It was to the venal protection of the Duchess of Kendal that Bolingbroke owed the royal pardon. Walpole had not received favorably the overtures which had been made to him in favor of the exile. "The attainder ought never to be abolished, and crimes ought never to be forgotten," said he, in the Council. The Marquise de Villette, niece of Madame Maintenon, at first the friend and subsequently the wife of Bolingbroke, had succeeded in interesting the favorite in his behalf. Eleven thousand pounds sterling were paid, it was said, for permission to return to England. He had as yet recovered neither his title, his rights, nor his fortune. The offer of his services was refused by Walpole. It was not until 1725, and even then, through the intervention of Madame Villette and the Duchess of Kendal, that Bolingbroke, having returned to France, finally obtained permission to present to Parliament a petition that Walpole consented to support. {171} More clear-sighted than he had often been during his public life, Bolingbroke while in France had served continually and to the utmost, the interests of the English minister, by sustaining his brother Horace and his brother-in-law Lord Townshend, in their rivalry against Lord Carteret, the Secretary of State. The amnesty voted by Parliament restored to Bolingbroke his personal fortune, and his rights to the heritage of his father, but without giving him the right of disposing of it. The king had promised Walpole, it was said, that Bolingbroke should never again hold any political position. "I am restored to two-thirds," wrote he to Swift, from his country house at Uxbridge. He received his friends, occupying or at least pretending to occupy himself exclusively with his estate and in literary pursuits. Voltaire was one of his visitors, when driven from France by his quarrel with the Chevalier Rohan, and passed two years in England. This event had a powerful effect upon Voltaire's mind, and many traces of the same may be found in his writings. The relations of the poet with Bolingbroke were of long standing; they had often met at the Chateau de la Source, near Orleans, where the exile lived for some time. "One thing which interests me," wrote Voltaire, "is the recall of milord Bolingbroke to England. He will be at Paris to-day, and I shall have the grief of bidding him farewell, perhaps forever." When Voltaire, in his turn, again reached his own country, he dedicated to Bolingbroke his tragedy of _Brutus_: "Permit me to present to you _Brutus_," wrote he, "although written in another language, _docte sermonis utriusque linguœ_, to you who have given me lessons in French as well as in English, to you who have taught me at least to give to my language that force and that energy which noble liberty of thought inspires: for vigorous sentiments of the soul always pass into the language, and he who thinks forcibly speaks likewise." Voltaire, on asking permission to