Henry St John, later Viscount Bolingbroke, was born in 1678, the year of the Popish Plot, and died in 1751, nine years before the accession of George III and the subsequent revival of Tory fortunes reshaped the British political landscape. However, Bolingbroke's career as an active politician spanned only the period from the last year of William III's reign, when he first entered Parliament in 1701, to the first of George I, when he was impeached by the overwhelmingly Whig Parliament elected in the aftermath of the Hanoverian succession and the Jacobite rising of 1715. St John's fortunes rose and fell with those of the post-Revolutionary Tory party. His political acumen, charisma and industry had recommended him to Tory leaders, who rapidly promoted him up the ranks of their administration until he held the crowning office of his career, as Secretary of State for the Northern Department during the closing years of the War of the Spanish Succession.

St John was elevated to the Lords as Viscount Bolingbroke in 1712, and in the following year he took credit for negotiating the Treaty of Utrecht which ended the war. Bolingbroke looked set to make a bid for the leadership of his party, until the Whigs won the general elections of 1715 by a landslide, ‘after which a new and more melancholy scene for the party, as well as for me, opened itself’, as he put it in A Letter to Sir William Wyndham (1716).