: ‘The dissolution of this party [i.e. the Country party], and the new division of the nation into Whig and Tory, brought us into extreme danger.’Footnote ⁸⁸

Bolingbroke concluded the Dissertation by arguing that both sides should agree ‘to fix upon this principal and real distinction and difference; the present division of parties; since parties we must have; and since those which subsisted formerly are quite extinguished, notwithstanding all the wicked endeavours by some men…to revive them’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Just as nothing could be more ‘ridiculous’ than to preserve the nominal division of Whig and Tory when the difference of principles no longer existed, ‘so nothing can be more reasonable than to admit the nominal division of constitutionists and anti-constitutionists, or of a Court and a Country party, at this time, when an avowed difference of principles make this distinction possible’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Bolingbroke leaned on the Country party ideology and held that this Country–Court polarity would be applicable as long as there were people ‘who argue for, and who promote even a corrupt dependency of the members of the two houses of Parliament on the crown’.Footnote ⁹¹ The Court party had to be opposed by the Country party, for if the independency of parliament was lost, the constitution would be a ‘dead letter’.Footnote ⁹² The rationale for and the nature of this opposition party will be further explored in the next section of the present article.

IV

Already in the Remarks, Bolingbroke had spelled out what he regarded as the proper characteristics of the business of opposition: opposition had to be commenced early and vigorously if the fundamentals of the free constitution were being attacked. He conceded that it was factious to oppose measures ‘which are of no material consequence to the national interest’.Footnote ⁹³ At the same time, he argued that ‘it is likewise faction, and faction of the worst kind, either not to oppose at all, or not to oppose in earnest, when points of the greatest importance to the nation are concerned’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In one of his earliest political writings in the Craftsman, Bolingbroke in fact attacked neutrality per se, when he referred to ancient Athens where the citizen who took no side ‘was branded for his infamous neutrality’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Bolingbroke believed that ‘[o]ur duty must oblige us in all public disputes to take the best side, and to espouse it with warmth’.Footnote ⁹⁶

The main enterprise of the Dissertation, besides demonstrating the redundancy of the names of Tory and Whig and the relevance of a Court–Country division, was to specify why it was necessary to oppose Walpole, or the ‘prime, or sole minister’ as Bolingbroke mockingly referred to Walpole at a time when the office of prime minister had no official place in the British constitution.Footnote ⁹⁷ As we saw in the previous section, Bolingbroke made use of the Country ideology to legitimize opposition. Justifying the need for opposition was a much harder task than it may seem, and Bolingbroke bemoaned that anyone who declared opposition to the administration was accused by the ministerial press of being either a Jacobite or a republican.Footnote ⁹⁸ Walpole and the Court Whigs posed as the only ones who could be trusted as custodians of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, the Act of Settlement of 1701, and the Hanoverian succession of 1714, and the Tories had by and large been proscribed after George I's accession in 1714.Footnote ⁹⁹ Bolingbroke had to find responses to all three points.

First, Bolingbroke argued that Walpole and the Court Whigs had not lived up to the principles of the Glorious Revolution. More specifically, Bolingbroke saw it as a chief end of the revolution to secure the nation against corruption, by which he meant a dependency of parliament on the court. The revolution was thus incomplete since the means for this technical sense of corruption (or influence) had increased massively in the decades after 1688–9, because of the larger revenue of the crown and the proliferation of government offices and employments, which had led to higher taxes and national debt.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In short, Bolingbroke was an enemy of the so-called financial revolution, which had seen the erection of the Bank of England and sovereign debt in the 1690s, and the creation of what he saw as a moneyed interest in opposition to the landed interest.Footnote ¹⁰¹ He believed that landowners and traders had to bear the cost of the ever-expanding state. One of the reasons why his Country platform was such a fierce opponent of the proposed excise scheme in 1733 was that the scheme would increase the number and powers of revenue officers and thus increase the number of people in the government's pay and consequently the government's reach.Footnote ¹⁰² Moreover, the revolution had provided for frequent parliaments and elections, but this had partly been overturned by the Septennial Act of 1716.Footnote ¹⁰³ In a sentence, Bolingbroke wanted to show that the opposition could be better trusted to cherish the legacy of the Glorious Revolution, as ‘the settlement then made is looked upon by the whole Country party as a new Magna Carta’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Secondly, Bolingbroke repeatedly argued that the Jacobite party had become an inconsiderable faction in the state, and that Jacobitism had nothing whatsoever to do with either him or his Country platform, as when he ridiculed the writings of the Jacobite Charles Leslie.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This was an essential move by Bolingbroke, as he had served the Pretender in 1715–16, and Walpole and the ministerial press never tired of portraying him as a Jacobite and a traitor.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Already in his vindication of 1716, he said that he was as anti-Catholic as any sensible Englishman and that he had tried to convince James III to convert to Protestantism.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Thirdly, although the revenue of the crown had increased, Bolingbroke argued that the present royal family had not been net gainers under Walpole. In his dedicatory letter to the Dissertation, Bolingbroke argued that the security of the House of Hanover depended on the full completion of the Glorious Revolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Just as the violence of the Whigs had turned the Tories into Jacobites, the proscription of Tories and other political enemies had created unnecessary enemies for the royal family, and this was particularly ill-fated in a free government, as ‘to hang up the tables of proscription, without the power to send the centurions to cut off every head that wears a face disliked at court, would be madness in a prince’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The message was that George II could effectively kill off all remnants of Jacobitism within the Tory party by ending proscription.

In A letter on the spirit of patriotism (1736), Bolingbroke would elaborate on his oppositional theory. The text was originally not written for general distribution but for a smaller readership and this presumably gave him more freedom. The Letter is in one sense pessimistic in tone, which is not strange considering that Bolingbroke had a year earlier felt obliged to go into a second exile in France, partly because of the revelation of his closeness to the French government and partly because the opposition had ‘failed’ both during the excise crisis of 1733 and the general election of the following year.Footnote ¹¹⁰ He is not holding back when describing the gravity of the state of Britain, which he thinks had ‘lost the spirit of [its] constitution’ and become an oligarchy in the hands of ‘[o]ne party [the Court Whigs, which have] given their whole attention, during several years, to the project of enriching themselves, and impoverishing the rest of the nation’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Bolingbroke expresses disappointment with the Country Tory–Whig coalition he had forged with Pulteney in 1726, which had missed two golden opportunities to bring down Walpole in 1733 and 1734. ‘I expect little from the principal actors that tread the stage at present’, he said, ‘these men have been clogged, or misled, or overborne by others; and, seduced by natural temper to inactivity’.Footnote ¹¹²

While Bolingbroke appears to have given up his coalition with Pulteney  – he did indeed say in 1736 that he was ‘quits with [his] friends, party friends I mean’ – the Letter is far from defeatist.Footnote ¹¹³ ‘I turn my eyes from the generation that is going off, to the generation that is coming on the stage’, he wrote, referring to Lord Cornbury, the addressee of the Letter, along with the other ‘boy patriots’, a group of young opposition politicians which included William Pitt and George Lyttelton, who would later create an opposition group centred around Frederick, the prince of Wales.Footnote ¹¹⁴ These young men, especially the young nobleman Cornbury, were destined to be ‘the guardian angels of the country they inhabit’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ It was the duty of such people ‘to oppose evil, and promote good government’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Bolingbroke emphasized again and again that this opposition had to be strong and persistent. This is because he believed that not even the worst thinkable minister could do harm unless others supported him in his mischief, and, importantly, unless those who oppose him were ‘faint and unsteady’ in their conduct.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He argued that there was ‘little difference…between opposing faintly and unsteadily and not opposing at all’.Footnote ¹¹⁸

For all his talk about retirement, we learn from Bolingbroke's correspondence that he remained concerned about the business of opposition in parliament. In 1736, when Tory–Whig divisions were opened up over the Quakers Tithe and Mortmain Bills and the proposed repeal of the Test and Corporation Act – precisely the sort of debate as we saw above that Bolingbroke was eager to avoid with the Dissenters – Bolingbroke berated his brother-in-law Robert Knight, an opposition Whig and member of parliament for Great Grimsby: ‘if you have broke the coalition by stating high whig points, whilst Torys have been kept so long from their old follys that they are weaned almost from ’em, the damage is great, & such as I apprehend it will be hard to repair’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Bolingbroke equated opposition with duty to one's country. His greatest fear was that many undertook opposition ‘not as a duty, but as an adventure’.Footnote ¹²⁰ These people ‘look[ed] on themselves like volunteers, not like men listed in the service’.Footnote ¹²¹ It is clear that Bolingbroke sought to encourage these young noblemen to view opposition as an even higher duty than office. It was a tangible worry in the period that able opposition politicians were bought by bribes, government positions, and sinecures, since the executive had a great deal of patronage at its disposal. He asked rhetorically: ‘To what higher station, to what greater glory can any mortal aspire, than to be, during the whole course of his life, the support of good, the control of bad government, and the guardian of public liberty?’Footnote ¹²² It was the duty of every politician ‘to promote good, and to oppose bad government; and, if not vested with the power of a minister of state, yet vested with the superior power of controlling those who are appointed such by the crown’.Footnote ¹²³

One obvious objection to the centrality of Bolingbroke's theory of opposition to the intellectual history of party is that he may have meant opposition by individual members of parliament and that he was as opposed as anyone to concerted opposition. Towards the end of the Letter, however, Bolingbroke goes beyond everything he had written about opposition thus far. He refers to the widespread idea ‘that opposition to an administration requires fewer preparatives, and less constant application than the conduct of it [the administration]’. This way of thinking is as a ‘gross error’ and a ‘false notion of opposition’, he thinks.Footnote ¹²⁴ ‘Want of concert…[and] want of preliminary measures’ would lead to disappointment in the business of opposition, he warns.Footnote ¹²⁵ Opposition is not to be undertaken in a haphazard way: ‘[e]very administration is a system of conduct: opposition, therefore, should be a system of conduct likewise’.Footnote ¹²⁶ As Edmund Burke was to do more than three decades later, Bolingbroke compared the struggle between opposition and administration to military combat.Footnote ¹²⁷ The moral of this metaphor is straightforward: oppositions and governments are like armies with generals, in other words, they are like parties and not made up of free-rangers.

Bolingbroke stressed that opposition needed to be as systematic as a government, and suggested that an organized party is acceptable to achieve concerted action: ‘[t]hey who engage in opposition are under as great obligations, to prepare themselves to control, as they who serve the crown are under, to prepare themselves to carry on the administration, and that a party formed for this purpose, do not act like good citizens nor honest men, unless they propose true, as well as oppose false measures of government’.Footnote ¹²⁸ At the end of the Letter, Bolingbroke says that he has demonstrated ‘the duty of an opposing party’, and that such ‘a party who opposed, systematically, a wise to a silly, an honest to an iniquitous scheme of government, would acquire greater reputation and strength, and arrive more surely at their end, than a party who opposed occasionally…without any general concert, with little uniformity’.Footnote ¹²⁹

Further evidence that Bolingbroke was thinking of opposition in terms of concerted activity is to be found in his private correspondence. For example, he wrote the following to his close friend Sir William Wyndham, the leader of the Tories in the House of Commons, in May 1737, after the opposition had supported Frederick, prince of Wales, over his request of an increased allowance: ‘when your Party appeared lately in the Prince's cause, I took it for granted, as I do still, that this step was part of a scheme, and the scheme that might follow it, & be built upon it, easily occurred to my mind’.Footnote ¹³⁰ The episode had frightened Walpole, who had felt compelled to produce a compromise over the prince's allowance.Footnote ¹³¹ Bolingbroke believed that the bad health of George II, fifty-five years old at the time, had rocked Walpole's confidence. In a later letter, Bolingbroke continued to press for an organized opposition centred around Prince Frederick: ‘this affair would have alarmed, and have done more than alarm them, in what ever state the Kings health had been, if it had been the first measure of a scheme of conduct wisely formed, and concerted among all those that stand in opposition to the present administration’.Footnote ¹³²

The second obvious objection to the importance the present article places on Bolingbroke's conception of an oppositional Country party in the genealogy of political party in the eighteenth century is that the Bolingbrokean party was meant to be a party to end all parties.Footnote ¹³³ It is important to note, however, that Bolingbroke never used a phrase corresponding to this evocative and oft-repeated slogan. Although he was sanguine about what the Country party could achieve, he never expressed any belief in a final end to political conflict. On the contrary, he said that although the constitution was near-perfect, people could never allow themselves to sit down without watchfulness.Footnote ¹³⁴ Bolingbroke appears to have accepted continued political conflict in a limited monarchy such as the British, where the ‘struggle between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of dominion…always hath subsisted, and…must always subsist’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Such conflicts could even in the future encompass the overthrow of a monarch as in the Glorious Revolution, as long as all parties recognized the overall constitutional framework: ‘Better ministers, better Kings, may be hereafter often wanted, and sometimes found, but a better constituted government never can.’Footnote ¹³⁶

Finally, it is also worthwhile to draw attention to one of Machiavelli's teachings that Bolingbroke firmly believed in: the natural mortality of states, which is closely linked to the argument about first principle discussed above.Footnote ¹³⁷ ‘The best instituted governments, like the best constituted animal bodies, carry in them the seeds of their destruction’, Bolingbroke wrote.Footnote ¹³⁸ ‘All that can be done, therefore, to prolong the duration of a good government, is to draw it back, on every favourable occasion, to the first principles on which it was founded.’Footnote ¹³⁹ Consequently, Bolingbroke must have accepted that even if his opposition party successfully had rolled back Walpole's allegedly corrupt regime and managed to bring the state back to first principles, decay and decadence would have returned at some stage, as all states contain the seeds of their own destruction. There could therefore never be a party to end all parties and the rationale for opposition could not be forever eradicated.

On balance, the evidence presented above appears to suggest that it is an overstatement to view the Bolingbrokean opposition party as a party to end all parties. This interpretation stands in sharp contrast to that of Shelley Burtt, who reads Bolingbroke as a thinker who rejected ‘the inevitability of conflict’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Burtt's analysis hinges on The idea of a patriot king, as she sees the patriot king as someone who ‘can and will govern in such a way as to transcend the usual adversarial nature of government’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The Patriot king is indeed the text commonly used to demonstrate that Bolingbroke believed that absolute unity and harmony without party political conflict was both feasible and desirable. This article must thus turn to this important but enigmatic text.

V

Many of the readings of Bolingbroke as an anti-party writer, and as a political thinker in general, are heavily based on The idea of a patriot king (1738). It is indeed in this text that we find some of Bolingbroke's most negative comments about political parties, e.g. that they are political evils, and such statements should not be ignored. It remains clear, however, that Bolingbroke has not abandoned his distinction between party and faction: ‘faction is to party what the superlative is to the positive: party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties’.Footnote ¹⁴² Meanwhile, he is now maintaining that ‘[p]arties, even before they degenerate into absolute factions, are still numbers of men associated together for certain purposes, and certain interests, which are not, or which are not allowed to be, those of the community of others’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Bolingbroke believes that he is himself particularly suited to understand the inner workings of political parties, for ‘[a] man who has not seen the inside of parties, nor had opportunities to examine nearly their secret motives, can hardly conceive how little a share principle of any sort, though principle of some sort or other be always pretended, has in the determination of their conduct’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ These statements show that Bolingbroke was not consistent in his employment of concepts as he is more negative about party than in his previous writings. They also reflect his disillusionment about the Country party platform at this stage in his life. As we shall see, however, this state of mind did not lead him to reject the inevitability of conflict and prescribe a non-party state.

The Patriot king is an education book for princes, modelled on Machiavelli's Il principe (c. 1513).Footnote ¹⁴⁵ It has commonly been read as an abstract political text, as fairly recently by Christine Gerrard.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In contrast, the present author thinks it should be read as a highly topical oppositional tract written for a small circle consisting of Frederick, the prince of Wales, and his advisers at a time when the prince was seen as a figurehead of the opposition. The main objective remains the replacement of Walpole, who bears the full responsibility for the corrupt state of the nation, ‘since he has been so long in possession of the whole power’ and has so long ‘corrupt[ed] the morals of men’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Bolingbroke's wish was that ‘[a] wise and honester administration may draw us back to our former credit and influence abroad’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ If we are to believe the author himself, he never wanted to publish the Patriot king, but only did so in order to correct an unauthorized version printed and distributed by his friend Alexander Pope.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The Patriot king is perhaps rightly considered as Bolingbroke's most utopian writing, e.g. he calls the patriot king ‘the most uncommon of all phenomenon in the physical or moral world’ and even a ‘standing miracle’ – possibly as attempts to inspire Prince Frederick – but I do not think it contains sufficient textual evidence to support the claim that Bolingbroke in it rejected the inevitability of political conflict.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Like Elizabeth, the paradigmatic patriot princess, the patriot king will be a unifier and a healer.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The patriot king has a duty ‘to govern like the common father of his people…he who does otherwise forfeits his title’.Footnote ¹⁵² He (Bolingbroke uses the masculine pronoun, although he thinks that the greatest patriot monarch of them all had been a woman) would not ‘be exposed to the temptation, of governing by a party; which must always end in the government of a faction’.Footnote ¹⁵³ It is important to remember, however, that Bolingbroke has a very specific precedent in mind. In Of the state of parties at the accession of George I (1739), written a year after the Patriot king and published together with it in 1749, with the explicit intention to complement the sections on party in the Patriot king, he attacked the policy of George I, a policy of which he had himself been a victim and was still suffering.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Upon George I's accession in 1714, Bolingbroke was shocked to find that the king would ‘immediately let loose the whole fury of party, suffer the queen's servants, who had surely been guilty of no crime against him, nor the state, to be so bitterly persecuted, and proscribe in effect every man in the country who did not bear the name of whig’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Bolingbroke is contrasting this conduct with that of Charles II upon the Restoration in 1660, and that of Henry IV of France, who ‘not only exercised clemency, but shew[ed] favour to those who had stood in arms against them’ after coming to the throne.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ He believed that the accession of George I and the subsequent violent behaviour of the Whigs drove the Tories into rebellion, a direct effect ‘of maintaining divisions in a nation, and of governing by faction’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Bolingbroke concluded the State of parties by saying that ‘division has caused all the mischief we lament, [and] that union can alone retrieve it’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ By ‘union’, however, he meant the ascendency of ‘the coalition of parties, so happily begun, so successfully carried on, and of late so unaccountably neglected’, i.e. the Country platform, combining Tories and opposition Whigs, which he forged with Pulteney in 1726.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Bolingbroke was explicit that this union would not incorporate the Court Whigs, and probably not even George II, who Bolingbroke at this point thought had turned into a party king in resemblance to his father: ‘such a union can never be expected till patriotism fills the throne, and faction be banished from the administration’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

To return to the Patriot king, while such a king, according to Bolingbroke's advice, was not at liberty to espouse or proscribe any party, ‘[h]e may favour one party and discourage another, upon occasions wherein the state of his kingdom makes such a temporary measure necessary’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Needless to say, this implies that there would be the political parties under the patriot king and that he would not rule in a party-less state.

Personnel and measures remain intertwined in Bolingbroke's thought. The first action of the patriot king, who ‘must begin to govern as soon as he begins to reign’, would be ‘to purge his court, and to call into the administration such men as he can assure himself will serve on the same principles on which he intends to govern’.Footnote ¹⁶² By this, he meant that Walpole and his Court Whigs, or ‘the prostitutes who set themselves to sale, all the locust who devour the land, with crowds of spies, parasites, and sycophants…and the whole swarms of little, noisome, nameless insects’ as he referred to them, would be banished.Footnote ¹⁶³ Entire parties were not to be proscribed, however, and the patriot king must make a distinction ‘between those who have affected to dip themselves deeply in precedent iniquitous, and those who have had the virtue to keep aloof of them’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

There has been a tendency among readers of the Patriot king to focus on the sweeping statements about the patriot king's ability to unify and purify the nation.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The all-important qualifications have sometimes been neglected. For Bolingbroke, it is axiomatic that ‘[a] people may be united in submission to the prince, and to the establishment, and yet be divided about general principles, or particular measures of government’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The reign of the patriot king would not entail an end to political debate or conflict. The people under such a reign ‘will support or oppose particular acts of administrations, and defend and attack the persons employed in them; and both these ways a conflict of parties may arise’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The patriot king must ‘pursue the union of his subjects, and the prosperity of his kingdoms independently of all parties’, but Bolingbroke recognizes that this in practice would mean that he would choose the best side rather than no side when two parties are clashing:

Bolingbroke believed that under a patriot king ‘the opportunities of forming an opposition…will be rare, and the pretences generally weak’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Importantly, ‘[s]uch opportunities, however, may happen; and there may be reason, as well as pretences, sometimes for opposition even in such a reign…Grievances then are complained of, mistakes and abuses in government are pointed out, and ministers are prosecuted by their enemies.’Footnote ¹⁷⁰ The patriot king ‘knows that neither he nor his ministers are infallible, nor impeccable. There may be abuses in his government, mistakes in his administration, and guilt in his ministers, which he had not observed.’Footnote ¹⁷¹ On the rare occasions when an opposition is justified in such an illustrious reign, the patriot king will not ‘treat those who carry on such prosecutions in a legal manner, as incendiaries, and as enemies of his government’, as Bolingbroke and Pulteney had been treated in the ministerial press.Footnote ¹⁷²

To conclude this section, although the Patriot king is probably Bolingbroke's most anti-party piece of writing, he does not in it appear to conceive of a state without either parties or opposition. As we have seen, many of his anti-party comments have contextual explanations and can be seen as part of his general discontent with George I and George II, both of whom he regarded as (Court) Whig kings.Footnote ¹⁷³ In case Prince Frederick would ascend the throne, Bolingbroke was eager to ensure that he would not be ensnared by Walpole and the Court Whigs, as had happened to George II upon his accession in 1727, when a great part of the political nation expected at least some change in the administration.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ The calling of his paradigmatic ruler a patriot king was not an entirely neutral move, as Bolingbroke's earlier coalition of parties had sometimes been referred to as a patriot platform, and the new generations of politicians in Prince Frederick's circle were known as the boy patriots. This group included George Lyttelton, Frederick's secretary at the time of the Patriot king's composition and originally intended as the dedicatee of the work. When the work was finally about to be published in an authorized version a decade later, Lyttelton wrote to Bolingbroke to turn down this ‘honour’, since he was no longer in Prince Frederick's service and in friendship with many of the late Walpole's close friends, meaning that he had joined Henry Pelham's ministry.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The episode demonstrates that the Patriot king was far from an abstract political text on how to avoid conflict and achieve harmony in a polity, but an oppositional tract and a contribution to the (party) political struggle of the day.

VI

Although we have to distinguish between Bolingbroke's intentions and his reception, it is not without significance that Bolingbroke was typically read by his contemporaries as a party writer and rarely if ever as an anti-party writer.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In 1750, Thomas Pownall wrote a noteworthy treatise which was largely a response to Bolingbroke. His major objection to Bolingbroke, and all writers wedded to the notion of mixed government, was the inevitability of conflict in this line of political thought. In the preface, he attacked what he perceived as an anti-Harringtonian message in The idea of a patriot king, which had the previous year been published in an edition authorized by Bolingbroke for the first time.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ By encouraging the patriot king to make appointments based on talent rather than property, Pownall argued that ‘the Measures recommended to the Patriot Prince, instead of healing, uniting and restoring, do seem more likely to run ALL into Party’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

Pownall's main target, however, was the Dissertation upon parties, which had been printed for the seventh time in 1749, and more specifically he criticized Bolingbroke's firm belief in the mixed constitution.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ In short, Pownall found it unsound to perceive of king and people as separate estates. ‘[I]t is of the very Essence of these Governments to subsist, and be carried on, by Parties and Opposition, as the noble Author of the Dissertation on Parties hath fully shown’, he wrote.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ He saw Bolingbroke's principles as essentially conflictual as they were ‘calculated for an opposition’ and ‘incompatible with establish'd Power’.Footnote ¹⁸¹

The present text has sought to reflect that Pownall's critical reading is in many ways closer to Bolingbroke's own intentions than those of most of his commentators in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pownall was right to view the Bolingbrokean party as an opposition party, which is not necessarily the same as a party to end all parties. Bolingbroke's raison d’être as a political writer was opposition to Walpole and the Court Whigs. All his political writings extol the virtues of opposition. We have also seen that Bolingbroke conceived of opposition as organized and concerted, to be undertaken by a party of political actors (who could be drawn from several parties in the sense of Whig and Tory) disciplined by leadership. He sometimes referred to this opposition as a Country party, which, in contrast to the Court faction, was a national party seeking to address national grievances and was equipped with principles, or, to use an anachronism, an ideology, which, unlike the Whig and Tory creeds, were fit for the political climate of the 1730s.

Bolingbroke had little to say about what would happen if and when this oppositional Country party was successful. Would it become a party of government, a new Court party? Some historians have speculated that Bolingbroke is likely to have followed a similar path as Walpole if he had been in power.Footnote ¹⁸² It did not fit his polemical purposes to spell out how the Country party would behave after the fall of Walpole and the Court Whigs. The closest we come to a description of a future political order in Bolingbroke's writings is the Patriot king. This text has often been read as a pie-in-the-sky attempt to abolish parties and political conflict as all political actors would unite in awe of the virtuous patriot king. The present article has shown that the Patriot king – which was initially not written for wider publication – was in itself an opposition tract and that the accession of such a king would generate something akin to a clean sweep in the administration; in short, Walpole and the Court Whigs would be substituted for those Bolingbroke considered his friends and patriots. Crucially, this article has demonstrated that Bolingbroke, even in this somewhat utopian text, is emphasizing that causes for opposition may arise even in the reign of the patriot king. It is explicit in Bolingbroke's account that parties divided over political issues would survive in such a reign, and while the patriot king would not govern by party – like Bolingbroke thought George I and George II had done – he would be at liberty to take sides in political disputes.

It remains true that Bolingbroke sometimes appeared to have damned party while condoning opposition, and evidence in favour of that view has not been concealed from the present analysis. The ambition has been, however, to explode the persistent myth of Bolingbroke as the paradigmatic anti-party thinker, because his views on these subjects are more multi-faceted. His writings were calculated to legitimize opposition and a very specific political party: the Country party. Finally, his writings on the Court and Country party division in British politics would provoke and influence writers for decades. Notably, David Hume used them as his starting point – and as targets of criticism – when writing his first batch of political essays in the early 1740s.Footnote ¹⁸³