552 
SAINT 
four Portuguese monks. A castle commands the town, 
which some time ago contained a few good houses, built of 
a kind of Portland stone; but both castle and town are now 
in a state of ruin, and present nothing but the greatest de¬ 
cay. Scarcely is an European to be seen in either; 7 miles 
south-west of Porto Praya. 
SAINT-JOHN (Henry, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke), 
a nobleman of great celebrity as well in the literary 
as the political world, was born in 1672 at Battersea, in 
Surrey. His father was Sir Henry St. John, of the ancient 
family of that name. His mother was a daughter and 
co-heiress of Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick. His early 
education seems to have been chiefly under the direction of 
his grandfather and grandmother, the latter of whom was 
daughter of St. John, Chief Justice under the republic, and 
was attached to the Presbyterian sect; but the impression he 
received from that circumstance was a rooted aversion to a 
party whose austerity was very uncongenial to his disposition. 
At a proper age he was sent to Eton School, and thence 
transferred to Christ-church College, in Oxford, and at both 
of these seminaries he gave indications of extraordinary 
talents, though impeded in their exertions by a predominant 
love of pleasure. He appeared in the world with the ad¬ 
vantages of a pleasing and dignified aspect, a graceful per¬ 
son, a winning address, a sparkling vivacity of manner and 
conversation, accompanied with singular acuteness and pene¬ 
tration, and uncommon powers of memory. For some 
years, however, he principally distinguished himself in the 
societies of the gay and dissolute, though there was no 
period in which he did not devote some hours to the ac¬ 
quisition of knowledge and cultivation of literature. He 
was the friend and protector of Dryden in his declining 
years, and prefixed a copy of encomiastic verses to Iris trans¬ 
lation of Virgil, printed in 1697. 
About the close of that century, Mr. St. John married the 
daughter and co-heiress of Sir Henry Winchescomb, of 
Berkshire; and in 1700, he entered the House of Commons, 
as representative for Wotton-Basset, a family borough. 
He joined the tory party, and attached himself to Harley 
(afterwards Earl of Oxford), who in this parliament was 
chosen Speaker. His abilities appeared so conspicuous, that 
in 1704 he was made Secretary at War, which post he held 
during the most triumphant period of the Duke of Marl¬ 
borough’s successes. When Harley was deprived of the seals 
in 1707, St. John resigned his post; and upon the restora¬ 
tion of the former to power in 1710, St. John was appointed 
Secretary of State. About this time he wrote a letter in the 
periodical tory paper called the Examiner, which gained him 
great fame as a party writer. He sat in the new parliament as 
knight for the county of Berks, and on him devolved a great 
part of the burthen of negotiating and defending the treaty 
of Utrecht. His services were rewarded by being created, 
in 1712, Baron St. John and Viscount Bolingbroke; but 
considering the difficulties of the times, he himself represents 
this elevation as being “ dragged into the House of Lords 
in such a manner as to make his promotion a punishment, not 
a reward, as he was there left to defend the treaties alone.” 
At this time, ambition and conscious abilities appear to have 
rendered him dissatisfied with holding a subaltern station 
under Harley, to whom he was, in fact, much superior in 
point of talents; and animosities began to prevail between 
these two statesmen, which terminated, on Bolingbroke’s 
side, in thorough aversion. “ I abhorred (says he) Oxford 
to that degree, that I could not bear to be joined with him in 
any case.” (Letter to Sir W. Wyndham.) Soon after the 
accession of George I. the seals ot office were taken from 
him, and his papers were secured. Conceiving that these 
measures were preparatory to his impeachment, he withdrew 
privately to France in March, 1715. Application was im¬ 
mediately made to him on the part of the Pretender to en¬ 
gage in his service; but this for the present he declined, and 
withdrew into Dauphine. At length, an emissary having 
been sent over to him from the Jacobite party in England, 
he accepted the seals of secretary of state to the Pretender, 
with which he returned to Paris. That in this step he was 
-JOHN. 
principally moved by resentment and disappointed ambition 
cannot be doubted, when it is considered that he had no 
hereditary prejudices in favour of the exiled family, and that, 
according to his own assertion, he had formerly promoted 
the succession of the house of Hanover. A bill of attainder 
against him soon followed, founded upon six articles of 
impeachment sent up from the Commons, chiefly relative 
to his conduct in the treaty of Utrecht. In the meantime he 
presently found cause to repent of his new engagement, 
since nothing could be worse planned or more weakly con¬ 
ducted than the attempt then made to restore the Stuarts, 
and his good sense and education led him to be equally 
ashamed of his Prince and his associates in office. The re¬ 
turn of the Pretender frQm Scotland was soon followed by 
the discharge of Bolingbroke from his post of secretary, and 
that, by articles of impeachment; so that he had the singular 
fortune of having been in the same office under a real and a 
mock sovereign, and having been dismissed in both instances 
with the same tokens of displeasure. 
It was now Lord Bolingbroke’s great object to obtain a 
restoration to his own country; and, through the mediation 
of the Earl of Stair, the English ambassador at Paris, he 
procured a promise of pardon from the king under certain 
conditions. Philosophy having at this time superseded 
politics in his mind, he wrote “ Reflections upon Exile,” 
a work in which he endeavoured to suggest topics of con¬ 
solation to himself upon the ground of unmerited sufferings. 
He also vindicated himself from the charges brought against 
him by the Pretender’s adherents; and he drew up a 
“ Letter to Sir William Wyndham,” in which he defended 
his whole conduct with respect to the tory party, and gave 
so striking a picture of the absurdity of the Jacobite counsels 
abroad, and of the bigotry of their Prince, as might have 
had a great effect in detaching the respectable English tories 
from that cause. This letter was not printed till after his 
death. Having become a widower, he married for his 
second wife the Marchioness de Villette,a niece of Madame 
Maintenon, a lady of great merit, with whom he enjoyed 
every domestic satisfaction. He remained in France till 
1723, when, having obtained from his Majesty a full pardon, 
he returned to England. Two years afterwards, an act of 
parliament restored him to his family inheritance, which by 
his attainder he had forfeited; and he then purchased an es¬ 
tate at Dawley, near Uxbridge, where he occupied himself 
in rural cares and amusements, like a man cured of ambition 
and all worldly passions. One of Pope’s letters to Swift 
gives a pleasing picture of their noble friend in his retirement; 
and he himself thus addresses the Dean: “lam in my farm, 
and here I shoot strong and tenacious roots: I have caught 
hold of the earth, to use the gardener’s phrase; and neither 
my enemies nor my friends will find it an easy matter to 
transplant me again.” But in this. Lord Bolingbroke either 
deceived himself or wished to deceive others; for pride and 
disappointment still rankled in his breast. He had not been 
able to procure a restoration to his seat in the House of Lords; 
and conceiving the minister, Walpole, to have been the 
cause of this mortification, he disclaimed all past obligations 
to him, and entered into a career of active opposition 
as a writer. In various papers in the Craftsman, as well 
as in separate pamphlets, he attacked the ministry 
with great boldness and vigour, interposing, how¬ 
ever, speculations upon philosophical and metaphysical 
subjects. This political warfare he carried on for ten years, 
when, disagreeing with Pulteney and other oppositionists, 
whom he charged, justly enough, with private views, he 
again, in 1735, withdrew to France. Having, now, as it 
appears, really given up any expectation of once more acting 
a part on the theatre of public affairs, he devoted his time 
and pen to general topics, and drew up “ Letters on the 
Study and Use of History,” a “ Letter on the true Use of Re¬ 
tirement and Study,” and other works of a speculative kind. 
His father, who had been created Viscount St. John during 
his son’s exile, dying in 1742, he returned and settled at the 
family seat at Battersea, where he passed the remainder of 
his life in dignified retirement, still occupied with undimi¬ 
nished 
