The opposition to Walpole

Bolingbroke defies easy classification. A would-be leader of the Tory high-flyers, he served in Queen Anne's Tory ministries from 1702 until her death in 1714 before supporting the failed Jacobite succession in 1715. He joined the Old Pretender and served as his secretary of state in 1715–16. He returned to England in 1723 from exile in Paris thanks to a qualified pardon from parliament, which excluded him from the House of Lords. The pen being forced upon him, Bolingbroke spent the 1720s and 1730s attempting to unite a disparate collection of Whig and Tory opponents to the ministries of Walpole on a ‘country’ platform through the political journal The Craftsman. During the 1730s, Bolingbroke became associated with the ‘patriot’ opposition to Walpole and the alternative court surrounding Frederick, Prince of Wales. Bolingbroke's campaign synthesised, in civic and ancient constitutional voice, Whig and Tory political languages. He wrote of England's mixed and balanced constitution, government in the service of the common good, and the ancient balance between monarchy and parliament. Such themes comprised the ‘spirit of liberty’ that was ‘authorized by the voice of the country’.

Despite Bolingbroke's kaleidoscopic political identities, his religious writings were those of a theorist of civil religion. He sought to defend the Erastian supremacy of the crown-in-parliament over the Church of England from the encroachment of powerful bishops such as Gibson and the clericalist defences of the Church of England of Warburton. Bolingbroke displayed outward conformity to the Thirty-Nine Articles. The Church of England was an institution of the civil state, subject to its governance. Bolingbroke always supported the ecclesiastical settlement of the Revolution and insisted upon the Anglican character of the church-state relationship. He was adamant that the monarch must profess the same Anglican religion as the nation and he defended the royal supremacy of the crown-in-parliament.

In his posthumous philosophical publications, he conceived of natural religion in which rational individuals exercised understanding of the supreme being through empirical observation of nature, and equated it with primitive Christianity. He attacked priestcraft, by which priestly power relied on the economic and spiritual exploitation of a superstitious laity, and feared enthusiasm. An Erastian writing in the reformed Christian tradition, Bolingbroke relied on the godly prince as a bulwark against priestly usurpation and sanctified the state as the sole guarantor of true religion.