faint hope of a restoration of the Stuarts. It is with the young
heir to the pretensions of James II. that the story of the life of
Bolingbroke becomes concerned.

King William III. died on the 8th of March, 1702, and was succeeded
by James II.'s daughter Anne, who was then thirty-eight years old,
and had been married when in her nineteenth year to Prince George of
Denmark. She was a good wife and a good, simple-minded woman; a
much-troubled mother, who had lost five children in their infancy,
besides one who survived to be a boy of eleven and had died in the
year 1700. As his death left the succession to the Crown unsettled,
an Act of Settlement, passed on the 12th of June, 1701, had provided
that, in case of failure of direct heirs to the throne, the Crown
should pass to the next Protestant in succession, who was Sophia,
wife of the Elector of Hanover. The Electress Sophia was daughter
of the Princess Elizabeth who had married the Elector Palatine in
1613, granddaughter, therefore, of James I. She was more than
seventy years old when Queen Anne began her reign. For ardent young
Tories, who had no great interest in the limitation of authority or
enthusiasm for a Protestant succession, it was no treason to think,
though it would be treason to say, that the old Electress and her
more than forty-year-old German son George, gross-minded and clumsy,
did not altogether shut out hope for the succession of a more direct
heir to the Crown.

In 1704 St. John was Secretary at War when Harley was Secretary of
State, and he remained in office till 1708, when the Whigs came in
under Marlborough and Godolphin, and St. John's successor was his
rival Robert Walpole. St. John retired then for two year from
public life to his country seat at Bucklersbury in Berkshire, which