EARLY in May 1726, the London newspapers announced the arrival of François Marie Arouet, the renowned French dramatist and poet who called himself Voltaire. About a week earlier he had been released from the Bastille after a two-week incarceration—nine years before he had spent eleven miserable months there—on condition that he go into exile. The first time he had been thrown into the grim Seine fortress on the trumped-up charge of libelling the Regent Phillip of Orleans and this time for challenging to a duel the Chevalier Rohan-Chabot, scion of one of the noblest families of France. Rohan-Chabot insulted him in the box of the actress Adrienne Lecouvreur at the Comédie Française and subsequently had his lackeys beat him up.

When he arrived in England, Voltaire was virtually unknown except to a small number of the cognoscenti. He had not yet written any significant prose; and of his dramas only one, Marianne, had been adapted to the English stage, and it was a failure. He had a few English friends and acquaintances of whom the closest was Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, one of the architects of the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the Anglo-French Wars in 1713. He had come to know the Englishman quite well in France, where Bolingbroke had been in exile since the ascent of George I to the throne in 1714. A year before Voltaire's arrival, Bolingbroke and his French wife had returned to England and purchased an estate at Dawley in Middlesex after getting permission from George I and parliamentary approval by paying the king's German mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, a bribe of 100,000 pounds.

Voltaire's selection of England as a place of exile was inspired,