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    Voltaire’s second literary success, which made him even more famous, could not be published legally in France. This time the poet aspired to wear Virgil’s mantle. La Henriade is an epic poem, modeled on the Aeneid , celebrating the glory of Henri IV. It was not the poetrythat offended the French censors but the ideas it contained. Henri IV had fought a war of succession to the French throne as a protector of the Protestants. He was backed by Queen Elizabeth of England. Although he later converted to Roman Catholicism—unconvincingly some thought—Henri signed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, guaranteeing freedom of conscience, the very thing that was revoked a hundred years later. La Henriade was an argument for religious tolerance and an attack on the fanaticism of the Catholic church. Since Catholicism was the French state religion, and religious dissent outlawed, Voltaire’s poem was about as subversive a document as one could wish. It was first printed in The Hague, and later published under the counter in Rouen.
    One of Voltaire’s greatest admirers at the time was Henry St. John Bolingbroke, a Tory aristocrat compelled to live in France after conspiring with the Catholic pretender to the English throne. Bolingbroke shared with Voltaire a taste for libertinage, brilliant conversation, and unorthodox religious views. Voltaire recorded in his notebook how London prostitutes rejoiced when Bolingbroke became minister of war under Queen Anne. His new salary was greedily discussed by the whores in St. James Park. “God bless us,” they cried, “five thousand pounds and all for us.” In exile, Bolingbroke married the marquise de Villette, a French widow twelve years older than himself, and tended to his garden park at La Source, a woody estate near Orléans, which he transformed in the English mode, with streams, grottoes, groves, and a hermitage.
    Voltaire visited La Source in 1722, and was enchanted. Bolingbroke, he wrote in a letter to his friend Nicolas-Claude Thieriot, was an illustrious Englishman who combined the erudition of England with the politesse of France. This was typical of Voltaire’s Enlightenment Anglophilia. England was the land of thinkers, of rationalists, while France was the nation of fine manners. Much of what we know about Voltaire in those days comes from his letters to Thieriot. Receiving Voltaire’s letters and acting as his drum-beater was Thieriot’s main role in life. He was a literary flâneur and a permanent guest at various grand houses, where he would recite Voltaire’s works and solicit praise for the master. It was to Thieriot that Voltaire later wrote Letters concerning the English Nation , his bible of Anglomania.
    Dangerous ideas that could not be expressed publicly in earlyeighteenth-century France were exchanged freely in cultivated circles. The natural habitat of the freethinker was the aristocratic salon. Bolingbroke was a Deist; that is to say, he believed in a natural order based not on revealed truth or church dogma but on reason. The creator was rational, a kind of heavenly philosopher. This belief was shared by other British thinkers of the time, notably the earl of Shaftesbury, whose writings on “natural” landscape gardening had a great influence in Europe. Voltaire is often considered to have been a Deist too. Perhaps he was. If Voltaire believed in any god at all, his deity was singularly lacking in heavenly trappings. It was Bolingbroke, in any event, who infected Voltaire with his first dose of Anglophilia. In the summer of 1724 Bolingbroke sent him a letter, setting down his views on life. In the manner of a Chinese gentleman-scholar, he compared the cultivation of a man’s character to that of his garden. The ideal was a natural order. He advised Voltaire to read Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding . And he pointed out that Sir Isaac Newton had shown the falsity of the Cartesian view of nature.
    English ideas matched