THE POLITICAL CHARLATAN
Bolingbroke. By Sir Charles Petrie. (Collins. I2S. 6d.) BoLINGERoiCE -has seemed a hero to some young Tories, though anything less like a hero it would be hard to imagine, for his was a squalid -career and a superficial mind. Raised up by Godolphin and Marlborough, he surreptitiously under- mined the Government of which he was a member, and sneaked off in time to join the incoming Tories. Given high office by Harley, he intrigued against him with the Queen and ultimately displaced him, only to find that he had ruined his party in the process and by his inept attempts to make -a deal with the Pretender. When . the crisis of 1714 came, he panicked ; and taking the advice of Marlborough, the benefactor whom he had betrayed and driven from his command, he ruined himself by flight across the Channel to
the Jacobite Court.
As Secretary of State to James II, he helped to ruin the Stuart cause by blabbing politics to his mistress, Madame de Tencin, who " took Bolingbroke's money, and sold his incautious confidences to Dubois (the friend of the Hanoverian regime), with the result that between the three of them the Fifteen came to an ignominious conclusion." He would have done better to take a leaf out of the book of that experi- enced rout the Regent Orleans, who refused to permit " gu'on l'entretint de politigue entre deux draps." James very properly dismissed him, an action which he never forgave. It is always difficult to forgive those to whom one has behaved badly. Sir Charles Petrie concludes : " The months he spent as JaCobge Secretary of State constitute the most dishonourable and. unsuccessful period of his career." And that is saying a lot ; for -he spent the second half of his life in unscrupulous scheming and intriguing his way back into place and office, at which he was defeated and then turned sententious..
As a matter of fact, it is not his shiftless careerism, his political, charlatanism, which is so impossible to stand, as his sententiousness. - This is the man who wrote for his own epitaph : -- _Here, lyes Henry St. John :
In the days- of ,Queen Anne,
Secretary at War, Secretary of State, and Viscount Bolingbroke ; In the days of King George the First and King George the Second, Something more and better . . .
He passed the latter part of his life at home, The enemy of no national party, The friend -of no faction . . . &c., &c.
It is too sickening, too obvious, when the man was the most factious in an age of political factiousness. When thoroughly at the end of his tether, defeated in all his schemes to ger back, and without hope, he had the cheek to write : " Whether I have done well or ill, -whether I have acted amongst you to any purpose or to none, I have acted with as little regard to personal interest as any man ever did." And so on. Bolingbroke would make an extraordinarily rich field for Professor Mannheim's researches into human shamelessness in the pursuit of its interests, and unselfconscious expression of them as the common good..
There is a cand,Our about this book which recommends it Charteir Petrie never fails to liking out the real motives o action, whether OflBolingbroke- or his opponents, without any humbug. His claims for Bolingbroke's • statesmanship are too high, as his estimate of Walpole's is altogether too low. But he has no illusions about his hero's character ; he calls him,
roundly, a cad. It must be allowed that the blackguard had charm, and that he wrote, as he lived, in fine style. But fortunately one does not need to pay any attention to what it was that he said : he was, among other things, such a liar.
A. L. Rowse.
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