When John St. John was a child his elder half-brother, Bolingbroke, was attainted and excluded by special remainder from succeeding to the peerage which their father was said to have bought from the Duchess of Kendal in 1716. Five years later Lord St. John invested another £4,000 in the Duchess to acquire the reversion of a customs sinecure worth £1,200 a year for the lives of his two younger sons, John and Holles.
We do not at all despair of licking our young cub into form very soon. The truth is he is extremely raw, but he seems to have docility and parts enough to make an honest man, provided he comes to have what is essential to a good character.
Bolingbroke to Henrietta St. John, 23 July 1720, Add. 34196, ff. 11-12.
Returned on the family interest for Wootton Bassett, at the first opportunity after coming of age, he voted with the Opposition except on the repeal of the Septennial Act in 1734. He never stood again but in the crisis of 1737 over the Prince of Wales’s allowance he is described as ‘a great advocate for the Prince, and intimate in consultations with’ him.
abandoned ... to him that he might restore the family seat, and that by living there decently and hospitably he might restore a family interest, too much and too long neglected. He may perhaps do the first in time ... as to the last I doubt more of it. They have made themselves a proverb in the country already for their stinginess.
When St. John’s wife died in 1747 Bolingbroke commented to their sister: ‘I wish that the prejudices and habits which his late wife gave him and which are none of the best do not stick by him’.