A patriot for whom? the afterlives of bolingbroke's patriot king

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 397-418

  Armitage, David ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 18844425667     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/386143     Document Type: Article

References (111)

1. See, e.g., Linda Colley, "The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760-1820," Past and Present, no. 102 (1984): 94-129;
2. John Dinwiddy, "England," in Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution, ed. Otto Dann and John Dinwiddy (London, 1988), pp. 53-70;
3. Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989), p. 6;
4. Hugh Cunningham, "The Language of Patriotism," in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 1, History and Politics, ed. Raphael Samuel (London, 1989), pp. 57-66;
5. and David Eastwood, "Robert Southey and the Meanings of Patriotism," Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 265-71.
6. For nuanced correctives to this orthodoxy, see Philip Harling, "The Duke of York Affair (1809) and the Complexities of War-Time Patriotism," Historical Journal 39 (1996): 963-84;
7. and Eliga H. Gould, "American Independence and Britain's Counterrevolution," Past and Present, no. 154 (1997): 107-41.
8. John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 96-111;
9. Marie Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opposition during the Seven Years' War (Oxford, 1980).
10. John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769-1782 (Kingston, Ontario, 1982), pp. 127-31.
11. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992), p. 145.
12. Cunningham, "The Language of Patriotism," pp. 70-82.
13. For a more general account of the European context in which "republican" patriotism was transformed into nineteenth-century nationalism, see Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford, 1995).
14. On its transmission, see the classic works of Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonweaìthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959);
15. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967; rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1992);
16. Quentin Skinner, "The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole," in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, ed. Neil McKendrick (London, 1974), pp. 113-21;
17. and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ., 1975).
18. Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848-1874 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 14, quote on p. 51;
19. James A. Epstein, "The Constitutionalist Idiom," in his Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 (New York, 1994), pp. 3-28.
20. J. G. A. Pocock, "The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse," in his Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought, Chiefly Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 215-310
21. presents a more richly inflected account of the continuities than Robert Zaller, "The Continuity of British Radicalism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Eighteenth-Century Life 6 (1981): 17-38.
22. Compare Carla H. Hay, James Burgh: Spokesman for Reform in Hanoverian England (Washington, D.C., 1979), p. 104, where she remarks "just how innately conservative the radical movement was"
23. Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (1968; reprint, Ithaca, N.Y., 1992).
24. Though for trenchant counterblasts, see Pocock, "The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform," pp. 242, 259, 261-62.
25. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, p. 167.
26. H. T. Dickinson, "Bolingbroke: The Idea of a Patriot King," History Today 20, no. 1 (January 1970): 13, 18, 19, and Bolingbroke (London, 1970), p. 307;
27. Simon Varey, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (Boston, 1984), p. 98;
28. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 179-85;
29. Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725-1742 (Oxford, 1994), chap. 7.
30. Sir Geoffrey Butler, The Tory Tradition: Bolingbroke, Burke, Disraeli, Salisbury (1914), preface by R. A. Butler (London, 1957), chap. 1;
31. Sydney Jackman, Man of Mercury: An Appreciation of the Mind of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (London, 1965), pp. 140-46;
32. Harvey Mansfield, Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke (Chicago, 1965);
33. Richard Faber, Beaconsfield and Bolingbroke (London, 1961).
34. On the Patriot King and the mirror-for-princes genre, see Jeffrey Hart, Viscount Bolingbroke: Tory Humanist (London, 1965), pp. 83-116;
35. and Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, pp. 198-203.
36. For other contemporary instances, see Daniel Defoe, Of Royall Educacion (ca. 1728), ed. Karl D. Bülbring (London, 1895);
37. Andrew Michael Ramsay, A Plan of Education for a Young Prince (London, 1732), An Essay on Civil Government (ca. 1738-39;
38. Simon Varey, "Hanover, Stuart, and the Patriot King," British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 6 (1983): 163-72. The presence of an anti-Jacobite polemic in Pope's edition of The Idea of a Patriot King, which was retained in Bolingbroke's 1749 edition, is evidence against Varey's argument (Varey, p. 167);
39. Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King: With Respect to the Constitution of Great Britain, ed. Alexander Pope (London, n.d.), pp. 97-101.
40. Colley, Britons, p. 206.
41. Fanny E. Ratchford, "Pope and the Patriot King," Texas Studies in English 6 (1926): 157-77;
42. Giles Barber, "Bolingbroke, Pope and the Patriot King," Library 19 (1964): 67-89;
43. Frank T. Smallwood, "Bolingbroke vs. Alexander Pope: The Publication of the Patriot King," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 65 (1971): 225-41.
44. D. J. McLaverty, Pope's Printer, John Wright: A Preliminary Study, Oxford Bibliographical Society Occasional Publication, vol. 11 (Oxford, 1977), p. 27, item 147, suggests 1741 as the date of Pope's edition. The four surviving copies of Pope's edition of The Idea of a Patriot King-in different states of completeness-are in the British Library; the Beinecke Library (Yale University); the Harry Ransom Humanities Center (University of Texas, Austin);
45. [William Warburton], A Letter to the Editor of the Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, the Idea of a Patriot-King, and the State of Parties, &c. (London, 1749).
46. Decisively challenges the influential argument of Mabel Hessler Cable, "The Idea of a Patriot King in the Propaganda of the Opposition to Walpole," Philological Quarterly 18 (1939): 124-30, that Bolingbroke was the inspirer, rather than the inheritor, of these earlier images of patriot kingship.
47. Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke, pp. 139-41.
48. As argued, e.g., in Dickinson, "Bolingbroke: The Idea of a Patriot King"; and Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, pp. 168-69.
49. For this reading of Bolingbroke's political thought from 1733-38, see David Armitage's "Introduction," in Bolingbroke: Political Writings, pp. vii-xxiv, and the texts of the Dissertation upon Parties and the letter "On the Spirit of Patriotism" therein.
50. Bolingbroke, Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism: On the Idea of a Patriot King: And on the State of Parties at the Accession of King George the First, ed. T. Davies (London, 1775), p. xi (this edition was dedicated to Edmund Burke). See the response of one reader to the first edition of the Letters in 1749: "surely a finer system of Politicks without Party, was never offer'd to the World" (Smart Lethieullier to William Borlase, 25 May 1749, BL, Stowe MS 752, fol. 28r).
51. For the contemporary debate surrounding the figure of Cicero, see, e.g., [George Lyttelton], Observations on the Life of Cicero (London, 1733);
52. and Conyers Middleton, The History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero, 3 vols. (London, 1742).
53. On the debate, see esp. Addison Ward, "The Tory View of Roman History," Studies in English Literature 4 (1964): 413-56;
54. Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge, La., 1982), pp. 210-56;
55. and Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 89-95.
56. Bolingbroke, "On the Spirit of Patriotism" (1736), p. 214.
57. See, e.g., Marcia Colish, "Cicero's De Officiis and Machiavelli's Prince," Sixteenth-Century Journal 9 (1978): 81-94;
58. In The Idea of a Patriot King, in Armitage, ed., Bolingbroke: Political Writings, pp. 273, 293, Bolingbroke cites Francis Bacon, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientίarum (1623) 1.1, in Francisci Baconis . . . Opera Omnia, 4 vols., ed. John Blackbourne (London, 1730), 1:52 (Bolingbroke was one of the subscribers of this edition; the italic number indicates the second row of pagination within the volume); Virgil, Georgics 4.561-62 (cited in Bacon, Opera Omnia, 1:56);
59. The best treatment of Bolingbroke in a late humanist context is Philip Hicks, "Bolingbroke, Clarendon and the Role of the Classical Historian," Eighteenth-Century Studies 20 (1987): 445-71.
60. On these later editions and translations, see Giles G. Barber, "A Bibliography of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke" (B.Litt. thesis, Oxford University, 1963), pp. 215-21.
61. Edward Lewis, The Patriot King Displayed: In the Life and Reign of Henry Vlll. King of England (London, 1769), pp. 243-44 (Thomas Hollis presented a copy to the British Museum on 13 January 1769: BL 523.b.20).
62. Charles Churchill, Gotham (London, 1764), bk. 3, lines 63-102
63. cited in Vincent Carretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens, Ga., 1990), pp. 46-47.
64. The Reign of George VI (London, 1763), p. 188;
65. I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984 (Oxford, 1966), pp. 4-6;
66. Gregory Claeys, ed., Utopias of the British Enlightenment, (Cambridge, 1994), p. xiv.
67. I would therefore question John Guy's conclusion that the "rhetoric of counsel" became decisively "redundant" after the 1650s as "a lexicon of rights and interests was recognized as more relevant to the discussion of liberty and authority" (John Guy, "The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England," in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak [Cambridge, 1995], p. 310).
68. Horace Walpole, "A Memorial of Several Noblemen and Gentlemen of the First Rank and Fortunes" (1753), in Memoirs of King George II, 3 vols., ed. John Brooke (New Haven, Conn., 1985), 1:204-6, 3:163-65.
69. Herbert Butterfield, George III and the Historians, rev. ed. (New York, 1959), pp. 231-37;
70. Letters from George 111 to Lord Bute, 1756-1766, ed. Romney Sedgwick (London, 1939), pp. xix-xliii.
71. William D. Liddle, " Ά Patriot King, or None': Lord Bolingbroke and the American Renunciation of George III," Journal of American History 65 (1979): 951-70;
72. William Belsham, Memoirs of the Reign of George III, 5 vols. (London, 1795), 1:3 (on the "perfect model of a PATRIOT KING,delineated by the happiest effort of a transcendent genius");
73. Butterfield, George IH and the Historians, pp. 58-59, 234.
74. James Burgh, "Remarks Historical and Political Collected from Books and Observations. Humbly Presented to the King's Most Excellent Majesty," 13 August 1762, BL, King's MS 433, fols. 86, 105.
75. Dickinson, Bolìngbroke, p. 307;
76. James Burgh, Political Disquisitions: An Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses, 3 vols. (London, 1774-75), 1:78-79, 118, 121-22, 273-74, 371-72, 377; 2:45-47, 168-70, 456-57; 3:197, 282, 343, 361, 414, 441-43.
77. Isaac Kramnick, "James Burgh and 'Opposition' Ideology in England and America," in his Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), pp. 205, 206. Kramnick's account overlooks Burgh's "Remarks Historical and Political" entirely.
78. Daniel A. Baugh, "Great Britain's 'Blue-Water' Policy, 1689-1815," International History Review 10 (1988): 52-53.
79. On the seventeenth century, see David Armitage, "John Milton: Poet against Empire," in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 207-10, 223-24;
80. on the eighteenth-century arguments over the continental commitment, see Baugh, "Great Britain's 'Blue-Water' Policy"; Richard Pares, "American versus Continental Warfare, 1739-1763," English Historical Review 51 (1936): 429-65;
81. N. A. M. Rodger, "The Continental Commitment in the Eighteenth Century," in War, Strategy, and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard, ed. Lawrence Freedman, Paul Hayes, and Robert O'Neill (Oxford, 1992), pp. 39-55.
82. Francis Dobbs, The Patriot King; or the Irish Chief (London, 1774).
83. On Dobbs, see A. T. Q. Stewart, A Deeper Silence: The Hidden Origins of the United Irishmen (London, 1993), pp. 36, 42-43, 45.
84. Alexander Bicknell, The Patriot King; or, Alfred and Elvida (London, 1788), pp. [iii], [vii], [iv]-vi, 67;
85. Haydn composed incidental music for J. W. Cowmeadow's adaptation of Bicknell's play, Alfred, König der Angelsachsen, oder der patriotische König, in 1796. Alfred remained a patriot hero for all of the period surveyed here; cf. James Thomson, Alfred: A Masque (London, 1740);
86. Eliga Hayden Gould, "War, Empire and the Language of State Formation: British Imperial Culture in the Age of the American Revolution" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1993), chap. 3.
87. For Myles Swinney and his support of the colonists and the conciliatory petition of 1775, see John Money, Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760-1800 (Manchester, 1977), p. 59.
88. The Speech of Leonard Smelt, pp. 13, 25, 26-27.
89. The System Occasioned by the Speech of Leonard Smelt, Esq. (London, 1780), pp. 5, 20.
90. Dror Wahrman, "Virtual Representation: Parliamentary Reporting and the Languages of Class in the 1790s," Past and Present, no. 136 (1992): 85-86, 89-91, 108.
91. Smelt], An Account of Some Particulars, pp. 5-6, 10, 29-30.
92. Wyvill, Political Papers, 1:39.
93. On the complexion of the late eighteenth-century empire, see esp. P. J. Marshall, "Empire and Authority in the Later Eighteenth Century," Imperial and Commonwealth History 15 (1987): 105-22;
94. and C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London, 1989), chap. 4.
95. A Solemn Appeal to the Good Sense of the Nation: Pointing out the Immediate Necessity of a Cordial Coalition between the King and the People (London, 1783), pp. 12-14, 59;
96. cf. Gould, "War, Empire and the Language of State Formation," pp. 255-58.
97. Colley, "The Apotheosis of George III," p. 104;
98. see Thomson, Alfred: A Masque, pp. 42-43;
99. and William Hayman Cummings, Dr. Arne and Rule Britannia (London, 1912), pp. 111-36.
100. For George Ill's own speech, see The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Times to 1803, 36 vols. (London, 1806-20), vol. 33, cols. 854-55.
101. ""The Speech of a Patriot King to His Parliament (London, 1797), pp. 7-8, 11-12, 14, 17-18, 19.
102. Poetical Epistle from Florizel to Perdita: With Perdita's Answer. And a Preliminary Discourse upon the Education of Princes (London, 1781), p. 14.
103. Thomas Green], Slight Observations upon Paine's Pamphlet: Principally Respecting His Comparison of the French and English Constitutions (London, 1791), pp. 44-45.
104. Catharine Macaulay Graham, "Letter XXV: Hints towards the Education of a Prince," in her Letters on Education (London, 1790), pp. 223-34.
105. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, 1987), pp. 78 ("Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?"), 110 (alluding to The Idea of a Patriot King, in Armitage, ed., Bolingbroke: Political Writings, pp. 230-31).
106. Robert Humphreys, The Patriot King. A Sermon Preached . . . on the Occasion of the Jubilee Celebrated in Honour of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Accession of His Majesty King George III to the Throne (Leeds, 1809), p. 22.
107. John Watkins, The Life and Times of "England's Patriot King," William the Fourth (London, 1831), pp. iii, 37, 350.
108. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Patriot King. A Sermon Preached . . . in Memory of His Late Most Gracious Majesty, William IV (London, 1837), p. 9.
109. Benjamin Disraeli, Vindication of the English Constitution in a Letter to a Noble and Learned Lord (London, 1835), pp. 185-88;
110. Faber, Beaconsfieid and Bolingbroke, pp. 29-37.
111. Linda Colley, "Radical Patriotism in Eighteenth-Century England," in Samuel, ed., Patriotism, p. 184.