Page:Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography Volume 1.pdf/702

BOL VIII. of England, was the eldest daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn and the lady Elizabeth his wife, and was born probably about 1501. Her father represented an ancient and noble family in Norfolk. She was carried to France in September, 1514, by Mary Tudor, the youngest sister of Henry VIII., when she went to marry Louis XII. After the death of Louis, Mary returned to England, but Anne remained in France, in the service first of Claude, the queen of Francis I., and after her death, in the household of the duchess of Alençon, where her beauty and varied accomplishments attracted universal admiration. She danced and played the flute and rebec to perfection, and dressed with marvellous taste. When, in due time, she returned home, Henry VIII. saw her in her father's garden at Hever, and was charmed with her wit; and, through the interest of Wolsey, she was appointed maid of honour to Queen Katharine of Aragon. Here she was receiving the addresses of Lord Percy, the eldest son of the duke of Northumberland, when Henry formed the project of making her his bride. For this purpose he divorced Katharine; and when the pope would not consent to so arbitrary a measure, he disowned the papal authority, and threw off the sacerdotal yoke of Rome. Anne Boleyn was privately married to King Henry, some say at Dover, the same day that the king returned from his celebrated visit to Francis I.; some say in the chapel of Sopewell Nunnery; and others at Blickling Hall in Norfolk. The probability is that the nuptials took place at Whitehall on the 25th of January, 1533. They were openly solemnized again at Easter-eve of the same year, April 12th; and she was crowned queen on Whit-Sunday, June 1st, "of all days the most lovely in England." On the 7th of the following September, to the great disappointment of her husband, she gave birth to a daughter, afterwards the renowned sovereign Elizabeth. Anne continued mistress of Henry's affections until the year 1536. Then her ill-disguised vanity having somewhat alienated his esteem, she discovered him one day caressing Jane Seymour, one of her attendants. Deeply wounded by this spectacle, she fell into transports of grief; and after some hours of intense agony, brought forth a dead son, January 29th. Henry was now thoroughly alienated from her. He caused her, on very slight grounds, to be indicted for high treason. He accused her of having allowed several persons to invade his conjugal rights. She was tried and condemned by a jury of peers, of whom her uncle, the duke of Norfolk, her inveterate enemy, was president. She defended herself before them with admirable presence of mind, convincing all of her innocence. Commending her little daughter Elizabeth to the care of Henry, and renewing her protestations of fidelity, she prepared for death, not only with serenity but cheerfulness. The executioner of Calais was sent for, as expert in his vocation. She was beheaded in the tower on the 19th of May, 1536. Her body was thrown into a common elm chest, made to hold arrows, and then interred. Henry married Jane Seymour the very day after her execution, and thus explained the secret reasons of his suspicions against her. Her private copy of Tindal's translation of the Bible is still in existence. She was not less accomplished than beautiful; and the verses which she composed shortly before her execution prove that she had considerable poetical powers.—T. J.  BOLIGENI,, an Italian jesuit, who, after the suppression of his order, was summoned by Pope Pius VI. to Rome, where he published a number of works, which so abounded in commendations of the suppressed order, that even his friends joined in the remonstrance which was addressed to him by the sacred college. He was born at Bergamo in 1733, and died at Rome in 1811.—J. S., G.  BOLINGBROKE,, Viscount, filled so long as he was on the stage as large a space in the public eye as any of his contemporaries, although he has no place in the Biographia Britannica. His family was of old standing; his father was a baronet, his mother the Lady Mary Rich, a daughter of the earl of Warwick. He was born at his father's seat of Battersea, near London, on the 1st of October, 1678. To impress this date, it may be remarked that Henry Lord Bolingbroke came into the world exactly a century, almost to the day, before one of the most remarkable men of our time—Henry Lord Brougham. Then his public life coincides almost exactly with the first half of the eighteenth century. He entered parliament in February, 1701; and he died at Battersea, where he first drew breath, on the 15th of December, 1751. He and that half century—which, however, extends its penumbra back to the Revolution, and onward to the death of George II.—had a good deal in common. It may be said that "he and it did in each other live; nor could he it, nor could it him survive." There is no thinking of that time without the image of Bolingbroke rising to the mind. We see him in it as in a glass. His political career is soon sketched. When he first appeared in the house of commons, William of Orange was still on the throne; but the coming reign was already casting its shadows before, and toryism was everywhere in the ascendant. St. John from the first attached himself to Harley; and so important had he very soon made himself that in 1704, when Harley became secretary of state, he was also brought into the ministry as secretary at war. They both remained in office until the whigs came in, under Marlborough and Godolphin, in 1708. Then again, when Harley returned to power in 1710, and became head of the government, with the office of chancellor of the exchequer, St. John was made one of the secretaries of state. Harley was soon after promoted to be lord high treasurer and earl of Oxford; and in July, 1712, St. John was also called to the house of lords by the title of Viscount Bolingbroke. Up to this time they had been to all appearance the fastest of friends; they now suddenly became—even while sitting in the same cabinet—rivals and enemies. At length in the end of July, 1714, Bolingbroke, chiefly through the aid of the bedchamber-woman, Lady Masham, succeeded in ousting the treasurer; but in less than a week the death of the queen snatched his victory from his hands. The lords justices, acting for the new king, turned him adrift at once. Neither he nor Harley ever held office again. Both were immediately impeached, and the late lord treasurer, after lying for some time in the tower, was brought to trial and acquitted; his rival had in the end of March, 1715, made his escape to France.

Bolingbroke was thus twice in power, each time for four years, between 1704 and 1714, the middle two years of the ten being the interval; and this was all over before he had reached the age of thirty-six—not quite half his term of life. The former of the two periods in which he was minister is famous for the most splendid of the campaigns of Marlborough; the latter, familiar both in our political history and in our literature as the four last years of the queen, for the peace of Utrecht, which was concluded in April, 1713, and which Bolingbroke was mainly instrumental in negotiating. There was little doubt at the time, and there can be none now, that the scheme of the desperate politician for the perpetuation of his power, after the death of Queen Anne, went the length of bringing in the Pretender. Apparently, indeed, that was his only chance.

As soon as he reached France, he went and offered his services to that personage; but by him too he was very soon dismissed. He then tried to make his peace with the English government, but without success. It was not till he had lived in exile for seven years that he obtained permission to return home. The matter is understood to have been managed through the good offices of the duchess of Kendal, the king's mistress, whose services are said to have been purchased at a cost of eleven thousand pounds. But even now he was not allowed to return to the house of lords: nor could he ever obtain that full restoration—a very unwelcome compliment to his power in debate. Thus tongue-tied, he set to work with his pen, and for some years attracted great attention by his attacks on the ministry in the Craftsman, and by other papers in the same publication, two series of which were afterwards published separately under the titles of "Letters upon the History of England, by Humphrey Oldcastle," and "A Dissertation upon Parties."

In the beginning of the year 1735 he again suddenly left England; and he remained mostly abroad for a second period of seven years. But he finally returned to England in 1742, on the death of his father, who in 1716 had been raised to the peerage by the title of Viscount St. John, with remainder to his sons by his second wife, who was not the mother of Lord Bolingbroke. In this same year, also, his great enemy Walpole, who had been in office, with the exception of a short interval, ever since his own expulsion, fell from power; but even that change, he soon found, was not likely to open to him the door of the house of lords. Harley and St. John, in their early days of brotherhood, besides being the chiefs of a political party, had formed together a centre of attraction for the literary luminaries of which Pope and Swift were the most remarkable, and seem both to have been sincerely loved as well as admired by the wits and poets with whom they thus lived in the freest association. 